Darwinism Led to Scientific Racism

Science is a half century behind: the world’s leading science journal,
Nature, finally admits that Darwinist “science” was a major cause of racism

 

by Jerry Bergman, PhD

In a Nature special issue on racism in science titled “Racism, Overcoming Science’s Toxic Legacy,”[1] leading scientists have finally come clean. It’s about time! Creationists have been exposing the racism promoted by evolutionary science and its contribution to Nazism for at least 70 years. Those doing so have been roundly condemned by secular society. My own experience in book reviews, and on the internet, is not uncommon. A dozen examples from Amazon reviews of books I authored exposing the racism in science include:

1. 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… Eugenics, again, wasn’t ‘invented’ post Darwin, the Greeks did it … Character attacks don’t undermine modern biology; it’s similar to blaming Newton for car accident victims, drunk driving, et al.[2]
2. 

   A detailed look at harmful habits and destructive views held by Darwin.

   The author … tries to pin it all on Darwin, but ruins the “it’s all Darwin’s fault” when he admits that … 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. Other points like that all the tyrants doing the mass starving’s [sic] and executions to impose socialism were all converted to evolution by Darwin and then to socialism is right on the money… all the robber barons grinding down the workers were guided by the survival of the fittest mentality Darwin taught them.[3]

3. This is not a normal scholarly book …. it’s written by some sort of creationist who hates evolution. Evidently the purpose of the book is to undermine the theory of evolution. I knew something was up when I read the introductions … Just a screed.[4]
4. The author of the book is a noted creationist and anti-evolutionist. He is basically trying to slam Darwin and Evolution by tying it to the worst people in history, the Nazis. Hitler did have Darwinian beliefs but they were very misguided and misunderstood. Darwin never was a “social Darwinist” and never even wrote or uttered the phrase “survival of the fittest”. This book is a hit job against Darwin and evolution.[5]
5. I won’t read a book in which the author believes that social Darwinism exists; it is nothing less than a perversion of true Darwinism and is misused as a metaphor for ‘the survival of the fittest’, another great heresy.
6. Darwin, as we all are, was a man of his time. Yes … his commentaries were also made within the frame of the mentality of the British Empire. It was all he knew… He was in close contact with all the leading great naturalists, geologists in England, as well as some in France and Switzerland.[6]
7. More like the dark side of Jerry Bergman.… Jerry Bergman’s really over-egged his credentials. I’m sure it will impress his core audience of naive creationists, but reasonable educated people know better.[7]
8. The reason people have heard of Charles Darwin today is not because of the audacity of his hypothesis.… what has made Darwin so famous is what has been learned since his publication. The entirety of scientific exploration has agreed with Darwin’s theory.… This author picks on the man rather than the science that universally confirms his conclusions. Put in historical context, that fact is truly amazing…. “Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.” –Richard Dawkins (Evolutionary Biologist). [8]
9. The paperback version of this book is particularly absorbing. It came in extremely useful when I ran out of toilet paper. In this respect, it far outclasses the Kindle version.
10. If you want to find out what Charles Darwin was really like, read his Correspondence (available in book form or online). You could not hope to meet a nicer gentleman, nor a more hard-working, honest scientist. I don’t know who Jerry Bergman is. He clearly has no idea who Charles Darwin was.[9]
11. This book was interesting; in the sense that I’m interested in deciphering the illogical argumentation and lies that sprout out of creationist perspectives [on race]; and this book was bursting with inconsistent arguments.[10]
12. Awful book … attributing Darwin with hidden agendas when he was merely using the language & phrasing of the day … In his efforts to sell the creationist agenda & intelligent design he resorts to character assassination.… The case for supporting creationism, theism, & intelligent design is not proven or any true supporting data for the need of external intervention from an omnipresent supernatural being controlling evolutionary processes.…. This book is a product of a mind that can’t cope with the thought that life is a random event that reacts to its surroundings with the most fitted surviving & the ill fitted destined for extinction. The randomness obviating the need for intervention challenges the need for a religious perspective or an omnipresent controlling god or gods intervening on our behalf.[11]

Many more examples exist, but these suffice to illustrate the often uninformed and even irrational opposition to evidence connecting Darwin and evolution to sexism, racism, and Nazism.

Nature Supports My Argument

The editors of this special issue of Nature wrote that science is “a shared experience, subject both to the best of what creativity and imagination have to offer and to humankind’s worst excesses.”[12] Openly admitting their contribution to racism, the Nature editors write that in the year 1904 Nature published an article

about eugenics by the statistician Francis Galton. One of the foremost scientists of his day, Galton defined eugenics as “the science which deals with all influences that improve and develop the inborn qualities of a race”.….  “the aim of eugenics is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens, causing them to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation.”[13]

Next, the Nature editorial openly admitted that Galton’s

ideas about eugenics had a huge, damaging influence that the world is still grappling with. The idea that some groups — people of color or poor people, for example — were inferior has fueled irreparable discrimination and racism. Nature published several papers by Galton and other eugenicists, thus giving a platform to these views. At the time, eugenics “was an active area of research and considered a very legitimate one,” says Melinda Baldwin, a historian at the University of Maryland, College Park, who wrote Making Nature.[14]

In Making Nature, a 2015 history of the journal, Nature, she acknowledged, had “helped to spread eugenic doctrine by publishing those [eugenic-supporting] scientists.”[15] Among those worst excesses is racism. Nature admits: “For centuries, science has built a legacy of excluding people of color and those from other historically marginalized groups from the scientific enterprise. Institutions and scientists have used research to underpin discriminatory thinking, and have prioritized research outputs that ignore and further disadvantage marginalized people. Nature has played a part in creating this racist legacy.”[16]

Nothing New

In the 2022 Editorial issue, Nature referred to previous articles they had published documenting racism in science. For example, one Nature article admitted in 2016 that

Eugenics itself was born in Britain in the late nineteenth century, nurtured by polymath Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin. The concept resonated with contemporary interpretations of ‘social Darwinism’, which hinged on engineering the ‘survival of the fittest’.[17]

The result was  that “Eugenics came to be seen as the solution to everything from hearing loss to criminality.”[18] Furthermore, the impact of Darwinian thought in academia was not small:

By 1928, a total of 375 U. S. universities and colleges were teaching eugenics, and 70% of high-school biology textbooks endorsed the pseudoscience in some form. Eugenics was also endorsed by presidents including Theodore Roosevelt, funded by philanthropic organizations including the Carnegie Institution, and touted by award-winning scientists such as biologist Edwin Grant Conklin and the Nobel laureate Hermann Muller, discoverer of X-ray mutagenesis, as well as prominent inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell.… Major British eugenicists included left-leaning scientists J. B. S. Haldane and Havelock Ellis, and supporters included the economist John Maynard Keynes, social reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and writer H. G. Wells.[19]

And in this article they even admitted that

One of the world’s leading universities — University College London (UCL) — has completed an inquiry into its support for the discredited pseudoscience of eugenics. Funds linked to Francis Galton, a racist who believed it was possible to improve the British population through selective breeding, and who founded the Eugenics Records Office at UCL in 1904, continue to line the university’s coffers to the value of more than £800,000 (U. S. $1 million).[20]

Among other recommendations, the inquiry’s report (referred to above)

recommended renaming lecture theatres and buildings bearing Galton’s name and that of another prominent geneticist. Although this is welcome, it does not acknowledge just how much yesterday’s mistakes survive in modern science.[21]

The fact is that most geneticists today rightly treat eugenics as a horrible mistake and admit the idea birthed by Darwin and his cousin, specifically

the concept of biological race — the belief that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups with meaningful differences between them — as easily debunked nonsense. But this ignores how these ideas manifest in the real world. They can only be truly understood as age-old intellectual threads, embedded in politics as much now as ever… Scientists who imagine that bias lies in others, not themselves, fail to recognize that to live in the world today is to be drip-fed assumptions and prejudices that guide our thoughts and actions. If it were any other way, the demographics of academia would be more equitable.[22]

The problem is that science is still pushing debunked ideas, many of which are honestly exposed on this website.

Summary

Nature is to be commended for finally beginning to come clean about the racism Darwinism has birthed and his ideas have nurtured for over a century. Now they need to come clean about the aggressive opposition science has meted out to those scientists who have valid scientific questions about the ability of evolution to explain all life on Earth.[23] Science needs to end the silence.[24] Instead of ghettoizing Darwin Doubters and fighting for court rulings to ensure that they are not able to influence secular science, science needs to open the door to the evidence wherever it leads. The censorship must stop if science is to progress.[25]

References

[1] Nobles, Melissa, et al. 2022. Racism: Overcoming Science’s Toxic Legacy. Nature, October 22; https://www.nature.com/immersive/d42859-022-00031-8/index.html.

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Effect-Jerry-Bergman-ebook/product-reviews/B00NU6XC4W/ref=cm_cr_unknown?pageNumber=1&filterByStar=one_star

[3]https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/reviews/0890518378/ref=cm_cr_unknown?filterByStar=one_star&pageNumber=1

[4] https:// amazon.com/product-reviews/B00E0TVLU0/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar

[5] https:// amazon.com/product-reviews/B00E0TVLU0/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar

[6] https:// amazon.com/product-reviews/0890516057/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar

[7] https://amazon.com/product-reviews/0890516057/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar

[8] https://amazon.com/product-reviews/0890516057/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar

[9] https://amazon.com/product-reviews/0890516057/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar

[10] https://amazon.com/product-reviews/0890516057/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar

[11] https://amazon.com/product-reviews/0890516057/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar

[12] Nobles, et al., 2020.

[13] Editorial. 2022. How Nature contributed to science’s discriminatory legacy. Nature 609:875-876, September 28.

[14] Editorial, 2022, p. 875.

[15] Editorial, 2022, p. 875.

[16] Nobles, et al., 2020.

[17] Nourse, Victoria. History of science: When eugenics became law. Nature 530:418, February 2016.

[18] Nourse, 2016, p. 418.

[19] Nourse, 2016, p. 418.

[20] Saini, Angela. Want to do better science? Admit you’re not objective. Nature, p. 175, 9 March 2020.

[21] Saini, 2020, p. 175.

[22] Saini, 2020, p. 175.

[23] Bergman, Jerry. Slaughter of the Dissidents: The Shocking Truth About Killing the Careers of Darwin Doubters. Second, revised edition. Southworth, WA: Leafcutter Press, 2013.

[24] Bergman, Jerry. Silencing the Darwin Skeptics. Southworth, WA: Leafcutter Press, 396 pages, 2016.

[25] Bergman, Jerry. Censoring the Darwin Skeptics: How Belief in Evolution is Enforced by Eliminating Dissidents. Southworth, WA: Leafcutter Press, 566 pages, 2021.

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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 1,800 college libraries in 27 countries. So far over 80,000 copies of the 60 books and monographs that he has authored or co-authored are in print. For more articles by Dr Bergman, see his Author Profile.