Readers will long be haunted by the memory of the 21-year-old gunman who opened fire earlier this month in a historic, mainly African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine.
David Klinghoffer, at Evolution News & Views, offers the following:
Dylann Roof’s apparent “manifesto” deals a little with themes of pseudo-scientific racism:
Negroes have lower [IQs], lower impulse control, and higher testosterone levels in generals. These three things alone are a recipe for violent behavior. If a scientist publishes a paper on the differences between the races in Western Europe or Americans, he can expect to lose his job. There are personality traits within human families, and within different breeds of cats or dogs, so why not within the races?
A horse and a donkey can breed and make a mule, but they are still two completely different animals. Just because we can breed with the other races doesnt make us the same.
But beyond that there was none of the evolutionary chatter you find at some neo-Nazi and white supremacist sites. Now, though, the mainstream media are rejoicing at the revelation that a racist group that evidently inspired Roof is headed by a man who is also a donor to Republican candidates.
But, more significantly,
When I read these articles, I noted that the official spokesman for Holt’s group is a person called Jared Taylor, best known for leading another, slightly more polished white nationalist web publication, American Renaissance. These organizations have their different emphases and preoccupations. While the Council of Conservative Citizens is obsessed by “black-on-white” crime, American Renaissance has as one of its specialties science-flavored, notably evolutionary, justifications for racism. In the media coverage I’ve seen, the latter fact has gone unmentioned. More.
Not really a surprise, actually. Modern racism is Darwinian in character. Growing up in Canada, I (O’Leary for News, b. 1950) didn’t run into much full-blown racism (as distinct from lots of ethnic grievance-mongering, driven more by grief or self-pity than hatred). But the racism I did hear was fully Darwinian in the sense of survival of the fittest, superior genetic pools, etc.
Significantly, these concepts were largely unknown to the general public before Darwinism began to be taught in the schools. The new concepts certainly did not create racism but they lent it the respectability of science. Thus, not surprisingly, there is indeed an “evolution” component to many North American mass murders.
The Darwin-in-the-schools lobby has made sure that the only proposed form of evolution most people in North America are even familiar with is Darwinism (natural selection acting on random mutations, roughly translated—with Darwin’s approval—as “survival of the fittest”). So we can bet that when apparent mass murderers say “evolution,” they mean Darwinian evolution, and not any other kind.
Worse, Darwinism is not like other evolution theories. The fact that Darwin was—like most Brit gents of his day—a racist often obscures the fact that race theory is not incidental to his theory of speciation, it is fundamental.
It explains, just for example, the need to heavily weight the balance in favour of Neanderthal man being a separate human species, with the usual easy speculation as to why the Neanderthals “died out,” as opposed to just being assimilated by waves of later migrants, as the genomic data suggest. Separate human species are needed to prop up the theory, and races are supposed to be heading toward speciation.
One factor that prevents any constructive discussion of these matters is that the legislators one would expect to be most concerned about racism, on account of the support visible minorities give them, also market Darwinism to their campus progressive base—presumably hoping (perhaps with good cause) that their much larger minority base will never find out how much their favoured candidates are in the tank for Darwin.
It would be an act of decency and fairness on the part of a person they trust to let them know. Don’t expect any legacy medium to confront these politicians about it.
And all the while, constructive understandings of evolution, that do not involve any racist assumptions—and are indeed contrary to them (horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, etc)—go unexplored.
Which is why I say: Stop all teaching of Darwinism in the schools now. Or else, teach it in context, giving significant time for evidence-based approaches to evolution.
See also: Neanderthal Man: The long-lost relative turns up again, this time with documents
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