Klinghoffer's Hero, Pat Buchanan?

I think I've said about enough about David Klinghoffer for a while. I'll keep an eye on his BeliefNet column and if he gets really, really stupid I might post again. I have been waiting for him to comment on the many comments his last "Strip Club" article received [comments his little missive requested, I might add], most seriously to his detriment, but he seems to have put any negative comments on ignore. Sounds about right.

So how about another petrified brain to discuss, Pat Buchanan. Here is a man who ran for President. Here is a man who [some] people still think has a functioning brain. In my opinion here is a man incapable of learning anything.

Case in point is a recent diatribe on the website "The US Daily", be sure it's an opinion piece called "Making a Monkey Out of Darwin". In it he quotes liberally from a book called ""The End of Darwinism: And How a Flawed and Disastrous Theory Was Stolen and Sold," by Eugene G. Windchy". I have no idea who Eugene G. Windchy is, I haven't read his book, but if Pat Buchanan's quotes are accurate then Mr. Windchy last attended a science class in about 1960 and was asleep at the wheel for most of it. I think he also missed his 'How to research a subject" class and "how to support your ideas" class. Of course since he is saying things that are anti-Darwin, Pat Buchanan just loves it.

Windchy makes many of the same tired claims that others, including a few Klinghoffer keeps making:

That Darwinism has proven “disastrous theory” is indisputable. [Only to people like Windchy, Buchanan, and Klinghoffer]

“Karl Marx loved Darwinism,” writes Windchy. “To him, survival of the fittest as the source of progress justified violence in bringing about social and political change, in other words, the revolution.” “Darwin suits my purpose,” Marx wrote. [OK, they all need a history lesson on the use of a timeline. The chronology is all wrong Check out "Marx, Stalin, and Darwin" from the Sensuous Curmudgeon]

Darwin suited Adolf Hitler’s purposes, too.Darwin, he demonstrates, stole his theory from Alfred Wallace scientific hoaxes as “Nebraska Man” – an anthropoid ape ancestor to man, whose tooth turned out to belong to a wild pig – and Piltdown Man, the missing link between monkey and man. [And who are the people who determined they were hoaxes? SCIENTISTS that who. Not some armchair Creationists like Windchy and Buchanan]

As for Buchanan's and Windchy's absurd claim that Charles Darwin stole the work Of Alfred Wallace I point you to Wallace's on words on the subject "MY RELATIONS WITH DARWIN IN REFERENCE TO THE THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION" By ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE" in which he says:

"My own paper is reprinted in my Essays on Natural Selection (1870), in the preface to which I wrote in reference to it as follows: "I have felt all my life, and I still feel, the most sincere satisfaction that Mr. Darwin had been at work long before me and that it was not left for me to attempt to write the Origin of Species. . . . Far abler men than myself may confess that they have not that untiring patience in accumulating and that wonderful skill in using large masses of facts of the most varied kind, that wide and accurate physiological knowledge, that acuteness in devising and skill in carrying out experiments, and that admirable style of composition, at once clear, persuasive and judicial—qualities which in their harmonious combination mark out Mr. Darwin as the man best fitted for the great work has undertaken and accomplished."

"In conclusion I would Only wish to add, that my connection with Darwin and his great work has helped to secure for my own writings on the same questions a full recognition by the press and the public; while my share in the origination and establishment of the theory of Natural Selection has usually been exaggerated. The one great result which I claim for my paper of 1858 is that it compelled Darwin to write and publish his Origin of Species without further delay. "

All in all, take a look at the article and see how lost Pat Buchanan is. But I will lay odds that soon he will be able to add to his shingle that he and David Klinghoffer are the best of friends. Gee, with friends like that . . . . you know the rest. Actually just the idea of Klinghoffer and Buchanan together is pretty hilarious for reasons you can discern yourself by doing a little reading up on pat Buchanan.

Need to give an aside to PZ Myers who also blogged about this 'opinion' piece and included the link to the Wallace material. Thanks PZ!!!

I would also like to link over to another favorite place, the NY Times blog "The Wild Side" of Dr. Olivia Judson and her post "Wallace should Hang". The Dr. J. of Biology gives Wallace more credit than he ever took for himself. She rightly identifies him as a naturalist and biologist in his own right and not simply the man whose letter got Darwin off the dime. But in any case Darwin's work was his own and the fact Wallace also made the same leaps of knowledge, although at the time he didn't realize it was about a decade after Darwin, also helped usher in the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection because it also confirmed Darwin's work.

By the way, for anyone interested Dr. Judson is back from her sabbatical and is again writing The Wild Side blog. While the guests, or ghosts, writers were excellent, I have always enjoyed her style and ability to break down complex concepts and make them not just understandable, but interesting and frequently entertaining. You can check out her return in "Operator? Can You Put Me Through to Ant Nest 251?"