Darwin and Race: Three Strikes, He’s Out – Discovery Institute

Photo: African pygmy Ota Benga was displayed at the Bronx Zoo in 1906, in support of Darwinian theory, via Wikimedia Commons.

February is Black History Month, and this week, Friday, February 12, is Darwin Day the birthday of Charles Darwin. It is, therefore, quite appropriate to probe and ask, What exactly did Charles Darwin evolutions leading light believe about race? Was he a racist? Most of Darwins apologists say emphatically, No! Adrian Desmond and James Moore, for example, suggest that opposition to slavery was indeed Darwins sacred cause, and that his conviction that all humankind was linked together through common descent led to that fervent belief. Adam Gopnik inAngels and Ages(2009) states emphatically, Racism, in any form that would have been familiar in his time or would be familiar in ours, had no place either in Darwins life or in Darwins logic. But is this true? A careful examination of the facts suggests that when it comes to Darwin and race its, Three strikes, youre out!

First, although Darwin may indeed have opposed slavery, he did not believe in racial equality. In theDescent of Man(1871) he cited the work of his generations leading ethnologists J. Barnard Davis and Paul Broca in linking cranial capacity with racial and ethnic hierarchies. Darwin was quite clear on the matter; science demonstrated that craniometrics allowed for the ranking of intellect accordingly:

The belief that there exists in man some close relationship between the size of the brain and the development of the intellectual faculties is supported by the comparison of skulls of savage and civilized races, of ancient and modern people, and by the analogy of the whole vertebrate series. Dr. J. Barnard Davis hasproved[emphasis added], by many careful measurements, that the mean internal capacity of the skull in Europeans is 92.3 cubic inches; in Americans 87.5; in Asians 87.1; and in Australians only 81.9 cubic inches.

Should there be any surprise, then, that Darwin would tell the Reverend Charles Kingsley in aletterdated February 6, 1862, It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing & clearing off the lower races. In 500 years how the Anglo-saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank. Or that he wouldwriteto William Graham on July 3, 1881, Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is. The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world. For Darwin, humans could be placed into definite racial categories with an Anglo-centric eye. Did Darwin really believe in the equality of all humankind: no. Strike one.

Did common descent translate for Darwin into racial equality the so-called brotherhood of man? Quite the contrary. For him, common descent also meant struggle for existence and so survival of the fittest could easily translate into racial superiority, national expansion, extermination of inferior peoples, and a view of human progress that was unmistakably racialized. Even his apologists, Desmond and Moore, are forced to admit inDarwins Sacred Cause(2009), Darwin ended up calibrating human rank no differently than the rest of his generation. After shunning talk of high and low in his youthful evolution notebooks, he had ceased to be unique or interesting on the subject. For Darwin common descent meant the evolutionary ascent of superior ethnic and racial groups over inferior ones. Strike two.

Finally, there is Darwins contribution to eugenics, a horrific abuse in the name of science that sought to improve humanity by selective breeding of societys best and the forced sterilization of societys worst people. One of Darwins most persistent defenders, historian Peter Bowler, insists inDarwin Deleted(2013), that eugenics was spawned by middle class fears of a rising tide of the unfit in later 19th- and early 20th-century society. Furthermore, he argues, It was eugenics that encouraged scientists to focus on heredity and recognize the potential of artificial selection, and they could have done this without the inspiration of Darwinism. It is true that eugenics certainly had a class-based element to it, but it is also true that eugenics was also seen as a form of racial hygiene leading toward a better society. Bowlers claim that eugenics could have been pursued without Darwin is doubtful. After all, it was Darwins own fascination with the domestic breeding of pigeons and livestock that formed the first chapter of hisOrigin of Species(1859) and this domestic breeding analogy he took to be the essence of natural selections creative power. Jean Gayon has argued convincingly inDarwins Struggle for Survival(1998)that his domestic breeding analogy was not merely a pedagogical tool or heuristic device but essential to the theory itself. But despite what Bowler argues, the link between Darwin and eugenics was made by leading eugenicists themselves, as when Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson write inApplied Eugenics(1918):

The science of eugenics is the natural result of the spread and acceptance of organic evolution, following the publication of Darwins workThe Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, in 1859. It took a generation for his ideas to win the day; but then they revolutionized the intellectual life of the civilized world. Man came to realize that the course of nature is regular; that the observed sequence of events can be described in formulas which are called natural laws; he learned that he could achieve great results in plant and animal breeding by working in harmony with these laws. Then the question logically arose, Is not man himself subject to those same laws? Can he not use his knowledge of them to improve his own species, as he has been more or less consciously improving the plants and animals that were of most value to him, for many centuries?

So it would appear that efforts to distance Darwin from the odious designs of eugenics are contradicted by the statements of eugenicists themselves. Whatever Bowler may think of the matter, it is clear that Darwins theory was uppermost in these social manipulators minds when they contemplated the wonders to which eugenic principles could be applied. Strike three.

By any measure, when racial equality is being discussed, Darwin is clearlyoutof the running.

Editors note: Darwinism and its legacy for racial thinking are examined in John Wests multiple award-winning documentary Human Zoos:

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Darwin and Race: Three Strikes, He's Out - Discovery Institute