Don't Blame Darwin for "Followers"

One of the criticisms of Darwin and the theory of evolution is that it leads to all kinds of bad things -- you know, like racism, eugenics, and the like. The question is: can you lay upon the head of Charles Darwin blame for insidious ideas he had nothing to do with. The 19th and 20th century gave birth to numerous ideas and practices that were justified by appeals to Darwin, but that had nothing to do with him or his theory of natural selection.

I quote here from Karl Giberson's Saving Darwin:

Capitalists, nationalists, and racists of course, promote agendas of self-interest and appeal to whatever rationale seems most helpful. Few of them were interested in any progress other than their own. And none of them are or were inspired by Darwin, for they have been around for ages. Two millennia before Darwin, for example, Plato championed selective breeding of humans as a way to increase the fitness of the race. His fellow Greek, Thrasymachus, preached that "might makes right," justifying the strong trampling the weak as a way to achieve more powerful political structures. The ancient Hebrews, in a campaign of reverse anti-Semitism, thought it appropriate to slaughter the men, women, children, infants, sheep, camels, donkeys, and cattle of the Amalekites, to prevent contamination of their superior religion. You can't have Hebrew cows mating with pagan bulls. Such examples illustrate the countless ways that strength and fitness could be promoted through subordination of the less fit -- all without any help from Darwin. (Karl Giberson, Saving Darwin, Harper One, 2008, p. 68).

Giberson makes the important point that Darwin's theory of natural selection was intended to be used as a descriptive device. The Social Darwinism of Hebert Spencer and others was very much a prescriptive philosophy. Darwin's theory was simply a convenient cover that gave horrendous ideas a scientific cover.