Did the French Revolution Evolve by Natural Selection?

Evolutionists are off the rails, applying Darwinian theory to matters of the mind and intellectual history.

If it’s been awhile since you heard anything about the French Revolution of 1789-1793, here’s a brief refresher. It was bad; really bad. It represented the collapse of a government into chaos and anarchy, with heads rolling everywhere (literally). Mob rule fueled by radical-leftist totalitarians gave the world a glimpse of dictatorships to come. Hanne Nabintu Herland, writing in an article on WND, describes some of the horrors at the height of the revolution:

Under the French revolutionary leader, Maximilien de Robespierre, guillotines were set up on almost every street corner in Paris. The little that was left of order now fell apart. People were executed at the smallest hint of opposition; orgies were organized in churches as a direct move by radicals to spite religion. Robespierre summarized his totalitarian logic, stating that there are only two types of people in France, the people and their enemies. Anyone who opposed the revolution was to be eliminated. Priests and the well-educated were beheaded and killed by the thousands without trials or examining evidence; their bodies were thrown into the streets. Nobody cared about the rule of law in the midst of this so-called glorious revolution. And it was profoundly anti-religious. Churches were locked up; priests demeaned and killed. The French Revolution meant the end of religious freedom in France. A new tyranny had begun – a “democratic” tyranny.

And yet this followed the so-called “French Enlightenment,” in which deists and atheists wrote passionate works demanding the authority of “reason” and “evidence,” promising a golden age of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” for all, once society had freed itself from the shackles of religious tradition. Robespierre is said to have justified the executions with the proverb, “To make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs” (one of the worst analogies in history). Whose omelette? Who appointed him the cook? And who wants to eat an omelette with blood in it? That kind of attitude would be used by Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

Herland says that order was not returned until Napoleon seized power and re-instituted the rule of law, including religious toleration, restoring some semblance of order.

The French Revolution was profoundly different from the American Revolution, which did usher in an age of “liberty and justice for all” based not on equality of outcome, but equality of opportunity. It also sprang from the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, with its “self-evident” truth that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. For a comparison of American and French ideals, see Dennis Prager explain “The American Trinity” of values. Fortunately, the French have learned a lot from America after Napoleon, and France is today one of America’s best allies in the free world.

The Darwinian Takeover of History

With that refresher in mind, look at what some Darwin-drunk eggheads at Indiana University came up with. In their paper in the elite Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they apply biological evolution to explain the French Revolution. This is not a joke; you can read the open-access paper yourself.

Our mapping of the French Revolution’s turbulent early days in terms of the creation, sharing, and destruction of word-use patterns complements existing studies of specific ideas (much as evolutionary biology analyzes both mechanisms of transmission/selection and the particular phenotypes for which an environment selects).

Could they just be using evolutionary biology as an analogy? They can’t possibly mean this, can they? Look at the Conclusion of the paper:

The history of human culture is more than just the rise and fall of particular ideas. It is also the emergence of new information-processing mechanisms and media, and roles that individuals and institutions play in creating and propagating these ideas through time. In the language of biological evolution, we must understand not only the characteristics for which an environment selects but the strength of that selection over time and the shifting and heterogeneous nature of the transmission mechanisms.

The figure in the paper shows a plot of novel ideas surviving through time in the same manner as novel traits in a population of organisms. They treat the members of committees, the writers of pamphlets, and debaters just like they would bacteria in a test tube or ants in an ant farm, watching which innovations “emerge” to carry the evolution forward. They treat the words of the revolutionaries as “patterns” that mutate and evolve.

A press release from Indiana University shows photos of the two main suspects perpetrating this latest Darwin fraud, Rebecca Spang and Alexander Barron. “Adopting analytical tools to track word-use patterns, they found the French Revolution’s principles, ideals and goals emerged and evolved in the assembly’s speeches and debates.” Is there no area of human inquiry safe from Darwin’s Stuff Happens Law?

Readers should take notice that this paper is completely amoral. There are no condemnations of Robespierre or the horrific executions and terrors of the French Revolution. It’s just stuff that happened according to the aimless meanderings of the blind evolutionary process.

Are we too harsh to call these eggheads the perpetrators of a fraud? Maybe we are not harsh enough. Why? Because their approach is nothing less than the death-knell of all science, all history, and all reason. With their self-deluded, self-refuting approach to knowledge, the Age of Reason evolves into the Rage of Un-reason.

To see why, let’s have another set of Darwin eggheads apply the same method to them. Rebecca Spang and Alexander Barron, with their bad case of the Yoda Complex delusion, were the chief perpetrators of the PNAS fraud, so let them become the lab rats now. With some skillful manipulation of symbols in fancy-looking equations and charts, the new eggheads could treat the writings of Spang and Barron like memes of a population that is evolving. Nothing about the content of their PNAS paper would matter any more, would it? The new scientists would look at Spang and Barron like bacteria, or ants, that come up once in awhile with new memes that succeed better than other memes. Maybe a turn of phrase, or a random mutation in a thought, or some other pattern, gets selected and survives. Then, the anteaters at the journal manipulate which ants get eaten and which ones get published—because they, too, are a population evolving by natural selection (in this case, predatory journal editors). You can continue this infinite regress; it’s turtles all the way down.

But could their argument be true? True? Ha ha ha ha, you dolt. What is truth? The only truth is that there is no truth! Everything evolves, and this paper will go extinct by chance just like everything else in this pointless universe [cue sound of implosion].

Dear reader, do you see why Darwinism must be laughed off the stage once and for all? It leads to the destruction of reason—indeed, of all human inquiry. With the totalitarian Darwinists in control, knowledge marches to the guillotine. Don’t like it? Too bad. Stuff happens.

Exercise tough love. Give these mutant scholars some books by C.S. Lewis to read.