Darwin's deadly delusions

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. …

~ Charles Darwin

[L]iving political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.

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~ Woodrow Wilson, Democrat presidential candidate, 1912

Prologue

Today's column continues my review of Dr. Benjamin Wiker's venerable opus, "10 Books that Screwed up he World and 5 others that didn't Help" (Regnery, 2008). My critique will be of the legendary English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-82) and his famous treatise on the origins of mankind, "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" (1871).

As a prologue to this book review, I propose the question: Can an idea, a theory, even a delusion kill? A cursory review just of 20th century dictators who overtly or covertly embraced and applied Darwin's ideas about evolution, survival of the fittest and natural selection to humanity, resulting in tens of millions of corpses they left in their wake, lamentably beckons a resounding, Yes!

Darwin's primary works on evolution theory, "Origins of Species" (1859), and later "The Descent of Man" (1871), legitimized the separation of morality and science, which for the next 150 years would thoroughly and systematically attack the suppositions behind traditional morality and imbue this "Third Way" (as the Nazis adopting Darwin's ideas would later call it) with the scientific legitimacy it needed to create a pagan, anti-God worldview rooted in fascism, socialism and eugenics and to propagate these diabolical ideas throughout the world.

'The Descent of Man': Precursor to the eugenics movement

In the opening chapter on Darwin, Wiker wrote: "Reading Charles Darwin's 'The Descent of Man' forces one to face an unpleasant truth: that if everything he said in his more famous 'Origin of Species' is true, then it quite logically follows that human beings ought to ensure that the fit breed with abandon and that the unfit are weeded out."

Subsequent generations of scientists, professors, humanists, intellectuals, politicians, judges and others would transmute Darwin's ideas into every conceivable aspect of society and culture through the vehicle of "social Darwinism" and, concurrent with new academic disciplines that grew out of 19th century Romanticism like "economics," "sociobiology," "sociology" and "cultural anthropology," would become very influential.

By the early 20th century, these people, whom today should be called fascists, were collectively part of the new avant garde of politics – the Progressives movement. Central to their new, bold and "experimental" ideas stood Darwin's evolutionary theory as the beginning of a grand, new Age of Enlightenment where anachronistic notions of God, the Bible and the Judeo-Christian traditions would be swept away (or in the case of Progressivism, incorporated) as the new secular zeitgeist took center stage – Secular Man, or New Man, armed with science would dominate and then eventually purge the world of all the inferior races of humanity.

The meek shall not inherit the earth, but the strong, the ruthless, the Machiavellian. "Survival of the fittest!" would be the rallying cry of social Darwinists.

Dr. Wiker continues his refutation of historical revisionists' efforts to obfuscate or separate the hateful ideas of the eugenics movement rooted in virulent racism from Darwin's purely scientific ideas of evolution: "Attempts to disengage Darwin from the eugenics movement date from a bit after World War II, when Hitler gave a bad name to survival of the fittest as applied to human beings. But it is impossible to distance Darwin from eugenics: It's a straight logical shot from his evolutionary arguments."

According to Wiker, "Darwin believed that morality was neither natural nor God-given, but was itself the result of natural selection. Whatever actions, attitudes, or passions happened to contribute to the survival of an individual or group were naturally selected. The virtue of courage, for example, was naturally selected, because in the struggle for existence the cowardly are wiped out right quickly and the manly types live on to breed happily with the appreciative maidens."

Wiker noted that Darwin was particularly interested in altruism, or more specifically, "sympathy": Darwin said that "those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring."

However, Wiker was not fooled by Darwin's concession to the gift of mercy, which has been voluminously codified in the Judeo-Christian tradition for millennia, and writes that "It [Darwin's view of 'sympathy'] substitutes indiscriminate niceness for goodness in human affairs."

Darwin's perverse ideas on humanity, sexuality and its place in nature creates a slippery slope that (given the appropriate conditions) plunges all mankind into the abyss. Wiker writes, "In trying to treat every living thing as part of one moral whole, it ends up inverting the entire moral order and the natural order along with it. The outcome is the animal rights activist who, overflowing with sympathy for the chimpanzee, destroys medical research clinics." He later says "that if humans being have rights, animals have rights as well."

Therefore, in Darwin's "The Descent of Man," Wiker cites that mankind is not a unique creation of God favored and distinct from the rest of creation, but Darwin's ideas are based on "the assumption that human beings are just one more animal on the evolutionary spectrum. If we are just one more animal, and so-called 'moral' traits are ultimately no more moral than any other evolved traits, then we obviously are not morally distinct from any other animal."

Darwin's conclusions in "The Descent of Man" are not very optimistic for humanity, especially for my people, as evident from the passage below:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous [i.e., most human-looking] apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Darwin made the unscientific and tragic leap in "The Descent of Man" that external differences among the world's racial and ethnic groups necessitated a hierarchy that numerous dictators in the 20th century – Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, et al. – would later to one degree or another exploit to diabolical ends.

Applying Darwin's ideas on human evolution, sexual selection, evolutionary psychology and evolutionary ethics to government policies encouraged these tyrants to attack the basic human and natural rights of the people. With revolution, war, famine, disease and economic collapse raging throughout the 20th century, mass genocide was inevitable.

That the delusion of social Darwinism (or as I prefer to call Darwin's ideas, scientific racism or scientific mythology) is still regarded as science orthodoxy today is beyond the pale. That Darwin's racist and unscientific ideas are still taught as authentic science in public schools, colleges, universities as well as codified in public policy and judicial rulings is a terrible vulgarity, a travesty of justice and a betrayal to the academy's sworn allegiance to Veritas – Truth.

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