Culture January 1, 1

In 2001, the Education Committee of the Louisiana House of Representatives passed a resolution rejecting “the core concepts of Darwinist ideology that certain races and classes of humans are inherently superior to others.” The resolution’s sponsor, an African-American Democratic legislator, asserted that by teaching “that some humans have evolved further than others,” the nineteenth-century English naturalist Charles Darwin “provided the main rationale for modern racism.” Upping the ante, Expelled, last year’s documentary-style motion picture by entertainer Ben Stein, who is Jewish, blamed the Holocaust on Nazi racism rooted in Darwinian science.