Atheist biologist and blogger PZ Myers has been undergoing something akin to a religious conversion. “Akin” I said — there’s no evidence that he’s leaving godlessness behind — but it seems that the bouquet of New Atheism is getting a bit too rancid even for one of its prophets.

Myers has of late taken on the pervasive abuse and denigration of women in the New Atheist movement. He’s right on target regarding its scope and depth, although he embraces a strain of feminism that has a few problems of its own. He is to be commended, just the same, for his willingness to condemn his allies and acolytes, who, assured of their ultimate unaccountability, have so assiduously put to practice their Darwinian imperative to rut.

Myers has laudably condemned James Watson, the eugenicist and bigot whose scientific stardom derives (as best I can see) primarily from his good fortune to have met Francis Crick some decades ago at Cambridge. Myers takes Watson to task for his assertions that Africans are intellectually (and presumably morally) inferior to Caucasians.

Myers quotes from a post from the blog Genotopia about Watson:

The trouble with Watson, then, is not how aberrant he is, but how conventional. He is no more — but no less — than an embodiment of late twentieth-century biomedicine. He exemplifies how a near-exclusive focus on the genetic basis of human behavior and social problems tends to sclerose them into a biologically determinist status quo. How that process occurs seems to me eminently worth observing and thinking about. Watson is an enigmatic character. He has managed his image carefully, if not always shrewdly. It is impossible to know what he “really thinks” on most issues, but I do believe this much: he believes that his main sin has been excessive honesty. He thinks he is simply saying what most people are afraid to say.

Unfortunately, he may be right.

Myers concurs:

The scary thing is that while Watson’s career will be neatly wrapped up as he sinks into retirement, I don’t see any sign that the genetic reductionist view is going to retire with him.

Good point. Why is it, one might ask, that genetic reductionism lives on, despite its odiousness? Here’s the headline of a post from Myers himself that might shed some light on the question:

“Mary’s Monday Metazoan: We’re all just apes here“

Myers’s charming post consists merely of a photo of a baby ape alongside a photo of a baby human, with both little simians sharing similar pose and facial expression. It’s a photo that Watson himself, not to mention countless others who have marched in the Darwinist ranks over the past century and a half, would be pleased to have on their wall.

My suggestion to Myers: why not include this quote from the Master himself:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

That is, of course, Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man. Here’s a compendium of Darwin’s racist quotes, which provide some historical background to Myer’s post and Watson’s elaborations.

Now of course we can’t blame Darwin for all racism in our time. He worked with the tools he had, and he affixed a scientific imprimatur to racist views, but others, like Watson and John Scopes (the venerated protagonist in the Scopes Monkey Trial), have carried his torch.

A prime source of scientific racism today is the Darwinian milieu that (as Myers admits) permeates the biological sciences, in which man is reduced to a simian meat machine ruled by his selfish genes. Any idea of a transcendent moral law, Darwinists like Myers and Watson assure us, is just a fabrication, conjured up by hairless simians who face no accountability after their earthly struggle for fitness. Our “humanity” is no more than the prize a little pack of hominids won in the rutting contest. Why get so worked up over a little ugliness among the primates? At least we’re no longer throwing our stool.

The lie that man is just an ape has been the theme of Myers’s blog Pharyngula for 12 years. It seems that he is becoming dimly aware something is wrong with his project.

Photo: Autor: Larry Moran (Per e-mail to PZ Myers) (emailed from PZ Myers) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) lub CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], Wikimedia Commons.