Darwin and Racism

I came across this article today published by CBN. Paul Strand takes a look at the extremely racist underpinnings of historic Darwinism and it's consequences in society over the past century and a half. From the article:

Darwin's book on human evolution, The Descent of Man, revealed him as what John West calls "a virulent racist."

"He did write extensively about how evolution by natural selection creates unequal races, and that in the evolutionary scheme of things, blacks are the closest to apes," he explained. West is the author of Darwin Day in America.

"It's not just residual racism," he added. "He's using his scientific theory as a justification for racism and countless scientists after Darwin latched on to that."

Read the article - "Confronting Evolution's Racists Roots"

Another resource I recommend is the book Darwin's Plantation: Evolution's Racist Roots, by Ken Ham and Charles Ware. This work has been highly criticized and slandered by countless reviewers (see Amazon.com), but what would you expect? They document the ugly legacy of evolutionary racism and genocide - an aspect of Darwinism which many modern scientists seek to conceal.

Darwin's Plantation: Evolution's Racist Roots

A few thoughts and excerpts from the book:

“Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.” - Stephen Jay Gould, a leading evolutionist (Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 1977)

Jim Fletcher, upon visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., wrote:

“The railroad car, once you realize what it represents, forces you in...The odd smell - which many visitors say must be the smell of death - can’t be scrubbed away. It shouldn’t be, for it reminds our senses in a visceral way of what happens when men leave God, and malevolent ideas go unchallenged....When Adolph Hitler looked for a ”final solution“ for what he called the ”Jewish problem“ - the fact of the Jews’ existence - he had only to recall what scientists like Ernest Haeckel and liberal theologians embraced: that a purposeless process, known as evolution, had generated all of life’s complexity, including civilization itself. It had done so through a pitiless procedure of the strong eliminating the weak. As the influence of this idea spread, the Bible was increasingly taught as myth.” (from Darwin’s Plantation, pg. 23-4)

Evolutionary thought regarding the origin of races, and the timescale of human development, was lived out in men like Hitler, and produced racial genocide such as that which occurred in Australia. Gathering "specimens" (especially fresh ones) was quite lucrative and highly valued by science because it provided evidence for “missing links.” Grave robbing and murder were rampant. The British museum received somewhere around 10,000 specimens, and today the Smithsonian holds the remains of over 15,000 individuals.

"Edward Ramsay, curator of the Australian Museum in Sydney for 20 years starting in 1874, was particularly heavily involved. He published a booklet for the museum that gave instructions not only on how to rob graves, but also on how to plug bullet wounds from freshly killed "specimens." Many freelance collectors worked under his guidance. For example, four weeks after Ramsay had requested skulls of Bungee Blacks, a keen young scientist sent him two of them, announcing, "The last of their tribe, had just been shot." (Darwin’s Plantation, pg. 25)

"Today, Darwinism and evolutionary thinking also enable ordinary, respectable professionals - otherwise dedicated to the saving of life - to justify their involvement in the slaughter of millions of unborn human beings, who (like the Aborigines of earlier Darwinian thinking) are also deemed “not yet fully human." (Darwin’s Plantation, pg. 26)

All of this is shocking and horrifying, but we must understand that without God, man truly is reduced to a beastly state, and will try to justify brutality under the guise of "science" and "progress."

In a future post, we will examine some of Darwin's personal views regarding slavery (commonly cited as evidence that evolution is not an inherently "racist" worldview), the perception of interracial marriage in the early 1900's, and the Biblical view of race.