One way I can tell that America's conservatives have become ideologues, akin to Communists, Fascists, and other idiots, is how they have turned everything into politics.

Even science.

I'm not talking about the ongoing debate over teaching science or religion on the schools. It's easy to see how so-called "intelligent design" is religion because you can't do anything with the insight "God did it" -- it leads to no experiment, and ends questioning. Evolution, on the other hand, constantly brings new questions with it. Theories are used to stimulate questions, not end them.

I'm talking instead about how, when you get some of these advocates in a corner, they will flat-out admit that the whole thing is politics, just another way to fight the liberal impulse on behalf of their ideology.

The canary in this coal mine is named George Gilder, (above, from Forbes), and in Wired this month he sings this tune like Sinatra.

Watch him build (then knock down) his evolution straw man:

Intelligent design at least asks the right questions. In a world of science that still falls short of a rigorous theory of human consciousness or of the big bang, intelligent design theory begins by recognizing that everywhere in nature, information is hierarchical and precedes its embodiment. The concept precedes the concrete. The contrary notion that the world of mind, including science itself, bubbled up randomly from a prebiotic brew has inspired all the reductionist futilities of the 20th century, from Marx's obtuse materialism to environmental weather panic to zero-sum Malthusian fears over population. In biology classes, our students are not learning the largely mathematical facts of 21st-century science; they're imbibing the consolations of a faith-driven 19th-century materialist myth.

What absolute, complete, utter nonsense. Evolutionary theory has nothing in common with Marx or Malthus. There is no faith in it. It need not be "believed." (And when someone who can write clearly, like Gilder, throws up a tortured construction like the one above, you can be certain they are trying to pull a fast one.)

So-called intelligent design, on the other hand, is all faith. Cut to the center of Gilder's b.s. and even he admits it. "Intelligent design theory begins by recognizing that everywhere in nature, information is hierarchical and precedes its embodiment. The concept precedes the concrete."

The concept precedes the concrete. Marx couldn't have said it better himself.

Note the other thing Gilder did in that paragraph. He projected his own form of argument on his opponents, associating Darwin (and science) with Marx. (I don't know that the two ever met. Darwin's essay on "The Origin of Species" was published in 1844, 23 years before Marx's "Das Kapital.")

But hey, when science is all politics, and politics is all ideology, and ideology is all a matter of belief, then why shouldn't science be about belief?

Thus does the dialectic replace the scientific method, and China evolve to crush America.