EvC Forum: Darwin on the Savage races

I thought, if you don't mind, I'd follow your example, and we can communicate mostly with cut and paste material.

Quote Mine Project writes:

Here is the quote in context:

Darwin writes:

The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is descended from some lower form; but this objection will not appear of much weight to those who, from general reasons, believe in the general principle of evolution. Breaks often occur in all parts of the series, some being wide, sharp and defined, others less so in various degrees; as between the orang and its nearest allies -- between the Tarsius and the other Lemuridae -- between the elephant, and in a more striking manner between the Ornithorhynchus or Echidna, and all other mammals. But these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct. At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. (Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. 2nd edn., London, John Murray, 1882, p. 156, which can be found at The writings of Charles Darwin on the web.)

First of all, Darwin is making a technical argument as to the "reality" of species, particularly Homo sapiens in this case, and why there should still be apparently distinct species, if all the different forms of life are related by common descent through incremental small changes. His answer is that competition against those forms with some, even small, advantage tends to eliminate closely related forms, giving rise to an apparent "gap" between the remaining forms. Whether or not Darwin was right about that is irrelevant to the use of this quote mine, of course, since that is part of the context that the creationists using it have assiduously removed. For those interested in the real issue, a bit more information can be found in the response to Quote #3.1.

Claims based on either of these quotes that Darwin and by extension modern evolutionary theory was or is "racist" or that the theory leads to racism, are less than honest. As John Wilkins noted in a "Feedback" article:

quote:
Throughout the Descent, when Darwin refers to "civilised races" he almost always is referring to cultures in Europe. I think Darwin was simply confused at that time about the difference between biological races and cultural races in humans. This is not surprising at this time - almost nobody made the distinction but Alfred Russel Wallace.

. . . At this time it was common for Europeans (based on an older notion of a "chain of being from lowest to highest") to think that Africans ("negroes") were all of one subspecific form, and were less developed than "Caucasians" or "Asians", based on a typology in around 1800 by the German Johann Friedrich Blumenach. In short, Darwin is falling prey to the same error almost everyone else was . . . So far as I can tell, he was not hoping for the extermination of these "races", though. ... Throughout his life, Darwin argued against slavery and for the freedom and dignity of native populations under European slavery.

Darwin was not perfect. But he was no racist.

In short, there is nothing in Darwin's words to support (and much in his life to contradict) any claim that Darwin wanted the "lower" or "savage races" to be exterminated. He was merely noting what appeared to him to be factual, based in no small part on the evidence of a European binge of imperialism and colonial conquest during his lifetime.

And if Wilkins is correct (and I think he is) about Darwin confusing biology and culture in this instance, Darwin was not entirely wrong. Certainly we can still see more technologically and militarily "advanced" cultures either destroying or, perhaps worse and more lasting, co-opting and replacing the less "advanced" ones.

I don't think I'll bother with the others.

You know, when someone sidles up to you and offers the slimy yield of their quote-mining, vilely smug, you can't help but feel a little dirty.

"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."

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