Interesting stuff. Sure, I’ll help you understand it.
You seem to want to make the comparison between the arguments regarding evil effects of religion, which you resist, and arguments regarding the evil effects of Darwin, which you tout.
The whole enterprise is juvenile, in this case, because the aim is to direct blame according to preconceived notions of who is right and who is wrong. It is the cheapest and shallowest form of political commentary, because the conclusion is foreordained: there is no chance you will give Darwin or religion an impartial appraisal. Indeed, the process of evaluation is replaced by a hunt for the information that apparently backs up your views, and is contrary to those of your opponents. It is a tarted-up version of graffiti: “Darwin sucks.”
Finding an author who apparently argues that Darwin had some sort of impact on Mao changes nothing. If that book did not exist, you would simply find another source that you could use to buttress your views and attack those of your opponents.
Hope that helps.

You give away the game when you say that Darwin was misunderstood by the Chinese Communists. When Pusey says that Darwin “rightly or wrongly” taught that “rebellion is a natural law,” he has the responsibility to show how his use of the word “rightly” in that statement might be construed to be correct, otherwise it’s dishonest to include it.
In addition, if anyone read his work as justifying revolution, creating an ideological vacuum that “cried out” for something like Marxism, and demonized and justified the murder of class enemies, that’s truly a “ridiculous parody” of what Darwin actually wrote, and to blame Darwin for those misreadings is as illegitimate as blaming Jesus for the Crusades or the burning of heretics.

To clarify, in my first paragraph, I should have written that when Pusey says the notion that “rebellion is a natural law” is something the Chinese “rightly or wrongly” learned from Darwin, he has the responsibility to show how his use of the word “rightly” might be construed to be correct, otherwise it’s dishonest to include it.

When it comes to evaluating the relationship between ideas and their consequences, why does Darwinism always get a free pass and a whitewash while religion is held to strict account?
When evaluating a social scheme like, e.g., Marxism, looking at its consequences makes sense. Does it deliver what it promises? Religions – at least their social aspects – can also be evaluated on similar grounds. Does a religion that promises to enhance moral behavior and promote justice actually do so in practice?
But scientific theories can’t be evaluated on such grounds. Geology, for example, tells us why there are a lot of diamonds in Africa. But the horrors inflicted over ‘conflict diamonds’ don’t call geology into question. Meteorology can tell us why hurricanes form near the equator, but what Katrina wrought in New Orleans doesn’t hint that meteorology is false.

(Oh, and actually, rejection of Darwinian evolution caused a huge fraction of the deaths under Mao. Look up the relationship between Lysenko and the Three Bitter Years…)

The intellectual excellence published by gifted, brilliant scientists is defiled and adulterated when Nature decides to print the useless word vomit of Pusey.
In the same Nature issue, Eva Andrei describes experimental evidence for the fractional quantum Hall Effect observed in graphene.
Pusey’s dribble clearly rests in sharp intellectual contrast.

The folks running Nature assuredly expected people like Dan to say empty criticisms like that, and said to themselves, “He just can’t handle an opinion that goes against what he already believes, when it’s printed by someone he respects.”

Pusey’s article is about what some people have made of their reading of Darwin. It does not establish that they correctly got what Darwin was saying. It’s ridiculous to blame Darwin for people who misunderstood and twisted his ideas to suit their own ideology, just as it would be ridiculous to blame the Bible for slavery, the murder of religious dissenters, and anti-semitism, all things that people have used it to support.

Sigh. Another diatribe by Mr. Klinghoffer on the supposed evils of “Darwinism”. To hear him tell it, the theory of evolution is the root of all evil nowadays. It seems that all evildoers who have ever heard of the theory of evolution have been infected by some sort of satanic disease. No matter how demented the thinking, no matter how peripheral evolution is to their thoughts, somehow “Darwinism” is to blame.
Mr. Klinghoffer loves to bring up the mantra that “ideas have consequences”. He then places the blame on the idea instead of on the people who misuse the idea. That means no one is personally responsible for their acts. Hitler didn’t kill Jews because of some misguided hatred and wanting a scapegoat to gain power, somehow “Darwinism” told him that is what he should do. Ideas only have consequences when someone acts on them, AND the acts are rarely based on a single idea. Read the ramblings of any of the people that Mr. Klinghoffer says have done evil in the name of “Darwinism” and you will see that it is only vaguely used as an excuse to do whatever they wanted to do anyway. Mr. Klinghoffer is just grasping at straws to explain HIS idea.
Mr. Klinghoffer wants to know “why does Darwinism always get a free pass and a whitewash while religion is held to strict account?” The short answer is that, NO “Darwinism” doesn’t always get a free pass. Mr. Klinghoffer is hardly the first person to want to blame Hitler (and other evils) on the theory of evolution and I have read just as much by people trying to say that the evils done in the name of religion shouldn’t be blamed on religion. It is NOT the idea that has consequences, it is the way some people misuse it.
The problem dear Mr. Klinghoffer isn’t in the ideas, it is in the people who use them to justify their own evil.

David Klinghoffer asks: “When it comes to evaluating the relationship between ideas and their consequences, why does Darwinism always get a free pass and a whitewash while religion is held to strict account? This is not a rhetorical question. Please do help me understand.”
Well, first, Marxism antedates Darwinism, and would therefore seem unlikely to be a consequence of it. Revolutionary movements in China antedate Darwinism, and hardly require Darwinian excuses, much less causation by evolutionary theory.
Second, Mao didn’t, Hitler didn’t, Stalin didn’t, claim to be acting in the name of evolutionary theory or cite Darwin to justify, e.g. invading Poland or staging the Great Leap Forward. The crusaders did claim to be acting in God’s name and on Christianity’s behalf; Christian preachers advocated and defended them. Muslim terrorists claim to be acting in the name of Islam and cite the Qur’an in justification of their actions.
Surely it is not impossibly difficult to see how direct and repeated citations of and appeals to an idea by the perpetrators of some atrocity carry more weight than the fact that you can trace some fragment of their total ideology, tenuously and indirectly, to that idea.
Third, evolutionary theory claims to explain various features of biology; like other scientific theories, it describes, rather than prescribes. Religion claims to tell men how to live; it may contain descriptive elements but is largely prescriptive. If evolutionary theory can’t prevent non-scientists from distorting its ideas to evil ends, well, that is not a failure of the theory as a description of nature and is irrelevant to its scientific validity. If a religion can’t prevent its putative followers from committing atrocities in its name, that does not speak well of its divine inspiration or divine guidance given to its followers.

Reinhard Heydrcih specifically used the Darwinian term “natural selection’ in the actual orders for the Holocaust, Wannsee, January 20, 1942, text available on the web and in Shirer’s book, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” I think that confirms where the idea came from. PS: Heydrich was a atheist and may have been in extreme denial because he was said to be of mixed Jewish and Aryan antecdents. He was NOT influenced by the Old Testament, the New Testament, or Martin Luther’s crabby letter. He was influenced by Darwin. Period.