Aren’t you just sick of Charles Darwin? On his 200th birth anniversary he’s all over the media like measles.

On the BBC (where else?) David Attenborough sheds a discreet tear and religiously places a bust of the great one in the National History Museum, replacing a more deserving scientist. Richard Dawkins, the Ayatollah of Darwinism, hurls fatwas at anyone who disagrees. Even Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has a go in The Times (London): “In praise of Darwin and the spirit of inquiry”. Pass the collection bucket!

And we still have Andrew Marr’s “film” about Darwin to come — stick to politics, Andrew, there’s a good chap.

The fact is, Darwin was wrong in his central assertion: natural selection.

Consider the development of the eye. By the minute stages of natural selection, it would have taken thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years to evolve. For most of that time the eye wouldn’t be functional. It would not carry any survival advantage at all. Clearly, it wouldn’t have survived, according to the theory of natural selection.

Unless, of course, it was deliberately protected during the long prototype stage, which would suggest a creative agency at work. I suspect Darwin himself might have preferred that outcome.

The problem with both “natural selection” and “Creationism” is that neither stands up to common-sense scrutiny. The newer, more sensible, version of Creationism, Intelligent Design — damned and blasted by the jihadists of Darwinism — is also wrongly named.

The word “design” suggests activity of the cerebral cortex, and therefore a human agency. “Intelligent” is open to the same critique.

Syntagma is happy to suggest an alternative to this “mis-seeing event” to solve a needless dispute.

Purposive Evolution. Teleology for the televisual age.

Happy to be of service.

I’ve written here a few times about the Czech Republic — currently holding the rotating Presidency of the European Council — and its inspirational Head of State, President Klaus.

Yesterday, Peter Hitchens provided us with a wide-ranging and revealing account of just what is going on inside that country for which Britain went to war in 1939: How the Czechs are fighting the marshmallow EU tyrant.

It still astonishes me that the British are reduced to depending on President Klaus — and the Irish electorate — to keep us out of the despised European constitution, currently masquerading under the pseudonym, “Lisbon Treaty”.

What does that say about our own cowardly Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, who lied and lied again in the service of the nation they were meant to protect?

Klaus is ten times the man they are.

If you listen to some commentators, President Obama has failed already. Some journos even compare him to Tony Blair, as I did early in the campaign. From a British perspective, that comparison is by no means favourably intended.

Even now he reminds me of Blair in his first year of office when he said: “It’s much harder than I thought it was going to be”. Blair couldn’t have given it much prior thought, even if he had any to spare.

But there are some aspects of Obama I warm to:

“I screwed up” and “We’re in for dangerous times ahead”, are almost impossible to imagine coming from Gordon Brown.

Ditto: “We’ll do this ourselves. We won’t wait for others to act”.

The Syntagma honeymoon, such as it is, remains intact. Just.

If you’ve ever clicked on the polls at dailymail.co.uk, you’ll have noticed that they usually split around 90 percent to 10. The Mail appears to know its reader demographics very well — not surprising for such a profitable newspaper.

Whenever I have a go at any of them, uncannily I always come out on the 90 percent side. I don’t think I’ve ever missed the winning mark.

Imagine, however, if identical polls were run on the Guardian/Observer site. I suspect the split would remain at 90/10 but in the opposite direction of opinion. At the muddled Independent, 50/50 would probably be the boring outcome.

So the Daily Mail polls serve no psephological purpose beyond reinforcing known attitudes and prejudices. Aren’t they just a distraction from all the pictures of semi-clad women?

President Sarkozy of France intends to cut the country’s notoriously bloated public sector and spend the money on tax cuts and shoring up essential infrastructure.

He criticizes Gordon Brown for mismanaging the British economy by piling up unprecendented levels of public debt. He also sneers at his derisory VAT cut and the waste of money propping up non-jobs in the public sector.

Brown has apparently called for an apology, and got one.

For what, precisely, was Sarkozy meant to apologize — his hurt feelings?

Quote of the Week
“You can never tiptoe lightly enough once you start building a world of eggshells. PC makes communication impossible. It renders a people literally illiterate: The conventions of language used by functioning societies throughout human history — irony, indirect quotation, period evocation, and, yes, even obsolete comic stereotype — are all suddenly suspect.” Mark Steyn

Article of the Week
Global economy nears abyss as central banks dither by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

This is white-water rafting now, with Niagara ahead.

John Evans

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