But let biologist and science writer David Bainbridge tell it, riffing off his new book, How Zoologists Organize Things: The Art of Classification:
The respected German über-Darwinist Ernst Haeckel perpetuated the myth of evolutionary progress when he claimed influentially that Judaism is an evolutionary intermediate between primitive paganism and advanced Christianity, and when he asserted that non-Europeans are “physiologically nearer to the mammals—apes and dogs—than to the civilized European. We must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives.”
Zoology must fight hard to decontaminate itself from the value judgments and skewed arguments of the past. Already, we no longer speak of animals as primitive or advanced, and those concepts have become meaningless in the context of humans too. Additionally, the human species is no longer considered to be gouped into a number of discrete races, but rather an array of populations, each adapted to its ancestral geographical environment, yet blurring genetically and culturally into its neighbors.
David Bainbridge, “Zoology’s Racism Problem” at The Scientist
The article starts by referencing the death of George Floyd as having “wide-ranging impacts” in getting science boffins to confront this stuff. It’s awful that anyone had to make that happen.
Note: An excerpt of Bainbridge’s book is available.
See also: Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne contemplates the idea that Darwin might be Canceled. But here’s the really interesting part: Coyne points to a medallion struck by Darwin’s wife’s family, the Wedgwood (who were abolitionists). But the medallion fits creationism far better than Darwinism.