Kevin D. Williamson:
The amazing muroid hind anatomy of Rattus norvegicus may be the product of eons of mind-bendingly complex Darwinian refinement, but I still don’t give a rat’s ass what Scott Walker thinks about evolution.
And neither does anybody else. Not really.
Governor Walker, making the rounds in London as part of his plan to relocate from Madison to Washington — the presidency is a roundabout affair — was asked whether he “believes in” evolution. “Believes in” is key language — nobody ever asks a politician whether he knows anything about evolution. It is a safe bet that Walker, famously a college dropout, has not been undertaking graduate-level studies of evolution in his spare time, assuming he has any time at all left over from knocking the stuffing out of Wisconsin’s thuggish Democrat-run public-sector unions and triumphing over the Gestapo-style “John Doe” inquisition launched against him by an unethical Democrat-run prosecutor’s office — and winning three elections in four years. Between kicking ass and taking names, Scott Walker probably does not have a great deal of time left over for biology.
When someone asks a politician whether he “believes in” evolution, he is not asking for a scientific opinion. If you want a scientific opinion, you ask a scientist, not a politician. What is instead being sought with that question is one of two things: 1) a profession of faith, not in science but in the half-informed worldview of the “I F******g Love Science,” Neil deGrasse Tyson–meme-affirming, enjoying-scientific-prestige-by-proxy crowd, or 2) a shameful public confession that one is a knuckle-dragging science “denier” who believes that the fossil record is a conspiracy of archeologists who get up in the morning and go to bed at night fuming about how much they hate the Baby Jesus. It is a purely political and rhetorical exercise.
The relevant scholars in the field do not “believe in” evolution, any more than a physicist “believes in” the proposition that objects subject to earth’s gravity accelerate toward the pavement at 9.8 meters per second squared — they know. As an intellectual matter, Scott Walker’s proclaiming that he “believes in” evolution would be precisely as meaningful as his proclaiming that he doesn’t “believe in” evolution — he has little or no relevant knowledge about the subject, and his choosing the right answer would be as intellectually significant as a chicken playing tic-tac-toe or infinite monkeys banging out Shakespearean sonnets on infinite typewriters. This is obvious if you ask a similar question about a field that doesn’t carry a similar pop-culture charge: Does Harry Reid believe that Ezra Pound’s contributions to The Waste-Land were in fact so profound and meaningful that he should be considered something like the coauthor of the poem? Who knows? I’d be surprised if he’d read The Waste-Land.
If asked whether he “believes in” evolution Scott Walker could have turned the question on his questioner: What, EXACTLY, do you mean when you use the term, ”evolution?”
It is a money bet that most people could not answer that question very well.
Even famous atheist Richard Dawkins admitted that, under his theory, the origin of life on earth was seeded here from life that existed elsewhere.
From God?
Or maybe from God via another planet?
And where are all those intermediate forms that couldn’t crawl anymore but couldn’t fly yet?
What about all the ones that couldn’t swim anymore but couldn’t run yet?