Adventures in Evolution

So I was reading a good book, one called 10 Books that Screwed Up the World. It's a marvelous book, showing how many of the dumb fads of today have their origins in friggin' messed up people. Well, at least Nietzsche admits his general insanity. Not so much with the other people mentioned in this book.

But that's not the point of my note. I discovered something about Darwin I had not previously known that supports my theory about him. Namely, that he is a racist, and because of his British heritage (sorry Brits, but nobody gets a perfect family mix in heritage) his perspective of the races is skewed.

One of the things you should know about Brits is that they didn't like Irish people in the past. They oppressed the Irish for 700 years, attempting to destroy their culture and keep their neighbor in the British Empire. Look up things like Oliver Cromwell, inheritance laws, and the causes of the Irish potato famine to learn more about that. If I'm not mistaken, the animosity between the two countries began when the Romans conquered the Brits. Even though the Romans later abandoned them and allowed the Angles, Saxons, and such to take over, the Brits remained influenced by Roman culture and thought. They were culturized, and us Irish were not, because apparently the Romans didn't feel like conquering the Irish for whatever reason. Thus the great rift began.

So that's the background. Back to the book. In 10 Books, Benjamin Wiker lists among them Darwin's The Descent of Man, a book which applies evolution more distinctly to the human race. This right here should have forced all logical thinkers to dismiss Darwin. After all, how can you trust a man that says something like this?

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of mans will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races...."

Seriously. How a person could read a quote like that and still take Darwin seriously is beyond me. Besides the obvious racism, the quote is entirely illogical. In studying history and the behavior of people, it seems much more likely that barbarians can destroy the civilized. After all, Rome was destroyed by a bunch of barbarians, and people these days can be very afraid of someone who even threatens violence without actually doing anything. The trouble with civilized people is that they forget they were once barbarians, and thus forget how to deal with barbarians that just so happen to be trouble (polite barbarians mind their own business). Also, barbarians aren't races, but cultures. Romans were primarily European, and they were destroyed primarily by German barbarians.

But onto my point. I had an "Aha!" moment while reading 10 Books. It was on pages 130-131, where Wiker is explaining out one of Darwin's concepts. This is the concept of race reproduction. Darwin is trying to explain that inferior races with low morals tend to "breed more" and thus create more problems for society. To establish his point, Darwin quotes a dude named W.R. Greg, as we must remember Darwin didn't create evolution, he dandied it up and made it a pretty story. Anyway, here's what Greg has to say.

"The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal foreseeing, self-respecting Scot, stern in his morality, sprirtual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence , passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him."

"AHA!" I yelled -- in my head. "I caught you, I caught you!"

Indeed I had. It was the old snake come again. It was that old attitude, trying to say that us Irish are inferior. I was instantly reminded of the words of Charles Kingsley, British historian.

"I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country...to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black one would not see it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours."

Ain't that friggin' jolly? Now, let it be said that I don't hate the British, and I don't think anybody else should either. They've changed since those days, and also it's not really good to hate people. It just gets the cycle going again.

And evolution is the result of this. Now, Ialready knew before reading the passage that Darwin didn't like black people. This dude lined up the races by skin color and said the darker ones were the most inferior. But then he throws in the Irish, and it reveals his heart for what it is. He doesn't think black people are inferior through scientific observation (and indeed I'm not sure that such a thing can actually be proven), but he's trying to create a belief system so that black people can be called "scientifically inferior" and thus have an excuse for his hate. Throwing in the Irish proves this.

How so, you ask? Well, Irish people aren't particularly like black people, I guess about as different as any two different people groups generally are -- and I'm not really sure you can compare the two correctly, as the Irish are one ethnic group, but the terms "black people", "the dark skinned", and "Africans" refer to a large number of ethnic groups. If the Brits saw both of these groups as uncivilized and inferior, then what better way to justify a hateful belief than by glorifying it with the name of science? If the blacks and the Irish are supposedly equally uncultured, then surely, surely there is a genetic cause, no?

No. Look again at that W.R. Greg quote. Supposedly the Irish are so dang different from the Scottish. Wow. Really? Really? History lesson: the Irish and the Scots come from the same branch of Celts. It's the, um, Gaullic branch, I believe. The Irish are about as close to the Scots genetically as any two ethnic groups can be, and this dude is trying to say that they're nothing alike. Darwin, by including the Greg quote in his book, is showing his belief in this statement. And yet the Irish are still able to be included with the "inferior" Africans, who are about as distant from the Irish as any ethnic group generally gets genetically. By establishing this, Darwin shows that he is not motivated by science or genetics, but rather by hate.

What makes this even "better" is that the Brits are Celts. They come from the Brythonic branch, which includes the Brits and the Welsh. Their culture used to be very like Ireland's, and their ancient mythology a parallel. Therefore, if the Irish are in any way inferior, this doom also belongs to the British. They cannot call themselves in any way superior, because their anscestry is caught up with ours. After all, if white people are so "superior", but one of the white ethnic groups is just like black people, then exactly how superior can white people be? Sometimes I wonder what Asian people think of all this nonsense. I hope they're not fooled. After all, Darwin did say that they have less skull capacity than Europeans.

For the moment, let's forget about races. Let's look at evolution. It holds that over time, superior creatures and races will live, whereas the inferior will not. According to this, it's an instant implication that some races are "more evolved" than others (That's is, it's an instant implication unless Darwin had the guts and the stupidity to actually say this straight out somewhere in The Descent of Man). So, evolution all by itself requires racism, because it's extremely improbable that all races would evolve alike. Some are more evolved, and others are less. Evolution is therefore by its nature racist, basically requiring its followers to believe that certain people groups are better than others.

All in all, I have to laugh. I didn't know I was part of an inferior race. It's so dang funny, isn't it? Well, not really, but I have an Irish sense of humor. I laugh at stupidity.