Will the ID cranks ever tire of the appeal to consequences?

Short answer, no.

The latest is Dembski laughing with glee at the latest bigoted ramblings of James Watson who apparently has gone and said Africans are stupid and that’s why Africa suffers. This is not the first, or last time that Watson will say something dumb, offensive, and backwards. Like some people who have received enough accolade that they are safe from any repercussions for their actions, he seems to just revel in being an ass. Like, as Zuska points out, his recent diagnosis of Rosalind Franklin as autistic, as if she was the asshole in that conflict.

As if Watson’s shenanigans aren’t embarrassing enough for humanity, Dembski has to then weigh in with the usual numbskull analysis and say, “See! If people believe in Darwinism we’ll have racist eugenics again“. No I’m not kidding. He asks:

Anybody willing to offer predictions about when Darwinists will be getting back big time into the eugenics business?

Let’s make this abundantly clear, eugenics was nothing but the use of science to justify pre-existing racist ideas scientists had about other races. These ideas were not scientifically valid. Dembski, and others with their historically indefensible “From Darwin to Hitler” nonsense, seem to be suggesting there is some scientific validity to this idea of inferior races. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that this is inadvertent, but it makes it no less tiresome.

The idea of inferior races, is, of course, nonsense, and the attempts to pin the ills of racism and the holocaust has even raised the ire of the Anti-Defamation League . Anyone who has read Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man realizes that in the case of eugenics the researchers were biased, the theories flawed, and the science manipulated to favor the outcome of a specific ideology. They started with their conclusions, and made the science fit their racist beliefs.

The IDers should be careful. The real similarity isn’t between modern evolutionary biologists and eugenicists, but between ID and the eugenics movement.
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