Saturday is when all the bad news is printed. Defending Evolution in order to misuse it was an interesting inside baseball NY Times story today on the front page (bottom left below the fold and it's Saturday) about the "split" among conservatives between the Creationists (and their well funded chimera Intelligent Design) and those needing evolution to justify conservative ideology. D at Lawyers Guns and Money commented refuting the claim that Facism and Communism are both based on Darwin (yep, that's what the Rethugs are saying). My comments and opinion are below the fold:
As M.J. O'Brien note above, what is troubling conservatives is that if they give up evolution, then they give up all the arguments about "nature" supporting the current power structures. Men over women, whites over blanks, the poor are just lazy etc.
They of course haven't done their homework. The Calvinists had the same problem and came up with the theory of "visible gifts" which translates as the rich are rich as a visible sign of God's decision to predestine them as saved.
I would suggest the appropriate modern term would be Social Intelligent Design. Women are inferior because the Intelligent Designer, (blessed be his name) made them that way, George Bush is rich because the only sign of Intelligence about him is the Design that makes him rich.
They need an ideology to support their artificial aristocracy.
This reasoning owes much to What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It? by Philip E. Agre who seems to have disappeared from the Internet.
One of the EvoCons (to coin an obvious phrase), "Larry Arnhart, a professor of political science at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb" seems to have plagiarized from Burke:
Mr. Arnhart says, conservatives assume that evolved social traditions have more wisdom than rationally planned reforms.
Ah well, to paraphrase, we'll stop no lie before it's time.
Looking for the rest of Saturday's bad news, we got: