Page 656 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

A THEORY THAT BELITTLES WOMEN

he alleged scientific support that Social Darwinism provided for racism, fascism and imperialism,

as well as communism, is a familiar subject that has been much written about. But one lesser
T known fact is that a great many Darwinists, including Charles Darwin himself, have believed in
the error that women are biologically and mentally inferior to men. The mental difference that Darwinists
claim to exist between the genders is of such a dimension that some evolutionists even divided them into

different physical species: men being Homo frontalis and women Homo parietalis. 137
Darwin described women as an "inferior" species, according to his own lights, because his world view
was based on natural selection. According to this unscientific and irrational view, men are proportionate-
ly more fit than women to compete in war, find a mate, and obtain food and clothing; while women have

remained at a distance from such activities. According to this scientifically baseless deduction, natural se-
lection exerts a stronger influence on men, so they achieved a superior position in all spheres, and evolved
further than women. As the following pages will show, Darwin proposed these illusory deductions not on
any scientific findings, but merely on the basis of evolutionist preconceptions.

Many researchers have revealed that Darwin's views on natural selection encouraged sexual discrimi-
nation. For instance, professor of history and philosophy of science Evelleen Richards concluded that
Darwin's views of women's nature fed into his evolutionary theorizing, "thereby nourishing several gen-
erations of [so-called] scientific sexism." 138 The evolutionist scientific writer Elaine Morgan states that us-

ing various branches of science such as biology and ethnology, Darwin encouraged men to think that
women were "manifestly inferior and irreversibly subordinant." 139
As the evolutionist scientist John R. Durant has stated, the two main consequences of the theory of evo-
lution are racism and sexual discrimination:

Darwin rested his case upon a judicious blend of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic arguments. Savages, who
were said to possess smaller brains and more prehensile limbs than the higher races, and whose lives were said
to be dominated more by instinct and less by reason ... were placed in an intermediate position between nature

and man; and Darwin extended this placement by analogy to include not only children and congenital idiots
but also women, some of whose powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation were "char-
acteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization." 140

The errors made by Darwin that Durant referred to appear in The Descent of Man:
It is generally admitted that with women the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation,
are more strikingly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower

races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation. 141
When one considers Darwin's general views about women and marriage, one can clearly see how he

654 Atlas of Creation Vol. 3