Kevin MacDonald Defends Darwin from Patrick Buchanan

“Pat Buchanan on Darwin”
from The Occidental Observer, July 1, 2009

Kevin MacDonald

Pat Buchanan is without doubt the most incisive political commentator that we have. His writings on the death of the West, immigration, the neocon influence in the Republican Party, and the Israel Lobby are brilliant and courageous, and they certainly have won him no friends among the most powerful forces in the Republican Party or among the watchdogs of political correctness.

So it is with a great deal of ambivalence that I must disagree with his recent op-ed “Making a monkey out of Darwin.” The article and the book it relies on, by Eugene G. Windchy, are a compendium of Creationist ideas claiming that Darwinism has no scientific basis and that it has led to great evil. I have discussed some of these issues in a previous article on Ben Stein’s movie Expelled which links Darwinism to the Holocaust and represents the scientific community of evolutionists as an oppressive Inquisition-like establishment bent on squelching heresy (obviously far more true of the $PLC and the ADL).

One particularly objectionable claim is that Karl Marx was inspired by Darwin. Marxism is far more associated with Lamarck’s idea that people can inherit the characteristics that their ancestors acquired during their lives. The inheritance of acquired characteristics is the exact opposite of Darwin’s view that the basic mechanism of evolution is natural selection — the selective retention of genetic variants because they result in increased survival and reproductive success.

Lamarckism, not Darwinism, became official ideology in the Soviet Union — the idea being that it would be easy to reshape human nature and produce the new Soviet Man. Famously, Trofim Lysenko applied this to agriculture, hoping to get plants to change their genetic characteristics by exposing them to harsh arctic climates.

This set back Soviet agriculture for decades, but the results were far worse for humans. Lamarckians believed that it would be easy to change the culture and train people to be good socialists. Then their children would inherit those traits and voila, it would usher in a golden age where people would not have nasty, capitalist traits like greed, envy, and selfishness. In the meantime, it was eminently reasonable to simply exterminate those who didn’t get with the program and who clung to their pre-revolutionary ways. In the end, the Lamarckians in the Soviet Union rationalized the murder of many millions of their fellow citizens in the name of creating the new Soviet man. Read the rest of the article.