Rabbi Shmuley Boteach writes: New York Times columnist Paul Krugman thinks Republicans are knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. In the not-too-distant future he sees a Republican half-wit winning the presidency and dragging America back to the Stone Age.
“One of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge,” Krugman recently wrote. “And, in a time of severe challenges – environmental, economic, and more – that’s a terrifying prospect.”
Krugman’s ire was piqued by Texas Governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry’s comments that evolution is “just a theory” that has “some gaps in it,” and that global warming is not a proven fact.
While I cannot comment on climate-change science, I do have a great deal to say about evolution.
I am not a scientist. But beginning in about 1990 I started organizing an annual debate at Oxford University on science versus religion where the focus was almost always on evolution and which featured some of the world’s greatest evolutionists like Richard Dawkins, who appeared several times, and the late John Maynard-Smith of the University of Sussex, who at the time was regarded by many as the greatest living evolutionary theorist.
