There’s been a bit of back and forth between Uncommon Descent and Evolution News and Science Today on an American thinkmag once again stepping on Darwin’s rake (racism). Something I (O’Leary for News) often say is that in any Darwinian scheme, someone must be the subhuman, got picked up there and their editor comments,
The word “creationism” is used unfairly as a cudgel against proponents of intelligent design. But fine, let’s entertain it for a moment, if only to designate a minimal concept like the philosophical one that says humans, while sharing biological common descent with other creatures, are uniquely endowed with souls bearing some sort of exceptional quality, however you characterize that. It could be a divine image, but need not be. The consistent materialist must deny all this.
The idea of racial equality, perfectly natural to a design perspective, can be achieved by the Darwinist only by continually and ruthlessly suppressing a built-in tendency. It requires bad faith: fooling himself about his own way of thinking. Like an irremediable birth defect, it’s never going to go away. David Klinghoffer, “Why Darwinism Can Never Separate Itself from Racism” at Evolution News and Science Today:
For the record, I’m not—of course—saying that all Darwinians are racist or that no non-Darwinians are racist. Rather, a belief in natural selection acting on random mutation as the main explanation for the human race makes racism intellectually reasonable, even if morally wrong.
If one believes, however, that God ordained that all human beings possess an immortal soul and are equal in his sight, racism is intellectually unreasonable as well as morally wrong.
But those aren’t even the only two choices. If one believes merely that evolution has proceeded by many different paths over billions of years—and not predominantly by the long, slow, methodical ascent of natural selection—looking for the subhuman loses its force. It is like looking for the space alien or the Abominable Snowman. He may exist or have existed. On the terms stated, who can rule it out? But he isn’t necessary for an explanation of how human life today comes to be as it is. So taking him seriously becomes the domain of cranks.
Under the circumstances, it is a testament to human decency that more Darwinians aren’t racists.
See also: “Race realism” (Darwinian racism) pops up again: the John Derbyshire commemorative edition. An American conservative thinkmag published geneticist Razib Khan, glorifying Darwinism, and he turned out to have apparent racist links. Then someone with even more pronounced racist links rose to defend him.
Darwinian conservative has a troubling history re racist links Every so often, for whatever reason, a US conservative thinkmag steps on Darwin’s rake.
In any Darwinian scheme, someone must be the subhuman. Otherwise, there is no beginning to human history.
and
Was Neanderthal man fully human? The role racism played in assessing the evidence
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