Here’s an interesting take on Darwin’s legacy: Darwin was the Black Man’s best friend, according to the organizers of an upcoming symposium (excerpt and link from the conference website, below).
Darwin’s racial views were complex. (He was an abolitionist who seemed to believe blacks were inferior to whites.) And his theories have been very effective in the hands of eugenicists and racists.
The organizers of the MIT symposium, celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday, blame the impacts of Darwin’s theories on misinterpretations of his work. They also advise President Obama to “follow Darwin’s lead (to unite Man into a single, global, civilization).”
A snippet from the symposium organizers’ web page:
The pseudo-scientific arguments that human “races” are separately evolved continues to rear its head, despite both fossil and genetic evidence establishing that all modern humans had their origin in Africa, before migrating and dispersing through Europe, Asian and the Pacific Islands. Modern genomics reveals clearly that all human groups share a common gene pool. Natural selection certainly continues to operate in human populations, but the invention of language has meant that many of the key features selected for in human populations are transmitted through culture and not through genes. Certainly this is true for the leaps that led to the expansion of humans across the Earth – domestication of plants and animals, irrigation, tool and weapons development, food storage and processing, textiles and clothing, sanitation, long range transportation and communication technologies. But biological determinism still lives, promoting pseudo-scientific claims that the variations that exist in the genomes and physiology of humans, represents profound differences between groups, rather than the normal range of variation found in large populations.
Pay attention people….This subject is at the very center of many of the worlds problems.
Civilization = Domestication by Selective breeding.
Darwin’s ideas were interpreted by others — most famously by Herbert Spencer in the popularization of “social” Darwinism, but it is hard to call him a “racist”. Racial categories were de rigeur in late 19th century European culture. The link to eugenics is a difficult one. Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, came up with the word, and his notions were completely elitist and clearly misguided. From this “origin”, eugenics spread far and wide — a kind of intellectual mutation. By the early 20th century, it was ubiquitous.
But to read the young Darwin, the Voyage of the Beagle Darwin, is to discover a naturalist with an intense interest in all life and its reason. Politically, Darwin was generally mild-mannered, and preferred to avoid controversy. He left that to T.H. Huxley…
There are all sorts of retrospectives this year, given the 150th anniversary of Origin. Certainly his ideas were interpreted in some horrible ways, and went down some dark paths. But more than worrying about Darwin as racist, it is perhaps time to realize that he wasn’t “one man, working alone” in this development of notions of natural selection and evolution. What about Wallace, who wrote a paper along similar lines a year or so before Origin? Or really an entire realm of speculation about living development going all the way back to the Greeks? Darwin used these ideas, refined them. He didn’t work in a vacuum.
None of us do…
Wow — how interesting. Today was the first time I’ve had to pleasure of visiting your site. I look forward to reading more!
[...] Mark Baard – January 15, 2009 [...]
Darwin was INTENSELY racist. Also, a majority of his work on Origin of the Species was researched and written by his father and grandfather, so he is also an illuminist fraud, putting into theory a passed-down eugenicist point of view that fools have since taken as hard science to their own peril Just because racism was a popular sentiment in his day does not excuse him from the epithet.
It hardly matters to most that Darwinism cannot be proved by the scientific method. It explains at face value why one is in such a stratified social construct and helps one totally dismiss the nagging spirituality that the elite have tried to snuff out. It’s spirituality that gives each individual a unique value, and holds us to be decent and honest and protect the weaker.
Social Darwinism is merely codified Eugenics dressed in scientific terms that excuses predatory psychopathic behavior by the dominant minority. It should be put out in the rubbish, along with phrenology and leeches.