MaxShimba
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- Apr 11, 2008
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Darwinism and Racism
The complete title of Darwin's most famous work, often abbreviated to The Origin of Species, was The Origin. of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. As Koster notes about Darwin's view on race, he:
'never considered "the less civilized races" to be authentically human. For all his decent hatred of slavery, his writings reek with all kinds of contempt for "primitive" people. Racism was culturally conditioned into educated Victorians by such "scientific" parlor tricks as Morton's measuring of brainpans with BB shot to prove that Africans and Indians had small brains, and hence, had deficient minds and intellects. Meeting the simple Indians of Tierra del Fuego, Darwin wrote: "I could not have believed how wide was the difference between savage and civilized man; it is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal . . . Viewing such a man, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures and inhabitants of the same world."44
Darwin's belief that some races (such as blacks) were inferior to others became so widely accepted that, as Haller concluded: 'the subject of race inferiority was beyond critical reach in the late nineteenth century.45 Although Darwin opposed all forms of slavery, he did conclude that one of the strongest evidences for evolution was the existence of living 'primitive races' which he believed were evolutionarily between the 'civilized races of man' and the gorilla:
'At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes. . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla. ... It has often been said ... that man can resist with impunity the greatest diversities of climate and other changes; but this is true only of the civilized races. Man in his wild condition seems to be in this respect almost as susceptible as his nearest allies, the anthropoid apes, which have never yet survived long, when removed from their native country.' 46
The missing link wasn't missing but, many evolutionists of the time concluded, lived in Australia and other faroffplaces.47 The existence of some living races was openly viewed as irrefutable evidence of a graduation of living creatures 'linking' humans to the monkeys (or today 'to our common primate ancestor'). This 'scientific conclusion' was interpreted as compelling evidence for evolution, thus a large number of biology textbooks of the time discussed the 'hierarchy of the races' topic.
The man who some regard as the actual modern 'discoverer' of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace, also espoused essentially the same idea.48 In his words,
'the weak dying was necessary to improve the race because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off leaving the superior-that is, only the fittest would survive.'49
This was the essence of Darwinism, and race differences and fitness of these differences (racism) was at its core.
Although Darwin was far less racist than many of his disciples, especially Spencer, Haeckel, Hooton, Pearson, and Huxley, his theory provided the basis for the latters' extreme racism. As Poliakov 50 noted, Darwin's primary spokesman in Germany, Ernest Haeckel, was 'the great ancestor' of Nazi biology theoreticians. Importantly, Darwin did little to oppose this conclusion which spread like wild-fire from his works.51 Since Darwin's writings were critical in the development of evolutionary theory, his thoughts on the application of his theory of racism are crucial to understand how the racism theory spawned. Although he was known as a kind and gentle man, Darwin openly gave his support to eugenic ideas which gradually won acceptance in the scientific community, both in Europe and the United States. Darwin, evidently highly influenced by his early theological and religious training, said:
'I have always maintained that excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work.'
Later, convinced that the eugenic theory was valid,
'In The Descent of Man, Darwin canonized Galton with the words; "we now know, through the admirable labours of Mr Galton, that genius . . . tends to be inherited.' 52
By the beginning of the 19th century, every discussion of social problems was permeated with 'scientific notions of class [and] race,' and that
'nearly every one of these theories had some practical applications as its corollary: political, social or cultural; and meanwhile biological research, anthropology and the science of language had intensified, not abated, the use of "race thinking".' 53
Even Chambers in his classic Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, about which Darwin said that without this book he might never have written The Origin of Species, concluded that the Negro was 'at the foot of' the Mongol, the Yellow race between, and Caucasians at the top.54 Chambers himself taught that the 'various races of mankind, are simply . . . stages in the development of the highest or Caucasian type. . .' and that the Blacks were the least developed, and the Caucasians were the highest, most evolved race.55
Racism Based on Biology
People have always tended to assume they were better than those who were culturally different, but most ideas of biological racial inferiority are fairly recent. Since up to the time of Darwin it was almost universally regarded that all humans were descendants of Adam and Eve-a view called monogenism-most concluding that all humans must literally be biological brothers. Although some individuals developed ingenious hypotheses to justify the conclusion that Blacks were inferior, such as God created them as a separate race (some concluded that the 'beasts of the earth ' discussed in Genesis was the Black race) this view has never held much weight in historical Christian theology, Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox.56-60 As Proctor opinioned:
'Prior to Darwin, it was difficult to argue against the Judeo-Christian conception of the unity of man, based on the single creation of Adam and Eve. Darwin 's theory suggested that humans had evolved over hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, and that the races of men had diverged while adapting to the particularities of local conditions. The impact of Darwin's theory was enormous.' 61
Consequently, until the middle 1800s, most Westerners believed that all humans were descendants of Adam and Eve, thus we are all brothers. Up until the widespread acceptance of evolution, the only justification for racism was the belief that God cursed certain groups or created other Adams who were inferior-a view called polygenismn -which could be identified by physical traits such as skin colour, or that some groups degenerated biologically more than others-but were still our brothers. As Gould notes, 'nearly all scientists were creationists before 1859, and most did not become polygenists', 62 and Walbank and Taylor conclude:
'. . . Darwinism led to racism and anti-semitism and was used to show that only "superior" nationalities and races were fit to survive. Thus, among the English-speaking peoples were to be found the champions of the "white man's burden" an imperial mission carried out by Anglo-Saxons. ... Similarly, the Russians preached the doctrine of pan-Slavism and the Germans that of pan-Germanism.' 63
On the question of racism and Christianity, especially as exemplified in Germany, Sir Arthur Keith stated that:
'Christianity makes no distinction of race or of color; it seeks to break down all racial barriers. In this respect the hand of Christianity is against that of Nature, for are not the races of mankind the evolutionary harvest which Nature has toiled through long ages to produce? 64
The racism which developed from the theory of evolution was by no means confined to Blacks. One of the leading American eugenicists, Charles Davenport, founder and director of the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory, concluded that Black Americans were below Caucasians-but so were several other groups. Among the groups that he included were 'the Poles, the Irish, the Italians, and . . . the Hebrews' and even the Serbians, Greeks, Swedes, Bohemians.65 He attributed a wide variety of negative racial characteristics to each different group: Poles tended to be independent although self-reliant, the Italians tended to commit crimes of personal violence, the Hebrews were a mixture of slovenly Serbians and the tidy Swedes, and the Germans and Bohemians were given to 'thriving'. He was concerned that the immigrants then flooding the United States would rapidly cause the American population to become darker in pigment, smaller in stature, and more involved in crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, and rape.
Davenport taught that a woman should not marry a man without a thorough knowledge of his biological and genealogical history. He felt a woman should act like a stock breeder who carefully checks the pedigree of a potential sire for his colts or calves. Davenport argued that the state should control who is able to breed, reasoning that if the state had the right to take a person's life, surely it could deny permission to reproduce. As a highly respected scientist, Davenport's ideas were highly influential at the time and no more radical than those advocated by many other scientists and intellectuals. In the late 1930s, the policies that Germany, then the most advanced nation in the world, was advocating were very similar.
The two races most often compared are the 'Caucasian ' and 'Negroid', now commonly called the 'white' and 'black' races. The dominant western cultural ethos, that whites were 'superior ' and blacks 'inferior' and more 'ape-like', was commonly reflected in science books published from 1880 and 1980. The textbook drawings which depict our supposed immediate ancestors, such as Homo erectus and Homo habilis, typically have very pronounced Negroid race characteristics including dark skin, kinky hair and Negroid facial features. Modern man (Homo sapiens), though, is often pictured as having light skin, straight hair, a flat forehead, a narrow nose and small lips.66 Most of the drawings of 'ape-men' and early humans even today still show pronounced Negroid traits (for examples see Time Life, The Neanderthals,67 and Early Men,68 April 1984 Science 84 cover). In addition, the fact that certain Negroid facial features are closer to the facial characteristics of many primates (the kinky hair, flat-nose, large lips, and sloping forehead, as well as the cheek and jaw-bone construction) has lent superficial support to this contention. The Caucasian race would for this reason be more evolutionarily 'fit', meaning it was a 'superior' race. As the major survival element in human evolution is intelligence, the conclusion that the higher evolved race, the Caucasians, possessed a superior intelligence was uncritically accepted for decades. Differences in intelligence were viewed as the key factors in human evolution because mind was a major factor of survival, and thus of selection.
The belief that evolution normally produced racial inequities was often noted, even exemplified, in the standard biology textbooks published around 1900. The popular American high school biology textbook by Hunter, titled A Civic Biology,69 in the section on evolution under the subtitle 'The Races of Man', stated that
'at the present time there exists upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instinct, social customs, and to an extent, in structure. '
The five races were then ranked from inferior to superior as follows:
'There are the Ethiopian or Negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.' 70
The textbook states that the 'highest' race is the Caucasians, who are specifically 'higher' developed in terms of 'instincts, social customs, and . . . [physical] structure.' 71 This book, widely adopted by American public high schools for over 30 years, was the text John Scopes used when he was a substitute biology teacher and was later convicted of violating the Butler Act, the law against teaching evolution in public schools. Also, typical of the views of the educated at this time is an article in the Encyclopedia Britannica which, under the heading 'Negro', stated:
'By the nearly unanimous consent of anthropologists this type occupies ... the lowest position in the evolutionary scale . . . the cranial sutures . . . close much earlier in the Negro than in other races. To this premature ossification of the skull, preventing all further development of the brain, many pathologists have attributed the inherent mental inferiority of the blacks, an inferiority which is even more marked than their physical differences . . . the development of the Negro and White proceeds on different lines . . . in the former the growth of the brain is . . . arrested by the premature closing of the cranial sutures ... The mental [differences] are at least as marked as the physical differences . . . No full blooded Negro has ever been distinguished as a man of science, a poet, or an artist . . .' 72
Moser, in reference to the above quote, argued that:
'... as to whether the Negroes in America have produced any great men ... the Encyclopaedia Britannica, edition of 1903 [claims that they have not]: the 1970 edition does [not] make this admission. '
Then Moser adds that it is his conclusion that
'. . . American Negroes that have made contributions to various fields, sports, science, etc., but. . . It is only that Negro that has a mixture of white genes in his system that has risen to the level where he has produced on the level with the white race.73
The man primarily responsible for the widespread acceptance of evolution in the 19th century, Thomas Huxley, wrote soon after the black slaves were freed that:
'No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average Negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible [to assume] that, when all his disabilities are removed, ... he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried out by thoughts and not by bites.74
Negroes were viewed by evolutionists then as being in certain ways unredeemably, unchangeably, and irrevocably inferior to whites.75 And racist sentiments such as these were held by many, if not most, prominent 19th century biologists who were evolutionists. In a review of a recent work which documented this beyond question, Burnham76 noted:
'After 1859, the evolutionary scheme raised additional questions, particularly whether or not Afro-Americans could survive competition with their white near relations. The momentous answer [from the scientists] was a resounding no . .. The African was inferior-he represented the missing link between ape and Teuton. '
Darwin was keenly aware of the implications of his theory on race. In the sixth chapter of The Descent of Man, he speculated that survival of the fittest pressures would eventually eliminate both the black race, which he considered inferior, and other 'lower races'. In addition, he concluded:
'I could show [that war had] done and [is] doing [much] . . . for the progress of civilization . . . The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date . . . an endless number of lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.' 77
And Morris78 noted as to Darwin's sub-title of his book The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life:
'It is clear from the context that he had races of animals primarily in mind, but at the same time it is also clear . . . that he thought of races of men in the same way.'
One of the many examples which illustrates that the 'graduations in the evolutionary level of living man' view was a major aspect of evolution is a response to a Dr. Austin H. Clark, a biologist at the Smithsonian Institution, who proposed that evolution proceeds in 'jumps' .78 Note that the quote draws support from the now discredited Piltdown Man, and the Neanderthal and Cro-magnon men (both now shown to be different races of modern humans) for evidence.
'Dr. Clark calmly reverses the old saying that nature never proceeds by leaps, and assures us that this is her only method or procedure. Yet man, as the skull history shows us so clearly, proceeded by slow steps from the Pithecanthropus, the Piltdown Man, the Neanderthal Man, to the Cro-magnon Man, who distinctly represents the modern type. If nature were as broad a jumper as Dr. Clark believes, the first man should have shown the high, civilized type of today. But we do not have to go back to fossils. The lowest type of men now living, the Australian savages, are at a sufficiently great remove from the civilized type to overthrow Dr. Clark's theory, which, instead of embodying the good points of the creational and developmental theories, actually combines the difficulties of both . . . ' 80
And Harvard evolutionist Gould concluded that racism was so widespread at this time that Darwin's co-author, Alfred Russel
'Wallace was one of the few nonracists of the nineteenth century [evolutionists]. He really believed that all human groups had innately equal capacities of intellect. Wallace defended his decidedly unconventional egalitarianism with two arguments, one anatomical the other cultural. He claimed [in contrast to the claims of almost all evolutionists of his day] first of all, that the brains of "savages'? are neither much smaller nor more poorly organized than our own [and that] . . . in the brain of the lowest savages, and, as far as we know, of the prehistoric races, we have an organ . . . little inferior in size and complexity to that of the highest type.' 81
The differences in behavior found between the black and white races, Wallace concluded, contrary to the conclusions of evolutionists around him, were because of cultural conditioning which 'can integrate the rudest savage into our own most courtly life.' The reason for Wallace's 'unconventional egalitarianism ' is explained by Gould as follows:
'Wallace, the hyperselectionist, the man who had twitted Darwin for his unwillingness to see the action of natural selection in every nuance of organic form, halted abruptly before the human brain. Our intellect and morality, Wallace argued, could not be the product of natural selection; therefore, since natural selection is evolution 's only way, some higher power-God, to put it directly-must have intervened to construct this latest and greatest organic innovation.' 82
Gould notes that Darwin was 'positively aghast at Wallace 's abrupt about-faith at the finish line itself.' 83 He wrote Wallace in 1869 that 'I differ grievously from you, and I am very sorry for it. ' Wallace, sensitive to the rebuke, thereafter referred to his non-racist theory of human intellect as 'my special heresy.'
An important argument that Hitler used to support his programs of racial genocide of the Jews, Blacks and other groups was that they were genetically 'inferior' and that their interbreeding with the superior Aryan race would adversely affect the latter's gene pool, polluting it, and lowering the overall quality of the 'pure race'.84-87 As Himmelfarb notes:
'From the "preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life " [that is, Darwin 's subtitle to Origin of Species] it was a short step to the preservation of favored individuals, classes or nations-and from their preservation to their glorification . . . Thus, it has become a portmunteau of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, and dictatorship, of the cults of the hero, the superman, and the master race . . . recent expressions of this philosophy, such as Mein Kampf are, unhappily, too familiar to require exposition here.' 83
Instead of letting chance factors dominate reproduction decisions, Hitler proposed that the scientists use the power of the state to influence these decisions so that the gene pool would shift to what 'informed conclusions' concluded was the desired direction. Consequently, Hitler encouraged those individuals that he perceived as having Aryan traits to mate, and discouraged 'interbreeding', supposing that this policy would gradually cause the Aryan race to evolve 'upward'. He believed that the Nazi race programs would further evolution by intelligently deciding which traits were not beneficial, and preventing those with them from reproducing.
