Darwinism and The Great Depression Ahead

When it comes to analyzing the economy, my favorite website is The Daily Reckoning, which is written by 2 financial advisers, Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin. I've read 4 of their books: Finanical Reckoning Day, Empire of Debt, The Demise of the Dollar, and Mobs, Markets, and Messiahs. If you're interested in signing up for their newsletter, click here.

In any case, I was reading the Feb. 16 edition of The Daily Reckoning Newsletter, and happened to discover a brief, somewhat out-of-place diatribe against Darwinism. See below...

Darwin seemed to have no natural enemies last week. It was the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. His theory was blessed in every account we saw. Everyone was on his side. As a result his ideas reproduced and multiplied until they were in practically every newspaper.
Commentators saw Darwinism at work everywhere. In the current worldwide financial meltdown, for example, they thought they saw not the beneficent ‘invisible hand’ of Adam Smith, but the bloody claw of natural selection. “It’s the survival of the fittest at work,” said one opinionist.

Ideas, like rats, need predators. Otherwise, they get out of hand. Seeing none to cull the weak parts of Darwin’s pensee, we will do it ourselves.

There are two parts to Darwinism as it is popularly understood. One part is based on observation – at which Darwin was a master. The other is extrapolation – not so much on Darwin’s part, but his followers. The problem is that the part that is probably correct is child-like and obvious. And the part that is more grown up is nothing more than empty guesswork. He notes that some animals are better suited to their environments than others. If a polar bear were suddenly born to a hog here in Nicaragua, it probably wouldn’t last long. On the other hand, if a mutation produced a naked polar bear at the North Pole, it wouldn’t stand much of a chance either. Both would probably perish, leaving no heirs or assigns…and thus removing from the gene pool whatever crazy aberration that created them. Some things survive and reproduce; some don’t. The essence of Darwinism is nothing more than that simple-minded observation, as near as we can tell.

But the application of this notion far and wide is a threat to the intellectual eco-system. Because of it, people think they know a lot more than they actually know. To the question, why is the polar bear white, rather than black, they have a ready answer: because evolution made him white. But this is no answer at all…it just postpones thinking until the next question: why did evolution make him that way?

Then, the guesses begin: because he can blend into the snowy background and sneak up on seals. Oh. They tell us, for example, that he covers his nose – which is black – with his paw, so he can get closer without being spotted.

Smart bear. But you’d think if evolution could turn his whole body black it could whitewash his nose too. And what about the seals? Are they morons? You’d think those that couldn’t tell the difference between a bear with his paw over his nose and an iceberg would have been weeded out by now. Besides, why aren’t seals white?

Of course, the biologists and know-it-alls have their answers, but they are just putting 2 and 2 together in the clumsiest way. They really don’t know why polar bears are white. All they know is that nature hasn’t exterminated the white polar bears – yet.

Many of these deep thinkers also believe that Darwin proved that God didn’t create man. Instead, man arose by the process of evolution, they say, one accidental step at a time. Man is the product of pure chance, they claim. As if God couldn’t make it look like an accident, if He wanted!

Clearly, there are better criticisms of Darwinism than this one, but I still enjoyed reading it because it reinforces one of the points that I've consistently made in my private political discussions - that all of these so-called "experts" don't know as much as they think they do, and what they do know is heavily clouded by their ideological biases. This is true whether it comes to politicians, economists, or scientists. And for that reason, citizens like you and me have a right to question the conventional wisdom and reach our own conclusions.

-Todd