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This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and Nov. 24 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, the landmark work in which Darwin laid forth his theory of natural selection. While celebrations have emphasized the British naturalist's giant role in the advancement of human progress, British political journalist Dennis Sewell is not convinced. In a new book, The Political Gene: How Darwin's Ideas Changed Politics, he highlights how often - and how easily - Darwin's big idea has been harnessed for sinister political ends. According to Sewell, evolution...
...which Darwin was wrong about certain key issues. He asserted that different races of mankind had traveled different distances along the evolutionary path - white Caucasians were at the top of the racial hierarchy, while black and brown people ranked below. [Racism] was a widespread prejudice in British society at the time, but he presented racial hierarchy as a matter of science. He also held that the poor were genetically second-rate - which inspired eugenics. (See a photo-essay on Darwin...
...comedy moniker Ben Dover. There's an innocence about such humor, as if Britons have been permanently stuck in adolescence since the Victorian era. But adolescence isn't the slow awakening it used to be, as Britain's soaring rates of teen sex and pregnancy indicate. The annual British Social Attitudes surveys chart a steady liberalization of British views on sex, with a majority of the public now finding nothing wrong with sex before marriage and same-sex relationships. Brits have long been apt to say they've got no problem with what people get up to in the privacy...
...been nearly seven years since the British government decided to join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq despite vocal opposition from antiwar activists at home, as well as a host of countries around the world. Years later, the bloody conflict, which claimed the lives of 179 British soldiers, remains deeply divisive in Britain. Revelations about former Prime Minister Tony Blair's intentions in the run-up to the war, as well as the views of military commanders during the fighting, continue to make front-page headlines and dominate the national debate...
...This is not the first inquiry into the war. In 2003, the Hutton Inquiry examined the reasons behind the suicide of a British government scientist who had been the source of media reports claiming that Blair had "sexed up" intelligence assessments of Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program before the war. In 2004, the Butler Review into prewar British intelligence reports concluded that key information used to justify the war had been unreliable and that British intelligence services were guilty of a number of failings. In the U.S., a 2004 Republican-led Senate report on U.S. prewar intelligence-gathering...