Anytime anyone defends Darwinism they almost always downplay the impact his theory had on racism and eugenics.
They calmly argue that “Religion is to blame for all the mayhem in the world, not science, you fundamentalist!”
Scientism, as we have come to remember, can have disastrous impacts. When they say “Follow the Science” we should perhaps judge where it is leading us.
The Discovery Institute recently ran an article by the late Dr. Olufemi Oluniyi which is adapted from chapter one of his recently released book, Darwin Comes to Africa: Social Darwinism and British Imperialism in Northern Nigeria.
It’s worth a read:
Charles Darwin elevated race as a factor in the struggle for survival…
“…As has been most indisputably and thoroughly documented elsewhere, Darwin’s letters and other writings clearly demonstrate that by “barbarous,” “inferior,” or “lower” peoples he usually meant dark-skinned people. The terms “highly civilised” or “superior” he applied to Caucasians. For example, in The Descent of Man Darwin states that the black man is closer than the white man to apes, and speaks of “the Negro” who “differs more… from the other races of man than do the mammals of the same continents from those of the other provinces.” There can be no doubt that Darwin thought dark-skinned peoples were less highly evolved than light-skinned peoples.
Racism (the dividing of humans on the supposed basis of race) did of course exist before Darwin. By 1779 German physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had divided humankind into five races based on cranial features, while by 1759 Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus had classified human beings into four categories based on the four known continents (European white, American reddish, Asian tawny, African black). The Frenchman Joseph Arthur de Gobineau classified humans into three racial groups by 1855 (black, white, and yellow).
Darwin’s “Scientific” Basis for Racism
Nevertheless, what the classifications lacked was a more credible scientific basis, which Darwin ostensibly provided. (Later we shall speak more of these foolish and harmful divisions and show that they have no basis in reality, but that rather there is only one human race, of which we are all a part.)
In the aftermath of Darwin’s books, as Gregory Claeys notes, Social Darwinism redefined fitness as intelligence, and intelligence as white — and let it be noted that “Darwin accepted the application… with others following suit, crafting a language of exclusion… [and] racial conflict.” In short, within a few years of Darwin’s books, “much of the language of ethnicity which would come to haunt the next century was now in place.”
Thus we see, summarizes historian Richard Weikart, the biologist Wilhelm Roux (1850–1924) describing the Darwinian “struggle within organisms as analogous to the struggle within society.” Similarly, writes Weikart, paleontologist Friedrich Rolle (1827–1887) argued that “population pressure naturally precipitates wars and violent conflicts between peoples and races” and that “the physically and mentally superior races suppress and exterminate the lower races, bringing progress and benefit to the whole of mankind.”
The Importance of War
Likewise the biologist Heinrich Ziegler (1891–1918) advocated that “according to Darwin’s theory, war has constantly been of the greatest importance for the general progress of the human race” and that “the physically weaker, the less intelligent, the morally inferior or morally degenerate peoples must clear out and make room for the stronger and better developed” in the interest of the general progress of the human race.
According to Weikart, Darwin’s disciple Ernst Haeckel differentiated “between ten races of humanity, with the Caucasian race the most highly developed,” following which he fervently “condoned the extermination of” so-called primitive races. Similarly, zoologist Oscar Schmidt (1823–1886), zoologist Richard Hertwig (1850–1937), biologist Richard Semon (1859–1918), and biologist Ernst Krause (1839–1903) all advocated “the extermination of human races as a natural and inevitable part of the process of natural selection.”
You see what we have here. These men and likewise many others argued that the logical extrapolation of Darwin’s theory was the extermination of their fellow humans in the name of evolutionary progress!
