The problem with Social Darwinism is that it's like the Nazi embrace of Friedrich Nietzsche, who himself despised anti-Semites and thought the Germans were degenerates. Darwinian theory does not predict the ascendance of the strong, nor does it establish competition as a measure of fitness. Most relationships in nature are not competitive; they are overwhelmingly cooperative and the competition stands out mostly because of its rarity. Real Social Darwinism, if there could actually be such a thing, would be socialism, not the sort of plutocracy envisioned by so-called Social Darwinists.

There's a real danger in trying to derive social policy by analogy from science. Science doesn't work by analogy and metaphor -- those are religious modes of thought, and a large part of the reason why modern science has produced a world of wonders in only a few centuries while religion has produced nothing of lasting value, ever. The overwhelming majority of animals are arthropods, while the overwhelming majority of life on earth is unicellular. Are we going to base social policy on our observation of lobsters and microbes?

Of course, in the natural world, parasites outnumber non-parasites by a comfortable margin. I guess the GOP is drawing some lessons from science.

---Cthulhu for President: Why vote for the lesser evil?

The Rightwing/GOP have been living with a deep contradiction for decades. One the one hand they exploit the gullible "religious" fundies' fear and hatred of evolutionary theory. On the other hand, they propound a heartless pseudo-libertarian ideology to justify winner-take-all social policies as "survival of the fittest", a gross distortion of evolutionary theory. Only the infinitely self-serving mentality of the Right could have sustained the cognitive dissonance for this long.

Maybe the cracks are finally beginning to show. Maybe the GOP cannon fodder is finally shaking off its biblical sleep?

FDR's response to progressive demands: "I agree. Now go out and make me do it."

Not an original observation but a revealing one nevertheless.  These Christian conservatives are more like the Taliban than they will admit.  

Stupidity, ignorance, repressive politics, religious intolerance, degrading the role of women, and the willingness to visit death and destruction upon those that don't BELIEVE the same way.

However, when many folks all embrace the same ignorant uneducated and violent coping behaviors so readily as the Taliban and the Christian conservatives it would be appropriate to understand what their payoffs are?  (What they get for acting the way they do?)

alohapolitics.com

You're absolutely right that the issue for the fundamentalists is the inerrancy of the bible. I went to seminary for my master's degree and my father (the ultimate fundamentalist) was upset about the evangelical seminary I chose to attend because they were actually having debate about whether the correct belief was inerrancy or infallability. Talk about dancing on the head of a pin!!

My brother and sister-in-law wouldn't let their children go see the movie "The Land Before Time" years ago because they didn't "believe in dinasours' for chrissakes.

Doesn't information itself have a liberal bias? Steven Colbert

between science and wingnuts. Here are some quotes from Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive from February 2005:

When President Bush plunged into the debate over the teaching of evolution this month, saying, "both sides ought to be properly taught," he seemed to be reading from the playbook of the Discovery Institute, the conservative think tank here that is at the helm of this newly volatile frontier in the nation's culture wars. [snip]

Mainstream scientists reject the notion that any controversy over evolution even exists. But Mr. Bush embraced the institute's talking points by suggesting that alternative theories and criticism should be included in biology curriculums "so people can understand what the debate is about."

Financed by some of the same Christian conservatives who helped Mr. Bush win the White House, the organization's intellectual core is a scattered group of scholars who for nearly a decade have explored the unorthodox explanation of life's origins known as intelligent design.

Together, they have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive. [snip]

As much philosophical worldview as scientific hypothesis, intelligent design challenges Darwin's theory of natural selection by arguing that some organisms are too complex to be explained by evolution alone, pointing to the possibility of supernatural influences. While mutual acceptance of evolution and the existence of God appeals instinctively to a faithful public, intelligent design is shunned as heresy in mainstream universities and science societies as untestable in laboratories.

I was appalled by this article. Before I read it, I was not aware that there is such a thing as "mainstream science": I thought there was just science and quackery.

Note that this article nowhere mentions, even in passing, that evolutionary theory is true. By the corporate media's standards of balance, that would be to take sides, and hence would be to abandon "objectivity". The Times thus frames a scientific issue politically, just as the regressives do.

I especially like the claims that intelligent design is "as much philosophical worldview as scientific hypothesis"—in fact it is nothing but a pathological symptom of being unable to deal with modernity— and that it puts "Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive".

To the Times, evolutionary theory, and by extension science in general, is just another point of view.