Endorsements

Endorsements

John West has written the definitive scholarly critique of the social implications of treating human beings as uppity animals. Darwin Day is an indispensable guidebook for the coming debate over whether a civilization based on amoral Darwinian materialism is fit to survive—a must read for all who fail to recognize what is at stake in teaching the materialist superstition. West concludes that non-material information and intelligence, mind and imagination are essential to human life in a meaningful universe.

George Gilder, author of Wealth and Poverty

John West has done a characteristically excellent job in analyzing social Darwinism and the insidious ideology which has infected almost every area of American public policy. This is provocative and important reading.

Charles Colson, Founder, Prison Fellowship

A superb overview of what happens once we start seeing man as an overachieving worm. John West shows how a Darwin Day worldview affects everything from sex and philanthropy to crime and euthanasia.

Marvin Olasky, Editor in Chief, World magazine

John West’s book is a deep and comprehensive study of scientific materialism’s morally corrupting effects on American public policy. Although some readers (like me) will not find his attack on Darwinian science persuasive, anyone who wants to think about the moral and political implications of modern science will have to ponder his arguments.

Larry Arnhart, Professor of Political Science at Northern Illinois University and author of Darwinian Conservatism

If you think that the debate over materialism is irrelevant to your own life, you need to read John West’s important and fascinating book. West provides shocking detail showing how scientific materialism and Darwinism have influenced many realms of American society and culture, including criminal justice, economics, business, education, and medicine. While promising utopia, scientific materialism has often debased humanity and produced many horrific social and medical experiments, some of which still continue today.

Richard Weikart, Professor of History, California State University, Stanislaus, and author of From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany

John West’s Darwin Day in America is a well-documented account of the frightening influence of philosophical materialism on the application of science to American society throughout the twentieth century. Forced sterilization, lobotomy, fetal experimentation, eugenics, the promotion of abortion, the normalization of pedophilia and incest—the monstrosities engendered by scientism chill the reader to the marrow, revealing how close America has come repeatedly to the brink of moral disaster, the final “abolition of man” that C. S. Lewis warned us of. The war, of course, goes on, and West’s history is essential reading for all Americans of good will who are determined to win the protracted conflict against a still unrepentant and undeterred reductionism. 

Robert C. Koons, Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin

Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences. West superbly makes the case that Darwin had plenty of bad ideas, and we are seeing plenty of ugly consequences today as a result. This very important book deserves to be widely read and discussed.

Culture Watch

West makes a solid case for how all such ugly social and cultural radicalism finds solid ideological grounding in the ideas of Darwin. For too long there have been apologists for Darwin who have sought to argue that a large gulf looms between the biological ideas of Darwin and Social Darwinism. West very capably demonstrates that there is in fact very little distance between the two.

News Weekly

West’s primary thesis in Darwin Day in America is that our culture and politics have been dehumanized by a scientific materialism (or reductionism) that sees man merely as the sum of his parts, and that this dogma has taken over the educational system in the United States. . . . West does an excellent job showing how Darwinian science has cheapened human life and limited man’s horizons. . . . This book demands a sequel.

Chronicles

Darwin Day in America is a thoroughly documented book (almost 100 pages of endnotes) written in an easy fluent style. It is much to be recommended.

New Oxford Review