Time to cancel Darwin

As much as I despise the cancel culture, if there is any cultural icon who deserves to be canceled for racist attitudes, it is Charles Darwin. Or were you not aware of how his ideas helped fuel the fires of eugenics?

I tweeted a poll on June 23, asking, “Who said this? The ‘western nations of Europe … now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors and stand at the summit of civilization.’”

Of the four choices offered, 4.2 percent voted for David Duke, 10.5 percent for Robert E. Lee, 29.6 percent for Adolph Hitler, and 55.7 percent for Charles Darwin. The majority got it right!

But is this knowledge widely disseminated? Do the countless millions of fawning Darwinists know about Darwin’s racial theories? And if they do, do they simply turn a blind eye to them?

The same day I did the poll, I sent the link of a disturbing article about Darwin to a friend of mine who is Black and a historian. The article, written by Austin Anderson and posted on the Philosophy for the Many site, was titled, “The Dark Side of Darwinism.”

He added, “Racist philosophy, eugenics and white supremacy are the love-children of Darwin. Survival of the fittest is the core of European philosophy and its approaches to colonization and imperialism.”

Which peoples does Darwin describe as “savages”? He is quite generous in his use of the term, including, Australians, Mongolians, Africans, Indians, South Americans, Polynesians, and Eskimos.

Darwin asks, “How little can the hard-worked wife of a degraded Australian savage, who uses hardly any abstract words and cannot count above four, exert her self-consciousness, or reflect on the nature of her own existence?”

This was virtually identical to the reasoning used by European and American slave traders, who viewed the Africans as intellectually inferior human beings, therefore deserving of servitude to the white man.

These savages, according to Darwin, also had lower morality, lack of ability to reason, and less self-control. And, quite naturally, given the survival of the fittest and the ruthlessness of the evolutionary process, the superior whites should conquer and colonize the savage’s lands.

As Anderson notes (while quoting Darwin), “As white Europeans ‘exterminate and replace’ the world’s ‘savage races,’ and as great apes go extinct, Darwin says that the gap between civilized man and his closest evolutionary ancestor will widen. The gap will eventually be between civilized man ‘and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla’.”

Of course, Darwin should have been canceled intellectually decades ago due to the abject scientific failure of Darwinian naturalism.

As atheist philosophy professor Thomas Nagel argued in his book Mind and Cosmos, “the modern scientific story of the origin of life through evolution is ‘ripe for displacement’ and it represents ‘a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense,’ which will be seen as ‘laughable’ in a couple of generations.” (The subtitle of Nagel’s book is, “Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.”)

There is no viable, materialistic explanation for the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin of human beings (as distinct from animals, with a conscience and a state of consciousness).

As Nagel wrote, “I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous, but that is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program [about the origin of life] as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science.”

Unfortunately, the intellectual cult of Darwinism does not seem ready to collapse just yet, as it remains thoroughly entrenched in academia to this day. To oppose it is to be a heretic.

But perhaps, given the dark side of some of Darwin’s theories, theories that were intrinsic to his evolutionary views, Darwin can be questioned morally. Starting there, it will be easier to topple his intellectual house of cards.

In his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Darwin put forth the idea that all life came from a single common ancestor and changed without design, goal, or purpose - our brain and morality developed as such - and humans are merely another animal - as he put forth in Descent of Man::

…Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high condition through a struggle for existence consequent on his rapid multiplication; and if he is to advance still higher, it is to be feared that he must remain subject to a severe struggle. Otherwise he would sink into indolence, and the more gifted men would not be more successful in the battle of life than the less gifted. Hence our natural rate of increase, though leading to many and obvious evils, must not be greatly diminished by any means. There should be open competition for all men; and the most able should not be prevented by laws or customs from succeeding best and rearing the largest number of offspring."
"We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”
-Charles Darwin, Descent of Man

In the Darwinian view of humans as animals, what would cause us to stop practicing animal husbandry within our own species? Reduce the meaning of "human" to "just another animal", and eugenics is fair game. Scientific data is well supported in animal husbandry. Eugenics is only abhorrent to those who recognize that there is something transcendently special about humans.

In the early decades of the 20th century, Human Zoos were created where thousands of indigenous peoples were put on public display and touted as “missing links” between man and apes. Their public display was arranged with the enthusiastic support of the most elite members of the scientific community, and it was promoted uncritically by America’s leading newspapers.

With Darwinism, there is always an inferior race and a superior race – there must be an intermediate bridging the gap – or as Darwin states:

“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, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked 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 civilised 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.”
- Charles Darwin, Descent of Man

If Darwin allowed Dawkins to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist then he also allowed scientists to be an intellectually fulfilled racist.

Racism and eugenics were the hallmarks of the theory of human evolution in the early 20th century, representing a clear consensus of evolutionary biologists as well as other scientists and leaders in higher education and government (endorsed by the Supreme Court in 1926). Eugenics is an ugly part of American history that was taught to our children (See: Hunter’s Civic Biology ) – a movement that caused the compulsory sterilization laws in 30 U.S. states that resulted in more than 60,000 sterilizations of disabled.

At the core of the current theory of evolution is materialism/naturalism and this is a worldview with consequences. For example, as Stephen Meyer points out -the constitution assumes:

Free will, hence the capacity for self-governance.
Moral responsibility hence accountability under the law.
Intrinsic dignity of the human being, hence inalienable human rights.
Unchanging moral principles and a stable human nature, making possible a stable system of Constitutional law.

In contrast, under the materialistic picture of reality pervasive in our culture, you get this:

Not free will, but determinism.
Since moral ideas evolve and are instinctive rather than a matter of choice, moral responsibility and accountability are undermined.
No conception of a design or purpose behind life, therefore the erosion of the concepts of human dignity and inalienable rights.
Since human nature evolves and moral law evolves, the supreme law governing our political system is also infinitely malleable.

These are not Conservative principles.

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