Until the late 1980’s when the generic “President’s Day” became the official holiday that subsumed them, America used to celebrate the birthdays of both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
As a result, “Darwin Day” has now supplanted Lincoln’s Birthday in the popular imagination; both men were born on February 12, 1809.
We think that that is a shame.
The title of Charles Darwin’s book is not “The Origin of The Species.” The full title seems shocking: “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” That last half of the title, often overlooked, sounds like it could come straight out of a Ku Klux Klan manual - which is precisely why Big Science rarely quotes the full title (even though Darwin was not referring specifically to “man” in his use of the words “favoured races.”). Big Science is uncomfortable with even the suggestion that evolutionary theory might favor politically incorrect thinking.
Darwinian evolution theory is a viable scientific theory. Author of The God Delusion Richard Dawkins has stated that Darwin’s evolution theory has provided atheists with “intellectual fulfillment.” If you grant that, then you must also grant that it has given a great many racists “intellectual fulfillment,” too.
Here is how Darwin himself translated his own gloomy scientific theory into an even more disturbing worldview (from the Descent of Man)
‘At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropological apes… will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state…even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla’.
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