The ID Report

Wow, is this another one?

At BeliefNet, David Klinghoffer writes,

Now isn't this fascinating. James von Brunn, the white-supremacist suspect in today's Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting in which the guard who was shot has now tragically died, describes the relevance of evolution to his sick thinking. He's obsessed with "genetics." He writes in his manifesto (emphasis added):

Aw, go there if you want to know what von Brunn thinks. [If a guy's in jail for murder, on good evidence, I don't care much what he thinks. I reserve that honour for scholars.]

It's the usual sicko stuff, but how come it is so commonly associated with Darwinism?

Both the Columbine school shooter and the Finnish school shooter would understand von B, about "evolution." See links to my files on them here.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Evolution Deceit, an interesting Turkish creationist book, is good at assembling and clearly explaining the arguments against Darwinism that you can be pretty sure the average lay person will not hear from conventional TV nature programs. It does, however, get some Western intellectual history wrong. This example attracted my attention, of course:

Quoting British journalist and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990),

I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has. - Deceit, p. 164, The End of Christendom (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980, sp. 43.)

He is identified there as an atheist.

Now, I knew Muggeridge at that time, and he had slowly been making his way back to Christianity since the early 1970s (dying a Roman Catholic, in the words of the ancient curse).

"Evolution," in the popular "hey, we just evolved, that's all," sense was one of the many ideas Muggs had begun to forswear - indeed to abjure because he had witnessed first hand the cultural vulgarity it underwrites.

For example "evolution" supposedly explains why women kill their kids and also why they don't - making the two decisions appear of equal moral value. "Evolution" explains why men are unfaithful and also why they are not.

Presumably, Muggs picked up the same sense I later did - that evo psycho sounds far too much like the afternoon soaps to be taken seriously as science. But - far more perceptive than many ponderous pundits we are saddled with here in Canada - Muggs also saw that the form in which the public consumes the idea of "evolution," and always will do so, is basically permission to indulge in bad behaviour because it is supposedly "natural." After a ll, Mr. Ooga! Ooga! did those things, and who can argue with him? Especially if he never existed.

Gee. I'd just as soon get into a row with the Red Ettin of Ireland. It had, we are told, three heads - a classical evolutionary psychologist, I suppose - one says yes, one says no, and one says "Give us more money."

By the way, while I am here, let me remember another Brit journalist and commentator, Gordon Rattray Taylor, who also foreswore Darwinism - in the last year of his life.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist, my blog on the intelligent design controversy:

Darwinism and popular culture: Capturing traditional peoples and treating them as exhibits ...

The missed link still much missed,. Butremembered

African?: Ota Benga - the missed link?

Theistic evolution: What does it really mean? (I don''t know, but am relieved to learn that no one else does either)

Frank Beckwith, of all people, attacked

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).