Darwin a racist?????

Question

Lately, I have been coming across articles and such which point to the fact that Charles Darwin was a racist, and believed that blacks are inferior to whites. I also watched a program called "The religion of Evolution", in which it stated that Darwin was a racist. Any comments on this?
Also, check out these links:
www.biblebelievers.net/creationscience/kjcevol1.htm
uncoverthenet.com

Answer 1

Evolution is all about racism. If I can find a race that I perceive isn't as far along the evolutionary path as I am, I'm within my rights to look down on them and treat them badly.

Evolution was the basis of the eugenics movement that eventually led to both Hitler and abortion rights -- the latter because it provided a way to terminate the pregnancies of immigrants and minorities and keep the species pure. (Look at the stats -- abortion still kills more babies of color than it does white babies.)

Answer 2

I haven't read anywhere that Darwin was racist. Did he actually say anything racist, or do people merely assume he was? Also, as others have pointed out, Europeans at this time had a very different attitude towards the strange and exotic people they probably would never meet in far away countries.

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Edit:
Craig, your first paragraph doesn't make any sense. If you percieve that someone is in some inferior to you, you are by no means within your rights to look down upon them and treat them badly. That's just ignorant.

Evolution is a mechanism, biological in nature, spanning several generations. If you want to exploit gravity for your nefarious purposes you are, unfortunately, able to do so. That certainly doesn't mean there's something inherently evil with it, only that ignorant people will grasp at straws when they need an excuse for their actions.

Answer 3

Evolution is not a religion.

So if a program called the RELIGION of evolution says anything - just believe that the TOTAL OPPOSITE of whatever the program says is the truth (i.e., Darwin was not a racist).

Answer 4

Darwin was a product of his time. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, ya know. And Abe Lincoln said some pretty racist things.

It's because of people like them that we are able to move beyond racism.

Answer 5

God is a racist too. He gave his love to White people and nobody else for the first thousand years or so before these white people felt bad about it and decide to spread the love by force and tortue.

Answer 6

You are correct, Darwin was indeed a racist. It does not surprise me. Darwinism, Racism, Atheism, Communism, Liberalism, etceteraism all go together like peas in a pod.

Answer 7

I read somewhere he also believed women were inferior to men, in both cases he thought they'd (blacks and women) evolved less than white men.

Answer 8

1. Virtually all Englishmen in Darwin's time viewed blacks as culturally and intellectually inferior to Europeans. Some men of that time (such as Louis Agassiz, a staunch creationist) went so far as to say they were a different species. Charles Darwin was a product of his times and no doubt viewed non-Europeans as inferior in ways, but he was far more liberal than most: He vehemently opposed slavery (Darwin 1913, especially chap. 21), and he contributed to missionary work to better the condition of the native Tierra del Fuegans. He treated people of all races with compassion.

2. The mention of "favoured races" in the subtitle of Origin of Species merely refers to variations within species which survive to leave more offspring. It does not imply racism.

3. The views of Darwin, or of any person, are irrelevant to the fact of evolution. Evolution is based on evidence, not on people's opinions.

References:

1. Darwin, Charles. 1913. Voyage Round the World of H.M.S. Beagle, 11th ed. London, John Murray. http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin/texts/beagle_voyage/beagle21.html

Further Reading:
Britian, Troy. n.d. Darwin on race and slavery. http://home.att.net/~troybritain/articles/darwin_on_race.htm

Furthermore:

1. When properly understood, evolution refutes racism. Before Darwin, people used typological thinking for living things, considering different plants and animals to be their distinct "kinds." This gave rise to a misleading conception of human races, in which different races are thought of as separate and distinct. Darwinism helps eliminate typological thinking and with it the basis for racism.

2. Genetic studies show that humans are remarkably homogeneous genetically, so all humans are only one biological race. Evolution does not teach racism; it teaches the very opposite.

3. Racism is thousands of years older than the theory of evolution, and its prevalence has probably decreased since Darwin's day; certainly slavery is much less now. That is the opposite of what we would expect if evolution promotes racism.

4. Darwin himself was far less racist than most of his contemporaries.

5. Although creationism is not inherently racist, it is based upon and inseparable from religious bigotry, and religious bigotry is no less hateful and harmful than racism.

6. Racism historically has been closely associated with creationism (Moore 2004), as is evident in the following examples:

* George McCready Price, who is to young-earth creationism what Darwin is to evolution, was much more racist than Darwin. He wrote,

The poor little fellow who went to the south
Got lost in the forests dank;
His skin grew black, as the fierce sun beat
And scorched his hair with its tropic heat,
And his mind became a blank.

In The Phantom of Organic Evolution, he referred to Negroes and Mongolians as degenerate humans (Numbers 1992, 85).

* During much of the long history of apartheid in South Africa, evolution was not allowed to be taught. The Christian National Education system, formalized in 1948 and accepted as national policy from 1967 to 1993, stated, among other things,

that white children should 'receive a separate education from black children to prepare them for their respective superior and inferior positions in South African social and economic life, and all education should be based on Christian National principles' (Esterhuysen and Smith 1998).

The policy excluded the concept of evolution, taught a version of history that negatively characterized non-whites, and made Bible education, including the teaching of creationism, and religious assemblies compulsory (Esterhuysen and Smith 1998).

* The Bible Belt in the southern United States fought hardest to maintain slavery.

* Henry Morris, of the Institute for Creation Research, has in the past read racism into his interpretation of the Bible:

Sometimes the Hamites, especially the Negroes, have even become actual slaves to the others. Possessed of a genetic character concerned mainly with mundane, practical matters, they have often eventually been displaced by the intellectual and philosophical acumen of the Japhethites and the religious zeal of the Semites (Morris 1976, 241).

7. None of this matters to the science of evolution.

Links:
Trott, Richard and Jim Lippard, 2003. Creationism implies racism? http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/racism.html
References:

1. Esterhuysen, Amanda and Jeannette Smith, 1998. Evolution: 'the forbidden word'? South African Archaeological Bulletin 53: 135-137. Quoted from Stear, J., 2004. It's official! Racism is an integral part of creationist dogma. http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/aig_and_racism_response.htm
2. Moore, R., 2004. (see below)
3. Morris, Henry M., 1976. The Genesis Record: A Scientific and Devotional Commentary on the Book of Beginnings. San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers.
4. Numbers, Ronald L., 1992, The Creationists, New York: Knopf.

Further Reading:
Mayr, Ernst, 2000. Darwin's influence on modern thought. Scientific American 283(1) (Jul.): 78-83.

Answer 9

Bible believers....nope, no prejudice there....