quote:Originally posted by Bill Gray:
Hi Miami,
I am just saying that both Charles Darwin and his friend, Margaret Sanger, felt and taught that all other races were inferior to the caucasian white race. They supported programs of eugenics to weed out the inferior races.
That is racist. Am I jugding Darwin? No, only his racist belief. And, since the world's view of evolution is defined by Darwin's book; I naturally have drawn the line between his beliefs and his teachings, or his book.
God bless, have a wonderful, blessed day,
Bill
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Bill, here is some information, from the Darwin wiki, that maybe you weren't aware of. I'm sure this will get you on track with respect to Darwin and his observations. Regards, miamizsun
Human Races
His encounters with the natives of the Tierra del Fuego on his Beagle voyage made Darwin believe that civilization had evolved over time from a more primitive state.
His encounters with the natives of the Tierra del Fuego on his Beagle voyage made Darwin believe that civilization had evolved over time from a more primitive state.
The questions of what "race" was, how many human races there were, and whether they could be "mixed", were key debates in the nascent field of anthropology in Darwin's time. After the American Civil War (1861-1865), the question of race and slavery were brought to the forefront in anthropology in the United States and Europe. Many scientists from the Southern U.S. were publishing long monographs on why the "Negro" was inferior and would soon be driven to extinction by newfound freedom, with an implication that slavery had been not only "beneficial" but "natural". Darwin was a long-time abolitionist who had been horrified by slavery when he first came into contact with it in Brazil while touring the world on the Beagle voyage many years before, and considered the "race question" one of the most important of his day. Darwin opposed the polygenism theory, developed by scientific racist discourse, which postulated that the different human races were distinct species ("polygenism") and were likely separately "created". To the contrary, Darwin considered that all human beings were of the same species, and that races, if they were useful markers at all, were simply "sub-species" or "variants." This view (known as "monogenism") was in stark contrast with the majority view in anthropology at the time, that Polygeny was supported by thinkers of many backgrounds, such as the zoologist, glaciologist, and geologist Louis Agassiz, and by later thinkers who would interpret Darwin's theory to imply that races had been evolved at different times or stages. Darwin's own views of this were that the differences between human races were superficial (he discusses them only in terms of skin color and hair style), and much of Descent is devoted to the question of the human races. Aside from the aforementioned encounter with slavery on the Beagle, Darwin also was perplexed by the "savage races" he saw in South America at Tierra del Fuego, which he saw as evidence of a man's more primitive state of civilization. During his years in London, his private notebooks were riddled with speculations and thoughts on the nature of the human races, many decades before he would publish Origin."