West, Metaxas: Face It, Darwinian Theory Is Itself Racist
Let’s be candid. It’s not just that Darwinian theory has had racists among its proponents. The theory itself is racist, with many evil stains on its conscience that follow straight from that fact, as any honest evolutionist would have to admit. You could cite the writing of Darwin himself, the disturbing illustrations of human evolution offered by his German disciple Ernst Haeckel, the “human zoos” of the early-20th-century United States, leading right up to the theory’s complicity in justifying the Final Solution.
But it’s more than that. As John West and Eric Metaxas emphasize in a new Socrates in the Studio episode, this malign record is no mere inexplicable aberration from an otherwise innocent scientific theory. The legacy is not a mistake, or a byproduct of the unenlightened past. It is quite explicable. It follows logically from Darwinian thinking itself, especially as reflected in The Descent of Man.
A Straightforward Reading
As Dr. West notes, a straightforward reading of that book indicates “you should expect dramatic differences” among races. After all, natural selection operates differently in different environments — say, in Africa as opposed to Scandinavia. It’s an inevitable prediction of evolution (very different from Judeo-Christian tradition, or from intelligent design) that the human races would be unequal. And given that, why wouldn’t you also expect that one race is closest of all to our ape cousins? What would be surprising is if there weren’t such a race. Darwin and the Darwinists saw that clearly, and the notorious human zoos at the St. Louis World’s Fair (see the photo at the top) and the Bronx Zoo, in 1904 and 1906 respectively, were simply seeking to educate the public about the implications of evolutionary biology.
Watch the episode here, though you will need to subscribe to Socrates + to continue beyond the first half hour or so. At about that mark, Metaxas asks a very good question: Today’s evolutionists (or most of them, beyond those on the demented far right) dismiss racist views. But in keeping with their Darwinism, how can they do this? What is their rationale? Do they have one that makes any sense?
Metaxas mentions that he’s familiar with how Hitler’s Nazis applied an evolutionary lens in their ideology. He covers that in his book Bonhoeffer, which I’m reading now — and it is excellent. For still more background, watch John West’s awarding-winning Documentary Human Zoos. It’s an in-depth look at this disturbing and typically covered-up thread from the history of “consensus science”:
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