President Klaus’s office has grown into a really fertile seedbed of various extreme opinions. Denying the global warming is a common agenda, and so is political-scientific analyses (in other words revealing attributes of leftism) of backpacks and drinking water bottles. From time to time, the President himself spices the discussion up by denying the Roma holocaust in the Lety camp, but his advisors do not lag behind. The second man of Klaus’s office, Petr Hájek, has now shown that their invention has not dried up. “I am not descended from the apes,” he said to open his contribution on darwinism at a seminar of the Center for Economics and Politics. By de facto advocating creationism, he irritated the biologists present at the event.
What is interesting is that in the atheistic Czech Republic was heard an opinion that meets with a response mainly in countries that find it difficult to harmonize their modernity with a strong religious tradition (Turkey, the USA). The belief in God – the creator and the findings of modern science are hard to put together for many people, and the most primitive solution to the dilemma rests in simply throwing one of the possibilities away as invalid. That’s what narrow-minded positivist scientists did for a long time and what creationists and intelligent design advocates do in an even more bizarre way. For a realistic person – whether a believer or atheist – all those would-be scientific attempts at denying darwinism and proving that Adam and Eve lived together in paradise side by side with rhinoceros and flamingos are basically funny and unbelievably complicated. What only makes the smile freeze is attempts to promote them into education plans like it happened in the USA.
That’s not the case of our country, so we can afford to laugh heartily at Hájek’s words and to watch him offering his religious belief, which has not yet grown up from the teenage period of a black-and-white division of the world, to the service of a traditional trench warfare of his boss and presenting darwinism as a marxist and leftist fallacy.
Local natural scientists are not yet used to imports of creationist nonsense, so the denying of Darwin by the President’s man made them angry. It’s understandable, but these emotions make one realize how easily the Castle think tank gets away with another, much more dangerous fallacy – denying of global warming. After all, when presented by Václav Klaus, it’s not a fallacy at all, but rather a sophisticated destructive strategy for handling the power. Czech scientists, including climatologists, reject it from time to time at press conferences, but that is not enough. A more vigorous and intensive campaign involving open letters, petitions, and distancing themselves at international forums could be useful.
