Page 591 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

Harun Yahya

SOCIAL DARWINISM AND THE FAVORED RACES MYTH

hough racism can be found throughout history, Darwin was the first to give it an alleged scien-
tific validity. The subtitle of The Origin of Species was The Preservation of Favoured Races in the

T Struggle for Life. Darwin's writings about "the preservation of favored races," and in particular
the unscientific claims in his The Descent of Man, lent support to the Nazis' erroneous belief in the supe-
riority of Aryan race, and a similar British belief about the Anglo-Saxons. In addition, Darwin's theory

of natural selection spoke of a fight to the death, a "law of the jungle." Applying it to human societies
made conflict and war inevitable between races and nations. A great many prominent figures of the
time, from warlike statesmen to philosophers, from politicians to scientists, adopted Darwin's theory. In
The Twisted Road to Auschwitz, Professor Karl A. Schleunes of North Carolina University's history facul-
ty describes how:

Darwin's notion of struggle for survival was quickly appropriated by the racists... such struggle, legitimized
by the latest [so-called] scientific views, justified the racists' conception of superior and inferior peoples...
and validated the struggle between them. 37

With the claims put forward by Darwin, those who held racist views naturally imagined that they
had found a scientific foundation for their views about human classes. But shortly afterwards, science

revealed that in the same way that Darwin's claims had no scientific validity, a great many movements
built around Darwin's ignorant views had committed an enormous error.
With the support it received from Darwinism, the Nazis practiced racism in the most violent man-
ner. Yet Germany was not the only place where so-called "scientific" racism reared its head. A number of
racist administrators and intellectuals arose in many countries, particularly in Great Britain and

America, racist laws and practices also made a rapid appearance.
Evolutionists in the 19th and early 20th centuries held almost totally racist views. Many scientists
had no hesitation about openly expressing such opinions. Books and articles written at the time offer the

most concrete proof. In Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, John S. Haller, a
professor of history at Southern Illinois University, describes how all 19th-century evolutionists falsely
believed in the superiority of the white race and that other races were inferior. One article in American
Scientist magazine calls Haller's book:

... extremely important... documenting as it does what has long been suspected: the ingrained, firm, and al-

most unanimous racism of North American men of science during the 19th (and into the 20th) century... Ab
initio, Afro-Americans were viewed by these intellectuals as being in certain ways unredeemably, un-
changeably, irrevocably inferior. 38

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