Greens and Evolution

It is commonplace for leftists to accuse conservatives of ignorance of and hostility toward science – of being “anti science” as they often put it. They usually and with good reason cite some conservatives’ attitudes toward evolution as evidence for their charge.  However leftists, at least the green ones, are by no means innocent of mythological thinking  on the same subject.

While some religious conservatives deny that evolution has occurred,  many greens accept that it has but demand that it now stop and claim that they have both the ability and a moral imperative to make it stop. They see the  distribution of species and individuals and the level of human activity of the present day, or of somewhere around 1800, or, for the more fervid, of the Middle Ages or  Neolithic times as an ideal  state which must be preserved or restored and  then shielded from change.  (Amusingly this in a way makes them conservatives or reactionaries in the old fashioned sense of those terms.)

This of course is quite unscientific.  Evolution cannot be stopped. It will continue. Environments will change. Some things will thrive, and others will decline. Species will become extinct, and new species will evolve. Humans participate in some of the processes, but cannot bring  them all to an absolute halt. The notion of an intrinsically ideal state of things ordained by Nature is not science but rather a manifestation of the romantic longings and/or resentments of those embracing it.  It is also another reason for considering the green movement to be a religion.

There is plenty of unscientific thinking going  around in a variety of places, and the leftists have less room than they think for being smug about the situations.