Lets talk a bit about some of historys most infamous racists. You know, the animals like Alabamas Bull Connor in the 1960s, Virginias George Fitzhugh in the 1850s and Englands Charles Darwin, author of Origin of the Species.

What? Do I mean Charles Darwin, founder of what we know today as the theory of evolution? Yes, thats the one, though, I hasten to add that there are two important qualifiers to be considered in the following discussion.

First, as an evangelical Christian, I absolutely believe the Bibles creation account. I also know that time isnt the same for God and man, so maybe He used something akin to evolution in the eons before Adam arrived, though that raises a host of spiritual issues to which we might return here in the future.

For now, no qualifiers are needed for Connor or Fitzhugh. The former was Birminghams Commissioner of Public Safety when the civil rights movement was focusing the nations attention on the injustices of Southern segregation. He cruelly unleashed police dogs and fire hoses on demonstrators.

Fitzhugh was among the most prominent Antebellum defenders of Southern slavery. He argued that the free laborer must work or starve. He is more of a slave than the Negro because he works longer and harder for less allowance than the slave Sounds a bit like Karl Marx, no?

Heres what Darwin, who was an English contemporary of Fitzhugh, said: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.

The second qualifier thus enters the conversation. Darwin had in mind Black Africans and Aboriginal Australians in his references to the savage races, but he wasnt simply offering a straightforward endorsement of racial genocide.

As John Wilkins, one of Darwins modern defenders,put it, at this time, it was common for Europeans (based on an older notion of a chain of being from lowest to highest) to think that Africans (negroes) were all of one subspecific form, and were less developed than Caucasians or Asians In short, Darwin is falling prey to the same error almost everyone else was . . .

In other words, a natural inferiority of Blacks to Whites was a commonplace assumption. No surprise then that Darwin subtitled his most famous book as The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.

Thus, the great Christian politician and reformer William Wilberforce had won victory in 1807 in his campaign to abolish the African slave trade, but racism had by no means disappeared from among Darwins enlightened contemporaries in mid-19th century Great Britain.

What did other evolutionary pioneers believe about the races? Consider the words of Thomas Huxley, the Imperial College of London botanist known to the Victorian Age as Darwins Bulldog for his earnest advocacy of evolution.

No rational man cognizant of the facts, believes that the average Negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man, said Huxley on the future prospects for Americas emancipated slaves. Huxley wasnt endorsing racism but his 1871 observation may tell us something about why the survival-of-the-fittest universe of Social Darwinism was right around the corner.

And thats the point here. Removing Gods purposeful creation of the Adam whose physical nature is constant throughout time leaves us with an uncreated, eternally changing evolving universe in which anything is possible and, more importantly, anything goes.

And what might be termed the Evolutionary Era of history that Darwin inaugurated 1859 to the present has seen mankinds worst racial and ethnic genocides, successive world wars, totalitarianisms, the Holocaust, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction and the possibility, however remote, of nuclear incineration of the entire human race.

No wonder Dostoevsky wasnt kidding when he saidwithout God,everything is possible.

Which is why I like something else Huxley said: My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations. I wonder if todays evolutionists are prepared to follow Huxleys example?

Mark Tapscott is executive editor and chief of The Daily Caller News Foundations Investigative Group. Follow Mark on Twitter.

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Here's Why We Can't Just Ignore The Racism In The Dawn Of Evolutionary Theory - The Daily Caller