The Evolutionary Fiction of Race
The Negroid stock is even more ancient than the Caucasian and Mongolian ... The standard of intelligence of the average adult Negro is similar to that of the eleven-year-old youth of the species Homo sapiens. -- Henry Fairfield Osborn
We cannot understand much of the history of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century anthropology, with its plethora of taxonomic names proposed for nearly every scrap of fossil bone, unless we appreciate its obsession with the identification and ranking of races.
|
Abortion
Among some animal species, then, infant killing appears to be a natural practice. Could it be natural for humans too, a trait inherited from our primate ancestors? Charles Darwin noted in the "Descent of Man" that infanticide has been probably the most important of all checks on population grown throughout most of human history.
|
Exploitation
As the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie put it after reading Darwin and Spencer "Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution. All is well since all grows better became my motto, my true source of comfort.
|
Male Chauvinism
In a period when women were beginning to demand the suffrage, higher education and entrance to middle-class professions. It was comforting to know that women could never outstrip men; the new Darwinism scientifically guaranteed it ... Darwinism supposedly proved female inferiority by an evolutionary reconstruction that center on the aggressive, territorial, hunting male and relegates the female to submissive domesticity and the periphery of the evolutionary process.
|
