Racism Serves Darwinism, Darwinism Serves Racism
Richard Weikart
Editor’s note: The following is excerpted from Chapter 1 of Richard Weikart’s new book, How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism.
When Darwin began compiling evidence for biological evolution in his
notebooks in the late 1830s, he included human evolution in his
ruminations. He indicated that when human races confront each other,
they fight and struggle with each other for supremacy. He wrote that
differences in intelligence usually settle this conflict, though in the
case of black Africans, their “organization” (presumably meaning their
immunity to diseases that ravaged Europeans who moved to Africa) gave
them an advantage in their homelands. His comments here imply that he
thought not only that some races are more intelligent than others, but
also that blacks were inferior in their mental abilities.1
Scientific Justification for Racism
Darwin’s racist and imperialist attitudes were conventional for his
time, but his use of racism to defend his theory of human evolution
buttressed those attitudes in the decades to follow by providing
scientific justification for racism among many of Darwin’s followers.
Racism was not just an incidental part of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
Rather Darwin considered racial inequality crucial evidence for his
theory. In order to convince his contemporaries of his theory of
evolution, he knew he needed to demonstrate the great variety within any
given species, while minimizing the gap between different species. When
applied to human evolution, this meant that Darwin had to stress human
inequality on the one hand, and human proximity to apes on the other.
Racism provided fodder for this argument, because Darwin placed the
black Africans and Australian aborigines close to the apes in his racial
hierarchy, while deeming the white Europeans far superior.
To be sure, when Darwin first published On the Origin of Species (1859),
he mostly avoided the topic of human evolution. He understood that this
was the most controversial part of his theory and that it would likely
provoke resistance (as it did). As he explained 12 years later in the
introduction to The Descent of Man, he had steered around the
issue of human evolution “as I thought that I should thus only add to
the prejudices against my views.”2 Only in the closing paragraphs of Origin had he
briefly mentioned that his theory would likely have ramifications for
human origins. Thus, when Darwin mentioned “races” in the full title of
his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,
he likely meant primarily varieties or sub-species of animals and
plants, rather than human races. However, Darwin later clarified in The Descent of Man that he viewed human races as varieties or sub-species,3 so everything he wrote in Origin did indeed apply to humanity. Darwin confirmed this in The Descent of Man, for one of its stated goals was to show that the evolutionary processes that Darwin had explained in Origin had brought about the origins of humans, too. The Descent of Man, in other words, argues quite explicitly for “the preservation of favoured” human “races in the struggle for life.”
Highly Problematic Features
Darwin’s conception of the struggle for life, or, as he more often
called it, the struggle for existence, had highly problematic features
when applied to humans. Darwin’s signature theory of natural selection
through the struggle for existence was based on Thomas Robert Malthus’s
population principle, which stated that humans (and other organisms)
tend to reproduce faster than their food supply can increase. This
implies that humans (and other species) are destined for mass death,
since the food supply can never keep up with the ever-growing
population. Darwin argued that because most organisms perish in their
quest for limited resources, they are locked in an inescapable
competition for those resources. This competition is most intense among
members of the same species because they are competing for the same
niche.
Despite the huge death toll resulting from the struggle for
existence, Darwin considered it a positive force nonetheless, because it
produced evolutionary progress. It weeded out the weak, sickly, and
less capable — the “unfit” — while the “fit” survived and reproduced. In
the last sentence of his chapter on “Struggle for Existence” in The Origin of Species,
Darwin stated, “When we reflect on this struggle, we may console
ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant,
that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the
vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.” Then, in the
next-to-the-last sentence of the book, he stated, “Thus, from the war
of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are
capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals,
directly follows.”4 When applied to humans, this would mean
that humans are contending with their fellow humans for scarce resources
in a competition-to-the-death. The fittest humans will survive and
reproduce, while the less fit will die.
Three Main Objectives of the Work
In The Descent of Man Darwin confirmed that he thought race
played a central role in this struggle, so racism is not an incidental
element of the book. Darwin explained from the outset the three main
objectives of the work: 1) investigate whether humans are descended from
some other animals; 2) explain the process of human evolution; and 3)
describe “the value of the differences between the so-called races of
man.”5 Of the seven chapters covering human evolution, one is
entitled, “On the Races of Man,” and racial themes also emerge in many
of the other chapters.
Toward the beginning of the book’s second chapter, “Comparison of the
Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals,” Darwin insisted that
certain races were mentally inferior to others:
Nor is the difference slight in
moral disposition between a barbarian, such as the man described by the
old navigator Byron, who dashed his child on the rocks for dropping a
basket of sea-urchins, and a Howard or Clarkson; and in intellect,
between a savage who does not use any abstract terms, and a Newton or
Shakspeare [sic]. Differences of this kind between the highest
men of the highest races and the lowest savages, are connected by the
finest gradations. Therefore it is possible that they might pass and be
developed into each other.6
Howard and Clarkson, incidentally, were leaders in the British
abolitionist movement, and Darwin considered them the epitome of moral
goodness. They were, of course, Europeans, as were Newton and
Shakespeare, and clearly Darwin was identifying them as “the highest men
of the highest races,” in contrast to the “lowest savages.” Thus,
Darwin buttressed his theory of human evolution by asserting that
Europeans were not only intellectually superior, but also higher on the
scale of morality. This is highly ironic, of course, because these
allegedly morally superior Europeans were at the time exterminating the
supposedly morally inferior natives of the Americas, Australia, and
elsewhere. Darwin apparently had no conscience about genocide, since he
saw nothing amiss about allegedly morally superior people killing off
those they deem inferior.
He considered the intellectual superiority of Europeans so
self-evident that he wrote in a later chapter, “The variability or
diversity of the mental faculties in men of the same race, not to
mention the greater differences between the men of distinct races, is so
notorious that not a word need here be said.”7 Despite its
apparent obviousness (to him), however, later in the same chapter he did
write more about it. He trotted out scientific evidence for
intellectual disparities among races that he (and many other European
scientists) considered compelling: the difference in their cranial
capacities.
According to the data cited by Darwin, the Europeans have the largest
cranial capacities at 92.3 cubic inches, while Asians have 87.1 cubic
inches, and Australians have only 81.9 cubic inches.8 The
lesson appeared unarguable: Europeans have greater intellectual
abilities than do other races. Darwin used this same line of evidence to
argue that women are intellectually inferior to men. (It should be
noted that cranial capacity measurements cited above turned out to be
inaccurate and misleading, and the relationship between cranial capacity
and intelligence has been found to be neither straightforward nor well
correlated.9) Later, when discussing the gap between
present-day humans and simians, Darwin mentioned that the gap would only
increase as the “savage races” were exterminated, because the black
Africans or Australian aborigines were currently the closest races to
the gorilla, which he considered the highest of the ape species.10
A Racial Struggle for Existence
In a four-page section “On the Extinction of the Races of Man,”
Darwin explained that the primary cause of the extinction was a racial
struggle for existence, which results in the decimation of weaker tribes
and races. He claimed that the disappearance of ancient races was not
the result of environmental factors or adverse circumstances. Rather, he
averred, “Extinction follows chiefly from the competition of tribe with
tribe, and race with race.” Though disease may aid some people in these
racial competitions, direct killing is also involved, because “when one
of two adjoining tribes becomes more numerous and powerful than the
other, the contest is soon settled by war, slaughter, cannibalism,
slavery, and absorption.” Darwin thought that in most cases the
so-called civilized peoples were winning this bloody contest: “When
civilised nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is
short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race.”11
What shouldn’t be overlooked here is that from Darwin’s perspective,
this pattern of natural selection by racial extermination was the path
to human progress.
Notes
- Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 537.
- Darwin, Descent, 1:1.
- In The Descent of Man chapter
“On the Races of Man,” Darwin confirmed his belief that human races
differ considerably, not only physically, but also in their mental
capacities. For this reason, he considered races to be distinct
sub-species. Darwin, Descent, 1:216, 227.
- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species [1859] (London: Penguin, 1968), quotes at 129, 459.
- Darwin, Descent, 1:3.
- Darwin, Descent, 1:35.
- Darwin, Descent, 1:109–110
- Darwin, Descent, 145–146.
- Daniel Graham, “A Bigger Brain Is Not Better,” Psychology Today, March 9, 2021, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-internet-brain/202103/bigger-brain-is-not-necessarily-better.
- Darwin, Descent, 1:201.
- Darwin, Descent, 1:238.