Red in Tooth & Claw

Racism, Eugenics & Other Bad Ideas from the Intellectual Descendants of Darwin

On July 21, 1925, John Scopes was found guilty of teaching Darwinian evolution in a state-funded high school in Dayton, Tennessee. He was fined $100. Scopes had ostensibly lost his battle with the state. But the side he represented was winning the greater war. I don’t say that because Scopes’s verdict was later overturned on a technicality. My contention is that the ideology he helped unleash on the public has been the source of more human oppression, suffering, and death than anyone in that Dayton courtroom could have imagined.

As it turned out, there was some question as to whether Scopes had ever actually taught evolution. But he agreed to claim that he had for a greater purpose—to ignite a national debate and deliberately attract attention to the fight. And it worked. The real tragedy of the Scopes trial was not that it in some way authorized the teaching of evolution, but that it cemented in the public mind acceptance of a deeper pathology. It popularized the idea that there was a war between science and religion and that religion was the losing side. In other words, it was successful at mainstreaming scientific materialism. At its core, a materialist mindset removes all restraint from the human tendency to misuse science. Darwinism was just the idea that made it seem reasonable, and the Scopes trial made it go viral.

Both during and after the trial, the news media, led in large part by H. L. Mencken, mocked prosecutor William Jennings Bryan and his Christian faith. At one point, Mencken put it this way:

One somehow pities him, despite his so palpable imbecilities.… But let no one, laughing at him, underestimate the magic that lies in his black, malignant eye, his frayed but still eloquent voice. He can shake and inflame these poor ignoramuses as no other man among us.¹

The press played along, describing the people of rural Tennessee as backward “boobs and bigots,” “peasants,” “yokels,” and “morons” who were hopelessly behind the times. The descriptions reflect the tendency of those defending science’s all-encompassing reach to abhor the “other.” History shows that those who label opponents of the “enlightened, scientific elite” in such degrading ways aren’t just trying to get laughs. Their dehumanizing bent is not a byproduct of their scientific materialism; it is one of its most prominent features. And it has a way of leading to horrific ends.

A Civic Biology

Hidden behind the mythology and revisionist history of the “Monkey Trial” is a centerpiece that seems to have gotten lost in all the noise: the textbook from which Scopes was teaching, A Civic Biology. John G. West notes that

If any teacher in America tried to teach Evolution using A Civic Biology today, the teacher would be stopped just as surely as John Scopes, and not merely because the book’s science is outdated.… The goal was to equip students to be good citizens, and it is the social and political agenda of the textbook that most dates it. For example, the textbook enlists evolutionary science to justify white supremacy.… Even more pronounced than the book’s racism is its advocacy of eugenics in the chapter on “Heredity and Variation.”²

Racism and eugenics are evil twins of the same pernicious source, spawn of thinking that originated long before Scopes and that continues to this day to rot everything it touches. Darwinian evolution has been used to justify both. But if Darwinism is about descent with modification, it has failed miserably at modifying the materialist mindset that has claimed millions of victims by brutalizing those whom the powerful consider “unfit.” History is replete with examples.

Eugenics, Racism & Hitler’s Bible

In 1921, Margaret Sanger organized the first American Birth Control Conference in New York City. Sanger’s overt racism and advocacy of eugenics were in perfect keeping with A Civic Biology.³ Here is Sanger in her own words:

The government of the United States deliberately encourages and even makes necessary by its laws that breeding—with a breakneck rapidity—of idiots, defectives, diseased, feeble-minded, and criminal classes.… Year by year more money is expended … to maintain an increasing race of morons which threaten the very foundations of our civilization.⁴

Sanger was one of the dehumanizers’ greatest champions. She believed that the way to protect “the very foundations of our civilization” was to choke off the upcoming glut of “morons” by whatever means necessary. Her primary means of choice was “birth control,” a term she coined.

Sanger was greatly influenced by Havelock Ellis, a British lover she took while in self-imposed exile to England to escape prosecution for sexual deviancy laws she had broken in New York City. Ellis, the architect of England’s sexual revolution, had been mentored by a man named Francis Galton. Galton’s family was intertwined with another British family through their common memberships in various elite academic and scientific societies. But the two families weren’t just connected socially; they were related through a common grandfather named Erasmus Darwin. Francis Galton was Charles Darwin’s half-cousin. Galton was also the man who coined the term “eugenics,” which he defined as:

applicable to men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognisance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.⁵

Galton’s eugenics was nothing but a modernized application of Thomas Malthus’s contention that there were just too many people in the world and that this “problem” could be addressed by actively eliminating undesirables:

If we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people in the houses, and court the return of the plague.⁶

Returning to Margaret Sanger, make no mistake. When she touted her ideas about eliminating “defective” humans, she was not talking only about the poor and uneducated. She also specifically sought “the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual extinction of defective stocks, those human weeds which threaten the blossoming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”⁷ That was the goal of “The Negro Project,” which she launched in 1939.

One of the board members of that project was Lothrop Stoddard, a high official of the Massachusetts Ku Klux Klan, whose 1920 book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, applied eugenics to what he called “scientific racism.” Another friend, advisor, and co-advocate for scientific racism with Sanger was Madison Grant. Grant was instrumental in placing an African man, Ota Benga, in a cage alongside apes and chimps in 1906 at the Bronx Zoo to “demonstrate evolution.”⁸

Darwinian connections to eugenics and racism didn’t end with Sanger or the men who shared and promoted the same ideas. When she founded the American Birth Control League (eventually renamed Planned Parenthood), Sanger shared offices in New York City with the American Eugenics Society and invited eugenicists from around the world to publish articles in her magazine, “Birth Control Review.” Stoddard and Grant not only wrote for the magazine but also published their own books on the subjects. Those books reached readers across the Atlantic Ocean. Stoddard’s The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man introduced the term “under-man” into certain German leaders’ conception of race. For that reason, Stoddard was later considered one of the “spiritual fathers” of Nazi Germany. And Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History was also well received. Originally written in 1916, Nazi leaders ordered it reprinted when they came to power. None other than Adolf Hitler said he considered “this book [to be] my Bible.”⁹

Darwin’s Demon

Pinpointing Charles Darwin as the God-hating atheist responsible for all this is too easy. Charity demands that we consider the whole story. There is some evidence that Darwin saw his theory as being compatible with Christian theism. After all, he repeatedly made a point of referring to the “Creator” and “creation” in his writings, denying that his analyses should shock anyone’s religious views. And he ended every edition of his infamous Origin published after 1860 with this line: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.”¹⁰

We can also have empathy for the grief he suffered after losing his 10-year-old daughter to scarlet fever. Her death hung over him for the rest of his life, overwhelming him with the most common and debilitating question human beings have asked, “How could a good God allow this?” Maybe, in Darwin’s mind, his theory was not so much an attempt to eliminate God altogether, but to let him off the hook as the Designer responsible for a world where seemingly cruel things happen.

Charity allows that we can extend Darwin the man some grace, even as we reject his conclusions. But what we cannot do in good conscience is deny that the philosophical foundation on which his theory was based gave philosophical cover to his intellectual descendants. And that is what allowed them to carry out some of the most diabolically evil practices in human history.

Heads of the Hydra

Sanger, Galton, Stoddard, Grant, and the Nazis are all connected to the same monster—a strand of dehumanization and death that runs from the materialist Greek philosophers, through the work of Charles Darwin, and straight into the gas chambers of Dachau and stainless-steel killing fields of Planned Parenthood. Darwinian evolution, racism, and eugenics are all simply different heads of materialism’s hydra. Darwin let that monster out of its cage, and 127 years later another Englishman, Richard Dawkins, triumphantly thanked him for “[making] it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”¹¹

But if racism and eugenics weren’t enough, the monster continues to grow heads. Today, we have “thought leaders” like Yuval Harari who extrapolate science to assure us that human rights are just an illusion:

The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation.… “Created equal” should therefore be translated into “evolved differently.” Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a “Creator” who “endows” them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals … there are no such things as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities, and characteristics.¹²

From there, it’s an easy path to justify all forms of “mercy killing” as ways to end the life of an evolved organism with “dignity.” Or, if death isn’t your thing, the similarly motivated transhumanists promise immortality if you’re willing to wait in cryogenic timeout until technology permits them to upload your brain into “the cloud” to be downloaded into a mechanical host.

Soulless Science

Scopes was the cultural moment that gave the monster a public platform. And once its ideology took root, it promised to finally remove the scourge of religious irrationality from society’s thinking and usher in the blessings and triumphs of scientific materialism. After the Dayton showdown in the so-called “war between science and religion,” our post-Scopes culture never looked back. Today, it embraces the monster and chastises any moronic rube who refuses to blindly “trust the science.”

Most who champion the methods and goals of scientific materialism either don’t understand, or don’t have the courage to acknowledge, that the ideology they worship is loveless because it reduces love to a series of chemical reactions; that it is purposeless because it renders final causes a mirage; that it is irrational and deterministic because it dismisses consciousness and free will as illusions; and that it is amoral because it offers objective morality no foundation (see "Escape from the Acid Bath").

Somehow, they smile and nod as rationality, purpose, love, and moral virtue get removed from the human equation, missing the fact that all they have left is power—a power so enchanting it scorns any limitations on its use. The powerful have a world to run, morons, rubes, defectives, yokels, and useless eaters be damned. If there ever were a clearer illustration of the axiom that “ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims,” it is hard to imagine what it might be.

Notes
1. Noah Adams, “Timeline: Remembering the Scopes Monkey Trial,” NPR (Jul. 5, 2005).
2. John G. West, Darwin Day in America (2007), 212.
3. Many of the connections between Darwinism, racism, and eugenics are outlined in Seth Gruber’s The 1916 Project:
The Lyin’, the Witch, and the War We’re In (2024).
4. George Grant, “Margaret Sanger—In Her Own Words” (Sep. 7, 2020).
5. Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Developments (1883) 24-25.
6. Thomas Malthus, “An Essay on the Principle of Population” (1798).
7. Margaret Sanger, “Apostle of Birth Control Sees Cause Gaining Here,” The New York Times (Apr. 8, 1923).
8. Madison Grant, Wikipedia.
9. Jonathan Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (2009), 67, 136.
10. Ibid, p. 25 in reference to: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 6th Edition (1896), 306.
11. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986), 6.
12. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), 116–117.