Darwin's Polar Bears
I can't get my mind off polar bears this morning. Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced in May that he would list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. His reasoning is that 1) the polar bears depend on sea ice; 2) the sea ice at the polar caps has been melting significantly for the last several decades; and 3) computer models project that this trend will continue in the future. This decision is yet another victory for those who advance the sketchy science of global warming, although many are saying Kempthorne's move did not go far enough.
The listing of polar bears as a threatened species sets a precedent, as the decision was not based on concrete evidence that the bears are, in fact, threatened. According to Kempthorne, the population of bears has grown from a low of about 12,000 in the late 1960s to approximately 25,000 today. For the first time, we are using speculative data from questionable computer models to foresee the future of Mother Earth.
It is comical to me that the same scientists responsible for this decision are the ones who champion Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory. Darwin would have never made a fuss over a struggling species. In fact, because 0f his convictions on natural selection, he even frowned on efforts to help the weaker members of the human race. In The Descent of Man he wrote,
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skills to save the life of everyone to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed (emphasis added).
If Darwin were in charge, there wouldn't be any polar bears. Let 'em drown. Survival of the fittest.
Sooner or later, our scientists are going to have to decide whether human beings are the crowning jewels of evolution, the fittest creatures at the top of the heap of natural selection, or the benevolent saviors of Planet Earth trying to preserve the globe in its present form.
As a Christian, I believe humans have a responsibility to be good stewards of the natural world God has blessed us with. That has been our charge from the first (Gen. 1:28-31). But environmentalism goes beyond this, positioning our nation in a set of inconsistencies that will amount to economic disaster and wasted resources.
