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When I discuss Critical Race Theory with leftists, I often make the point that, while I'd rather public schools not encourage students to speculate on the causes of racial disparities, I'd be amenable to a compromise where systemic racism is taught as one possibility, alongside cultural and biological explanations.
The response to this (when it's not an accusation of racism on my part) is that I'm just like the creationists who wanted their psuedoscience taught alongside evolution. This is kind of true, in that I am asking that ideas I like be taught alongside ones favored by the academic establishment. However, when you take social desirability out of the equation, HBD is more similar to evolution because it literally IS just applied evolution, and systemic racism/CRT/disparate impact/wokeness/social justice/anti-racism/whatever label we're using this week is analogous to creationism in that we have little direct evidence it exists, but we assume it must exist because the current state of affairs would make sense as its outcome, even though it would also make sense as the outcome of other processes.
I doubt that I'm the first person around these parts to say that the Pastafarian explanation for gravity (an invisible, non-corporeal Flying Spaghetti Monster physically pushes us onto the ground) has no less evidence supporting it than the woke explanation for half-Asian, half-white children having a mean IQ between that of Asians and that of whites (stereotype threat impacts them half as much).
I also doubt that I'm the first person around these parts to draw a comparison between creationists who acknowledge microevolution while denying Darwinism to leftists who acknowledge within-group heritability while denying between-group heritability.
However, a thought occurred to me today that frightened me, and my hope is that when I voice it, you will unanimously dismiss it as ridiculous, because if it's in any way true, then I'm going to be devastated.
What if the truth value of Darwinism had little, if anything, to do with its acceptance by the academic establishment, and the falsehood of intelligent design had little, if anything, to do with its rejection by the academic establishment? If truth was that important, we'd expect CRT to be seen as equivalent to creationism, but it's not.
You know the Schmitt meme about how all disputes can be reduced to friend vs. enemy? Well.. maybe that's what happened with the debate over evolution in public schools. Maybe evolution was pushed specifically because the religious right objected to it, and not because it was real. That evolution actually WAS real was incidental at best.
Promote evolution and CRT because they hurt the right. Eliminate intelligent design and HBD because they hurt the left. This is how a Schmittposter would describe what happened, and maybe that literally is what happened.
Please tell me I'm just mindkilled. I'm not being rhetorical here. I would find that reassuring.
You’re only half wrong- the scopes monkey trial, notably, centered around the teaching of evolution as a way to advocate eugenics, with the prestige press of the day painting it as a new Spanish Inquisition shutting down brave truth tellers.
If there was an agenda behind adopting belief in evolution, it was that of eugenics. We forget, today, just how much of a long-standing culture wars issue eugenics was in the Victorian era through the mid century, with opposition spearheaded by mostly-Darwinism-skeptical churches(and there’s a nearly 1-1 correspondence between these bodies’ stance on eugenics at the time and their stance on abortion today- much stronger than between their stances on abortion today and their stance on abortion in 1930) and support mostly the province of educated persons with secular rationale.
The Scopes Monkey Trial was kayfabe, with both sides of the case being backed by a local newspaper in order to generate publicity for a small town in Tennessee. (See Wikipedia)
I think there are two very different Christian lines of criticism of evolution. The position of the conservative faction of Anglicanism in Darwin's day, and of the Catholic Church until JPII's 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy, is roughly-speaking that evolution is unfortunate if true (because it makes eugenics possible, and because it makes atheism more intellectually respectable and therefore more dangerous) but nevertheless a proper matter of scientific enquiry, not theological debate. In England, the conservative bishops left the attacks on Darwin to scientifically-trained clerics like Sedgwick, who tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to attack him on scientific grounds.
The position that evolution should be rejected based on theological arguments is unique to the tradition of non-denominational American Protestantism that we loosely categorise as "evangelical". That is the position that was being pushed by the prosecution in Scopes, because that is what made the kayfabe show appealing to American culture warriors on both sides. (The culture war in question was mainline vs evangelical, which maps onto the modern blue vs red surprisingly well).
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