Buchanan Takes Selective Quotations, a Reference to Hitler, and Calls it an “Article”

Lest we forget that there are, indeed, still battles to be fought in the culture war, Pat Buchanan returns to “Human Events” this week with an eminently predictable screed against evolution, creatively titled “Making a Monkey Out of Darwin.” Har har! Get it?!

Yes, it turns out that – stop me if you’ve heard this before – the theory of evolution is directly responsible for everything Hitler ever did. While I thoroughly reject the argument that entire schools of thought can be discarded out of hand because Hitler once might have heard about them, it’s worth noting that this particular point of attack actually bites itself: there’s as much evidence that Hitler was a creationist as there is that he was a “Darwinist.” Next.

Buchanan’s only other point is to take two quotes by the eminent biologist Stephen Jay Gould concerning the debate between different schools of evolutionary biology and stand them on their heads, until they lose all of their original meaning and sound like Gould is, somehow, arguing against his chosen field of research. Don’t buy it. Gould never called evolution a “religion,” nor did he suggest that any abscence in the fossil record came close to endangering evolutionary biology as a whole. Rather, he took partial absences from the record as, at most, evidence against the idea of gradual evolution, and for the theory of punctuated equilibrium. Disagreements within the academy about the finer points of evolutionary biology do not somehow lend credence to creationism. You might as well argue that the conflict between general relativity and quantum theory compels the validity of heliocentrism as a gap-filler, because hey, even Stephen Hawking has his doubts about general relativity!

You have to wonder about a man who depends upon open and obvious deception to make his case to the public. What kind of example does this set for his organization, and the young men who look up to him? Oh — right.