After I wrote my last post of yesterday, I looked and thought more carefully about just how awful Darwin's claims in the second paragraph of that letter really were. Here is the entire paragraph, you can check the text against that of the Darwin Correspondence Project - certainly a pro-Darwin outfit at his own Cambridge University - I copied and pasted their posting of it, changing nothing.
Lastly I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilisation than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is. The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world. But I will write no more, and not even mention the many points in your work which have much interested me. I have indeed cause to apologise for troubling you with my impressions, and my sole excuse is the excitement in my mind which your book has aroused.
You get the feeling that Darwin's "excitement of mind" was aroused because he felt that William Graham didn't give his theory, natural selection, due praise. The structure of Darwin's argument to convince Graham of that is in line with Darwin's writing from at least the time he wrote The Descent of Man because the same argument was made in it, with a number of other named and implied "lower races" being the object of his selective scheme. I will take the argument sentence by sentence because it's my experience that if there are Darwinists reading this, they will skate past any parts of it they don't like and pretend it doesn't mean what Darwin said.
Lastly I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilisation than you seem inclined to admit.
Darwin is not only claiming scientific validity for his theory of natural selection, he is claiming it as having a more significant role "for the progress of civilisation" than Graham would have granted it. In the next sentences he gives an example of just how he sees his theory as contributing to the "progress of civilisation" and the consequences of it.
Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is.
He cites the past in which the Turkish empire conquered a large part of Europe and rivaled European empires and kingdoms - off hand, I can't think of any country conquered by "the Turks" which were governed democratically. And Darwin claims that "such an idea now is" "ridiculous". The only basis of it being "ridiculous" would be if you believed the other petty monarchies, fiefdoms, parts of European empires were less "ridiculous" than the Ottomans, which would be a hard case to make. Considering that history and his theory. one thing that is ridiculous is the choice Darwin made in choosing to finger the Turks in this way. He went on:
The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence.
You wonder, if some Turk had been writing on this topic at the height of the Turkish empire why it wouldn't have been as legitimate an idea to say that "The Turkish race have beaten the so-called Caucaian races hollow in the struggle for existence". But, as I've noted before, Darwin often played fast and loose with history when applying his theory of natural selection to groups he didn't like.
But that's not the most sinister thing in that sentence, it is the assertion that the military defeat of the Turks didn't only have military or historical significance, Darwin, through natural selection, gives it scientific significance with all of the implications of rigorous reliability that is carried by that assertion. Not only scientific significance, but deadly scientific significance entirely due to the nature of his theory of natural selection. The losers in a Darwinian "struggle for existence" die and disappear from the future. The reason they die is due to their inferiority to those who kill them. Which is the bridge between his historically dubious claims about the Turks and the most chilling sentence yet.
Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.
Remember the context into which Darwin, himself set that sentence, his claim made to William Graham, "on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilisation than you seem inclined to admit," He, himself, claimed that his theory will have a role in a future in which "an endless number of the lower races (his term, not mine) will have been eliminated (that is erradicated, killed) by the higher civilised races (by his own text, the "so-called Caucasian races") throughout the world. He is calling genocide an engine of "the progress of civilisation". In this instance he named the Turks as a group he clearly anticipated being wiped out by "so-called" Caucasians. Clearly, that's not only scientific racism, blatant scientific racism, it is an endorsement of genocide as an engine of progress. I have noted before that Darwin had been making assertions to that effect since at least the publication of The Descent of Man, other members of his inner circle had been making similar racist claims based in natural selection about the beneficial results of the deaths of those who they considered "lower" by their superior, white, murderers, Darwin's closest British colleague and his protective "bull dog" Thomas Huxley from at least 1865 in his putrid essay Emancipation - Black and White, Ernst Haeckel since at least 1868 in the book Darwin completely endorsed as representing his own views, Natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte .
At the same time a third member of Darwin's inner circle, Francis Galton was already publishing articles and the book Hereditary Genius, the foundation of his eugenics - something he directly attributed to his reading of On the Origin of Species and which he noted his cousin Charles Darwin praised in a letter he published on Darwin's first reading Hereditary Genius. Eugenics, in practice, was not only used in the United States, Canada and elsewhere in an attempt to either inhibit the continuation of races, it was also used as an indirect form of genocide, something which the Nazis studied and learned from in forming their own genocidal eugenics.
As I've wondered about the other groups Darwin named, specifically, as being inferior to those groups he deemed superior - no surprise is there that he counted his Brits as the pinnacle of superiority - what are we supposed to make of him today? Taking the conventional definition of a generation as 33 years, it is just over four generations ago that he not only deemed the Turks to be scientifically identified as inferior, but that their eradication by "so-called Caucasians" was to be anticipated and such would constitute "the progress of civilisation". He had also made claims about other groups being wiped out by their "superiors" as the advance of "civilisation". That taint of inferiority under Darwin was biological, it was inherited, it would be passed on if such "inferior" people had children. The great-great grandchildren of the people Darwin eagerly anticipated being wiped out because of their inherent inferiority are alive today, no doubt some of them at universities being indoctrinated in natural selection and, if not on a science track, in the cult of the post-war, plaster Saint Charles Darwin who sciency propagandists are lying about having said such things, right now.
When he chose to pick on "the Turks" Darwin was especially stupid because if there is one thing that the Turkish people were known for in history, it was as conquerors. At any point what Darwin said about them could have been said about those they conqurered. You have to wonder if he were aware of just who was included in that ethnic family. Of course, as is always true in history, today's conquering rulers can be tomorrows has-beens. Look at Darwin's Brits. As to such conquest constituting the progress of "civilisation," in the example Darwin gave, I'd say that the idea that his Victorian Brits were civilized is a delusion. I guess Darwin's idea of "civilisation" included those who committed genocide. By his definition, Genghis Khan must have been one of the most "civilised" men in history, his murderous "hoard" an engine of the progress of said "civilisation". I suppose he'd agree with that if they'd been "so-called Caucasians" or, even better, Brits.
The role that such thinking denominated to be "science" with all of the rights and privileges of assumed reliability that club believes they are entitled to in the continuation of genocidal and racist thinking is important to consider.
Update: Oh, for Petes' sake. What do you supposed Darwin meant when HE CALLED THE DEFEAT OF THE TURKS BY "THE SO-CALLED CAUCASIANS" A LOSS IN A "STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE"? Do you imagine that the losers in a "struggle for existence" were believed by Darwin to still exist afterwards? They fucking die! They leave no descendants. IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE AN EVOLUTIONARY THEORY, AFTER ALL!
Jeesh! Who ever passed you in reading in 2nd grade was practicing grade inflation. There's a lot of that going around in these STEM emphasizing days.
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