Darwin's Racism and Sexism

I mentioned a few days ago that Allison Hopper's essay in Scientific American was so absurd as to be embarrassing to both her and the journal which published it (See Hopper's Whoppers).

Her thesis was, essentially, that it's somehow racist of Darwin skeptics to reject the evolutionary paradigm. She writes, for instance, that she wants to “unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies.”

Yet it was the 19th century Darwinians who provided the very scientific justification seized upon by the racists who came along at the end of that century and the first fifty years or so of the 20th century.

In an article at Evolution News Michael Flannery states that,

Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s indefatigable “Bulldog,” wrote a shameful essay on May 20, 1865, shortly after the conclusion of the American Civil War. He suggested that the South should be relieved given that it was no longer responsible for the care and “protection” of the now-former slaves.

He declared that no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man.” A reform-minded American Darwinist, Charles Loring Brace, concurred.

Richard Weikart, author of the book From Darwin to Hitler, writes that, contrary to Ms Hopper's allegations,

...the vast majority of white supremacists today embrace Darwinian evolution and use it as evidence for their white supremacy.

In a 2017 article in his Radix journal, Richard Spencer, a leading figure on the white supremacist Alt-Right argued that “Group differences exist as consequences of evolution by natural selection” and “racial differences are a natural and normal consequence of human evolution.”

This is a commonplace view among white supremacists, as you can easily discover by looking at white supremacist websites and print publications.

...most people today who reject evolution, which includes many people of color, are not racists. On the other hand, most of the leading white supremacists today embrace evolutionary theory with alacrity.

In a piece at Science Princeton anthropologist Augustin Fuentes, who is sympathetic to Darwin, nevertheless points out the harmful opinions he expresses in his 1871 book The Descent of Man. Fuentes writes:

...some of Darwin's other assertions were dismally, and dangerously, wrong. “Descent” is a text from which to learn, but not to venerate....“Descent,” like so many of the scientific tomes of Darwin's day, offers a racist and sexist view of humanity.

Darwin portrayed Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia as less than Europeans in capacity and behavior. Peoples of the African continent were consistently referred to as cognitively depauperate, less capable, and of a lower rank than other races.

....yet he still, baselessly, asserted evolutionary differences between races. He went beyond simple racial rankings, offering justification of empire and colonialism, and genocide, through “survival of the fittest.”

This too is confounding given Darwin's robust stance against slavery.

Well, if I may be permitted a quibble, Fuentes seems to be mistakenly assuming that opposition to slavery necessarily entails that one regards the enslaved as in all respects equal to the rest of humanity, but that's clearly not so.

A number of abolitionists who opposed slavery nevertheless thought that blacks were inferior to whites.

One need not think the "races" are in every sense equal to see that chattel slavery is a moral evil. Nor must one think that everyone is in every sense equal to everyone else in order to believe that everyone should be treated equally under the law.

But that aside, Darwin's chauvinism didn't end at race. It extended also to sex. Fuentes notes that:

In “Descent,” Darwin identified women as less capable than (White) men, often akin to the “lower races.” He described man as more courageous, energetic, inventive, and intelligent, invoking natural and sexual selection as justification...

Fuentes acknowledges and laments the influence Darwin has had ever since on public attitudes about race and gender:

Racists, sexists, and white supremacists, some of them academics, use concepts and statements “validated” by their presence in “Descent” as support for erroneous beliefs, and the public accepts much of it uncritically.

So, should Darwin's statues be taken down?

No, but I don't know how activist wokesters can demand that statues of southern slave owners and Confederate generals be toppled while Darwin, whose views actually provided much of the intellectual rationale for 19th and 20th century racism, remains placidly ensconced in Shrewsbury and at the London Museum of Natural History.

Darwin Statue in Shrewsbury, England

Darwin Statue at London Museum of Natural History