Darwin’s Shocking, and Revealing, Subtitle—Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882)
From the beginning, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution contained the seeds of bigotry. His famous work Origin of Species was published in 1859. What is less well-known is its original and shocking sub-title: The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. The naturalist followed up his culture-shifting work with The Descent of Man in 1871. Here, he extrapolated upon man's relationship with apes by moving from mere physical attributes to psychological and moral traits. Additionally, he peppered his new work with suggestions on how to continue man’s evolution. His followers, often called social Darwinists, took him literally. They accepted his challenge to continue man’s advancement by eliminating “degenerate human breeding stock.” The chosen means for such “progress” often were abortion, eugenics, and euthanasia.
The notion of “survival of the fittest” has inspired a host of current modern prejudices and abuses.1 In Holland, doctors practice involuntary euthanasia. In America, parents select embryos for destruction based upon genetic prenatal screening. Women sell their “donor eggs” off to the highest bidder. All of these developments degrade the understanding of what it means to be human, and all of them owe their origin to Darwinism.
With savages, the weak in body or mind are eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.2