Was Darwin a Racist?

Tools    





Keep on Rockin in the Free World
Hopefully one day, the idea of what race we belong to will be singular, that is to say human.

Maybe the day after that the flying car dealership will open in my neighborhood as well.
And then the day after that, maybe your flying car will hit a flying pig. (i.e. it ain't gonna happen). Hopefully soon enough, people will be having sex with enough people of slightly differing 'races' that the gene pool will mix completely and we'll all look like one indistinguishable 'race.'

And what exactly is race, for that matter? How can one be distinguished from another? What makes a black person different racially from a white person? Skin color? Because then where does the line separate the two? I don't know, random thoughts that don't require a response.
hey look its negative nancy.



Racism is a learned behavior. Each generation it gets a little less ignorant.
__________________
"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo.



@ mark:

Maybe I missed it or it's a reference that somehow got lost somewhere, but I am interested in the part about Australians and where Yoda got that from because to me, at least in the context of Yod's argument, it seems clear that "Australians" refers to dark-skinned aborigines.
Hey mark, Yoda's quote:

even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as the baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.
is from Darwin, Descent of Man, Chapter 6 - On the Affinities and Genealogy of Man, (you can find it on page 160 of volume 1, second edition).

I too read Darwin's use of "Australians" to mean "Aboriginal Australians."



It's an important aspect of the theory and the circumstances under which it was formed, but we've whitewashed even the book's title in many instances to tiptoe around it.
It's not quite clear that "we've" whitewashed the book's title. Origin of Species underwent massive revisions in the 6 editions Darwin published in his lifetime, among them being the title change that you note. Not saying that that isn't the motivation behind some modern editions' titles but I think it's a little less obvious than you suggested there.

Another incidental change is that in the 2nd edition Darwin changed the last sentence: "There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one" to read "There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed by The Creator into a few forms or into one." (I got this information from The Times Literary Supplement: March 16, 2007. Jim Endersby - Creative designs?)

who do you hear even talking about this outside of Christians looking to take the guy down a peg?
That's a question that requires more reading, and maybe mark can tell us whether there's much public discussion of race amongst biologists. I would imagine there's a lot of talk about this amongst social scientists and science-historians. Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Guns, Germs and Steel" is definitely conscious of the persistence of pseudo-scientific "Darwinian" justifications for racial prejudice. I don't think he gets into whether or not Darwin himself was a racist but that book represents (among other things) an attempt to come up with a non-racist but "scientific" explanation for how some civilizations and "races" came to have a historical leg up on others. Science and race also comes up often in public discussions of intelligence testing, for example the debate over 'The Bell Curve' in the late-nineties.



If it's all kumbaya and campfires, then sure, very nice. If it's part of a "here, let's help you poor dark-skinned people become civilized like us," then not so much.
I've got a different viewpoint from that image, Yoda. Once taught in a junior college in San Antonio where they, not surprisingly, had a "Hispanic Culture" field of study, where they taught Hispanic history, Hispanic languages, Hispanic cooking, and I kid you not, they even had a class in Hispanic "crafts," primarily basket-weaving! Of course, a lot of the Hispanic youngsters (there is a large Hispanic population in San Antone) enrolled in these studies, none of which one could classify as particularly challenging, even for a student not steeped in Hispanic culture from birth. And I couldn't help thinking that going over to the business school and taking a class in accounting or business managment would do them more good and help them break out of the barrio (or even remain in the barrio and prosper) more than all the Hispanic Culture classes being offered. Feel good classes are fine--brown pride, black pride, white pride is wonderful--as long as you don't use it as an excuse for looking down on one of the other colors. But courses tailored to race or culture isn't going to provide anyone with the markable skills to get ahead in the real world--not unless there's a difference between black and white accounting methods or between brown and white math.

Now a white person can sit around the campfire with another race or another culture and sing kumbaya and other native songs until it's time to pee on the ashes and go home, at which time the white person gets into a bigger more expensive car and drives to a gated, more expensive neighborhood and his more luxurious and expensive house thinking what a great person he's been to put himself on the same level as those poor folks and sit around the campfire like equals and sing native songs, and boy, those people sure can sing, can't they!

Trying to help other cultures and races to a better life doesn't have to be as condesending as you make it sound. It can be a prenatal nurse teaching young pregnant women how to take care of themselves and their babies, how to sterilize water and screen windows and doors and other little things that will protect their and their babies' heath. It can be a retired farmer in the peace corps teaching local farmers how to get more productivity from the land with fertilizers and crop rotations. Or it could be a husky high school graduate who spends the summer providing the muscle power to dig a water well or even more sanitary outdoor toilets in a remote native village before college starts.

It just seems to me spending a week or a month or a summer trying to lift poorer people up closer to my level of civilization is better than spending a week or a month or a summer sitting around campfires singing kumbaya while slapping disease-carrying skeeters, sharing their meager food supply, and peeing behind trees. Lowering myself to their level does nothing for either of us; raising them to my level improves their lifestyle and that of the world.

Regardless, though On the Origin of Species doesn't contain anything too overt (though, as you've noticed, significant qualifiers like "no more racist than anyone else of his time" are necessary), it does make reference to "savages," which he examines much in the same way one would an animal.

Things become more overt in his next book on the subject, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, which was published 12 years later. In it, he has a chapter on race where he talks openly about how the "civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world," and specifically notes the difference in "intellectual faculties" among races.
I'll admit up front I've never read Darwin--always seemed too dry to me. So I'm willing to take your word for what he says in his book. But I noted that Descent of Man was published in 1871, a time when the great majority of Europeans, Americans, and other whites definitely were extremely racist by today's standards, and nearly everyone really thought blacks and "savages" were mentally inferior to whites. Yeah, that's stupid; yeah, they were wrong. But they didn't know that then.

It's true and not an excuse to say Abe Lincoln was no more prejudice than most people of his time. In fact, I think his visit to Richmond after his capture would show he was less prejudice than many. When he issued his emancipation proclamation, it didn't free one single slave because it stipulated freedom only in those Confederate states that were still in rebellion on that date, and excluded any of the 4 slave-holding states still in the Union plus all lands then occupied by the US Army. Lincoln's primary purpose at the time was not to free black slaves in the US. His purpose was to make slavery an official issue in the war to prevent England from giving recognition and aid to the Confederacy. His main concern from start to finish was to preserve the Union. Yet his proclamation, although issued for essentially all the wrong reasons, did set the stage for freeing slaves at the end of the war.

For that matter, I once read one of the Walden Pond bunch of philosophers (the real guys, not from the Doonesbury comics) was rabidly anti-Irish, yet his teachings are still worthwhile.

As for his statement about the civilized races would exterminate the "savage" races, it certainly looked in 1871 we were well on the way to that, being just 5 years short of a US Army surprise attack on an Indian village that became Custer's Last Stand.

Fortunately, the "savages" weren't exterminated, but the life they previously lived could not be tolerated and were pushed aside in North and South America, Australia, Africa, southeast Asia and the Pacific islands by more advanced cultures. Take the American Indians--by the 1870s, they were still basically living in the stone age, using hides for clothes and tents, farming with sharp pointed sticks, living in small bands because it was hard to sustain themselves on limited food supplies.

Before the coming of Columbus, they had domesticated only the dog and the turkey, and, in South America, the lama. It was the horses that the Spanish introduced to the Americas that later increased their mobility. But they never built a wheel or a pulley, their folk remedies were insufficient for major diseases (they introduced syphilis to the Europeans but never found an effective way to treat it themselves). The same raw ingredients were available in the Americas as in China and Europe, yet they never manufactured gunpowder, even after they learned about from European settlers. They were dependent on the white man for the rifles they owned, the ammunition they shot, the steel knives and axes that could hold an edge, unlike their stone tools and weapons.

They simply were too poorly equipped and too small a number to resist a more advanced and populus civilization. One had to give way, and in each and every case, it was the "savages." Darwin was wrong in thinking the more advanced civilizations would eliminate the less advance--unless of course he was speaking of the less advanced civilization being absorbed by the more advanced group so they eventually became one, rather than being killed off. That has happened to a large extent and continues to this day around the world.



Employee of the Month
I don`t think it matters much. His theory has been proven and is still important to understand the way of world and nature. But Darwin as a person is dead and not imporant any more. Or do anyone thinks about Henry Fords political agenda when driving a mustang?



Sorry Harmonica.......I got to stay here.
Also, "racism" IMO is a combo of ignorance and neurosis, whether by a group of people or 1 person-- unfortunately, the word gets thrown around with such abandon these days that it often reveals more about the accuser than the accusee. That's the thing about words like this, the truth behind the word gets watered down with the flippant use of it.
__________________
Under-the-radar Movie Awesomeness.
http://earlsmoviepicks.blogspot.com/



I don`t think it matters much. His theory has been proven and is still important to understand the way of world and nature. But Darwin as a person is dead and not imporant any more. Or do anyone thinks about Henry Fords political agenda when driving a mustang?
You're right, it might not matter much whether Darwin himself was racist or not.

On the other hand, whether or not, in Darwin's time or now, evolutionary theory and natural selection lended/lends support to theories and attitudes about race, and how it does and doesn't (for example whether this is something intrinsic to the theory itself that influences society or an inevitable outcome in an already racist society, or something else) is what I think Yoda wanted to know, and that's a worthwhile thing to ask.

I think the racism of Darwin and his contemporaries was tied pretty strongly to ideas of class, nationalism and the rise of modern states as categories for the paradoxical division/unification of mankind. I'm thinking that those were probably parts of every day life, fortune and unavoidable reality for Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries in a way that specialized empiricism and scientific theories weren't as immediate. In that environment it might be hard to imagine an alternative understanding of biology that didn't feed racism.

Here's a related tangent. Before I went on vacation I was reading a bit of 19th century writers on race. I'm not sure where the quote was from but it may have been Herbert Spencer who seemed to think that Asians looked kind of like infants, and therefore Asian society was at a more "infantile" stage of development. This would fit well with the idea of the "White Man's Burden" to "raise up" these other civilizations into "adulthood", a justification for imperialism. Sorry, I'm going from 2-week-old memory so I may have the attribution wrong, but the point is this is a racist theory that doesn't seem particularly to rely on natural selection. In the 19th century there were competing theories of biological and societal development, not just Darwinism and "Social Darwinism" (not to conflate the two either). The challenge is to find one that directly contradicts 19th century racism in a way that it couldn't be used as a justification. That could just be an impossible challenge since people seem to have a knack for coming up with creative interpretations for things.

The really important point to me is whether or how modern evolutionary theory is connected to modern racism and how both may have "evolved" from their 19th century antecedents. Unfortunately I don't know enough to feel very comfortable saying more than that's an interesting point for further study. Maybe someone else would care to elaborate on this for now.



Keep on Rockin in the Free World
Also, "racism" IMO is a combo of ignorance and neurosis, whether by a group of people or 1 person-- unfortunately, the word gets thrown around with such abandon these days that it often reveals more about the accuser than the accusee. That's the thing about words like this, the truth behind the word gets watered down with the flippant use of it.

Thats a good point Earl. I think it has something to do with (goin a lil conspiracy theory for yas, so break out tin-foil hats), with the apparent need to Categorize people in simplistic easy terms.

I get the feeling sometimes that the media, at least the western media that i grew up on, does this at the whim of its advertisers commercial interests.

Assumptions are made all the time based on these sorta pre-conceived stereotypes, and of course it extends far beyond racism issues. Of Course living in Canada gives one an interesting perspective on these matters.

Its also imo a generational thing, each generation evolves a bit more, and with teh internet, i believe among regular joe and jane public the communication with others that participate in many of the same things that we do breaks down a lot of these rather silly barriers.

My kids for instance, cannot fathom there was a time, much less when I was their age, that the prevailing wisdom in teh NFL was that African-Americans did not have the mental capacity to excell at quarterback.

think about that for a second.

Today that notion has been proven to be patently Ridiculous, and tbph when i started watching Football with my dad the CFL is all we watched, so Warren Moon guiding the Edmonton Eskimoes to multiple titles didn't seem anything other than the best QB in the league doing his thing.

We as a society evolve all the time, it just isn't noticeable in any real way sometimes, except viewed in the rear view mirror.



My kids for instance, cannot fathom there was a time, much less when I was their age, that the prevailing wisdom in teh NFL was that African-Americans did not have the mental capacity to excell at quarterback.

think about that for a second.
I can top you on that--I was born in East Texas in the 1940s when segregation still had 20 years to run. Blacks at the back of the bus and and in the balcony of the movie theaters, not welcomed at all in white churches, had separate "but equal" schools and bathrooms, had to order their food from outside a "white-only" eatery and eat it standing outside. It wasn't until sometime after I learned to read that I discovered there was any other designation for black people than the N-word.

But I learned that segregation wasn't right before I ever got in school. Not from any of the older members of my family--they had grown up that way and thought segregation was the natural way of life. But there was a hot, muggy summer day in the JC Penney store in Longview, Tex., when I was so hot and dry that I was spittin cotton and had to find somewhere to get a drink of water. My aunt went with me to hunt down a water fountain, only to find the "white" fountain was out of order. So she tells me come on, you can get a drink later. But at that moment, a young black boy steps up to the "colored" fountain and refrigerated water flowed from its spout like a river of paradise. So I tell my aunt, 'Hey, that fountain's working. I'll get a drink from there!"

"No, you can't drink from there!" she tells me.

"What do you mean?" I respond. "That kid is getting a drink. The fountain is working. Why can't I get a drink?"

"No, no," she says, trying to pull me away. "That's just for those people!"

"What people? People who have already had a drink?" I ask. "I want water! I want water!"

Well, we created quit a stir in JC Penney's that day, but I never did get any water. And that's when I figured out that any system that prevents a thirsty kid from getting a drink--no matter what his color--is not worth a tinker's damn.

Thank gawd my kids never had to experience that. There were Blacks and Asians and Hispanics as well as whites in the neighborhoods where they grew up and on their soccer teams and in their schools, so segregation has absolutely no meaning to them. But back in the late 1970s, I spent a couple of weeks in South Africa where toilets and water fountains were labeled "white," "colored," and "black." Made me remembering what a soul-chilling experience segregation was when I was a kid and how glad I was that we have progressed beyond that.