From: Ted Davis (tdavis@messiah.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 19 2003 - 18:56:19 EST
Sarah,
You are right about YECs accepting free-market economics while rejecting
"free-market" biology, i.e., Darwinism. That point is a favorite one of Cal
DeWitt at the Univ of Wisconsin, incidentally. I point out this irony to my
students regularly: I make the point that Darwin's theory was *profoundly*
conservative, in the economic sense, at the time it was introduced. Darwin
himself was an economic "liberal" in the 19th century sense, that is, he
wanted "free" markets.
And yes, fundamentalists were also racists. Bryan was a racist, Harry
Rimmer actually joined the KKK, I could go down the list. Nearly every
American from the early 20th century would qualify as a racist today.
However, this does not alter my point about social Darwinism. My posts have
implied that I am equating social Darwinism largely with racism; I am not.
It was much larger than just "scientific racism," it was also eugenics and
cutthroat capitalism and Marxism and Nazism and.... well, it's a long list.
As for Bryan's objections to evolution, the leading ones included these two:
that evolution was used widely in Germany to justify militarism (context
here is world war one, not world war two), as documented by a leading
American biologist (Vernon Kellogg) in his book, Headquarters Nights; and
that evolution eroded social justice and democracy in America (Bryan was a
socialist and borderline pacifist). To document this quickly and get a good
sense of it, I recommend this:
Stephen Jay Gould, "William Jennings Bryan's Last Campaign." Natural History
(November 1987), 16-26.
ted
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