Darwin classified his own white race as more advanced than those “lower organisms” such as pygmies, and he called different people groups “savage,” “low,” and “degraded.”

Darwin wasn’t the first to propose biological arguments for racism, but his works fuelled the most ugly and deadly racism. Even evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory” (Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 1977).

Darwin didn’t hide his view that his evolutionary thinking applied to human races as well as to animal species. The full title of his seminal 1859 book was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. He followed up more explicitly in The Descent of Man, where he spelled out his racial theory:

The Western nations of Europe . . . now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors [that they] stand at the summit of civilization. . . . The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races through the world.

How little we understand that Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution provided the doctrine behind white supremacism. Whereas the British Empire of the early 19th century had been dominated by Christian reformers such as William Wilberforce, who sold slave badges that proclaimed, “Am I not a man and a brother?”, Darwin’s writings converted an empire with a conscience into an empire with a scientific philosophy. Four years after Darwin published The Origin of Species, James Hunt turned it into a justification for slavery. In his 1863 paper, “On the Negro’s Place in Nature,” he asserted: “Our Bristol and Liverpool merchants, perhaps, helped to benefit the race when they transported some of them to America.”

Christian reformers had spent decades in the early 19th century teaching Britain to view non-European races as their equals before God. In a matter of years, Darwin swept not only God off the table, but also the value of people of every race with him.

Enabling Genocide

The European West too willing to accept Darwinian evolution as its gospel of overseas expansion. Due to his beliefs about natural selection toward the Aborigines he found is Australia The Melbourne Review used Darwin’s teachings to justify the genocide of indigenous Australians in 1876. Darwin did not try and stop them. When the Australian newspaper argued that “the inexorable law of natural selection [justifies] exterminating the inferior Australian and Maori races”—that “the world is better for it” since failure to do so would be “promoting the non-survival of the fittest, protecting the propagation of the imprudent, the diseased, the defective, and the criminal”—it was Christian missionaries who raised an outcry on behalf of this forgotten genocide. Darwin simply commented, “I do not know of a more striking instance of the comparative rate of increase of a civilized over a savage race.”

Meanwhile, several thousand miles away, Cecil Rhodes was gleefully embracing Darwin’s thinking as justification for white expansion across southern Africa. He was so inspired by Darwinian evolutionist Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man that he later confessed, “That book has made me what I am.” What it made him was the architect of one of the most brutal and immoral acts of European expansion and genocide in history.

Rhodes wrote in 1877: I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. . . . It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honorable race the world possesses.

If what Rhodes believed sounds shocking to you—and I hope it does—then understand that he was simply stating what he drew from the works of both Darwin and Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, who extrapolated his cousin’s thinking to pioneer racial eugenics.

During the colonial land-grab of African countries by European nations after the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, Germany annexed Namibia, then known as South-West Africa. German settlers and military quickly ran roughshod over the historical rights and claims of the Herero tribal inhabitants, and for the next 20 years plundered their lands, houses and livestock. The Governor, Theodor Leutwein, wrote that the German settlers had an ‘inborn feeling of belonging to a superior race’. Thus racism was rife. The Herero were regularly referred to as ‘baboons’; the men were commonly beaten to death for minor infringements, and the women were made sex slaves by the soldiers and settlers.

Examples are myriad and I include a few here: Darwin’s thinking was used by late 19th-century Americans to justify acts of genocide against Native Americans. Hitler and his Nazi philosophers used it to justify wars of expansion and horrific holocaust. Communist Russia used Darwinian evolution to justify its liquidation of non-Russian people groups within the Soviet empire. It was used by Serbs to justify their genocide against Croatians and Kosovans.

Because whether or not you agree with his thoughts on evolution, you should at the very least want to discover he was wrong. Whom would you rather discover was right all along? The Christian reformers of the early 19th century, like William Wilberforce and the Earl of Shaftesbury, who argued from belief in divine creation that slaves should be freed and that children shouldn’t be forced to work themselves to death in factories for having been born to the wrong parents? Or Charles Darwin, who argued from belief in a godless beginning to the universe that natural selection is a virtue and that, consequently, acts of genocide are part and parcel of the way the world was always supposed to be?

As he got older, especially in his famous, The Descent of Man, he developed an early version the perspective later called “social Darwinism”:

“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 . . . 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.” The Decent of Man

He saw natural selection at work in the killing of indigenous peoples of Australia by the British, wrote here of blacks (some of the “savage races”) being a category close to gorillas, and spoke against social programs for the poor and “weak” because such programs permitted the least desirable people to survive.

By the late 1800s a racist perspective called “social Darwinism” extensively developed these ideas of Darwin and argued aggressively that certain “inferior races” were less evolved, less human, and more apelike than the “superior races.” Prominent social scientists like Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner argued that social life was a life-and-death struggle in which the best individuals would win out over inferior individuals. Sumner argued that wealthy Americans, almost entirely white at the time, were products of natural selection and as the “superior race” essential to the advance of civilization. Black Americans were seen by many of these openly racist analysts as a “degenerate race” whose alleged “immorality” was a racial trait.

Though some have presented him that way, Darwin was not a bystander to this vicious scientific racism. In their earlier book, Darwin, Adrian Desmond and James Moore summarize thus:

“‘Social Darwinism’ is often taken to be something extraneous, an ugly concretion added to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing Darwin’s image. But his notebooks make plain that competition, free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality were written into the equation from the start–‘Darwinism’ was always intended to explain human society.”

Why has his racist thinking received so little attention in the recurring celebrations of Darwin and use of his major ideas and celebrations of his impact?

Charles Darwin's Racist Framing -

While he was the product of his time, he indeed was not just a racist. He was also a social Darwinist. He himself was not of solid singular position throughout his life but rather of a increasingly radicalizing racist and social Darwinist towards the end of his life, emerging originally from the concept that all humans are created equal in his theological studies at Cambridge.

Whether it is deserving of a footnote in the already incredibly brief explanation given in history school books that he was also a horrible man, the problem is simple. It is not as much an issue of censorship - it is an issue of what to include in the school book at all. In school history books we don’t digress much. We don’t explain things to depth. Things are abstracted often so much that they become inaccurate.

A report was published in the 12 January, 2008, edition of the St. Petersburg Times titled "Foster links Darwin, Hitler." Bill Foster, a former City Council member, wrote a to the school board noting the dangers inherent in the theory of evolution being taught as a scientific fact, and demanded that the compulsory teaching of Darwinism be prevented.

Foster described the reason for his opposition to the theory of evolution being taught as fact in these words: "Evolution gives our kids an excuse to believe in natural selection and survival of the fittest, which leads to a belief that they are superior over the weak … This is a slippery slope." Foster's letter came on the eve of the state of Florida putting new science standards to the vote. These new standards regarded Charles Darwin's theory as the pillar of modern biology. The science standards that had been in force in the state since 1996 made no reference to the word "evolution." The state Board of Education was to vote on the issue on 19 February.

At the same time, Foster is one of the leading candidates in the elections for the post of St. Petersburg's mayor, due to be held in 2009. In his letter, Foster goes on to stress the link between Hitler and Darwin: "Adolf Hitler duped an entire generation using Darwin's evolution … He sought to preserve the 'favored' race in the struggle for survival."

In the letter in question, Foster cites the Columbine massacre as striking evidence of the harm resulting from the teaching of Darwinism as a scientific fact. That armed attack, carried out by two students in a school in Columbine, USA on 20 April, 1999, resulted in the deaths of 12 students and a teacher, with a further 23 students being injured. The two assailants later committed suicide. Foster stressed how one of the pair had posted the following words on his web site: "You know what I love? Natural selection! It's the best thing that ever happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms."

In the wake of the 1999 shooting, Tom DeLay, a member of the US House of Representatives, cited Darwin's theory as a contributing factor and wrote in a letter that duly found its way into the Congressional Record that public schools "teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud." The Columbine massacre was no exceptional attack carried out by students holding Darwinist views. In Finland, Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who described himself as a social Darwinist, shot 8 people to death at the Jokela High School some 40 miles from Helsinki, before killing himself. In a manifesto setting out his views, Auvinen used the following words, which clearly revealed the influence of Darwinist views in this massacre: "I am prepared to fight and die for my cause. I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection. … No, the truth is that I am just an animal, a human, an individual, a dissident. … It's time to put NATURAL SELECTION & SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST back on tracks!"

The evangelical Christian group Coral Ridge Ministries, active in the state of Florida, produced a new TV special called "Darwin's Deadly Legacy." The film, aired on Christian cable networks and on some 200 TV stations in the country as a whole, described Adolf Hitler's dependence on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution with regard to the Holocaust.

Fourteen scholars, scientists and authors contributed comments to the documentary, which was aired 26-27 August, 2007, during "Coral Ridge Hour." D. James Kennedy, the pastor of Coral Ridge Ministries, said: "To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler. Hitler tried to speed up evolution, to help it along, and millions suffered and died in unspeakable ways because of it."

CRM spokesman John Aman said: "Darwinism is a philosophy, it's a worldview, and one of the key things in it is that evolution advances by death, so death is a good thing. Hitler thought he was doing civilization a favor by eliminating lives that were not worth living. We of course think that is an egregious moral tragedy and a consequence of the worldview that was initiated by Darwin and popularized by his followers."

The alliance between Darwin and Hitler resulted in a tragedy responsible for the deaths of some 40 million, half of them Jews, the balance were Gypsies, Christians, dissenters and other European lower life nationals.

The Germany of Hitler’s day was steeped in social Darwinianism or eugenics (Eugenics is the application of Darwinian evolution to produce better offspring by improving the birthrate of the “fit” and reducing the birthrate of the less “fit”).Most Germans considered it to be scientifically true. This was because, firstly, Darwin’s Origin of Species” had been translated in German in 1860, followed by his “Descent of Man” in 1875, in which Darwin showing himself to be a social Darwinist, speculated, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.” And their logical sequel, articles on eugenics, by Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, had been translated into German by the early 1900s.

Secondly, Ernst Haeckel, professor of Zoology at Jena University in Germany from 1865 to 1909, had become Darwin’s chief European apostle proclaiming the gospel of evolution. Haeckel’s infamous “gill slit” diagrams or embryological drawings supposedly recapitulating various stages of evolutionary development in the womb (i.e. fish, amphibian, etc.) are still featured in biology textbooks today, even though scientists have known for some time that they were forged (see chapter on Embryology) Thirdly, the German nation had been subjected for many years to the “God-is-dead” atheism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who believed that Darwinian evolution would eventually produce the “Ubermensch,” a superman race. In due course, Hitler became the chief promulgator of Darwinian racist views. Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle) is infested with evolutionary ideas as selection, survival of the fittest, extinction of the weak, superior race, mixing one’s blood, etc. As Richard Weikart, professor of modern European history at California State University points out: “Since Hitler viewed evolutionary progress as essentially good, he believed the highest good was to cooperate with it…if evolution produced the ends, the Darwinian mechanism suggested the means: increase the population of the “most fit” people to displace others in the struggle for existence.” This undoubtedly was the rationale behind the Nazi genetic engineering program, the “Lebensborn,” of which 10,000 children were born in Germany and 9000 in Norway between 1935 and 1945 to build up an Aryan “Master-race”, while the concentration camps dealt with the latter 11 million “useless eaters,” as authenticated and documented at the Nuremberg Trials

Proponents of Darwinian Evolution, not surprisingly, would like us to believe that any supposed connection between Darwinian evolution and Nazi ideology or communist ideology is nonsense, but Dr. Jaroslav Joseph Havel, who has done pioneering work in plant ecology and taxonomy in Australia and New Guinea, and reforestation research in Indonesia and many other countries, would strongly disagree. He had a non-Christian upbringing during World War 11 in Czechoslovakia, where the schools were either controlled by the Nazis or by communists, neither of whom had any time for Christianity. Evolution was the only world view that was taught. As the war engulfed most of Europe, he observed that morals were regarded as relative. Sound familar? Even vengeance killing, he relates, was seen as a virtue, not a crime. In his own words, “I have lived under two regimes that used evolution as a basic doctrine and translated it into a political weapon that destroyed millions of human lives. I can’t see it as just academic.”

Dr. Havel, whose life as a draftee into bomb disposal squads was considered expendable, poignantly explains: “Under the Nazis I was classified as half-human (Halbmensch) because I spoke Czech.” Further, when the Czech communists, as puppets of the Soviet Union, took over the government in 1948, he once again saw the “naked power of the state” manifest itself, this time in the incarceration in labour camps of all the non-cooperative who were labelled as “class enemies.” About such, he said, “It does not seem to occur to people that once they can be persuaded that they are just smart monkeys produced by chance through a struggle of survival, they can be pushed around by dictators much more easily than someone who believes he was created with an eternal soul.”

Of course, it is no secret that Karl Marx admired and revered Darwin. Marx saw in Darwinism the scientific and sociological support for an economic experiment that eclipsed even the carnage of Hitler’s Germany.

Simply they were dancing to their DNA.