Page 107 - The Social Weapon: Darwinism

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• Edward Ramsay, curator of the Australian Museum in Sydney for
20 years from 1874, was particularly heavily involved. He pub-
lished a museum booklet which appeared to include Aborigines
under the designation of “Australian animals.” It also gave instruc-
tions not only on how to rob graves, but also on how to plug up bul-
let wounds in freshly killed “specimens.” Many freelance collectors
worked under his guidance. Four weeks after he had requested
skulls of Bungee (Russell River) blacks, a keen young science stu-
dent sent him two, announcing that they, the last of their tribe, had
just been shot. 4
• A German evolutionist, Amalie Dietrich came to Australia asking
station owners for Aborigines to be shot for specimens, particularly
skin for stuffing and mounting for her museum employers. 5
Another study documenting this maltreatment and slaughter
inflicted on the Aborigines is the book Aborigines in White Australia: A
Documentary History of the Attitudes Affecting Official Policy and the
Australian Aborigine 1697–1973 edited by Sharman Stone,
Parliamentary Secretary to the Australian Minister for Environment
and Heritage. Apart from a few comments by the editor, this book
consists of such documents as parliamentary records, examination re-
ports, letters to editors and anthropological reports.
In the book, Stone constructs the following relationship between
Darwin's theory and the slaughter of the Aborigines:
In 1859 Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species popularized
the notion of biological (and therefore social) evolution. Scholars
began to discuss civilization as a unilinear process with races able to
ascend or descend a graduated scale. The European was the “fittest
to survive.” [The Aboriginal] was doomed to die out according to a
“natural law,” like the dodo and the dinosaur. This theory, sup-
ported by the facts at hand continued to be quoted until well into
the twentieth century when it was noticed that the dark-skinned
race was multiplying. Until that time it could be used to justify ne-
glect and murder. 6

As the book's editor makes clear, some European Darwinists

Harun Yahya - Adnan Oktar