Darwin, Too, Was a Racist

The native Australians or Aborigines, whom Darwinists regarded as inferior, are no different from any other race. The photo on the right shows the native Australian athlete Cathy Freeman lighting the 2000 Olympic flame.

The great majority of present-day evolutionists say that unlike their 19th century counterparts, they are opposed to racism, and seek to free Darwin of racist imputations. Most writings about Darwin make great efforts to give the impression that he was compassionate, well intentioned, and opposed to slavery. The fact is, however, that Darwin believed that the theory of natural selection constituted a scientific justification for racial discrimination and conflict between races. Darwin's books, some of his letters, and his private notes contain openly racist expressions. For example, in The Descent of Man, Darwin claimed that certain races, such as blacks and Aborigines, were inferior and that in due course, they would be eliminated and disappear in the struggle for survival:

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… 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 the baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.35

In those words Darwin equated certain races with primates and predicted that “civilized races of man” would eliminate “savage races” from the face of the Earth. In other words, Darwin was foreseeing genocide, a racial ethnic cleansing to take place in the near future. Indeed, Darwin's disastrous “predictions” actually did come about, and 20th-century racists saw the theory of evolution as offering them support to perpetrate terrible slaughter. Examples include the Nazis' murder of some 40 million people during the World War II, the South African government's apartheid system affording European races immense privileges over others, racist attacks against Turks and other foreigners in Europe, racial discrimination against blacks in the USA and against the native Aborigines in Australia, and the neo-Nazi movement that from time to time raises its head in various European countries. All gained strength from the alleged scientific support provided by Darwinism. (For further details on the connection between fascism, racism and Darwinism, see Harun Yahya's Fascism: The Bloody Ideology of Darwinism, Kultur Publishing, April 2002.)

Darwin's book The Voyage of the Beagle

Nor were Darwin's racist statements limited to these. For example, in The Voyage of the Beagle, published before The Origin of Species, he speaks of encountering “backward” human races from Tierra del Fuego:

It was without exception the most curious & interesting spectacle I ever beheld. I would not have believed how entire the difference between savage & civilised man is. It is much greater than between a wild & domesticated animal... [I] believe if the world was searched, no lower grade of man could be found.36

This is how Darwin describes the native people of Patagonia, whom he calls “barbarian”:

Perhaps nothing is more certain to create astonishment than the first sight in his native haunt of a barbarian—of man in his lowest and most savage state. One's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like these?—men, whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals... I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilised man.37

In a letter to Charles Kingsley, Darwin described the Fuegian natives he saw:

I declare the thought, when I first saw in Tierra del Feugo a naked, painted, shivering, hideous savage, that my ancestors must have been somewhat similar beings, was at that time as revolting to me, nay more revolting, than my present belief that an incomparably more remote ancestor was a hairy beast. Monkeys have downright good hearts.38

All these are important indications of Darwin's racism. Disparaging certain races as much as he can, he humanizes and praises apes by referring to them as good-hearted animals. He openly maintained that “inferior” races needed to be eliminated, that this consequence of natural selection would make a major contribution to the advance of civilization, as in a letter to the scientist W. Graham in July 1881:

Slaves seeking their freedom in Western South Africa in 1904 were savagely put down. Two young blacks hanged in 1902, for being members of a different race. In the 21st century, however, it has been realized that in biological terms, there are no differences between 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.39

Darwin's racist nonsense extended even as far as the highly moral and glorious Turkish nation. (For more about Darwin's baseless and hostile statements regarding the Turkish nation, and how they are historically and scientifically unfounded, see Harun Yahya's Evrim Teorisinin Irkçı Yüzü: Darwin'in Türk Düşmanlığı (The Racist Face of the Theory of Evolution: Darwin's Hostility Towards the Turks), Kultur Publishing, Istanbul, October 2001.)

In predicting the elimination of “lower races” according to his own twisted lights, Darwin not only provided support for racism, but also established an allegedly scientific foundation for the race wars, slaughter and genocide to take place later in the 20th century.

Evolutionists make great efforts to disassociate Darwin's name from racism, but Harvard University's Stephen Jay Gould admitted the support Darwin gave to racism in a reference to The Origin of Species:

Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.40

Other prominent proponents of the theory of evolution, such as Thomas Huxley, were also racists. Shortly after the American Civil War and the emancipation of the black slaves, Huxley wrote the following:

No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man. And if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried out by thoughts and not by bites.41

Huxley refers to the black race as if they were animals, not human beings, and makes the oft-disproven claim that the blacks will inevitably lag behind in the conceptual race.

The seeds of racism, sown together with the theory of evolution in the mid-1800s, began to produce their real fruits towards the mid-1900s. Friedrich Nietzsche, a contemporary of Darwin's and a passionate adherent of the theory of evolution, popularized such baseless terms as the “superman” and “the supreme race.” National Socialism was the inevitable result. Hitler and the Nazis made Darwin's law of the jungle into state policy that left 40 million dead. (Further details will be examined in Chapter 5.)