Dr McConeghy's Supplemental Notes

When Good Ideas Go Bad --

• Darwin and Christians
• Darwin. Social Darwinism, Elitism, Imperialism and Eugenics
• Darwin, the Communists and Hitler!
• Tuskegee

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

Evolution by Natural Selection

Evolution is an idea with a long history. From the ancient Greeks until modern times it has been the subject of speculation. As Western Science developed during the 1700s and early 1800s, many people began to write and discuss the idea that living things had developed and descended through long periods of time to create the modern environment.

Arguments about Evolution came to a climax when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. It was not long before the vast majority of biologists agreed -- Darwin had correctly explained the development of biological systems: descent with change over millions of years. There was a lot of conflict over this idea: many conservative Christians were committed to the opposing idea that the Earth was not old, and that animals and plants had been created independently and concurrently as described in the Book of Genesis in the Christian Bible.

(you can take a look at Darwin's Origin of Species )

(if your Bible knowledge is a little rusty, brush up at this link to a dozen tranlations of The Bible : Genesis )

Darwin shortly before his death. He grew the beard a few years after his book was published. Supposedly, he grew it so that he would not be recognized and harassed by religious fanatics when he went out in public.

What was Darwin's basic idea,

like many great ideas in history, Natural Selection can be summed up in a straightforward way that can be understood by any intelligent person:

1) populations have variability -- that is, individuals within a population are not all the same, they vary from one individual to another. This is true for essentially all populations. The variations are inheritable -- that is, tall parents tend to have tall children, etc... Sometimes mutations -- changes in the DNA code -- occur, resulting in a change in the offspring that could create an advantage or disadvantage for the new individual...

2) more offspring are produced than can survive, leading to a struggle for existence -- the number of seeds, eggs, etc produced by living things are far in excess of the number that can survive. It is obvious if you think about it, but even though a parent produced thousands of offspring, nearly all of them must die -- in fact, a typical parent can, on the average, only produce one offspring who lives to maturity, or a pair of parents can only produce two offspring who survive. If this were not true, the world would be overrun. So, individual variances (differences) may help some individuals to survive -- not all offspring can survive, so what made it possible for those who survived to beat their siblings? The ones who survive may have some particular trait or characteristic which helped them to survive while their siblings were killed

3) the individuals who survive are the ones who will reproduce. Their traits will be passed down to their offspring. The traits of the survivors will become more common in the population, while the traits of the losers will die out or disappear...

more about Darwin and his basic ideas...

St Augustine -- University Chapel, Duke University (photo: D. McConeghy) One of hundreds of stained glass images in the beautiful Chapel next to the famous Divinity School, just a short walk from the Biological Science and Medical Research buildings. Duke is famous for the studies of primate evolution that have been carried out there, and their chapel is said to have the largest Sunday attendance of any university chapel in America.

Darwin and Christians

The conflict between the community of biologists and scientists who supported Darwin and the Christian church leaders who opposed him lasted about 50 years. By the 1920s many Christians had come to understand the scientific arguments of Darwinism and had integrated those ideas into their faith. Darwinian Evolution came to be taught in universities and high schools all over the United States and Britain, in Europe and around the world. Only a relatively small set of diehard Fundamentalist Christians kept up the fight against the ideas of Evolution and Natural Selection.

One of the last blows to serious anti-evolution was fought in 1925 in Tennessee in a famous trial. A high school science teacher, John Scopes, was tried for teaching Evolution in his science classes in violation of the laws of Tennessee. Although he was convicted and fined $100 the trial was a defeat for the forces opposing Evolution. Details of the trial were published in sensational news stories printed around the world and it later became the subject of a famous play, Inherit the Wind. The anti-evolution forces were held up to ridicule. At the time 15 states had laws pending that would have made it illegal to teach Evolution. Soon after the trial the new laws were discarded in 13 of the 15. Today Evolution is taught in every state and a series of legal decisions in the USA have clarified the what can be taught. US Courts and Evolution

The vast majority of Christian churches have no problem with Evolution. The Roman Catholic church (the largest Christian group), has officially said for more than 50 years that Evolution is not in conflict with Catholic teaching and it is perfectly OK for Catholics to study and teach Evolution as scientific fact -- a viewpoint that Pope John Paul II confirmed again in a speech to scientists

"... I would like to remind you that the Magisterium of the Church has already made pronouncements on these matters within the framework of her own competence... In his Encyclical Humani generis (given in the year 1950), my predecessor Pius XII had already stated that there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith..." Pope John Paul II, October 22, 1996

As students, you should consider that famous universities such as Notre Dame (a Catholic University), Duke (a Methodist University), Wake Forest (a Baptist University) as well as virtually every accredited and distinguished university in the world, teach Evolution with the financial and moral support of their religious leaders. None of them teach Creationism that I know of.

More?

Here's a link with a very comprehensive set of bible readings, including a dozen different translations of the ancient texts into English. If you wish to read various interpretations of the Christian viewpoints, try searching on-line using search terms Genesis and Creation, Evolution and Creation, etc. You will find literally hundreds of web pages spanning every possible shade of opinion from extreme conservative Christians to radical militant atheists, from ignorant and ill written comments to very scholarly and thoughtful analyses, defending, distorting, apologizing for, explaining, attacking Darwin. For anyone who loves argument and the battle of ideas, this is heaven! -- Have fun :-)

Herbert Spencer(1820-1903) and "Social Darwinism"

About the time that Darwin was writing "The Origin of Species" another English scholar, Herbert Spencer was creating the line of thought that was eventually called "Social Darwinism." He was already strongly headed in this direction before Darwin's book was published, but as with Karl Marx and some other later political philosophers, Spencer found in Darwin's model a justification for his own ideas. Spencer also based his thinking on the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus and Charles Lyell (after Hutton), who in turn were writers who directed Darwin's thoughts toward Natural Selection. Spencer promoted the study of Evolution and was responsible for the phrase "survival of the fittest" to sum up Darwin's Natural Selection model.

"Now, we propose in the first place to show, that this law of organic progress is the law of all progress. Whether it be in the development of the Earth, in the development of Life upon its surface, the development of Society, of Government, of Manufactures, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, this same evolution of the simple into the complex, through a process of continuous differentiation, holds throughout. From the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilization, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, is that in which Progress essentially consists.... " (from Spencer's "Progress: Its Laws and Cause" 1857)

Spencer's idealogy could be summed up as suggesting that in society, as well as in the natural world, there is a struggle for existence. Those who win the struggle, who get rich, get power, get prestige and status, are the "best" and the poor, disabled, and powerless are the losers in the battle for existence. Spencer argued tha the way to allow the world to develop was for the government to avoid interfering and to give individuals the greatest possible freedom.

Because of Spencer's wide ranging influence (he sold more than 1,000,000 books during the middle 1800s) there are many on-line sources for information about him.

Karl Marx, Engels and Darwin

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the great theorists of what became Communism. And they both were strong adherents of evolutionary theory. Engels wrote to Marx: "Darwin who I am now reading, is splendid" and in Marx's eulogy, Engels wrote "Just as Darwin had discovered the law of evolution in organic nature so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history'" Supposedly, Marx even wished to dedicate a portion of Das Kapital to the author of The Origin of Species according to the historian Jorafsky, "Darwin 'declined the honor' because, he wrote to Marx, he did not know the work, and he did not believe that direct attacks on religion advanced the cause of free thought"

Darwin's struggle for existence among animals and plants was reflected in the view that Marx had of society: a struggle between the working class and the monied class. The idea that Nature consisted of struggle gave a "scientific" support to Marx's idea of class struggle. This has been discussed in innumerable critiques of Marx, Communism, and Darwin. In many cases, Darwin has actually been blamed for the rise of Communism, since without the idea of Evolution and the natural selection that depends on a struggle for existence, many feel that Communism and its atheistic viewpoint could not have advanced as it did during the first half of the 20th century. This is pretty hard dealing on Darwin, since if he had not explained Natural Selection then certainly Alfred Wallace or any one of 1000 other biologists would have done so. Darwin didn't create nature or nature's laws. He just wrote what he observed.

There is a huge amount of material on the internet regarding Karl Marx and his writings and ideas.

Adolph Hitler and Darwin

Hitler was the leader of the German National Socialist (Nazi) party. In general, the German Socialists, who often claimed to be faithful Christians, hated the atheist Bolshevik Russian Communists, and fought them bitterly in World War II's Eastern Front. Despite their differences, both Communists and Socialists adopted Darwin's views of the struggle for existence. In Nazi Germany this was merged into the concept of the Master Race -- the violent anti-semitic extermination program to do away with inferior races -- Jews, Gypsies, Blacks -- and the mentally or physically handicapped, homosexuals, etc.

It is extremely hard for most of us to understand the combination of hatred, Christian teachings, Racism, science, and insanity that fueled the Nazi psyche.

I hate to suggest this to anyone, but if you have the stomach for it you can search the web right here in the USA in the 21st Century and find white supremacy websites that glorify Hitler, and in some cases have pictures of Darwin right alongside him. It is disconcerting to find that shy, stuttering biologist and minister who spent most of his life living in suburbia and working in his greenhouse, stuck up there next to the most evil dictator of the 20th century.

Hitler's extremist application of Darwin's natural history studies led to unbelievable horrors. Hitler had a Christian upbringing, served bravely as a front line soldier in World War I, and had a lively intelligence that rapidly absorbed scientific information. He had a a great faith in new science. He was kind to dogs and his friends. He stood by and watched millions be murdered, actively directed and led the murder of millions more, and watched the destruction of his homeland with untold suffering and destruction.

How can we understand Hitler or understand the forces that controlled the events of his time? Is it a proof that the most pessimistic interpretations of Natural Selection and the struggle for existence are true? Or, is it a proof that when we turn to false ideas, the outcomes will be terrible?

Sir Francis Galton and Eugenics "A National Religion"

Francis Galton started writing about Natural Selection as it applies to humans when he was a young man. As early as 1869 he published "Hereditary Genius" in which he strongly took the side of inheritance in the argument over Nature vs Nuture (which still continues to this day!). This is perhaps not surprising when we consider that he was a cousin of Charles Darwin and had the example of the Darwin and Wedgewood families in front of him -- a long string of distinguished people generation after generation.

He continued along in the same direction for many years, promoting the view that natural selection in humans could create superior people. By 1904 he was at the point where he gave a famous lecture at the London School of Economics entitled "Eugenics-- its Definition, Scope and Purpose." Eugenics meant the purposeful encouragement of reproduction of children by "superior" people and the discouragement of reproduction by "inferior" people. It was a kind of deliberate, forced "Natural Selection" -- speeding up Evolution, you might say. Galton tried to convince his listeners to take on this crusade as a new "National Religion" that would lead to greater and greater success for his country.

Galton's talk led to angry arguments about the ethics of his ideas -- arguments which continue to this very day.

Just a few years ago Richard Lynn wrote a book, "Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations (Human Evolution, Behavior, and Intelligence) ", in which Lynn claims that failure to take up the idea of Eugenics has caused a "reverse" selection in which the general standards for people in the western world have been steadily declining. In his view, Natural Selection has been defeated by advances in modern medicine and welfare -- he suggests that these measures support crowds of "inferior" people with big families, while "superior" people are too busy with their prestigious careers and self-indulgent pleasures to have more than one or two children. This idea has attracted many notable people, for instance, the Nobel-Prize winning inventor of the transistor, physicist William B. Shockley, who spent much of the last part of his life promoting Eugenics and making regular contributions to a "genius" sperm bank which preserved the sperm only of men with IQs greater than 140.

Many people have either Eugenic or Anti-Eugenic viewpoints. Do you support the idea of giving more money to welfare mothers with many children, or should they only get a limited amount of money no matter how many kids they have? Does a mentally handicapped person who is being cared for by the state have the right to bear children? What about insane people? Who is responsible for the expenses of the children of deadbeat dads, criminals or rapists? Does every child have the right to whatever it takes to get them educated, even if that means that some more capable students must receive less education than they could take advantage of?

If these questions were easy to answer, we would not still be arguing about them 100 years later!

For the most part, in Britain the public applications of Galton and his extremist views were mostly not very extreme, and today Galton's viewpoint is no longer considered a model for public policy. Galton was not just concerned with Eugenics -- he was a brilliant researcher in several fields. He started as a geographer and made important contributions to understanding the geography of Africa; he was interested in weather and made several very important discoveries in weather forecasting; he was the person most responsible for the use of fingerprints in crime detection. He was known as the person who would "measure anything and everything anywhere, anytime" because of his relentless pursuit of scientific facts.

Imperialism and Elitism

To be "elite" is to be powerful, rich, prestigious, of high status. There have always been elite people since ancient times, and they have always had arguments ready to explain why they are elite, and why that gives them the right to live well while others are poor. For a very long time the explanation was that God wanted things that way -- the "Divine Right of Kings" as they called it. But after the church became less powerful, that divine right wasn't such an effective argument any more. Then when Darwin wrote about the struggle for existence and Spencer called it "survival of the fittest" then the elite had a new argument. Now, they could claim that science upheld their right to be elite! They were elite because they were the fittest, the superior people who deserved to be on top because they had won the battle for existence.

This is a big part of the justification for Eugenics (as discussed above) and of course we can immediately see that this kind of attitude is likely to lead to racist and ethnic supremacy philosophies. It was important in the propaganda of all the dictatorships of World War II -- the idea that the Japanese had the right to be superior in the Orient, that Germans had the right to be superior over the Slavs and other peoples of Europe, etc...

In the dictatorships, the supremacist arguments often led to outright destruction of the "inferior" people. The classic example of this was of course the destruction of European jews by the Nazis. But there were plenty of other examples that were horrifying in their own right. Other examples often cited are the treatment of the American Indians by the European colonists (although much of that happened before Darwin's time and was justified by religious arguments rather than Darwinian) and the extremely cruel treatment of the native African people in the Belgian African colonies during the late 1800s.

There was a paternalistic and patronizing aspect to the Darwinian viewpoint as well. Many Americans and Europeans saw their role as bringing a more evolved culture to "primitive" people who were less evolved. In other words, it wasn't necessarily that other races were inherently inferior, but their primitive and unevolved cultures prevented them from learning or understanding evolved concepts such as democracy, industrialization, etc.

American President Theodore Roosevelt expressed this as "educating uncivilized peoples" and it was clearly seen as a mission by many thousands of Americans during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Many thousands of British and Americans travelled around the world to bring western culture to the "uncivilized" colonial people. This was famously expressed in a poem by Rudyard Kipling, the British poet.

Rudyard Kipling 1865 - 1936

Racism for Good? Insofar as they unquestionably believed that their colonial peoples were inferior in intellect, culture and judgment to themselves, the British and American people of the 19th century were racists. But they weren't necessarily evil. All people who believed in racial inequality didn't hate their "inferior" brothers and sisters. On the contrary,they often had paternalistic and altruistic motivations...

Here is the first part of Rudyard Kipling's poem (1899)

The White Man's Burden

--------------------------

Take up the White man's burden
Send forth the best ye breed
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man's burden
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain.
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.
Take up the White Man's burden
The savage wars of peace
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease...

Kipling's poem uses the introduction of Western culture, bringing improved agriculture, health standards, economics, etc. as the justification for the "wars of peace." It clearly reflects the attitude of idealistic westerners toward the colonial entreprise, their colonial peoples, and makes colonization an act of benevolence towards those who are "inferior." Anyone familiar with the history of the 19th and early 20th centuries can cite numerous examples of ways in which Americans and Europeans, tried to "uplift" colonial peoples, often with destructive results to culture and pride.

It was a period of great events, and deserves much more study from all of us so that we can understand how benevolent motivations can lead to exploitation and cruelty.

Dr Taliaferro Clark, head of the United States Public Health Service at the time the Tuskegee Study was initiated.

The Tuskegee Experiment -- A notable case of Racism and Elitism in the United States

In the 1930s the United States Public Health Service became involved in a medical study considering the effects of long-term untreated syphilis. The subjects of the study were poor black men in the neighborhood of Tuskegee, Alabama. When the study started the doctors located men who had become infected with syphilis in the community. The doctors conducting the study, who were mostly white northerners, had decided (correctly) that the treatments generally recommended for syphilis at that time were useless. They wanted to know exactly how the disease worked when people were infected for a long time without being treated. Over a period of many years they kept watch on the infected black men, taking care of their other illnesses but not trying to cure their syphilis.

This lack of treatment alone wouldn't have been too terrible since at the time, there really was no cure for syphilis anyway. But things tooks a twisted turn during the 1940s. At that time, penicillin was discovered and became widely available. It was soon discovered that penicillin was an excellent cure for syphilis. The doctors in the Tuskegee study decided to withhold penicillin from the men who were being watched. For many years they did not treat the diseased men, and even prevented them from being treated by other doctors in the community. They deliberately failed to treate the men with a drug that the doctors knew was effective, in order to not interfere with the continuing observations.

It was widely considered, and there is little room to doubt, that these men would never have been denied treatment if they had been rich or white. They were considered expendable because they were poor and black. It was a shameful page in the history of medicine in the United States, and in the history of the United States Public Health Service.

Although there were previous accounts, the history of this event was made widely known by the book Bad Blood written by investigative author James Jones. Today this event is often studied in medical school ethics classes. The US Public Health Service has long since issued strict guidelines about how human subjects can be treated in government sponsored medical experiments, and in 1997 President Clinton formally apologized to the survivors and families of the Tuskegee Study men.