When you are in the habit of setting days and months aside to celebrate everything and everyone, you are bound to have some rather odd coincidences. Today, February 12th, might be one of them. In the midst of Black History Month, we take a day to “celebrate” Darwin Day. Chosen to coincide with the birthday of Charles Darwin, the day is set aside to highlight Darwin’s unique contributions to science and to promote science more generally. A strange coincidence because Charles Darwin single-handedly gave the world a theory that, at its very core, gives intellectual justification for racism.
To be fair, Charles Darwin himself was vehemently opposed to slavery. He came from a long line of abolitionists. The problem is that he also came from a long line of atheists so that his hatred of God was greater than his love of slaves. His justification of slavery and many other genocidal practices was not merely an unintended consequence of his theory but a result of a willed obstinance. His co-discoverer of the theory of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace warned him that it was insufficient for explaining man and his friends, including Samuel Wilberforce, the son of the great British abolitionist, warned of the brutality his theory justified. Darwin, in a moment of brutal honesty once wrote, “I have lately read Morley’s Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity produce little permanent effect: real good seems only to follow the slow and silent side attacks.” In short, he was willing to accept any collateral damage in his “slow and silent attack on Christianity.”
Even Evolutionary Ideas Have Consequences
If we look closely at the theory of evolution itself, we will see why racism necessarily follows. The Theory of Evolution is based on the relatively straightforward principle of Natural Selection—“As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.” Colloquially known as “Survival of the Fittest”, Darwin’s model is rather intuitive until he posits that it explains everything. The principle is without limitation and any species, given enough time and interaction with the environment, might evolve into any other species. It is endless evolution with no room for distinctions between micro- and macro-evolution even though Darwin never uncovered evidence for the latter.
Had he simply put forward the theory of Natural Selection to explain the origin of non-human species like he did in his first book On the Origin of Species, then it is very likely that the microevolutionary aspects would have been accepted and the macroevolutionary rejected, or at least severely modified. But Darwin had intrinsically connected his scientific theory to a materialist worldview. To consummate the wedding, he slipped humans into the theory in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.
Despite making numerous connections between the rudimentary forms of morality and intelligence in animals and human beings, Darwin was plagued by what appears to be an uncrossable chasm—the difference between the highest animal and the highest human. But if he was to apply Natural Selection to the “descent of man” then he could allow for a slow and steady evolution which posits that there is not just a difference between animals and men, but between gradations of men as well. As he puts it in The Descent of Man “Some of these, for instance the Negro and European, are so distinct that, if specimens had been brought to a naturalist without any further information, they would undoubtedly have been considered by him as good and true species.”
For Darwin evolution is an ongoing process. This means that it continues down to our own day and that various species are continually fighting for survival; humans included. Governed by the first evolutionary principle of Survival of the Fittest, Natural Selection has favored certain races over others. Race is pitted against race and tribe against tribe so that the only way we know which is the most fit of them is by their continued survival and destruction of other races and tribes. So then evolution not only scientifically justifies slavery and racism, but also genocide. As Darwin himself put it in Decent of Man:
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes [like the gorilla, orangutan, or chimpanzee] . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
An Inherent Contradiction
Modern men are unique in their ability to hold contradictions together in their head, but it is impossible to hold them together in practice. Either racism, slavery, and genocide are wrong and Evolution is a false explanation for the origin of man or Evolution is true and racism, slavery and genocide are justified. There can be no intellectual racism without actual racism emerging. No amount of “sympathy” (to use Darwin’s term) or “woke” condemnation can overcome “scientific fact.” When science is all you got for truth, then you have to accept the consequences of that.
We have spoken on any number of occasions previously on why Evolution is both bad philosophy and bad science. Nevertheless it is accepted as fact because it is the only explanation that eliminates God. Darwin knew that and his intellectual progeny know it as well. The problem is that any worldview that eliminates God ultimately ends up justifying the elimination of men. If Man really came from below, then we might treat him as we see fit. Might makes right. But if man came from above then every man is intrinsically valuable regardless of whether he is a savage or civilized. In fact, as history has borne out, it is Christianity and not some blind process of evolution that raises man from savage to gentleman.