Nice try, Jack, but it doesn't fly that Darwin wasn't a racist & that his theory of evolution & natural selection was applied many times over by many people to justify racism and genocide of some races or enslaving them. Darwin's first book, '
The Origen of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.'
It DID NOT SAY the preservation of favoured 'species' but favoured RACES, referring directly to the evolution & descent of mankind.
This comes out more clearly in Darwin's SECOND book, 'The Descent of Man.'
Darwin didn’t hide his view that his evolutionary thinking applied to human races as well as to animal species. Here is one of his quotes from that book:
"The Western nations of Europe . . . now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors [that they] stand at the summit of civilization. . . . The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races through the world."
That to me is chilling!
What Your Biology Teacher Didn’t Tell You About Charles Darwin
Four years after Darwin published
The Origin of Species, James Hunt turned it into a justification for slavery. In his 1863 paper, “On the Negro’s Place IN NATURE,” he asserted: “Our Bristol & Liverpool merchants, perhaps, helped to benefit the race when they transported some of them to America.”
Christian reformers had spent decades in the early 19th century teaching Britain to view non-European races as their equals before God. In a matter of years, Darwin swept not only God off the table, but also the value of people of every race with him.
When
The Melbourne Review used Darwin’s teachings to justify the genocide of indigenous Australians in 1876, he didn’t try & stop them. When the Australian newspaper argued that “the inexorable law of natural selection [justifies] exterminating the inferior Australian & Maori races”—
that “the world is better for it” since failure to do so would be “promoting the non-survival of the fittest, protecting the propagation of the imprudent, the diseased, the defective & the criminal”—it was Christian missionaries who raised an outcry on behalf of this forgotten genocide. Darwin simply commented, “I do not know of a more striking instance of the comparative rate of increase of a civilized over a savage race.”
Cecil Rhodes was gleefully embracing Darwin’s thinking as justification for white expansion across southern Africa. He was so inspired by Darwinian evolutionist Winwood Reade’s
The Martyrdom of Man that he later confessed, “That book has made me what I am.”
What it made him was the architect of one of the most brutal and immoral acts of European expansion and genocide in history. Rhodes
wrote in 1877:
"I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. . . . It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honorable race the world possesses."
If what Rhodes believed sounds shocking to you—and I hope it does—then understand that he was simply stating what he drew from the works of both Darwin & Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, who extrapolated his cousin’s thinking to pioneer racial eugenics.
Darwin and Race - WallBuilders
No one best exemplifies the inherent racism found in Darwin’s
Preservation of the Favored Races than his cousin & fellow scientist, Francis Galton. He was a man who applied himself widely to the various scientific fields, but most of all to theories of racial development which he termed “eugenics.”
Much of his work is based off that of Darwin & the two conversed through letters until the latter passed. In Galton’s major work,
Inquiries into Human Faculty & its Development, he advocated for the gradual extermination of the “lower races” through deliberate breeding of the higher “stock.”
Galton himself attempted to “further the course of evolution” through a variety of means & methods. Most outrageously, he proposed colonizing Africa with the Chinese in hopes that the latter would breed-out the former, extinguishing the inhabitants of that continent entirely. He writes:
"My proposal is to make the encouragement of the Chinese settlements at one or more suitable places on the East Coast of Africa a par of our national policy, in the belief that the Chinese immigrants would not only maintain their position, but that they would multiply & their descendants supplant the inferior Negro race. I should expect the large part of the African seaboard, now sparsely occupied by lazy, palavering savages…might in a few years be tenanted by industrious, order loving Chinese…"
Darwin's comment to this was his writing to his cousin Galton:
"Though I see so much difficulty, the object seems a grand one & you have pointed out the sole feasible, yet I fear utopian, plan of procedure in IMPROVING the human race."
Again this is chilling!
And again the application of both of these men's racist thoughts & how it should be applied to the human races was born out once again in the southern US apologists reasons for slavery of blacks.
One such piece of writing, out of the many which exist, is the 1905 essay by Benjamin K. Hays entitled
, Natural Selection and the Race Problem. After breaking down the way Darwin’s theory applies to humanity, Hays turns his attention to the American situation:
"And the black man—what of him? As he was known to the ancient Egyptians, to the Greek & to the Roman, even so is he found in his African home today. At the dawn of history he was fully developed & during the past 3000 years he has not made one step of progress."
"Independently, he has shown no power to advance. The superiority of the American negro to his African brother, who is a savage & cannibal, is DUE TO slavery & could have been acquired in NO other way."
"Men who ascribe debased characteristics of the negro to slavery show a short-sightedness that is pitiable. The present attainment of the American negro has been solely the result of his close personal contact with the white man."
"Nor should it be forgotten that most of the leaders in the negro race are men with Anglo-Saxon blood in their veins who partake more of their Caucasian than of their Ethiopian lineage. Some of these are splendid men, who are making heroic efforts to elevate the negro race. Others of mixed blood are vicious & turbulent. These are the men who create trouble."
"Left to itself, a negro population lapses into barbarism…The negro has been domesticated, but the question is, will he ever become an integral part of Anglo-American civilization….The black man has never been a competitor, but has always been subservient to the white race. And just so long as he remains subservient his position is secure & just so soon as he becomes a competitor his fate is sealed."
Again chilling!
Hays synthesizes the natural extension of Darwin’s beliefs saying:
"The weak has ever been dominated by the strong, and where the strong cannot control it will destroy. As long as a weaker race will render service, it will be protected by the stronger. But whenever & wherever the weaker becomes a competitor of the stronger, the Struggle for Existence will be brief & the relentless hand of Natural Selection will place the weaker in the list of those that are numbered with the past."
Praise the Lord for Christian teaching to refute this chilling belief & applications & the courage of Christians to bring this to light & stand against it.
Gal 3:27-29 For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed & heirs according to the promise.
Genesis 1:26,27 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea & the birds of the air, over the livestock & over all the earth itself & every creature that crawls upon it.”
27So God created man IN HIS OWN IMAGE; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
Acts 17:25,26 He Himself gives all men life & breath & everything else. From ONE MAN He made every nation of men, to inhabit the whole earth; & He determined their appointed times & the boundaries of their lands.
