Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

To: Sherman Logan

Darwin’s views on race are more than clear in his follow-up book “The Ascent of Man.” His disciples include Francis Galton and Margaret Sanger. In “Ascent” he compares the human race to a barnyard where defective animals are destroyed for the good of “the race” and predicts a future where the more advanced races (such as the Anglo-Saxons) would wage war on the inferior ones,


11 posted on 08/24/2014 2:30:16 PM PDT by D_Idaho ("For we wrestle not against flesh and blood...")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies ]


To: D_Idaho

Actually, it’s “Descent of Man.”

Here’s, AFAIK, the offending passage.

“At some future point, not distant as measured by centuries, the civilised 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 will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised 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.”

Given what Darwin had seen in his lifetime, his conclusion that more advanced peoples would exterminate less-advanced ones was entirely reasonable. I don’t see in the above any indication that Darwin approved, or that he though this extermination would be a good thing.

I am also unaware of any passage where DArwin “compares the human race to a barnyard where defective animals are destroyed for the good of “the race.”

Many of those who claimed to follow him did so, of course, but AFAIK this was something they extrapolated (not unreasonably, to be fair) from his work, not something he stated himself.

Given the obvious implications for racism of his works, and the tenor of the times, I think Darwin’s work is surprisingly non-racist. For instance, he proclaimed a single origin for all the human races, in contradiction to the widely held, at the time, notion that the superior races had a different ancestry.


25 posted on 08/24/2014 2:51:49 PM PDT by Sherman Logan (Perception wins all the battles. Reality wins all the wars.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 11 | View Replies ]

To: D_Idaho
Darwin’s views on race are more than clear in his follow-up book “The Ascent of Man.” His disciples include Francis Galton and Margaret Sanger.

The influence primarily responsible for the modern eugenics movement was the establishment of the doctrine of organic evolution following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859.

—Samuel J. Holmes, Human Genetics, ch.25 (1936).


46 posted on 08/25/2014 2:27:18 AM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode (<<== Click here to learn about Evolution!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 11 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson