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Darwinism and Humanity: A Matter of Life and Death

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In his recent book, Faith vs. Fact, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne echoes an ominous sentiment that is becoming more and more prevalent in our society: He argues that we would be better off if we began treating humans like animals. In his zeal to promote death via assisted suicide he states, “Although it’s seen by nearly everyone as humane — and even moral — to end the life of our terminally ill pets, it’s regarded as murder to make the same decision for ourselves.” He scoffs at the idea that humans are qualitatively distinct from animals and thus worthy of greater dignity or protection.

DeathofHumanity3D.jpgReally? Does Coyne then seriously think we should round up stray humans, put them in the pound, and then kill them if no one comes to take care of them? Wouldn’t this be more humane than allowing them to suffer from homelessness and the despondency and despair that accompany it? Now, I am quite confident that Coyne would be appalled by this “modest proposal” — as he should be — because even he is not willing to follow the logic of his own position that humans are not special.

In my new book, The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life, I trace the roots of this attitude that humans are just advanced apes wearing clothes. It will probably not surprise anyone that Darwinism played a key role in this development. In addition, I provide many shocking examples of the dehumanizing tendencies that flow from mentality that sees a human as just another animal. Finally, I show the pernicious influence this has had on issues of life and death: abortion, infanticide, suicide, assisted suicide, and euthanasia.

Darwin’s theory was, from the start, a doctrine that extolled death as an engine of progress. In the conclusion of The Origin of Species, Darwin stated, “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.” According to Darwin’s concept of natural selection, organisms better adapted to their environment would survive, while a much larger number of the “unfit” would perish in the struggle for existence. Evolutionary progress was predicated on mass death. In The Descent of Man he applied natural selection to people by arguing that humans are not qualitatively different from animals. He argued that humans were in an intense struggle for existence with their fellow humans, which inevitably resulted in the death of the vast bulk of humans before they can reproduce.

As I have shown in my previous books, From Darwin to Hitler and Hitler’s Ethic, this blurring of the distinction between humans and animals, together with the view that the death of the unfit brings evolutionary progress, would have harmful effects in Germany, giving impetus to Nazi ideology and atrocities. However, it also brought forth bad fruit in the United States. On the basis of his Darwinian worldview Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. embraced a philosophy of struggle and rejected the “right to life.” Holmes’s rejection of natural rights, including the right to life, manifested itself not only in his glorification of brutal competition, including war, but also in his embrace of a radical eugenics ideology that included killing those deemed unfit. In 1927 Holmes delivered the famous Buck v. Bell decision that gave legal sanction in the United States to compulsory sterilization laws, which many states had enacted to promote eugenics, the program to improve human heredity. Further, he advocated “restricting propagation by the undesirables and putting to death infants that didn’t pass the examination.” Holmes thus approved of humans rationally deciding which of their fellow citizens they should kill.

More recently, Richard Dawkins, one of the most famous evolutionary biologists alive today, has argued that humans are not all that special, so we should start according apes rights similar to those enjoyed by humans. He has also called the pro-life position “deeply un-evolutionary,” so he supports abortion and euthanasia. He even remarked once that he hoped that if he ever reached the point where he was “past it” (whatever that means), that he would be euthanized.

Once of the most prominent bioethicists in the world, Peter Singer, who holds an endowed chair at Princeton University, has likewise argued that Darwinism logically entails a rejection of the Judeo-Christian sanctity-of-life ethic. He claims that Darwin “undermined the foundations of the entire Western way of thinking on the place of our species in the universe.” According to Singer, it stripped humanity of the special status that Judeo-Christian thought had conferred upon it. He complains that even though Darwin “gave what ought to have been its final blow” to the “human-centred view of the universe,” the view that humans are special and sacred has not yet vanished. Singer is now hoping and laboring to provide the deathblow to the sanctity-of-life ethic. Indeed Singer argues forcefully that human life has no meaning or purpose, because biological life began “in a chance combination of gasses; it then evolved through random mutation and natural selection. All this just happened; it did not happen to any overall purpose.” According to Singer’s worldview, human life is just a cosmic accident without any real significance. He wrote his book Unsanctifying Human Life in order to strip humanity of its unique value.

While not all Darwinists embrace abortion, euthanasia, or the devaluing of human life — and for this we can be thankful — nonetheless many Darwinists have argued that their theory does undermine meaning, purpose, objective morality, and the value of humanity. Clearly Darwinism has had a powerful influence historically in shaping the “culture of death” that we now find ourselves in. Darwinism is not just an esoteric or abstract theory about nature; it is a theory that has profound implications for the way we view humanity and morality. Darwinism really is a matter of life and death.

Dr. Weikart is professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, and Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture. His new book, The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life, has just been released.

Image: Dog pound, by Nhandler [CC BY 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons.

Richard Weikart

Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Richard Weikart is Emeritus Professor of History, California State University, Stanislaus, and author of seven books, including From Darwin to Hitler, Hitler’s Ethic, The Death of Humanity, and Hitler’s Religion. His most recent book is Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism (2022). His PhD dissertation, Socialist Darwinism, earned the biennial prize of the Forum for History of Human Sciences as best dissertation in that field. He has lectured at many universities and other venues in the US and Europe. He also has been interviewed on dozens of radio shows, podcasts, and TV, and appeared in seven documentaries, including Expelled. Some of his lectures and interviews are available on YouTube.

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