It's a mixture of both, from what I understand. The 'kumbaya' bit is that he promoted the idea of all humans being one species (& hence any potential 'fitness' is achievable by members of any racial group). On these grounds he's way ahead of his time.
I'd like to flesh this out a little. I don't know with great specificity just what the "norms" were in that time (I'd actually imagine they're more divergent than they are now, and harder to pin down), but I've been frequently surprised by how old-school racism often seemed perfectly willing to accept that the supposedly-lesser races were human, just of an inferior sort.
He still talks the talk of the time, and does seem to believe in the superiority of white cultures, this is true. But surely you'd agree that patronising benevolence and recognition of 'brotherhood' is preferable to sanctioned exploitation and accusations of inherent inferiority?
Preferable in a vacuum, but in practice I'm not sure it makes any difference, or that it's not more insidious. The idea that some races are not really human is made largely out of ignorance which can be theoretically fixed with knowledge. The idea that one race is superior to another culturally, or something of the sort, is a lot harder to disprove, and it's the type of racism that persists to this day. It's a much tougher sort of weed. I call this progress in only the vaguest, most abstract sense of the word.
That's a rather vague sentence. Do you mean he examined their teeth like a horse and kicked the backs of their legs to check sturdiness? Or do you mean he viewed them from the perspective of humans being of the animal kingdom, as he did with his own children's behaviour, for example? (This is, after all, the man who called his wife-to-be the
"most interesting specimen in the whole series of vertebrate animals" )
I actually don't remember which reference to "savages" I was thinking of when I mentioned that. There are quite a few. But I see your point, about how detached he seems to be about this sort of thing in general. More on that in a moment.
That quote was a worry of his, not a desire. Such a concern is patronising, but not without precedent (the Spanish extermination of the Aztecs etc).
The full context of the quote doesn't convey any worry to me at all. Whether or not it contains a desire is admittedly arguable (I'm on the fence myself), though he clearly seems to regard it as factual. He also unveils a clear racial chain-of-command at the end of the passage, which I already quoted in the last post (it's the "...some ape as low as the baboon" one).
This is the central argument, I think: the claim that Darwin clearly believed black people (and Australians, incidentally, which now sounds so random as to almost be amusing) to be inferior to whites. The defense is that lots of people back then did, and by acknowledging their humanity at all, he was ahead of his time. I imagine we agree so far.
This may all be true, but I'm not sure it gets us nearer an actual answer. Being awarded humanity, only to be simultaneously deemed an inferior form of it, seems like a bit of a booby prize to me, and on net I'm not sure it's even much of a positive. Whatever gain may come from being recognized as some generic brand of humanity would seem to be lost by such a claim being scientifically codified. In other words, I'll take people who think I'm sub-human through their own ignorance over a man who thinks I'm just flat-out inferior through his own scientific deduction. The former affords me a much better chance of changing minds, for one.
It's not unlike the old Lewis quote that "of all bad men religious bad men are the worst." Similarly, I'd say the worst kind of ignorance is that which comes from educated men. Not only because they should know better, but because their ignorance almost invariably comes with a kind of self-assurance -- and likely authority -- that have ideological consequences for people around them. If a guy on a street corner holds up a sign that says the world is ending, nobody cares and nobody panics or gets hurt. If a guy in a lab coat does it, more people listen.
So, what we really have are two branches of argument: whether Darwin's beliefs were morally superior or inferior for his time, and whether or not they're harmful, regardless of his intention. You bring this up later, anyway, so onward...
The latter mini-quote needs context:
Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties. Everyone who has had the opportunity of comparison must have been struck with the contrast between the taciturn, even morose, aborigines of S. America and the light-hearted, talkative negroes.
It's not like he's saying 'these guys can't do maths', which is what could be assumed from your mini-quote alone. This seems a relatively benign bit of stereotyping, for the time.
Well, the important part is whether "intellectual faculties" refers to innate intelligence or just education. These days it certainly reads like the former. I don't think the context really leans in either direction, though; he clearly seems to
favor the "light-hearted, talkative negroes" as superior to the "taciturn, even morose, aborigines," no?
He does seem to be talking about non-Caucasians as taxonomically 'lower' there, which would seem to be at odds with the 'all are Homo Sapiens' stance. I'd appreciate any other 'racial hierarchy' quotes you have to hand. (Incidentally, he's not actually talking about evolution here, but extinction - IE the removal of 'living links' in the evolutionary 'chain').
I haven't found anything more damning than that one, I don't think, but I'm not sure. Serves me right for not replying for a friggin' year, or whatever it's been. I had more, I swear!
But we seem to agree that his focus is largely on cultural superiority, anyway.
And of course, this is where you were leading all the time. It's only a miracle you haven't mentioned Hitler yet.
Well, it's a debate about racism and survival of the fittest. It was inevitable.
Screw Godwin; it's a stupid law.
Firstly, your logic is awry. Evolution isn't considered a 'rising scale' of superiority (but rather an ebb & flow of 'suitability' to an environment - the other meaning of 'fittest' so conveniently forgotten by many who read 'power politics' into evolution). The physical 'plasticity' inherent in all species means each one can sustain numerous iterations which may have an incremental advantage in any given environment (& these advantages often are extremely minimal). Conceptually, it seems more accurate to suggest that individuals may be superior in certain circumstances, but inferior in others.
Technically, yes, but in practice there's not a lot of debate about things like intelligence always being more useful. It is the dominant trait of importance, far and away. Given that intelligence is the chief thing that makes us more "evolved" than animals, I don't think it's unreasonable to operate under the assumption that more "evolved" versions of ourselves would chiefly be smarter, rather than faster or stronger.
And that's before we actually get to the modern science. 'Racial' (read regional) genetics currently works under the following mantra: "most genetic differences between individuals occur within traditional racial groups, not across racial divides". This is a conceit that will be
tested as the science progresses, but for now no key or 'superior' trait has been found to reside within one race but not another. (Mind you, we haven't really found any 'superior trait genes' full stop
)
I doubt Darwin knew this at the time.
But your point is a fair one all the same, so I should modify my remark not to say that belief in more-evolved humans is inevitable, just that it's probably likely based on generalizations about intelligence. And that generalizing about intelligence being the thing that makes us "fittest" is reasonable.
From the reading I've done around this now, it seems that Darwin did indeed entertain many racial prejudices (even if we could say he was more enlightened than many around him on several fronts).
(Incidentally I'd recommend reading
this amazon review for a particularly convincing counter-argument to some of the broader claims being made for the influence of the 'brotherhood' aspect, and Darwin's tempered-racism)
The question then is, what legacy did this 'ignorance' leave? Modern versions of evolution don't lend support to racism. Are they products of their time? Most likely. Are the scientific discoveries that have emerged from Darwin's work flexible and far-reaching enough to touch on large swathes of human existence? Seems that way. Can they be abused? Yep. Do they show any signs of Victorian racism? No they don't.
Ah, here we are: back to the "what were the effects?" line of thought. This is admittedly very nebulous. Darwin is, for all his importance, probably just a cup in the bucket rather than a lowly drop, so we can't parse out all the effects of his work. But we can probably agree that Darwin clearly regarded "civilized" man as significantly superior to the "savages," which has tremendous implications for British imperialism. Indeed, you could hardly custom-build a more convenient justification for it.
It's fair to wonder, I think, given the proximity of his thoughts on natural selection to his thoughts on cultural superiority, whether or not he regarded civilization and culture as the next form of evolution. IE: in the same way intelligence is a very different form of progress than strength or speed, so to is culture a very different use of intelligence than mere survival. There's nothing explicit here, just speculation on my part.
By the by, I'm a firm believer in "never judge a belief system by its abuses" (with exceptions for the outliers, perhaps), so I'm not suggesting that any of this has much to do with the validity of his work. The discussion started when I wondered aloud if the film would touch on the racial aspects of the book. It's not so much that I think he was a fire-breathing racist (again, relative to his time), as that I'm perturbed by how rarely the racial aspect of natural selection gets talked about. It's a very dehumanizing theory, and it lends itself so naturally to prejudice. I don't believe we should cease to teach things because they can be abused, but who do you hear even talking about this outside of Christians looking to take the guy down a peg? 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.
Another question we could ask is: Did he have any other notable drives or beliefs that
did leave a legacy. Well, we could look to his insistence on repeated, long-term, inventive experiments to test his key theories, and his wide-ranging interest in the work of others. And at how the theories that survived these approaches spawned many core principles & facts that are held as true to this day. Those traits could be worth looking at too
Oh, sure. I didn't mean this as an indictment of the totality of the man, and I wouldn't expect
Creation to dwell on this one topic. I would simply hope it would address it in some form. Perhaps it does; has anyone here seen it?