At BreakPoint Radio today, John Stonestreet has an excellent commentary on the totalitarian temptation that runs now through science and culture. The temptation is to explain everything about human beings in evolutionary terms, and to employ that dubious science as a tool to refashion our culture as a whole — everything from sex to law to diet.

Stonestreet highlights the new expanded edition of John West’s book, Darwin Day in America, which tells the story of how we got here, culminating in an all new chapter, "Scientism in the Age of Obama — and Beyond."

In his outstanding book, "Darwin Day in America," which has recently been updated and re-released, John West of Discovery Institute chronicles "how our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science."

West writes that our understanding of science is "so totalistic in its outlook that its defenders claim the right to remake every sphere of human life from public policy and education to ethics and religion."

Of course, this isn’t new. In the decades following the publication of "On the Origin of Species," people like William Graham Sumner and Ernst Haeckel took that logic and applied it to economics through the so-called "struggle between the races."

And of course eugenics, the horrible brainchild of Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, would have been literally unimaginable without Darwinism.

Today, scarcely a month goes by without some aspect of human life being explained in Darwinian terms. One book, entitled "The Murderer Next Door," explains — you guessed it — the human, especially male, propensity to commit murder as Richards Dawkins’ "selfish gene" at work.

On a much more whimsical note, men’s domination in Scrabble championships has also been explained in Darwinian terms.

At best, the dominance of Darwinism and scientism does an injustice to what it means to be human. At worst, as in the case of eugenics, it causes suffering on a massive scale.

If the science of Darwinian evolution were truly unassailable, that would be bad enough. Much of this might then have to be accepted with a sigh of resignation. The fact that the science itself is deeply flawed, as professionals in the field themselves increasingly admit in their technical literature, makes it all the more outrageous.

Listen to John Stonestreet here. Amazon is currently sold out of Darwin’s Doubt, but you can get your copy directly from the publisher at a fine discount, or of course, alternatively, from Barnes & Noble.