He might have not indented it this way but that does not excuse the fact that most everything Darwin states in this matter is extremely racist, narrow minded, and false. In The Descent of Man, he talks about inferior and superior races and claims human development was tributary to a vicious process of selection, of “the elimination of the slightly less well-endowed individuals.” Herbert Spencer would only rephrase what Darwin claimed in his book when he called it “survival of the fittest.” Indeed, contrary to what some are claiming today in Darwin's defense, Spencer’s catchy line is pure and unadulterated Darwinian nonsense.
The other question Darwin never addresses is the one about the origin of all those human races living today on planet Earth. Similar to what we have in the Bible, where the Old Testament god wants his chosen race to kill most everyone who does not swear obedience to him, Darwin’s humans live in a dog-eat-dog kind of world where races no one knowns where they came from fight each other for survival. That and the belief in the existence of favored races led to the emergence in the last decades of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century of the science of eugenics.
Darwin is very clear, a clarity that does not allow for misinterpretations, and equally wrong when he speaks of “favoured races” and of better-endowed individuals of the same species causing some sort of natural selection among the population of the planet, something supposedly leading to the emergence of a superior human. The concept of eugenics was born out of that non-factual view, and this new science was supposed to be a way of creating the perfect human race. All a scientist had to do was eliminate the weaker, the less well-endowed individuals within our communities, as Darwin suggested it happens in nature, and the resulting superior race would have taken over the planet. At the surface it looked like a good, rational idea, reason why even some among the progressive cultural and political personalities of the time were enthusiastically embracing it. As it turned out, since the premises were false, it was actually a very bad idea.
Darwin was convinced the civilized nations would one day overcome and basically completely annihilate the so-called savage races. That nonsense would be soon put to a test and the results were devastating for civilization Earth. Among others, his irrational assumptions became the silent foundation for the ideology embraced by supremacist groups and an essential part of Hitler’s reasoning behind his final solution plan. To justify his crimes, Hitler would use the argument provided by German scientists who happened to be big supporters and practitioners of eugenics. The movement for race purity, however, did not start under the Nazi, or in Germany. It all began much earlier, in America.
In the 1860s and the 1870s, a certain Francis Galton put eugenics on the map, and many found it to be an attractive, a sound proposition. His passion for eugenics was the result of the influence exerted on him by his cousin’s recently published works on natural and racial selection, two best sellers the complete title of which read On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Indeed, his cousin was no other than Charles Darwin, and no one has ever heard him denouncing Francis’ work for being immoral, racist, and anti-social.
The eugenics movement gained notoriety in America when another Charles, Charles Davenport, created the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations. German scientists joined the institution, and the Swiss-born German psychiatrist and geneticist Ernst Rüdin became one of the presidents of IFEO. He was later appointed director of the Genealogical-Demographic Department at the German Institute for Psychiatric Research in Munich (1917-1945), and director of the German Society for Racial Hygiene of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research.
A prominent figure of the scientific community, Rüdin is considered the father of the National Socialist Party’s ideology. In fact, he would end up writing the official racial policy of Nazi Germany.
A Time of Change will be released in 2020 under to be determined circumstances.
