Recently the NZ Herald moved from broadsheet to tabloid format. It did not take the venerable rag long to lower its journalistic standards to reflect its new format.
A storm-in-a-teacup scandal hit the headlines over the weekend. Raaaaacism! But worse, fundamentalist Christian raaaaaacism. Still worse, fundamentalist creationist Christian raaaaacism. Yup. That's the worst kind there is.
Apparently a self-promoting violet of the non-shrinking kind was grossly offended by pamphlets circulated in the South Waikato which apparently had the temerity to argue that people who believe in evolution are flirting with racism.
"Are you a racist? You are if you believe in evolution!" the letter states. "Kids are taught in school that man evolved (changed) from a chimp. So I ask you who changed the most from a black chimp with black hair and brown eyes? A black man with black hair and brown eyes? Or a white man with blond hair and blue eyes?"The article breathlessly suggests that those responsible for the pamphlets were promoting racism, whereas even a superficial glance at the quotations provided demonstrate the authors were arguing against evolution because evolutionism is incipiently racist. Such subtleties are lost on Herald journalists and on attention seeking models. But it is axiomatic for tabloid journalists that the fact must never get in the way of a tall story.
Needless to say, the underlying point is a serious one. Evolutionism is an implicitly racist doctrine. It's not hard to understand why. Evolutionism teaches that all life and matter is evolving from lower to higher (more advanced) forms. Yes, yes of course this violates the natural law of entropy or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but let's not be picky. Therefore, it seems reasonable to postulate seriously that there are more and less advanced human beings. It would seem not unreasonable--to the evolutionist--regardless of how politically incorrect it may be, to posit seriously that some humans are more primitive than others because the whole race is in evolutionary transition.
Historically there have been plenty of examples of this kind of theorising amongst evolutionists. For a while brain size was taken as an evidence of higher and lower specimens of humanity. Darwin himself, writing in 1871, cites one evolutionary theorist who claimed there were 63 species of man. [The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Appleton, 1871), p. 218.]
One of the more prominent was a Philadelphia physician, Samuel Morton who engaged in field research measuring the cranial capacities of different races.
Morton dies an early death in 1851 and was regarded as a well-respected scientist of his time who had provided the world with the definitive work on racial intelligence. The figures [of racial cranial capacity] confirmed what everyone "knew": the white man was the most intelligent, the Indian next, and the Negro least of all. {Ian T. Taylor, In the Minds of Men: Darwin and the New World Order (Toronto: TFE Publishing, 1874), p.263.]Morton's conclusions were not refuted statistically until Jay Gould did the job nicely in the late 1970's, when he re-analyzed Morton's data. Darwin himself saw the human race as divided into lower and higher forms, some more close to apes than others. (Naturally, Caucasians were thought to be of the higher form, while Negroes and aborigines closest to apes.)
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. [Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871),1st edition, I: p.168f.]Darwin had form--despite the attempts of his modern day hagiographers. Then, of course, there is the clear connection between the eugenics movement of the first half of the last century, virulent amongst the Commentariat in Britain and the USA, in which there was a clear link between evolutionism and the prospect of developing a higher kind of human being through selective breeding. Such ideas were subsequently lost to the mainstream because of Hitler's particular application of the eugenics doctrine. It became unfashionable to maintain the ideology--although it still makes an appearance from time to time.
Brute evolution gives no support to a sentimental notion that "advanced" beings seek to nurture and protect and prolong the lives of the weak and the primitive. Nature is without sentiment, without morality. To suggest that ethics and sentiment reflect a higher evolutionary stage contradicts the essence of evolutionary doctrine--that advances come through the elimination of the weaker amongst the species and the survival of the fittest. Evolutionists who today attempt to elide around this issue merely show that, on their own terms, they have become a more degenerated unfit member of the species.
So, today, the leading popularisers of evolution get mighty close to eugenics and wanting some inferior members of the human race to be "bred" out or eliminated. Christopher Hitchens fulminations against the religious and his willingness to crusade for counter-jihad are one example. Richard Dawkins's calls for children to be removed from Christian parents at birth is another.
But, then, such subtleties are way beyond the pay scale of pop journos working for a tabloid.
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