Charles Darwin supported his cousin Francis Galton’s eugenics theories, Charles Darwin’s son and grandson devoted their lives to advancing eugenics, so yes I think it makes perfect sense to lay a significant portion of the blame for eugenics at the feet of the Darwin family.
Again, I am not speaking of Charles Darwin, I am speaking about the family and the Darwinist movement. Think about this, isn’t it odd that Charles Darwin’s children and grandchildren didn’t pursue evolutionary biology, but many of them DID work tirelessly pushing eugenics, THEY obviously felt it was significant.
The aristocracy of Europe as well as the rest of the world needed a rational as to why they deserved a superior position in society. They really believed they were better than the lower classes (think about that label). What they heard in the theories of Natural Selection and Evolution gave them the reasons they needed. It gave them a name and some pseudo-scientific credibility. In reality they were oppressing the lower classes of their own countries and conquered lands centuries under the banner of nobility before they had a tidy scientific fig leaf..
What’s wrong with attributing eugenics partly to Darwin? He advocated some of that and you can find bits of it in his writings. Just because he was a naturalist who made some observations and came up with The Origin of Species, doesn’t preclude him from being a eugencist.
NL, if you want to distance the scientific nature of the ToE, variation within species and the idea of natural selection, from eugenics, that’s understandable.
Eugenics doesn’t play into a scientific theory, even though the scientific theory can be used to justify eugenics.
But reality is, Darwin and his family and compatriots, the self-appointed intellectual elite of the day, and their eugenics philosophy is tied in to the ToE. Like it or not. The ToE and the concepts behind it were used to support the eugenics movement.
Darwin wasn’t perfect either and just because he’s the one who came up with the ToE in so many words, doesn’t put him above reproach. Your constant defending him as if he’s guiltless merely puts you in a position of appearing to defend eugenics as well.
If you google Darwin and eugenics, you’ll see the connection between social Darwinism, eugenics, and the ToE.
This is where scientists really need to speak out against the hijacking of scientific theories if they don’t want it, or them, to be associated with eugenics and social Darwinism, and liberalism. But the track record of scientists speaking out against the political or ideological hijacking of science is, unfortunately, poor.
Thus, scientists will continue to be labeled liberal.