Evolution Icon Evolution

“Communism Was Welded to Darwinism”

Communism

You never know who’s going to turn up at Q&A with Jonathan Wells and John West. The Discovery Institute biologist and political scientist, respectively, answered questions from the audience following a performance of the play Disinherit the Wind in Hollywood, California – which was a pretty interesting event in itself.

But then there stands up a biologist from a local university, unidentified, who proceeds to blow everyone away with an account of his experience as a younger man in a formerly Communist country. He explains that under the totalitarian culture of his youth, “Communism was literally welded to Darwinism.”

We recorded his remarks and they form a new episode of ID the Future. Listen to it here.

The guy is extremely articulate. He explains that for Communists, Darwinism “legitimizes conflict instead of participation and cooperation” – providing a model of class struggle, he implies, as required by pseudoscientific Marxian theory.

He goes on to talk about the wonder of DNA repair, which is an underemphasized problem for materialist theories of life’s origins. Without these absolutely vital and highly complex mechanisms, life, including the first life, would be unthinkable. So they must have been in place from the start – another hopeless chicken-and-egg problem, unless you’re willing to consider the design hypothesis.

Dr. West then comments on the impact upon one’s view of reality if you think, as Darwin did, that life and all that’s best in it is the product not of a designer’s intention, but rather of endless, horrific Malthusian competition amidst “famine, disease, and death.”

All this in barely nine minutes. Good stuff.

Photo credit: Mkvarda, via Pixabay.