WND Blunders, Publishes Pro-Darwin Heresy

Every now and then, WorldNetDaily (WND) publishes a column by someone we enjoy reading because he makes sense and we agree with him. It always surprises us that sane writers would allow their work to appear in WND, but it’s probably something that happens when one’s work is syndicated and the author has no control over where it might show up.

Still, we can’t imagine that WND would intentionally print what we found today in their publication, because — except for today’s lapse — WND is a flamingly creationist, absolutely execrable, moronic, and incurably crazed journalistic organ that believes in and enthusiastically promotes every conspiracy theory that ever existed.

We assume that what we’re about to discuss is an editorial blunder which occurred because they were impressed by the author’s name and didn’t thoroughly read what he had written. However it happened, WND is running a column by Walter E. Williams, a respected economist. That’s no surprise (WND isn’t wrong about everything), but — it’s pro-Darwin! Williams’ column is titled Obama’s nonsensical economics.

We must warn you in advance: it’s stridently anti-Obama and pro-free enterprise. That’s standard stuff for your Curmudgeon, although some of you may find it offensive. But that’s not why we’re posting this. The remarkable thing about Williams’ column is his references to Darwin and evolution — he obviously favors both of them, which somehow slipped by the creationists who run WND. Here are some excerpts, with bold font added by us:

Last week, President Barack Obama, at a Capital Hilton fundraising event, told the crowd, “We can’t go back to this brand of you’re-on-your-own economics.” Throughout my professional career as an economist, I’ve never come across the theory of “you’re-on-your-own economics.”

I’m guessing what the president means by – and finds offensive in – “you’re-on-your-own economics” is that it’s a system in which people are held responsible for their actions, that they take risks and must live with the results, that people can’t force others to pay for their mistakes, and that they can’t live at the expense of other people.

Williams is good! We really like what comes next:

President Obama’s vision was shared by our Pilgrim Fathers of the Plymouth Colony in modern-day Massachusetts. They established a communist system.

We won’t excerpt from that part of Williams’ essay, because: (a) that’s not what we want to write about today; and (b) we prefer that you click over to WND so you can read that part of Williams’ column just as he wrote it. As some of you may recall, we’ve previously written about that colonial catastrophe, and we link to it every Thanksgiving (see Of Plymouth Plantation: “Every Man for His Own Particular”).

Now we come to what attracted us to Williams’ essay, and which violates WND’s core beliefs:

President Obama also told the Washington Hilton crowd that “we are not a country that was built on the idea of survival of the fittest.” Obama is not by himself, but “survival of the fittest” is one of the greatest misunderstandings of Charles Darwin’s pathbreaking work “On the Origin of Species.”

We suspect that the WND editors didn’t read far enough to see that, or what follows it, which is why it slipped into their creationist publication. Let’s read on:

When Obama and most other people use the expression “survival of the fittest,” they suggest that a bunch of people or animals are competing with one another, and the strongest, smartest or cleverest survives. That’s not what Darwin and evolutionary biologists have in mind. Instead, what they have in mind is that those who survive have characteristics that make them better-equipped to survive and hence reproduce themselves in a particular environment. They are not laying waste to their competitors.

Exactly! As we’ve often said before (see, e.g., Evolution, Intelligent Design, and Barack Obama), Darwin’s theory and free-market economics fit quite naturally together in the rational mind. We continue:

Let’s try a few survival of the fittest questions. Which companies do you think should survive and expand, those that can meet the changing wants of their customers in a least-cost fashion or those that cannot do so? If the means of communication become cheaper through fax machines, the Internet and telephones, should subsidies be expended to help the U.S. Postal Service survive?

This stuff is so obvious to us that we’re constantly amazed when others seem not to get it. Here’s more:

Years ago, typing was done on a mechanical typewriter; milk was delivered to doorsteps via horse and wagon; slide rules were used to make calculations. Should any of these products and practices have survived, or was it OK for natural selection to consign them to the dustbin of history?

Here’s the end of Williams’ column:

Try cornering the president or his supporters, and ask them whether they believe government should ensure that the unfit survive and rather than “you’re-on-your-own economics” there should be “you’re-on-somebody-else economics.”

Well said! But someone at WND may lose his job for letting a pro-evolution essay appear in their otherwise totally creationist publication.

Copyright © 2012. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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