Darwinism, scientific and "Social" versions

Robert Reich has a good piece out on Darwinism, focusing on how today's Republicans repudiate the scientific theory of evolution (natural selection). But they endorse, in substance if not in label, the Social Darwinism of the Gilded Age: Of Darwinism and Social Darwinism CommonDreams.org 11/29/05. He writes:

The Conservative Movement, as its progenitors like to call it, is now mounting a full-throttled attack on Darwinism even as it has thoroughly embraced Darwin’s bastard child, social Darwinism. On the face of it, these positions may appear inconsistent. What unites them is a profound disdain for science, logic, and fact. ...

The modern Conservative Movement has embraced social Darwinism with no less fervor than it has condemned Darwinism. Social Darwinism gives a moral justification for rejecting social insurance and supporting tax cuts for the rich. "In America," says Robert Bork, "'the rich' are overwhelmingly people – entrepreneurs, small businessmen, corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, etc. – who have gained their higher incomes through intelligence, imagination, and hard work." Any transfer of wealth from rich to poor thereby undermines the nation’s moral fiber. Allow the virtuous rich to keep more of their earnings and pay less in taxes, and they’ll be even more virtuous. Give the non-virtuous poor food stamps, Medicaid, and what’s left of welfare, and they'll fall into deeper moral torpor.

The only exception I would take to what he writes in this article is that he says that scientists are unanimous (for all meaningful purposes) in saying that evolution is "a fact, not a theory".

Presumably he's responding here to the flat-earther argument that evolution is "just a theory", i.e. a guess. But however hard it may be for the flat-earth crowd to accept that "theory" may have a different meaning in science than in colloquial English, evolution is indeed a theory. A scientific theory, which means it's an intellectual framework to describe the process that is evidenced by the scientific facts of geology, biology, paleontology and other fields.

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