Bad music: When racists and religious fundamentalists remix Darwin

I had a friend in high school who'd invite me over to listen to his 50 shades of miscellaneous electronic music he had collected from various indie record stores in Seattle. He would play DJ for as long as I could endure him spinning records by artists whom I had mostly never heard of prior. Results were mixed for me, but I was introduced to some music which became of interest. It was a process of discovery, seldom enlightening, but enjoyable all the same because my friend possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of this arcane electronica and was obsessively passionate about it. There's contagion in such enthusiasm, and I couldn't help but listen to his stories and to the endless stream of analog music. This was back when record turntables had yet to face their dinosaur-killing asteroid – the CD format and the advent of music migration to the Internet.

What struck me at the time was how some of these electronica/industrial bands took rock and pop classics and outright butchered them. I recall a psychedelic-disco version of “Sympathy For The Devil (Who Killed the Kennedys)” by Laibach, who put out an eight track album with seven different covers of the legendary Rolling Stones song. I rather enjoyed the version featuring the female singer, and could do without the rest. This relatively new music genre was bold in its experimentation, and no “classic” was safe from being covered, sampled, or remixed.

Ditto for Darwin's classic work on evolutionary theory, apparently. Evolution has been a target for religious fundamentalists in the United States for decades. Apart from the endemic belief that denies evolution exists at all, there's a healthy fraction of the creationist vision, including its slightly-evolved Intelligent Design movement (and every incarnation of creationism after 2005 when the Supreme Court banned Intelligent Design from being taught in schools), who accept another interpretation of evolution. Mainly, the belief that God alone created man, and evolution only played a very limited role in some forms of life.

I'd definitely qualify this as an unimpressive remix by creationists DJs, albeit one excruciating to listen to. Regrettably, there hasn't been a lot of thought put into the requisite designer drugs one would need to ingest in mass quantities to dance to this offbeat pseudoscience. But for our viewing pleasure, they did build a Creationist Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, where you can saddle-up your toddler on a triceratops to recreate those acid trips of youth. Because according to creationists, humans and dinosaurs co-existed. And humans rode dinosaurs?

From the Creationist Museum display, “What Did Dinosaurs Eat”:

“Before man's Fall, animals were vegetarians. In a 'very good' creation, no animal would die, so there were no carnivores. All the beasts of the earth, no just the 'beasts of the field' that God brought to Adam to name, ate only plants.”

I hear an extended remix of Darwin playing off in the distance, echoing off walls of fear and ignorance. You can't dance to it, it must be 'scientific racism'. 

A recent meeting with an overtly racist colleague reminded me that religious fundamentalists aren't the only ones remixing Darwin. According to his perspective, evolution is mostly fact. But he took it a step further and commented that “there should be another way to classify race besides evolution”.

This school of thought falls under scientific racism. Yes, it's actually a thing. It mostly died out after theend of the Second World War. Naturally, Hitler was an ardent fan of the concept, but the roots of scientific racism trace back to thinkers from antiquity. Essentially, scientific racism exploits evolution and other branches of science in order to “prove” the superiority of one race over another. Individuals are categorised by their phenotypes and assigned to a distinct race.

The argument presented to me was that there's such a small difference between human DNA and that of a chimpanzee, and yet that tiny two percent difference accounts for an entirely new species. In his view, human DNA slightly varies from individual to individual but accounts for the significant differences in our appearances across the globe. So why aren't we, biologically-speaking, different races? His gross omission of additional evolutionary processes aside, he already considered humans to be so racially segregated by ability, intelligence, civility, etc., that for all practical purposes, not all humans are humans, but distinct species. If he had been white, I would have asked him for directions to the Ku Klux Klan museum in South Carolina.

Yeah, I still listen to the old classics like biology, geology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and the lot.

Call me old fashioned. They're timeless hits, unlike our experiments in religion and race relations. And if in some bizarre alternate universe the racists and religious fundamentalists were correct, I've got plenty of sympathy for the devil to spare. Evolution should be left to the scientists alone to remix and play. Any other DJ just won't cut it.