"Darwin’s Struggle for Racial Superiority"

by J. Michael Sharman, Contributing Writer

If you look up Charles Darwin on Google’s Advanced Book Search you can actually view the cover page and complete title of his 1859 book: The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

“Favoured races”?

To bring an honest analysis to Darwin’s theory of evolution, one has to know that Darwin’s thinking was shaped by two things: his rejection of God and his racist views of mankind.

Darwin believed the Bible was a fantasy: “But I had gradually come to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.”

Darwin simply did not believe that some races were created equal to others: “The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatization and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties.”

Because of his perception of their racial inferiority, Darwin predicted non-white races would become extinct: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

He wrote a colleague that it would be beneficial for the “lower races” to be wiped off the planet by the “Caucasian races”: “I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk 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 civilized races throughout the world.”

Darwin even had contempt for racial blendings that did not reflect the vision he saw in his own mirror: “The inferior vitality of mulattoes is spoken of in a trustworthy work as a well-known phenomenon, and this, although a different consideration from their lessened fertility, may perhaps be advanced as a proof of the specific distinctness of the parent races.”

In Darwin’s The Descent of Man, he laid the foundation for future population planning to help eradicate the “lower” races: “[E]xcepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” The big danger, Darwin said, was that, “the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members.”

In a personal notebook, Darwin summed up what he believed was the origin of Man: “The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather.”

In the first chapter of Genesis, the Bible says: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
Which statement of our origin would you prefer to be associated with?
For myself, I think God has beaten Darwin hollow.

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