Read below for excerpts from Darwin's Plantation: Evolution's Racist Roots by Charles Ware and Ken Ham.
Darwinian Racism
pg. 10 -- One professor in the 1880s wrote: "I consider the Negro to be a lower species of man and cannot make up my mind to look upon him as 'a man and a brother,' for the gorilla would then also have to be admitted into the family." (Ernest Haeckel, The History of Creation: Vol II, (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1876), p. 365-366.)
pg 22 -- On the last page of his book, "The Descent of Man," Charles Darwin expressed the opinion that he would rather be descended from a monkey than from a "Savage." In describing those with darker skin, he often used words like "savage," "low," and "degraded" to describe American Indians, pygmies, and almost every ehtnic group whose physical appearnace and culture differed from his own. In his work, pygmies have been compared to "lower organisms"...
Although racism did not begin with Darwinism, Darwin did more than any person to popularize it. After Darwin "proved" that all humans descended from apes, it was natural to conclude that some races had descended further than others. In his opinion, some races (namely the white ones) have left the others far behind, while other races (pygmies especially) have hardly matured at all. The subtitle of Darwin's classic 1859 book, "The Origin of Species," was "The Preservations of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life."
pg 23 -- The widely held view was that blacks evolved from the strong but less intelligent gorillas, the Orientals evolved from the orangutan, and whites evolved from the most intelligent of all primates, the chimpanzees. (T.G.Crookshank, The Mongol in Our Midst (New York: E.F.Dutton, 1924)) Across the globe, such conclusions were used to justify racism, oppression, and genocide.
pg 92 -- The roots of Darwin's plantation were rapidly spreading and establishing themselves not only in the philosophies of a few scientists but also in textbooks and in schools where the younger members of society were indoctrinated with Darwinist philosophies. What do you think that did to people's thinking in America? In 1925, the year of the Scopes trial, racism was already being taught in the public schools in America in a very obvious way through the biology textbooks. In Dayton, Tennessee, where the Scopes trial took place, the biology textbook that was being used across America was "A Civic Biology Presented in Problems" by George William Hunter who blatantly stated: "The Races of Man. At the present time there exist upon the earth five races...the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America."
What was Justified
pg 25 -- In order to justify their nation's expansionist aggression, the Japanese had been told that they were the most "highly evolved" race on earth.
pg 26 -- In North America, Darwinism was used to justify colonial slavery as well as the elimination of "savage native tribes" who hindered the European's westward expansion in the name "manifest destiny."
Today, Darwinism and evolutionary thinking also enable ordinary, respectable professionals - otherwise dedicated to the saving of life - to justify their involvement in the slaughter of millions of unborn human beings who are also deemed "not yet fully human."
pg 30 -- Perhaps the most infamous abuse of evolution to justify racism was Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, which promoted a master race and sought to exterminate so-called inferior races.
"We see Hilter devoutly convinced that evolution provides the only real basis for a national policy...The German Fuhrer...is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution." (Arthur Keith, Evolution and Ethics (New York: G.P.Putnam's Sons, 1947)
pg 31 -- Stalin, Hitler, and Mao were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions - and it can be shown that they did this because of the influence of Darwinian naturalism, which fanned the flames of ethnic superiority.
pg 34 -- Even Stephen Jay Gould, a leading evolutionist, explains how people in the 19th century abused science to support their own prejudices: "Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory." (Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977))
What the Bible Says
pg 26 -- According to God's Word, all the people on earth today descended from Noah's three sons, who descended from the first man, Adam. So we all share the same bloodline. We're all brothers and sisters, siblings and cousins in the same family.
pg 28 -- "These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was populated" (Gen 9:19).
pg 107 -- "Eve...was the mother of all the living" (Gen. 3:20). We know from God's Word that all people descended from one woman, Eve. Mitochondrial DNA is passed directly from mother to child. We would predict that mitochondrial DNA would be similar in all people alive today. Scientific research on mitochondrial DNA seems to bear this out.
pg 111 -- "And He has made all nations of men of one blood..." (Acts 17:26).
What the Latest Science Says
pg 28 -- With our current understanding of genetics, we now know that these biological differences are superficial and insignificant.
pg 112 -- Before Darwin, the term "race" was largely a political and geographical term. People that were closely related biologically (such as the English and the Irish) were considered to be separate races.
Scientists today agree that there is really only one biological race of humans. Geneticists have found that if we were to take any two people from anywhere in the world, the basic genetic differences between these two people would typically be around 0.2 percent, even if they came from the same people group. "Racial" characteristics account for only about 6 percent of this 0.2 percent variation. That means that the "racial" genetic variation between human beings of different "race" is a mere 0.012 percent.
