A lot of blowhards out there who like to speak on evolutionary theory have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. It should come as no surprise that much of that pap comes from the right, whose leaders, even the “scientific” ones, love to beat up on science. The nuances of evolution are contentious as hell, but somehow this simple theory always ends up getting shouted down for only being a theory, or some other crap that shows the speaker fundamentally doesn’t understand how science works. (See this excellent primer on how creationists and others have yet to produce an argument against evolution.)On the opposite, but equally egregious, end of the spectrum from the “Theory!” folks are the pop-evolutionary psychology clowns who say that, because something has been theorized or observed in nature, that it immediately applies to humans too. Sure, it’s a fun academic exercise to look at human behavior through proposed mechanisms of evolution, but here’s the rub: real human behavior is orders of magnitude more complicated than the observations of animal behavior that evolutionary theory is based on.And then there’s something else entirely, a mutant troll from the Internet’s primordial soup: conservative columnists who triumph Mitt Romney’s excessive wealth as his trump card, using an evolutionary argument as back-up. That is what National Review writer Kevin Williamson does in a piece titled “Like a Boss,” which argues that Romney is richer and more fertile than Obama, and is thus a superior candidate for President.Read the rest over at Motherboard.
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