Posted on 06/25/2025 7:36:29 AM PDT by Heartlander
On July 21, 1925, John Scopes was found guilty of teaching Darwinian evolution in a state-funded high school in Dayton, Tennessee. He was fined $100. Scopes had ostensibly lost his battle with the state. But the side he represented was winning the greater war. I don’t say that because Scopes’s verdict was later overturned on a technicality. My contention is that the ideology he helped unleash on the public has been the source of more human oppression, suffering, and death than anyone in that Dayton courtroom could have imagined.
As it turned out, there was some question as to whether Scopes had ever actually taught evolution. But he agreed to claim that he had for a greater purpose—to ignite a national debate and deliberately attract attention to the fight. And it worked. The real tragedy of the Scopes trial was not that it in some way authorized the teaching of evolution, but that it cemented in the public mind acceptance of a deeper pathology. It popularized the idea that there was a war between science and religion and that religion was the losing side. In other words, it was successful at mainstreaming scientific materialism. At its core, a materialist mindset removes all restraint from the human tendency to misuse science. Darwinism was just the idea that made it seem reasonable, and the Scopes trial made it go viral.
Both during and after the trial, the news media, led in large part by H. L. Mencken, mocked prosecutor William Jennings Bryan and his Christian faith. At one point, Mencken put it this way:
One somehow pities him, despite his so palpable imbecilities.… But let no one, laughing at him, underestimate the magic that lies in his black, malignant eye, his frayed but still eloquent voice. He can shake and inflame these poor ignoramuses as no other man among us.1
The press played along, describing the people of rural Tennessee as backward “boobs and bigots,” “peasants,” “yokels,” and “morons” who were hopelessly behind the times. The descriptions reflect the tendency of those defending science’s all-encompassing reach to abhor the “other.” History shows that those who label opponents of the “enlightened, scientific elite” in such degrading ways aren’t just trying to get laughs. Their dehumanizing bent is not a byproduct of their scientific materialism; it is one of its most prominent features. And it has a way of leading to horrific ends.
A Civic Biology
Hidden behind the mythology and revisionist history of the “Monkey Trial” is a centerpiece that seems to have gotten lost in all the noise: the textbook from which Scopes was teaching, A Civic Biology. John G. West notes that
If any teacher in America tried to teach Evolution using A Civic Biology today, the teacher would be stopped just as surely as John Scopes, and not merely because the book’s science is outdated.… The goal was to equip students to be good citizens, and it is the social and political agenda of the textbook that most dates it. For example, the textbook enlists evolutionary science to justify white supremacy.… Even more pronounced than the book’s racism is its advocacy of eugenics in the chapter on “Heredity and Variation.”2
Racism and eugenics are evil twins of the same pernicious source, spawn of thinking that originated long before Scopes and that continues to this day to rot everything it touches. Darwinian evolution has been used to justify both. But if Darwinism is about descent with modification, it has failed miserably at modifying the materialist mindset that has claimed millions of victims by brutalizing those whom the powerful consider “unfit.” History is replete with examples.
Eugenics, Racism & Hitler’s Bible
In 1921, Margaret Sanger organized the first American Birth Control Conference in New York City. Sanger’s overt racism and advocacy of eugenics were in perfect keeping with A Civic Biology.3 Here is Sanger in her own words:
The government of the United States deliberately encourages and even makes necessary by its laws that breeding—with a breakneck rapidity—of idiots, defectives, diseased, feeble-minded, and criminal classes.… Year by year more money is expended … to maintain an increasing race of morons which threaten the very foundations of our civilization.4
Sanger was one of the dehumanizers’ greatest champions. She believed that the way to protect “the very foundations of our civilization” was to choke off the upcoming glut of “morons” by whatever means necessary. Her primary means of choice was “birth control,” a term she coined.
Sanger was greatly influenced by Havelock Ellis, a British lover she took while in self-imposed exile to England to escape prosecution for sexual deviancy laws she had broken in New York City. Ellis, the architect of England’s sexual revolution, had been mentored by a man named Francis Galton. Galton’s family was intertwined with another British family through their common memberships in various elite academic and scientific societies. But the two families weren’t just connected socially; they were related through a common grandfather named Erasmus Darwin. Francis Galton was Charles Darwin’s half-cousin. Galton was also the man who coined the term “eugenics,” which he defined as:
applicable to men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognisance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.5
Galton’s eugenics was nothing but a modernized application of Thomas Malthus’s contention that there were just too many people in the world and that this “problem” could be addressed by actively eliminating undesirables:
If we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people in the houses, and court the return of the plague.6
Returning to Margaret Sanger, make no mistake. When she touted her ideas about eliminating “defective” humans, she was not talking only about the poor and uneducated. She also specifically sought “the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual extinction of defective stocks, those human weeds which threaten the blossoming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”7 That was the goal of “The Negro Project,” which she launched in 1939.
One of the board members of that project was Lothrop Stoddard, a high official of the Massachusetts Ku Klux Klan, whose 1920 book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, applied eugenics to what he called “scientific racism.” Another friend, advisor, and co-advocate for scientific racism with Sanger was Madison Grant. Grant was instrumental in placing an African man, Ota Benga, in a cage alongside apes and chimps in 1906 at the Bronx Zoo to “demonstrate evolution.”8
Darwinian connections to eugenics and racism didn’t end with Sanger or the men who shared and promoted the same ideas. When she founded the American Birth Control League (eventually renamed Planned Parenthood), Sanger shared offices in New York City with the American Eugenics Society and invited eugenicists from around the world to publish articles in her magazine, “Birth Control Review.” Stoddard and Grant not only wrote for the magazine but also published their own books on the subjects. Those books reached readers across the Atlantic Ocean. Stoddard’s The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man introduced the term “under-man” into certain German leaders’ conception of race. For that reason, Stoddard was later considered one of the “spiritual fathers” of Nazi Germany. And Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History was also well received. Originally written in 1916, Nazi leaders ordered it reprinted when they came to power. None other than Adolf Hitler said he considered “this book [to be] my Bible.”9
Darwin’s Demon
Pinpointing Charles Darwin as the God-hating atheist responsible for all this is too easy. Charity demands that we consider the whole story. There is some evidence that Darwin saw his theory as being compatible with Christian theism. After all, he repeatedly made a point of referring to the “Creator” and “creation” in his writings, denying that his analyses should shock anyone’s religious views. And he ended every edition of his infamous Origin published after 1860 with this line: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.”10
We can also have empathy for the grief he suffered after losing his 10-year-old daughter to scarlet fever. Her death hung over him for the rest of his life, overwhelming him with the most common and debilitating question human beings have asked, “How could a good God allow this?” Maybe, in Darwin’s mind, his theory was not so much an attempt to eliminate God altogether, but to let him off the hook as the Designer responsible for a world where seemingly cruel things happen.
Charity allows that we can extend Darwin the man some grace, even as we reject his conclusions. But what we cannot do in good conscience is deny that the philosophical foundation on which his theory was based gave philosophical cover to his intellectual descendants. And that is what allowed them to carry out some of the most diabolically evil practices in human history.
Heads of the Hydra
Sanger, Galton, Stoddard, Grant, and the Nazis are all connected to the same monster—a strand of dehumanization and death that runs from the materialist Greek philosophers, through the work of Charles Darwin, and straight into the gas chambers of Dachau and stainless-steel killing fields of Planned Parenthood. Darwinian evolution, racism, and eugenics are all simply different heads of materialism’s hydra. Darwin let that monster out of its cage, and 127 years later another Englishman, Richard Dawkins, triumphantly thanked him for “[making] it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”11
But if racism and eugenics weren’t enough, the monster continues to grow heads. Today, we have “thought leaders” like Yuval Harari who extrapolate science to assure us that human rights are just an illusion:
The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation.… “Created equal” should therefore be translated into “evolved differently.” Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a “Creator” who “endows” them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals … there are no such things as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities, and characteristics.12
From there, it’s an easy path to justify all forms of “mercy killing” as ways to end the life of an evolved organism with “dignity.” Or, if death isn’t your thing, the similarly motivated transhumanists promise immortality if you’re willing to wait in cryogenic timeout until technology permits them to upload your brain into “the cloud” to be downloaded into a mechanical host.
Soulless Science
Scopes was the cultural moment that gave the monster a public platform. And once its ideology took root, it promised to finally remove the scourge of religious irrationality from society’s thinking and usher in the blessings and triumphs of scientific materialism. After the Dayton showdown in the so-called “war between science and religion,” our post-Scopes culture never looked back. Today, it embraces the monster and chastises any moronic rube who refuses to blindly “trust the science.”
Most who champion the methods and goals of scientific materialism either don’t understand, or don’t have the courage to acknowledge, that the ideology they worship is loveless because it reduces love to a series of chemical reactions; that it is purposeless because it renders final causes a mirage; that it is irrational and deterministic because it dismisses consciousness and free will as illusions; and that it is amoral because it offers objective morality no foundation (see "Escape from the Acid Bath").
Somehow, they smile and nod as rationality, purpose, love, and moral virtue get removed from the human equation, missing the fact that all they have left is power—a power so enchanting it scorns any limitations on its use. The powerful have a world to run, morons, rubes, defectives, yokels, and useless eaters be damned. If there ever were a clearer illustration of the axiom that “ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims,” it is hard to imagine what it might be.
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Improvement of Man. - If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection.Eugenics. - When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, that dread white plague which is still responsible for almost one seventh of all deaths, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science is of being well born is called eugenics.
Parasitism and its Cost to Society. - Hundreds of families such as those described above exist to-day, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.
The Remedy. - If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country.
…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.”If Darwin allowed Dawkins to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist then he also allowed scientists to be an intellectually fulfilled racist.
- Charles Darwin, Descent of Man
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:
In contrast, under the materialistic picture of reality pervasive in our culture, you get this:
These are not Conservative principles and is partially to blame for our current state of affairs.
BTTT
A very interesting article. Thx.
IMHO it’s a bit too charitable to give Darwin some leeway in his intent or meanings within Origin of Species. He cleared things up perfectly a dozen or so years later when he wrote Descent of Man. In it he said that his natural selection beliefs should be applied to keeping non-whites in their place (scientific racism).
Scopes biography on Wikipedia indicates after his stint in “education” he ran for Congress as a member of the Socialist Party
There’s a consistent thread on some things all the way through history.......
Bookmark.
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