Here's Marty Peretz, publisher of The New Republic magazine, trying to show off his scientific sophistication by doing what liberals love to do which is make fun of the rubes who believe in things like the uniqueness of human beings:
Who is the most repellent Republican?.... I must say that Romney strikes me as the smarmiest. But it seems to me that it's Huckabee, although he does have a certain charm, the charm of the primitive. My minimum condition for and from a plausible president is that he accept that men and women are descended from apes and monkeys. Huckabee surely doesn't. But, then, I'm not sure that George Bush does either.
Perhaps no single paragraph in the political literature of the last half-century does a better job of illustrating all at once the arrogance, pomposity, superciliousness, scorn, contempt and sense of superiority many liberals hold for their fellow man. It also reveals Peretz's own ignorance of the matter upon which he chooses to pontificate.
It turns out that Peretz's minimum standard would disqualify any Darwinian who knew what he was talking about, which Peretz obviously does not. No informed Darwinian, no matter how fervent a believer he may be in the theory of evolution, believes that man descended from apes and monkeys. Evolutionary theory teaches instead that apes, monkeys and man all descended from the same common ancestor. The simians are our cousins, according to the theory, not our ancestors.
Somebody please inform Mr. Peretz of this before he ridicules somebody else for not believing what nobody else but him believes either.
RLC