When Darwinian Racism Came to Africa, and the West

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2023

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

Today’s ID the Future features another reading from scholar Olufemi Oluniyi’s new book, Darwin Comes to Africa. In this excerpt we learn how Darwin himself laid much of the groundwork for social Darwinist ideas, primarily in his book The Descent of Man, and how those ideas were energetically developed in the ensuing decades by various mainstream scientists. Oluniyi further details how their work fueled pseudo-scientific racism against black Africans and other indigenous peoples outside the West. To learn more about this neglected corner of modern Western history, and for the good news that the flow of evidence has turned against Darwinism and, with it, social Darwinist principles, pick up Oluniyi’s book here.

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0:00.0	I. Charles Darwin father not just a scientific theory, but a toxic social ideology that
0:17.5	fuelled racist colonial policies in Africa. That's the message of African scholar Olofimi Olunai in the new book Darwin Comes to Africa.
0:27.0	This is John West, Vice President of Discovery Institute.
0:30.0	In this
0:35.0	the future, we're going to hear another excerpt from Darwin Comes to Africa by the late Dr.
0:36.5	Olfimi Olunai. In this selection from Chapter 1, Dr. Olunai
0:42.0	explains how Darwin's theory was used to justify efforts at racial
0:46.9	extermination.
0:48.9	Let's listen.
0:50.9	Charles Darwin elevated race as a factor in the struggle for survival.
0:56.0	12 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species,
1:01.0	Darwin published The Descent of Man and Selection in relation to sex, a highly impactful
1:08.2	book as far as Europe's attitudes to Africa. Professor Frank B Besag observes that in Darwin's first book he used
1:16.8	race and species interchangeably. In other words at that time for Darwin there was a human race but not a black race.
1:26.2	In his second book, however, Darwin not only made references to races among humans, but he further distinguished between the lowest savages and the lowest
1:36.2	barbarians on the one hand and the highly civilized nations, including the Western nations of Europe who stand at the summit of civilization on the other.
1:46.7	Two points of clarification are here required.
1:50.0	First, while at times Darwin used the terms savages and barbarians to refer to the modern humans ancient four beers,
1:58.8	at other times he used those derogatory terms to speak of his contemporaries in distant lands, as when he writes,
2:07.0	at the present day, civilized nations are everywhere supplanting barbarous nations.
2:14.3	Second, as has been most indisputably and thoroughly
2:18.3	documented elsewhere, Darwin's letters and other writings clearly demonstrate that by Barbaross, inferior or lower peoples,
	...

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