EXPLAIN THIS: Darwin’s Racism of the Gaps

By Jonathan Witt

In the wake of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), thought leaders in Europe and the United States used his theory of evolution by natural selection to justify violent and dehumanizing treatment of non-whites around the globe. This much is well known. Less widely recognized is that Darwin’s case for ape-to-man evolution rested in no small part on his racist view of non-whites.

The jump from ape-like to human may seem like too great a leap for mindless evolution, he conceded, but not, he suggested, if we recognize that the “lower races” are far closer to apes than are the “higher races,” with Caucasians, in his view, at the top of the human evolutionary pyramid.

In recounting his adventures from 1831–36 aboard the globe-circling HMS Beagle, Darwin describes some of the indigenous people he encountered as barbarians persisting in the “lowest and most savage state… whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; men who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason.”

Elsewhere in the account, he writes that on meeting the “poor wretches” of Tierra del Fuego, he found it hard to believe “they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world. It is a common subject of conjecture what pleasure in life some of the lower animals can enjoy; how much more reasonably the same question may be asked with respect to these barbarians!”

Go here on Evolution News and Science Today for the balance of Jonathan Witt’s challenging analysis of the fundamental racism underlying Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory.

Also do not miss Witt on the explanation for why Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer of the process of natural selection, reached very different conclusions about the “inferior races,” as did others of Darwin’s generation such as British explorer David Livingstone.

Cover illustration by Doina Gavrilov on Unsplash

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