Human Evolution
What Darwin Got Wrong, and Why the Far-Right Embrace Social Darwinism
What Darwin Got Wrong, and Why the Far-Right Embrace Social Darwinism
Sunday, 16 April 2023
Human Evolution - What Darwin Got Wrong, and Why the Far-Right Embrace Social Darwinism
Racist and sexist depictions of human evolution still permeate science, education and popular culture today
They have no concerns about the scientific validity of the claimed scientific basis for their belief in their superiority over other peoples. It's whatever excuse they think they can get away with that's importan,t and more often than not, religion provides that excuse for them.
So, while simultaneously appealing to the Christian fundamentalists who reject Darwinian evolution on doctrinaire grounds, they sell the notion of white supremacy and male superiority over women based on Darwin's social ideas, so-called social Darwinism, that Darwin got from the Christian culture he grew up in.
While Social Darwinism has been rejected by the egalitarian left in politics as having no scientific basis, it is ironic that this is the only aspect of 'Darwinism'; that the far-right embraces, but it's closeness to Christian fundamentalism makes it doubly attractive to them.
Charles Darwin, who trained for the priesthood as a young man before turning to biology, was a man of his age and took it as established fact that there was a racial hierarchy in the world and that men were naturally superior to women, because that was the reality he saw, but the reality he saw was the result of 18 centuries of Christianity. Rather than question those basic cultural assumption on which English and European imperialism depended, and which seemed to be borne out by its success in dominating the world, he looked for a scientific basis for them in the framework of the evolutionary biology he and Wallace had identified as the explanation for biodiversity and the origin of species.
Darwin was right about a great deal, but fundamentally wrong about the biological superiority of white males. Indeed, given that all species, and all races have been evolving for the same length of time, and the process of evolution has no goal but is shaped by the prevailing local environment, it makes no sense at all to talk about one species or race being more highly evolved than another. All living organisms are more or less perfectly adapted by natural selection to fit their evolutionary niche and when their environment changes, the pressure to adapt changes. There is no pinnacle; no supreme achievement of evolution. All species are liable to find themselves less than perfectly adapted to a changing environment in different places at different times and to evolve accordingly.
But Darwin saw a hierarchy, both racial and sexual - and a hierarchy that the Christian religion he was raised in accepted as the natural order and promulgated it as the right and proper form of society, much as white supremacist Christians do today, so he saw his task as explaining what he saw rather than explaining why the 'natural order' was an illusion created by circumstance. In the words of the Anglican hymn, written in 1848, just 11 years before Darwin's Origin of Species was published:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.
The circumstance was, as Jared Diamond points out in his book, Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years due to the good fortune of Europeans having several domesticable animals in Eurasia so Europeans had horsepower for work whereas much of the rest of the world never had more than manpower. Europeans also co-evolved with a range of viruses, mostly acquired by living in close proximity to domestic animals, so when they came into contact with the rest of the world, their germs devastated their societies and weakened their resistance to colonial powers. The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.
As Diamond points out, had Bantus been able to domesticate rhinoceroses, imaging the consequences for history if Roman legions had come up against Bantu cavalries mounted in rhinoceroses. We would probably now have far right Africans trying to justify their colonization and Africanization of Eurasia and carrying off millions of white West Europeans into slavery in Africa where their descendants were being treated as a social underclass, as proving the biological superiority of the black races and why the 'white lives matter' campaign is dangerous radical extremism aimed at overthrowing the God-given order (the god being some West African local god which featured in their origin myths). White sports people would be being taunted with monkey noises and thrown bananas while thanking the West African god for their sporting success.
And enlightened scientists such as the author of the following article would be campaigning for an end to the pervading black supremacist thinking in science and decrying the influence of a black evolutionary biologist who, 170 year ago wrote a book explaining why black men were the superior form of the species and why black culture was superior to the primitive cultures of the pale-skinned races.
The author is Rui Diogo, Associate Professor of Anatomy, Howard University. His article from The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
Racist and sexist depictions of human evolution still permeate science, education and popular culture today
Human evolution is typically depicted with a progressive whitening of the skin, despite a lack of evidence to support it.
Rui Diogo, Howard University
Systemic racism and sexism have permeated civilization since the rise of agriculture, when people started living in one place for a long time. Early Western scientists, such as Aristotle in ancient Greece, were indoctrinated with the ethnocentric and misogynistic narratives that permeated their society. More than 2,000 years after Aristotle’s writings, English naturalist Charles Darwin also extrapolated the sexist and racist narratives he heard and read in his youth to the natural world.
Darwin presented his biased views as scientific facts, such as in his 1871 book “The Descent of Man,” where he described his belief that men are evolutionarily superior to women, Europeans superior to non-Europeans and hierarchical civilizations superior to small egalitarian societies. In that book, which continues to be studied in schools and natural history museums, he considered “the hideous ornaments and the equally hideous music admired by most savages” to be “not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, in birds,” and compared the appearance of Africans to the New World monkey Pithecia satanas.
Science isn’t immune to sexism and racism.
It is not coincidence that Darwin had a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, an honor emblematic of English power, and was publicly commemorated as a symbol of “English success in conquering nature and civilizing the globe during Victoria’s long reign.”
Despite the significant societal changes that have occurred in the last 150 years, sexist and racist narratives are still common in science, medicine and education. As a teacher and researcher at Howard University, I am interested in combining my main fields of study, biology and anthropology, to discuss broader societal issues. In research I recently published with my colleague Fatimah Jackson and three medical students at Howard University, we show how racist and sexist narratives are not a thing of the past: They are still present in scientific papers, textbooks, museums and educational materials.
From museums to scientific papers
One example of how biased narratives are still present in science today is the numerous depictions of human evolution as a linear trend from darker and more “primitive” human beings to more “evolved” ones with a lighter skin tone. Natural history museums, websites and UNESCO heritage sites have all shown this trend.
The fact that such depictions are not scientifically accurate does not discourage their continued circulation. Roughly 11% of people living today are “white,” or European descendants. Images showing a linear progression to whiteness do not accurately represent either human evolution or what living humans look like today, as a whole. Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence supporting a progressive skin whitening. Lighter skin pigmentation chiefly evolved within just a few groups that migrated to non-African regions with high or low latitudes, such as the northern regions of America, Europe and Asia.
Illustrations of human evolution tend to depict progressive skin whitening.
But these choices are not truly “random.” Depictions of human evolution frequently only show men. In the few cases where women are depicted, they tend to be shown as passive mothers, not as active inventors, cave painters or food gatherers, despite available anthropological data showing that pre-historical women were all those things.
Another example of sexist narratives in science is how researchers continue to discuss the “puzzling” evolution of the female orgasm. Darwin constructed narratives about how women were evolutionarily “coy” and sexually passive, even though he acknowledged that females actively select their sexual partners in most mammalian species. As a Victorian, it was difficult for him to accept that women could play an active part in choosing a partner, so he argued that such roles only applied to women in early human evolution. According to Darwin, men later began to sexually select women.
Sexist narratives about women being more “coy” and “less sexual,” including the idea of the female orgasm as an evolutionary puzzle, are contradicted by a wide range of evidence. For instance, women are the ones who actually more frequently experience multiple orgasms as well as more complex, elaborate and intense orgasms on average, compared to men. Women are not biologically less sexual, but sexist stereotypes were accepted as scientific fact.
The vicious cycle of systemic racism and sexism
Educational materials, including textbooks and anatomical atlases used by science and medical students, play a crucial role in perpetuating biased narratives. For example, the 2017 edition of “Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy,” commonly used by medical students and clinical professionals, includes about 180 divs that show skin color. Of those, the vast majority show male individuals with white skin, and only two show individuals with “darker” skin. This perpetuates the depiction of white men as the anatomical prototype of the human species and fails to display the full anatomical diversity of people.
Textbooks and educational materials can perpetuate the biases of their creators in science and society.
One of the key characteristics of systemic racism and sexism is that it is unconsciously perpetuated by people who often don’t realize that the narratives and choices they make are biased. Academics can address long-standing racist, sexist and Western-centric biases by being both more alert and proactive in detecting and correcting these influences in their work. Allowing inaccurate narratives to continue to circulate in science, medicine, education and the media perpetuates not only these narratives in future generations, but also the discrimination, oppression and atrocities that have been justified by them in the past.
Rui Diogo, Associate Professor of Anatomy, Howard University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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