Ethics

Ben Stein Brings the Crazy

By Ed Brayton

And in the Worldnutdaily, naturally. It's the same old argument we've heard from creationists time and time again - that Darwin was a racist - oblivious as they are to the obvious hypocrisy of it all. And it's pretty standard demagoguery: start with a kernel of truth (yes, by today's standards Darwin was certainly a racist), pretend any mitigating factors don't exist (the fact that virtually all of Western society was imbued with racism at the time) and ignore the fact that the argument cuts against their position just as strongly as it does the one they're trying to criticize (do we really need to list all of the racism of that age justified by the Bible?). Stein begins with a giant logical fallacy:

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on March 05, 2008 (boomark / email).