Darwin’s Racism Under Fire
The Truth Finally Comes Out in the Leading Science Magazine:
Darwin was a First-Class Racist! The Evidence is in Darwin’s
Second Major Book The Descent of Man.
by Jerry Bergman, PhD
After quoting Charles Darwin’s racist writings for decades (for which I was condemned), the truth has now come out. Darwin’s racism was finally admitted in an article by a Princeton University professor and published in the most esteemed science journal in America, aptly titled Science.[1] The author, Professor Agustín Fuentes, wrote that some of Darwin’s racist “assertions were dismally, and dangerously, wrong. ‘Descent’ [of Man, Darwin’s 1871 treatise, is a book] …. not to venerate” as is common among many evolutionists today. Fuentes writes that, despite
some innovative inferences, “Descent” is often problematic, prejudiced, and injurious. Darwin thought he was relying on data, objectivity, and scientific thinking in describing human evolutionary outcomes. But for much of the book, he was not. “Descent,” like so many of the scientific tomes of Darwin’s day, offers a racist and sexist view of humanity.[2]
Furthermore, Fuentes adds “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.”[3] Fuentes concludes that Darwin 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.” … 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, despite the lack of concrete data and biological assessment. His adamant assertions about the centrality of male agency and the passivity of the female in evolutionary processes, for humans and across the animal world, resonate with both Victorian and contemporary misogyny….. Darwin was a perceptive scientist whose views on race and sex should have been more influenced by data and his own lived experience. But Darwin’s racist and sexist beliefs, echoing the views of scientific colleagues and his society, were powerful mediators of his perception of reality.[4]
One example of sexism is Darwin having written that women were at a “lower level of development” than men, due to an “earlier arrest of individual evolution” in human females. Because they had smaller brains, Darwin and other evolutionists believed women were “eternally primitive” and childlike, less spiritual, more materialistic, and “a real danger to contemporary civilization.”[5] Darwin also listed historical proof that supported his view that women were inferior to men.[6] Ironically, Darwin’s daughter Henrietta was one of the main editors of Darwin’s Descent of Man. Some Darwin scholars speculate that Darwin’s original words were toned down by Henrietta when she edited the book.
Darwin expressed the same racist ideas many times in his writings. An example is ‘the civilized races ….are now everywhere extending, their range, so as to take the place of the lower races,” which Darwin believed would eventually lose in the survival of the fittest struggle.”[7]
Scientists’ Racism Exploited by White Supremacists
A predictable result was that “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.”[8] An example is the Ku Klux Klan often used quotes and claims from older, pre-1930 scientific literature to justify its Negro inferiority claims. David Duke, once the most prominent racist in America today, headed the largest White Supremacist organization in the world. His influence can be gauged by the fact that he was elected to serve in the Congress of the State of Louisiana.
Darwinist ideas were critically important in developing and maintaining his racist ideas. Duke makes clear in his autobiography that his racism was clearly a result of his acceptance, not only of Darwinism, but of the eugenics that logically results from Darwinism. Duke repeats all of the arguments commonly published in the standard biological literature, including those by Darwin, until the American Civil Rights Movement – such as claiming that differences between the major races include not only skin color and hair texture, but also brain size, cranial structure, intelligence, musculature, hormonal levels, sexual behavior, temperament, dentition, and even personality.[9] Darwin’s writing were an especially important influence on racism because it is uncontested that Darwin’s ideas had a profound influence on the entire academic and scientific world. In fact, “’The Descent of Man’ is one of the most influential books in the history of human evolutionary science.”[10]
Creationists Teach the Unity of the Races
Creationists have been saying for decades that only one race exists, the human race, and Christian teaching proclaims that all men are of one blood.” The teaching that all men descended from the first man, Adam, is a core doctrine taught by Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Examples include: “And [He] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth (Acts 17:26 KJV). Furthermore, “By one man sin entered into the world’ that death came into the world and then ‘passed upon all men’ (Romans 5:12).”
Fuentes recognizes the fact that one race exists, the human race. He wrote that, in spite of the Darwin’s confident writing in “Descent” and his other writings, “today one can look to data demonstrating unequivocally that race is not a valid description of human biological variation.”[11]
A common Response to my Publishing the Same Conclusions as Fuentes
When I published the same conclusions that Fuentes penned in his Science article in my book The Other Side of Darwin, typical of the one star reviews was by ”Phoenix” who wrote under the title Let’s be “scholarly”…
This book is very twisted in very troubling ways…. Darwin, as we all are, was a man of his time. .. One should read his observations as a young man on the Beagle before ever calling Darwin racist…. Why should that surprise us or lead us to consider him as somehow more racist than anyone else of his time…. Ditto for his outlook on women… This book is finally a disquieting pseudo-scholarly attempt to disqualify one of the most important theories that we have today to help us build an accurate vision of our world.[12]
Another reviewer on Amazon of my book The Darwin Effect: Its Influence on Nazism, Eugenics, Racism, Communism , wrote “This book is blaming just about everything on Darwin. Maybe he was racist, maybe he wasn’t, but at his time racism was nothing new. Racism existed as far back as ancient Greece.”[13] Another review of the same book added “The author is alas, too honest. He tries to pin it all on Darwin, but ruins the “it’s all Darwin’s fault” when he admits that several of these [biases] were actually there before Darwin. …. racism started about 100 years earlier, but Darwin gave it the pseudo-science to increase it and give it legitimacy. Sexism, he admits, was near universal, but Darwin made it that women were less evolved [than men]”[14]
Summary
Evolutionists have finally recognized the fact that Darwin has influenced the lethal racism that developed after the Biblical foundation of the equality of the “races” was undermined. Now that the leading scientific journal has acknowledged his major contribution to this problem, will it open the door to others to document this fact? It has, after all, has been well documented such as in Zitzer’s 778 page tome small print study.[15]
How Darwinism led to racism, eugenics, Nazism, communism and genocide.
[1] Fuentes, Agustín. 2021. “The Descent of Man,” 150 years on. Science 372 (6544): 769. May 21.
DOI: 10.1126/science.abj4606
[2] Fuentes, 2021, p 769.
[3] Fuentes, 2021, p 769
[4] Fuentes, 2021, p 769.
[5] Gilmore, David. 2009. Misogyny: The Male Malady. Philadelphia, PA University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 124-125. Se also George Romanes 1887 Mental Differences Between Men and Women. The Nineteenth Century. Pp 654-672. May. Also in Popular Science Monthly Volume 31 July 1887. Also William Fielding 1927. “Women: The Eternal Primitive. Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1927 64 pages.
[6] Darwin, Charles. 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Vol 2 p. 327.
[7] Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, p. 169,
[8] Fuentes, 2021, p 769.
[9] Duke, David. 1998. My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding. Covington, LA: Free Speech Press. p. 86.
[10] Fuentes, 2021, p 769.
[11] Fuentes, 2021, p 769.
[12]https://www.amazon.com/productreviews/0890516057/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar
[13]https://www.amazon.com/productreviews/0890518378/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar
[14] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RQOP7EQX7DZEF/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewpnt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0890518378#RQOP7EQX7DZEF
[15] Zitzer, Leon. 2016. Darwin’s Racism. New York: I Universe.
Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,300 publications in 12 languages and 40 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,500 college libraries in 27 countries. So far over 80,000 copies of the 40 books and monographs that he has authored or co-authored are in print. For more articles by Dr Bergman, see his Author Profile.