Is evolution killing all the health-care grannies??

The health care debate is getting completely insane. But I'm glad that we still have things to laugh about. For example, here is an idiotic article in Washington Times, Getting Rid of Granny, that brings in evolution to the debate:

The bottom line is not the bottom line. It is something far more profound. Our decisions regarding who will get help and who won't are more than about bean-counting bureaucrats deciding if your drugs or operation will cost more than you are contributing to the U.S. Treasury.

The secular left claims we are evolutionary accidents who managed to crawl out of the slime and by "natural selection" stand erect and over millions of years outsmart our ancestors, the apes. If that is your belief, then you probably think health care should be rationed. Why spend lots of money to improve -- or save -- the life of someone who evolved from slime and has no special significance other than the "accident" of becoming human? Policies flow from such a philosophy, though the average secularist probably wouldn't put it in such stark terms. Stark, or not, isn't this the inevitable progression of seeing humanity as maybe complex, but nothing special?

No need to comment on this kind of idiocy - but this particular article does make me wonder about human intelligence. Oh - and once again, no apes are not our ancestors - but humans and apes had a common ancestor 5-7 million years ago.

If you really have to, you can read the full article here.

By the way, just this past Sunday there was a review of a book about the conservation efforts of Theodore Roosevelt: The Wilderness Warrior - Theodore Roosevelt and the crusade for America. Interestingly, evolution played a major role in the development of his ideas for the conservation of nature (must be at the expense of killing some grannies...):

By the time he took over the presidency after McKinley’s assassination in 1901, Roosevelt was primed for environmental action. He created the National Wildlife Refuge System and made the United States Forest Service and the Biological Survey progressive and energetic agents for wildlife and habitat protection.
...
Brinkley refers often to Roosevelt’s Darwinism. Roosevelt certainly saw himself as a disciple of Darwin, but Brinkley sometimes uses Darwinism as if it were synonymous with environmentalism — as if to acknowledge the interconnectedness of human beings and animals is to conclude that both must be saved together. What is scarcely explored is how peculiarly American Roosevelt’s Darwinism was, combining a belief in natural selection with the intuition that God made the world and that human beings — especially Americans — were inevitably stewards of it. Brinkley quotes Roosevelt writing a year before his death: “Thank Heaven I sat at the feet of Darwin and Huxley.” Roosevelt was not being ironic; he could thank God for Darwin. Just as he could be a hunter and a conservationist; indeed the two activities encouraged each other.

Read the full review here. You can also read an excerpt from chapter one here: The education of a Darwinian Naturalist.