That does NOT imply that these attacks are necessarily "intrinsic" to Darwinism, nor that these folks are representative.
The risk exists but it is not certain.
He's correct that Ann is attacking a dumbed-down/strawman version of Darwin: and it is an interesting approach to claim Darwinism refutes leftism. Will digest this over time before making up my mind.
Cheers!
The coterie of court philosophers responsible for propping up Soviet ideology understood this perfectly. That's why the Stalin regime sent people to Siberia for the crime of believing the evidence for Darwin rather than the Party's preference for Lamarck.
Well, the main problem with the left is they hate that man creature. They hate his family, how he thinks, how he lives and they want to change it all up.
But it is not possible to change the nature of man.
For whatever reason, leftists clearly were uncomfortable with pure Darwinism almost from the start. Most of the left finally seems to have given up on the issue, but for most of the last 150 years they strongly preferred, and sometimes stubbornly clung to, Lamarckian as opposed to Darwinian versions of evolution.
The last anti-Darwinian broadside I can think of from a Leftist was Jeremy Rifkin's Algeny. That was from the 70's IIRC. There are probably more recent examples. I haven't followed the antievolution literature closely in recent years, but leftist anti-Darwinism seems to have subsided.
There also has been, and may well still be, strong anti-Darwinian sentiments among many "newage" religion types, which might be considered part of the left. Examples are Rupert Sheldrake with his theory of "morphic resonance," Francis Hitching (The Neck of the Giraffe) and William Fix (The Bone Peddlers). Some "newage" religions are explicitly antievolutionary (not just anti-Darwinist) e.g. "Krishna Consciousness" and the Raelians; and many others, while not explicitly antievolution, insist on lurid scenarios of earth history and the genealogy of the human race that are wildly contradictory to any and every scientific account, e.g. Madam Blavatsky's Theosophy.