Plan B?!

Das Gegner der Evolutionstheorie diese gerne als Wurzel allen Übels darstellen, inklusive des Faschismus, ist wirklich nichts Neues, siehe z. B. Harun Yahya, der "Darwinismus" für Rassismus, Faschismus, Kommunismus und Terrorismus verantwortlich macht, und wahrscheinlich auch noch dafür, dass es an Wochenenden so oft regnet. Von daher ist es nicht gerade Enthüllungsjournalismus, wenn man auch beim Discovery Institute Leute findet, die sich nicht zu schade sind, diesen Blödsinn zu verbreiten.

Red State Rabble entdeckt in letzter Zeit aber eine besondere Häufung von Aussagen wie dieser:

Discovery’s Plan B has popped up with increasing frequency over a number of months, but got its official launch with speeches in Washington and Philadelphia earlier this week by Discovery fellow John West that quickly cut the Nazi’s six million victims to “hundred of thousands.”

According to West, “Darwinism” is responsible for “the eugenics movement that sterilized scores of thousands of Americans deemed unfit in the early decades of the last century, the concurrent rise of the abortion movement, and the extermination of hundreds of thousands of supposed social undesirables by the Nazis in Germany.”

This week’s events were preceded by the broadcast of “Darwin’s Deadly Legacy,” a production of Coral Ridge Ministries, on Christian television last August. The program, which explicitly links the crimes of Hitler to Charles Darwin featured Discovery fellows Richard Weikart, Jonathan Wells, Phillip Johnson, and Michael Behe. They were joined on the program by right-wing columnist Ann Coulter, the author most recently of Godless: The Church of Liberalism.

Weikart, the author of From Darwin to Hitler writes that “Darwinism played a key role in the rise of eugenics, euthanasia, infanticide, abortion, and racial extermination, all ultimately embraced by the Nazis.” As an academic, Weikart is sometimes coy about how much responsibility he places on the shoulders of Charles Darwin for the crimes of the Nazis, but his readers have no problem drawing the intended conclusions:

“I never knew about the link between Darwin and Hitler until after reading Richard Weikart’s book,” says Coulter.

“To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler,” says Dr. Kennedy, the host of the program.” “Hitler tried to speed up evolution, to help it along, and millions suffered and died in unspeakable ways because of it.”

Ich bin mir alles andere als sicher, ob das Dreckschleudern in Richtung Evolutionstheorie tatsächlich eine Art "Plan B" des DIs ist - deren Mitglieder brauchen generell nicht extra eine Strategie, um sich wie Idioten zu verhalten... [Man schaue nur einfach mal durch die neuesten Nachrichten des DIs - da findet sich immer was.]

Meiner Meinung nach disqualifiziert sich soundso jeder, der Aussagen wie "No Darwin, no Hitler" (s. o.) macht, von jeglicher Diskussion, da er/sie die Natur wissenschaftlicher Theorien nicht versteht.
Selbst wenn die Evolutionstheorie tatsächlich die Grundlage für [setzte bevorzugtes Übel ein] wäre, hätte es keine Relevanz für die Gültigkeit der Evolutionstheorie.
Wissenschaftliche Theorien ganz allgemein hören nicht auf zu stimmen, weil einem die Konsequenzen daraus nicht gefallen. Im Grunde ist das ja eine höchst triviale Erkenntnis, aber offensichtlich kann man es trotzdem nicht oft genug wiederholen.

Aber trotzdem ist das Post meiner Meinung nach absolut lesenswert, auch und vor allem als Einstieg in die Geschichte des DIs und ID in Amerika. Als Appetithäppchen:

When Judge John Jones ruled, in December of 2005, that intelligent design isn't science and the only real effect of the Dover school board's ID policy was to advance religion, the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based intelligent design advocacy group, found itself with a problem on its hands.

Discovery's strategy, its very raison d'etre, had been to promote a renamed and re-branded creationism as science in order to skirt a damaging series of court rulings, most prominently the 1987 Supreme Court Edwards v. Aguillard decision, in order to bring both God and Genesis back into the nation's public school science classes.

As Discovery's Phillip Johnson, the UC-Berkeley law professor who plotted legal strategy for the intelligent design movement, told Elizabeth Nickson, a columnist for the National Post in 2004:

"Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools."

[...]

The depth of Discovery's crisis was revealed by a series of embarrassingly lame attempts to label Jones, an observant Lutheran and conservative Republican appointed to the bench by George Bush, an activist judge. That no one but the ID faithful could be convinced was demonstrated by Jones being named to Time magazine's list of the "100 Most Influential People in America."

When the activist judge label failed to stick, Discovery attempted to smear his ruling as plagiarized. Legal experts were unmoved by the charge, which came across to the public at large as nothing more than sour grapes, and to add insult to injury, excerpts from Jones' landmark ruling were subsequently published in the 2006 edition of Best American Nonrequired Reading.

[...]

Discovery also came under increasing fire from their allies in the creationist movement. [...]

Young and old earth creationists, who make up the vast majority of the foot soldiers in the intelligent design ranks, began to ask what value there was to the constant denials that "the designer" was in fact the Christian God of the Bible if the ID legal strategy couldn't deliver the goods.

Der Vollständigkeit halber empfehle ich auch noch mein Post "Irreducible Confusion" über Dissidenten von der neuen Partyline des DIs, so es sie denn tatsächlich gibt.

MfG,
JLT