Darwin and Higher Breeding

Pistols At Dawn

It is presumably an embarrassment to the modern evolutionist that Charles Darwin, the founder of the evolutionist cosmology, welcomed the extinguishing of what he saw as lower human species.  He saw this ethnic cleansing as inevitable and right and natural and determined by evolutionary principles.  He wrote in The Descent of Man (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004, p.163):

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races throughout the world.

So more advanced human beings were going to exterminate the less advanced--the fact that they would be successful in exterminating them would be proof positive of their superiority and fitness to survive. When that happened, argued Darwin, we would see a far bigger gap between apes and human beings in the evolutionary chain of being. At his time of writing Darwin thought that there were human ethnic groups that were pretty close to apes--specifically the Australian aboriginal and the Negro.

Now, of course, today such views are regarded by evolutionists as quaint, old-fashioned, or Victorian. It is more fashionable to speak of all men being equal--but this is just a modern fad.
  There is no gainsaying that in a few centuries human beings may well become more sophisticated and engage in a bit of good old fashioned ethnic cleansing.  Maybe a new Yellow Peril will engulf the world and wipe out millions upon millions.  Evolutionism would regard this as morally right--for the fittest would have survived, the weakest would have gone into history.  And that's a good thing.  That's what evolutionism is all about, after all.

Thus, it is not at all surprising that in the early twentieth century, as Darwinism became the intellectual flavour of the month in the West, that it became respectable and intellectually sophisticated to advocate eugenics or breeding programmes to produce a new higher class of humans who would be resistant to disease and have the facility for receiving higher education.  Such views were actively promoted and publicly lauded in both the UK and the US.

And then there is the Nazi connection.  According to David Klinghoffer,

In Mein Kampf, Hitler used Darwinian language to make his case for racial war against the Jews.  He rallied the millions of Germans who bought his bestselling book with an appeal to biology, which, as he argued, revealed certain iron laws of Nature--principally the struggle for supremacy pitting the superior races against the inferior. . . .
What you would not readily foresee from reading Darwin's writings is that the race requiring extermination would turn out to be us Jews.  But Hitler perceived an inner logic in Darwinism that even Charles Darwin did not.

And what was that logic?  Hitler said that he and the German people respected the laws of Nature--welcomed them, worked with them, and complied with them.  That was one of the reasons they had a legitimate claim to being ethnically superior and a more advanced race. The Germans faced up to and complied with the implied duty of extermination of the inferior races.  But the Jews . . . they said the opposite.  They were unnatural or anti-natural.  Jews argued that it was man's role to overcome Nature--which, Hitler said, was utter Jewish nonsense.  (David Klinghoffer, "God's Image, our Mission," God and Evolution, edited by Jay Richards [Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2010], p.298f)

Modern evolutionists would prefer to keep that noisome skeleton very firmly locked in the closet.  But the stench remains.  Dr Greg Bahnsen was once debating an evolutionist.  In his concluding remarks, he asked his opponent and audience to imagine that in his hand he had a .44 magnum.  He was going to conclude the debate--and win it--by lifting the gun and shooting his opponent in the head.  That he exterminated his opponent proved not only his opponent's weakness, but that the opponent himself must concede the point and acknowledge that he had legitimately lost, and that moreover Dr Bahnsen had played fair.

It makes the point neatly that evolutionists can only traffic their nonsense if no-one takes them seriously and accords them ethical privileges which they themselves have no foundation to acknowledge or claim.