Charles Darwin and the children of the evolution
The naturalist outraged the church, prompting a bitter debate that still sets creationists against evolutionists. Now a sinister link has emerged between his work and the recent spate of high-school killings by crazed, nihilistic teenagers
Dennis Sewell - November 8, 2009
You wouldn’t know from the celebrations of Charles Darwin’s life this year that the amiable Victorian gent portrayed in those TV drama-docs pottering around the garden of his home in Kent has been fingered as a racist, an apologist for genocide, and the inspiration of a string of psychopathic killers.
The Darwin double anniversary (2009 marks both the bicentenary of his birth and 150 years since the first publication of On the Origin of Species) has featured much vanilla hoopla: the Royal Mail issued commemorative stamps; Damien Hirst designed the dust jacket for a special edition of Darwin’s masterpiece; Bristol Zoo offered free admission to men with beards, and the Natural History Museum served pea soup made to a recipe devised by Darwin’s wife, Emma. The conclusion of dozens of lectures, articles and education packs for schools has been that Darwin wasn’t just a brilliant scientist, but a thoroughly good egg.
With hardly a mention that his name has been associated with some of the most infamous crimes of modern history, it is as if there has been an unspoken agreement to accentuate the positive. Certainly, the milquetoast Darwin played by Paul Bettany in the recent film Creation provided little hint that there might be a dark side to the great man’s bequest to posterity. The film focuses on Darwin’s inner conflicts in the years leading up to the publication of On the Origin of Species. The scientist is reluctant to make his ideas public, not because he has foreseen dire social consequences, but chiefly because he fears that the theory of evolution will upset his wife and the Church of England.
Tags: Social Darwinism
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November 17th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Ideas portend certain existential consequences. Guess we all know Darwin’s ideas produce.
November 17th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Note where the author writes, “Of course, it is not unusual for homicidal maniacs to cite great writers when seeking to justify their crimes. The Chicago spree-killers Leopold and Loeb (the models for Hitchcock’s 1948 film, Rope) claimed Friedrich Nietzsche as their muse, as did the Moors murderer Ian Brady.” This almost comes off as if to say, “Crazy people are libel to blame any random person” but if one understands just how much Nietzchean philosophy is premised on Darwinism in the first place, the toxic effect of his evolutionary ideology becomes all the more apparent.
November 18th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
This is a very good article to have actually appeared in the mainstream press here in the U.K. This story is singularly conspicuous amongst all the pro-Darwin hoopla recently with the double centenary that the scientific community has been celebrating with Darwin’s Origin of Species and his birthday.
November 20th, 2009 at 2:06 am
The “Rope,” that serves as the title for Hitchcock’s film, is itself a reference to one of Nietzsche’s most Darwinian images; that of mankind as a metaphoric rope across the abyss, between ape and superman. Famed lawyer Clarence Darrow, when defending Leopold and Loeb, claimed that the two murderers had been driven to kill after being taught Darwinian Natural Selection in school. Ironic, if not amusing, seeing as how Darrow would not long after become enshrined as the great advocate of Darwinism in public education, through his role in the famous “Scope’s Monkey Trial.” Though, technically this marks the celebrated Darrow as both a hypocrite and the prototypical “sleazy lawyer,” his aforementioned defense of Leopold and Loeb may have been valid. The evolutionary text book, at the heart of the Scope’s trial, lauded the European races as the highest strata of humanity, with individuals of African decent placed at the very bottom. Though Leopold and Loeb’s killing weren’t racially motivated, they were still informed by the idea that some humans were higher forms of life than others. Hopefully, more people will begin to acknowledge the unfortunate history of Darwinism and challenge it’s dehumanizing contentions so who are spared another situation like Nazi Germany.