04.18.08
Shermer, Expelled, and Darwinian ideology
Even as critics of Darwinism press the issue of Darwinism and Hitler, the larger confusion created by Darwin’s theory, with its classical liberal lineage, passes into the unconscious. Here Shermer, with tactics typical of defenders, neutralizes the insight (as in his Mind of the Market) by displacing the blame backwards even as he restates the ideological fallacy as if it were normal science, or conventional wisdom.
When Stein interviewed me and asked my opinion on the impact of Darwinism on culture, he seemed astonishingly ignorant of the many other ways that Darwinism has been used and abused by political and economic ideologues of all stripes. Because Stein is a well-known economic conservative (and because I had just finished writing my book The Mind of the Market, a chapter of which compares Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” with Charles Darwin’s “natural selection”), I pointed out how the captains of industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries justified their beliefs in laissez faire capitalism through the social Darwinism of “survival of the fittest corporations.” And, more recently, I noted that Enron’s CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, said his favorite book in Harvard Business School was Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (first published in 1976), a form of Darwinism that Skilling badly misinterpreted. Scientific theorists cannot be held responsible for how their ideas are employed in the service of non-scientific agendas.