Prof. Dawkins Responds To Rick Perry's Ignorance

Wowsa. I love Richard Dawkins. Texas Governor Rick Perry is right now the leading contended for the Republican Presidential nomination, and he recently said that evolution is "a theory that's out there" in response to a question. Professor Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and former Oxford professor, one of the more famous new Atheists, responds in the Washington Post with this excoriation (emphasis added):

There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today’s Republican party (I disavow the ridiculous ‘GOP’ nickname, because the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt has lately forfeited all claim to be considered ‘grand’) is this: In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.


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A politician’s attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself. It can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy but, compared to Perry’s and the Tea Party’s pronouncements on other topics such as economics, taxation, history and sexual politics, their ignorance of evolutionary science might be overlooked. Except that a politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today.


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There are many reasons to vote against Rick Perry. His fatuous stance on the teaching of evolution in schools is perhaps not the first reason that springs to mind. But maybe it is the most telling litmus test of the other reasons, and it seems to apply not just to him but, lamentably, to all the likely contenders for the Republican nomination. The ‘evolution question’ deserves a prominent place in the list of questions put to candidates in interviews and public debates during the course of the coming election.

It should be noted that, in February 2009, on the bicentennial of Darwin's birth (same day as President Abraham Lincoln, February 12, 1809), Gallup released a poll which showed that a mere 39% of Americans believe in evolution. (25% says they do not believe in evolution and 36% have no opinion.) Hopefully someone will re-do that poll again (particular to minimize the no opinion category) as Rick Perry grows more prominent in the public eye, and perhaps Mr. Perry will recognize (and be asked about) the separation of church and state that American's founding fathers believed in.