However, Mr. Schmidt has provided four comments and not one has dealt with the subject, namely- Cass Sunstein.

The reason I didn’t engage with it was simple and straightforward: I agree with Mrs. Mercer (n.b.: do you prefer being referred to as Mrs. Mercer or Ilana?). My own comments would have amounted to less than gilding the lilly.

I focused on this because it is key to why the right keeps getting gutted in arguments. I also don’t believe for one second that the article above means to praise Darwin. Here’s the context:

Because people ascribe a degree of respectability to academics, intellectuals, philosophers and scholars, they can disregard the rights of the people much easier than a naked tyrant. In fact, Rousseau, Darwin and Nietzsche can go places Hitler, Stalin, Chavez and Obama could never dream.

Uh-huh.

As I repeat, it matters, because the right’s indulgence in this drivel is key to it getting gutted.

Moon,

Neo-Darwinism is the addition of genetics to explain the source of variation that powers evolution.

Just glancing at the rest of your comment, you clearly don’t understand the first thing about evolution. Break open a few books and read something on it.

Oh, and to this:

But what do you have to win? A morally unbounded, meaningless life followed by extinction? Forgive a great many of us if we choose to look a little harder instead.

Atlas Shrugged has been in print for over fifty years. And before that, you could go back to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. Yet, that’s all secondary. I don’t flinch from conclusions just because they’re upsetting.

Finally: there is no “debate” about evolution. Every single piece of evidence supports evolution, and none is against it.

neo-Darwinism: random mutations + natural selection accounts for all the diversity in life. The origin of life itself, however, is left unexplained.

The devil is in the details and probability theory. Your side has been driven to postulating an infinite number of undetectable universes and we just happen to be in one of the incredible lucky ones so that we are able to experience our good fortune.

So now it is faith versus faith.

But what do you have to win? A morally unbounded, meaningless life followed by extinction? Forgive a great many of us if we choose to look a little harder instead.

Vox Day loves to debate Darwinist, and I believe, has challenged Dawkins to a debate

I believe that Dawkins’s standard reply is “Would look good on your C.V. Not so good on mine.” You can find a more lengthy discussion of that in A Devil’s Chaplain.

Let me give you another example. Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal fascism does wonders in refuting the canard that fascism is somehow the result of capitalism run amuck. However, he fatally damages his case by going in for this sort of horrible innuendo against Darwin (and also by trying to airbrush the role of Catholicism and Christianity in the Fascist movements of the twentieth century).

So, I wonder again, what’s Darwin doing on this list?

They have not debated me and I assure you not all the bloody ribbons would be mine. But I am nothing compared to some heavy weights I know of.

Yes, there are many ninnies on my side, just as there are many on your side.

As libertarians, let’s agree to disagree. Rather that fight over what should be taught in the government schools, for instance, let’s just abolish them.

The truth will surely prevail on a level playing field, eh?

The check, such as it is, is in the mail. You have my thanks but alas, little cash. We love you Ilana.

I have applied libertarian thinking to a wide-ranging array of topics, from intellectual property to antitrust, to Just War, to economy, Hollywood, Islam—you name it, I’ve written about it.

Of which I am aware and have read. However, I do believe you have missed the important point.

I have lost count of the number of times I’ve heard American rightists whine about their loss of the entire cultural arena. What do they expect? By endorsing this flim-flam they hand the mantle of science, reason and progress to the opposition – and then sit slack jawed when they’re cut to ribbons in debate, or dismissed as reactionary cranks. Now one could try to reclaim it for the cause of individualism, liberty and capitalism. Alternatively, one could decide it’s too much trouble, and sit on the sidelines wailing that everything’s going down the tubes.

A decidely Godless non-neocon, John Derbyshire, has very accurately described the squalid innuendo against Darwin as “a blood libel on Western Civilization”. Quite. What kind of “conservatism” wants to throw out the crowning glories of the West?

[Darwin was hardly the best of the West. Bach: now that I can understand. Derb is a paleoconservative—and a Ron Paul supporter. I am hardly in the mold of the rightists against whom you rail (Mark Steyn is), so go debate them.]

Here we see “atheistic intolerance”.

Ah, Ilana! I see you have put Hugo in his place already. I should have known.

Since I’m not religious, I’m in the “I just don’t know” school of thought too. [Ditto]

There is a wealth of first-rate books explaining the evidence for evolution for the intelligent layman, one of the most recent being Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth. And, unlike relativity or quantum physics, evolution can be addressed directly, without years of specialized learning.

Given this “I just don’t know” is not good enough.