PATERNALISM OR RACISM?

How serious are the prejudices in Charles Darwin’s writings? Unlike someone like Adam Gopnik who is in complete denial about these prejudices, Stephen Gould recognized in The Mismeasure of Man that you cannot make Darwin out to be an egalitarian. Darwin definitely believed in a hierarchy of cultures, with European civilization at the top. But Gould tries to soften Darwin’s views into a kind of gentle paternalism. Based on his own standards, that does not hold up.

Before I get to that, I should say that Gould made the inaccurate claim that “All [in Darwin’s time] were racists by modern standards,” though earlier he had made an exception for Alfred Wallace who has been “justly hailed as an antiracist.” So in a sense, Gould was admitting that Darwin might well have been a racist, but that is excusable because everyone in that time was. The problem is that Gould erased plenty of antiracists besides Wallace. Just one more example is Charles Napier, a British military hero. In 1835, he objected to the ranking of races and indignantly denied that Australian Aborigines formed a missing link between man and monkey. Darwin, like so many other racists of his time, pondered the question of which race was the lowest and had a hard time deciding whether it was the Australians or the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. For someone like Napier, this was nonsense.

Even taking at face value that remark about all being racist, Gould acknowledged that there were harsher racists and kindlier racists. Here, he said, is how we can distinguish them: “those we now judge most harshly urged that inferiority be used as an excuse for dispossession and slavery, while those we most admire in retrospect urged a moral principle of equal rights and nonexploitation, whatever the biological status of people.” I ask: Which one most accurately describes colonialism?

In the very next sentence, Gould claimed, “Darwin held this second position along with the two Americans best regarded by later history [Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln].” That is true for Darwin only in regard to legal slavery. It is an untrue statement when it comes to the issue of colonialism and the extermination of the colonized. On that score, Darwin held the first position—the inferiority of savages justified Europeans taking their land. Colonialism was as dispossessing and exploitive as slavery. Darwin supported it as one of the consequences of native inferiority. It would be people like Wallace, Charles Napier, Georg Gerland, John Stokes, Saxe Bannister, Langfield Ward, and many members of the Aborigines’ Protection Society who really fulfilled (in varying degrees) the position Gould admired. Darwin turned his back on what colonization and the idea of savage inferiority were doing to natives. Gould never addressed this. He brought his usual historical curiosity to a full stop.

There is evidence in The Descent of Man that Darwin considered signs of savage inferiority in their biological make-up, for example in their having a better sense of smell than white people, which put savages closer to the world of animals. His most serious biological assessment of them was that they had smaller brains, which would indicate lower intellects. Gould ignored this direct evidence of Darwin’s biological determinism.

Even if we assume that Gould was right about Darwin believing savages were improvable and therefore not trapped in biological inferiority, it turns out to be a distinction without a difference. In another essay in The Mismeasure of Man, Gould eloquently describes the effects of believing in biological determinism: “Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.” That is exactly what colonialism did, when it wasn’t murdering people. It stunted life, denied opportunities, and imposed this from without, while claiming the limitations were due to the internal nature of savages.

So does it really matter if Darwin was technically a biological determinist or not, if ultimately he gave his tacit or explicit assent to the colonial project? I can’t see that it does. It’s the same difference, no matter how you slice it or dice it. Paternalism is a misdirection that Gould gave himself so that he wouldn’t see the evidence of Darwin’s support for the colonial enterprise and its stunting of life. Gould also missed that Darwin linked natural selection to the colonial enterprise and in doing so, he made a biological theory (natural selection) supportive of colonialism.

Gould quotes a famous passage from Descent in which Darwin says that over the next few centuries, “the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world” (Darwin also states here that anthropomorphous apes will be exterminated too). Gould actually quotes a longer portion of it. He cites the passage to show that Darwin did believe certain human races were inferior and that Darwin ranked savages between apes and white people, which in Gould's view makes Darwin a paternalist. But Gould completely ignores the part about extermination! There is nothing more stunting of life than extermination. I fail to see how that can be called paternalism. And I find it mindboggling that Gould could completely miss that.

© 2015 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

REVIEW OF "THE SHAPE Of THE NEW"

The following is a review of a part of The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World by Scott Montgomery and Daniel Chirot, published in May of this year, which I recently put up on Amazon.

MORE MYTH THAN HISTORY ON ONE ISSUE

This is not a review of the whole book. I always limit my reviews. In this book, what concerns me is the section on Darwin and evolution. That is all I feel qualified to comment on. They make too many errors for this to be called accurate history.

They treat Darwin as a hero (always a good sign that we are being confronted more with myth than with history). They try to cover themselves by stating early on that Darwin “was not the true originator of all that he wrote about.” But they contradict that as they continue. In fact, in the very same paragraph they claim that common descent was one of his new ideas and they repeat this later on, claiming common descent was “original to Darwin.”

This is completely false. The idea that species were evolving or descending from previous species, going back to a common origin for all life, preceded Charles Darwin by a long shot. Not only the idea of this, but offering evidence for it was going on long before Darwin. His own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, proposed that perhaps life had developed from a single living filament and presented enough evidence to make it a reasonable hypothesis to pursue. In his day, it was known as generation (one species generating another species just like the births of individuals). The authors of this book mention Erasmus Darwin only once in connection with some family problems, but never say anything about the work he did to establish evolutionary theory.

They briefly mention Lamarck, who published an important book on this the year Charles Darwin was born, and Robert Chambers whose book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published in 1844 and then nine more editions before Origin of Species appeared. Throughout most of the 19^th century, more copies of Vestiges were produced than Origin. It is true that Vestiges had a fifteen year head start, but it took much more than fifteen years for Origin to catch up. In the days of Chambers, evolution was known as the development hypothesis and he presented a mighty strong case for it.

There are two ways people can be erased from history. One is to completely ignore them and the other is to give them brief mention while understating or even suppressing their achievements. Authors Montgomery and Chirot choose to do the latter for Lamarck and Chambers. They completely miss what these two figures accomplished. Chambers presented much of the same evidence for common descent that Darwin would and in fact proved that evolution or development was far more probable than the theory of independent or special creation. Yet he never gets credit for it.

The authors rightly praise Darwin for linking man to the rest of nature, but Chambers did just as good a job and went further. Chambers stressed that human beings were related to all other forms of life and especially to the lower animals (an expression they all used, including Darwin); even in intelligence, there were differences in degree only. Since we are all related, Chambers concluded that we had to respect the rights and feelings of other animals. Darwin would never go that far. When Darwin testified before a Royal Commission Committee on the question of vivisection, he pleaded with them not to ban outright all experiments on living animals, as mankind might derive some benefits from this, but he did object to experiments without anesthesia if they could be done with anesthesia. However, he would never go so far as putting man and animals as sympathetically close together as Chambers did.

Montgomery and Chirot also play down Darwin’s connection to later developments of Social Darwinism and eugenics. I agree with the authors that Darwin would have been horrified at some of the later things that were done with his theory of natural selection, but he would not have been horrified by all of it. Darwin himself stressed that the lower races of human beings would be exterminated by colonialism and suggested that humanity would rise higher because of this. The authors completely fail to say anything about this. They make Darwin appear more humane than he actually was.

The authors mention that Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton initiated eugenics thinking, but they leave out two crucial points. First, Darwin liked his cousin’s book on this. Second, when Galton argued that nature does not care for individuals, but only uses them to make superior races, Darwin only slightly disagreed. He pointed out that there are many extinct species which shows that nature may not care much for species either. But Darwin added that maybe the right way to express all this was that “Nature cares only for the superior individuals and then makes her new and better races” (he framed this in a rhetorical question). Darwin never thought about what it would be like to carry this to a logical conclusion, but we cannot say that Darwin did not supply plenty of grist for the Social Darwinist mill.

The authors present Darwin as a champion for what they call “the final secularization of the living world.” Long ago, Darwin was made into a great hero in the fight between science and religion (ironically, he never approved of this bogus combat and was always happy to see anyone reconcile religion and science), but when anyone is made into a hero, it means other people or their accomplishments have to be erased from history in order that the hero can shine more. It is that falsification of history to which I object.

The key point is this: When people are erased from history, it is usually the humanitarians. Chambers and other evolutionists were more holistic than Darwin who saw nature as a hierarchy of groups subordinate to groups. For Chambers and others, it is the whole that evolves and all the parts, including humanity, need each other in this scheme. Chambers was a more humane evolutionist than Darwin. We have lost a lot by forgetting this part of history.

© 2015 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

RACIST THINKING FRONT AND CENTER

My email pal Sean once told me that historical Jesus studies needs a good kick in the arse. How true. The same can be said of Darwin studies and even the history of science, especially as it relates to evolution. When will we wake up and be truthful about what the evidence tells us?

Every time I come across a book or article on scientific racism in the 19^th century, they always do the same thing. They make it seem like it was an aberration that was endorsed only by lesser figures. Charles Darwin is never mentioned or at best a glancing comment on his racism is offered. Same goes for Thomas Huxley. We have enforced this forgetfulness that scientific racism was a mainstream position. The top-notch scientists of the day promoted it. And every one of them would have sworn that their “racism” was objective and based soundly on the evidence.

How did the best scientists of the day go so wrong? How could they have so deceived themselves? These questions never get asked because we live in denial that it ever happened.

At the end of the American Civil War, Thomas Huxley gave a brief lecture entitled “Emancipation—Black and White” (the white part referred to women). He was glad that slavery was finally at an end in the west, but he emphasized that half the arguments brought in favor of abolition were wrong. In particular, the argument of equality between the races was dead wrong, as far as he was concerned: “no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man … The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins …”

Scientific racism went deep. It was not just a slight mistake. And science was not self-correcting about this. No profession is self-correcting. It is only when plenty of criticism from the outside makes inroads that science makes corrections.

We not only have ignored mainstream science’s devotion to racist ideas, but we have failed to take note of many of the anti-racists who were trying vainly to make a course correction. In 1864, just one year before Huxley’s lecture, Alfred Wallace made some interesting remarks on the subject. They were offered in a discussion following someone else’s paper delivered at a meeting of the London Anthropological Society. Unfortunately, we don’t have a record of Wallace in his own words, but rather a summary made by a third party. If we can trust the summary, Wallace made the following points:

He began by agreeing that the Negro is intellectually inferior to Europeans. “The only question to be determined,” he said, “was, how far that inferiority extends.” He then went on to challenge any ideas of inferiority by arguing, in effect, that these opinions are not based on any evidence. We have only seen Negroes in the most unfavorable conditions. How can one draw any fair conclusions from that? “We had never seen the negro under favourable circumstances. We had always seen him either as a slave or perfectly free without any stimulus to exertion … We had not yet seen the negro under the circumstances that would show him to the greatest advantage.” Wallace also made the point that if Negroes seemed to avoid work unless pressed by necessity, the same was true of all mankind (i.e., including white people), so that was no argument for inferiority.

A year before Huxley firmly stated his racist leanings, Wallace was already rebuking such thinking. We forget that, along with the fact that mainstream science ignored him and other anti-racists. Racism, in other words, went so deep that it forced the best scientists of the day to distort their view of the evidence and they would not pay attention even when their errors were pointed out. We ought to pay that more heed than we have—if only because it means that the dangers of mainstream science making mistakes is still with us.

© 2015 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

ONE VERSUS MANY—AN EXISTENTIAL DILEMMA FOR ALL CULTURES

[This month I am posting the same thing on my historical Jesus blog. This is adapted from the book I am currently working on: Darwin's Racism: The Definitive Case, Along With a Close Look at Some of the Forgotten, Genuine Humanitarians of That Time.]

One of the worst things we ever did was invent the word religion. There is no such thing as religion. There are only cultures, which is a broader and looser term, much less loaded with preconceptions than religion is. By inventing this word, we have set up a bogus conflict between religion and science, and we have prevented ourselves from facing the real issues.

 
Call something a religion and we make assumptions about its beliefs about God and life. We automatically assume that it teaches God is all-knowing and all-powerful. We assume all religions believe God dictates and man’s duty is to obey; and when he doesn’t, God punishes. But anyone who reads the Torah honestly would have to admit that none of this accurately captures its depictions of God and human beings. There, the relationship between man and God is hardly ever straightforward.
 
I would not call the frequent debates, for example between God and Moses or God and Abraham, a simple matter of God proclaiming and man obeying. Sometimes God learns from them. He agrees to debating what truth is instead of proclaiming it. He accepts Moses confronting him about an appropriate punishment for Miriam and, in fact, reduces a lifetime of leprosy for Miriam to seven days. There is an implication that God makes or is capable of making mistakes. He agrees to reason with Abraham about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. He practically begs Abraham to teach him. None of this fits what religious dogma is supposed to say about who God is and what he wants.
 
A better description of ancient Jewish culture, like other cultures, is that it wrestles with the existential problems of life. Existential problems never change. They are there in so-called religious culture and they are there in scientific culture. That’s what we should pay attention to, that’s what ails us, and not the manufactured, bogus conflict between religion and the secular. Existential dilemmas, often the exact same ones, remain in every culture, and calling them secular or religious does not change a thing. Verbal gamesmanship never solves anything.
 
The existential themes of life have been around forever. The ancients were as much concerned with them as we are. They were just as sophisticated, just as rational, just as historical, just as sensible and foolish as we are in attempting to figure out what is what. We are not superior. We have nothing over them. They too struggled to understand human nature, where we fit in the scheme of things, where we come from, and whether we can tolerate diversity or do we have to force everything into one mold. Their answers are comparable to our answers and as good as ours. Their mistakes were just like our mistakes. The grammar of their wrestling with these questions may have been different than ours, but I can assure you that they were no less rational than we were.
 
It is arrogance to think we secularists or scientists are superior in any way. We are still not sure if we can accept the diversity of human life on this planet or does everyone have to fit the mold of western civilization with all its devotion to technology and consumerism. We have our gods too. We have our Towers of Babel.
 
Just to switch over to Greek culture for a moment: In the play Ajax by the very ancient Greek writer Sophocles, Ajax enters the scene completely mad. The goddess Athena, visible to the audience but invisible to the human characters on stage, mocks him and enjoys her act of having driven him crazy. But if we pay attention, we realize that Ajax has gone mad because he had always considered himself to be the number one warrior in the world and now he has just lost a contest with Odysseus. For the first time in his life, he is now the second best fighter in the world. His self-image has been shattered. He cannot adjust or bend, so he breaks. He goes mad and then commits suicide. Ajax could not accept that he could be more than one thing.
 
When Odysseus appears later on, he tries to convince the authorities to give Ajax an honorable burial despite the shame of his suicide. Odysseus, we realize, has the flexibility that Ajax lacked. The rules of tradition are pliable for him. He would rather bend (including bending his attachment to tradition) than break. (I owe this interpretation of Ajax to a great philosophy teacher I had at Queens College in New York, Professor Henry Wolz—one of the great teachers who become more unforgettable as time passes.)
 
It reminds me that the Talmud points out that copies of Torah are made with the pliable reed, and not a more rigid implement, to teach us that to study and learn Torah you have to be as bendable as that reed (Taanith 20b). Torah in each verse is more than one thing. Only the man or woman who bends can fully appreciate what Torah has to tell us.
 
I am not here to proclaim that this is the central message of Torah or that love of the stranger and immigrant (alluded to so often in Torah) is the central message. There is no one final lesson. The Bible, like the writings of Darwin or the essays of Wallace or the varied output of Constantine Rafinesque or the plays of Shakespeare or the plays of the Greeks, has no one theme. Any great work has multiple threads running through it. ‘God don’t like empire or oneness’ is one theme of Torah, not the ultimate theme.
 
The problem of one versus many, autocratic rule (in personal or social life) versus the flexibility of diversity, goes back for ages. We are just as capable as the ancients of letting irrationality intrude into our system of knowledge (science) and they were just as sophisticated as we are in finding rational answers. We are not superior, better, wiser. If Darwin came up short in some respects (in his anthropological opinions of the inferiority of native peoples), it is a far more serious problem that we have come up short in discussing what he said. It is nothing but arrogance to misrepresent his complete views. It is arrogance to treat him or any modern figure as superior to previous accomplishments. If we are serious about defeating arrogance and if we truly (as opposed to hypocritically) believe that this is one of the purposes of science, then we had better learn this—learn it well and learn it fast—that our “advances” are just travels in a circle.
 
© 2105 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com

 

WHO IS THE ENEMY?

One would think that the following is a simple proposition that everyone could agree to:  The enemy is bad reasoning, no matter where it occurs, no matter who does it, and by bad reasoning, I mean primarily failure to pay attention to the evidence. But I continue to be amazed by how many people cannot accept this. There have always been certain religious people who will disdain evidence and regard any secular approach to evidence as unacceptable. But more and more, I see atheists who are convinced that religion is the enemy (it is always wrong, they say, and cannot prove any of its claims) and that, while science is not perfect, it is essentially always good and self-correcting of its mistakes.

 
This is not a contest. This is not a game. This is not about scoring points. This is not even about making mistakes and who makes more of them. This is about a deep flaw in human nature which you can see in any human activity including science and religion. It is the very human inclination to reject evidence in favor of ideology.
 
The idea that practicing science is inherently good and practicing religion inherently bad is despicable nonsense. Both are human institutions which are good or bad depending on the human beings running them. Science is not sacrosanct. It is a product of human beings.
 
Many religious people are deeply devoted to a God who created the world according to certain rules. These people believe we have a duty to understand the laws of nature. They are deeply committed materialists because their religion tells them to study and honor the world just as God created it. You cannot define these people out of existence by claiming all religion is false or a case of bad reasoning.
 
Science in the ideal is one of the greatest things there is, but professional science and ideal science are not the same thing. Professional science does not get a free pass just because the word ‘science’ is in it. When we think of science, we usually have in mind the science of technology which gives us useful things. In that kind of science, we excel. If we don’t reason correctly, the immediate practical results are bad. Bridges and buildings will collapse, refrigerators will stop running, the a/c will go on the fritz, cellphones will drop calls. But in fields where there are no immediate practical results, scientists will champion ideological preconceptions over evidence which becomes irrelevant. It happens all the time.
 
One such field is the study of history. Historical study is a science because, when done right, it is mainly about evidence. But history (including the history of science) is notorious for being influenced by ideology and throwing evidence to the winds. Who is hurt when history is misused? No bridges will collapse. Tell lies about history and everything continues to function. Usually, it is only minorities who are hurt when historical lies are perpetrated, and the majority in power could care less about that.
 
Here is a small bit of the history of science: Fifteen years before Darwin came along, Robert Chambers proved by a preponderance of the evidence that evolution (descent from previous species) was more probable than independent or special creation. Mainstream scientists of the time refused to acknowledge his accomplishment. Today, Chambers and his accomplishment are still erased from history. Darwin has been made into a god who cannot have any competition. Chambers was more holistic than Darwin. He believed all organisms are connected into a great whole in which no one part gets special treatment. That meant the feelings and rights of animals would have to be respected. He pushed this further than Darwin did.
 
I mention this because I believe that when we get the history of science wrong, it means there are still problems in science today. When a field cannot accurately study its own history, something very odd is going on. Religion has the same problem. Being dishonest about its own history is a vice shared by both science and religion. Both seek power rather than truth-telling.
 
When you look at any science where practical results are not at issue, ideology tends to replace the hunt for evidence. That is the key issue and we don’t pay attention to this in part because of this stupid, false battle between science and religion, which blinds us to the real issues at stake. Religion versus science is a false issue. It is not based on evidence. It is an ugly ideological battle that has nothing to recommend it. When people mess with the evidence in order to champion their ideology, that is where the trouble lies, and it happens in science as well as religion more often than we would like to think.
 
© 2015 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

A REVIEW OF JERRY COYNE’S RECENT BOOK

[I posted the following review of Jerry Coyne’s Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible on Amazon last week. Like all my reviews, it is not a full-scale review but focuses on one issue. I will add a few comments at the end.]

 
There is no essential conflict between religion and science. There is certainly conflict between individuals, ideologues, on both sides. But to introduce this into the fields themselves is artificial. It serves those who want to promote their own power, but contains no truth beyond that.
 
Coyne has cherry picked his evidence, and worse yet, his definitions, especially of religion, to manufacture a controversy. He eliminates awe and wonder, experienced by many scientists, from his definition of religion (103) because it interferes with his ideology. Coyne knows very well there are many examples of science and religion getting along (e.g., the “science-friendly believer” on 64), but that does not suit his purpose. He picks out the most irrational features of religion (belief in miracles and a willingness to blind oneself to the evidence) and compares these to the best science has to offer. How is this fair?
 
It is as if Coyne were out to demonize religion—making it dangerous to both science and society (225). But it is only a certain type of fanatical religious thinking that is dangerous. Coyne might agree. What he misses is this: It is not in its character as religious that this thinking is harmful, but in its character as bad reasoning, and such reasoning (like ignoring evidence) is not limited to religion.
 
Here is a series of simple propositions which seem to make many people angry whenever I propose them: The enemy is not religion. The enemy is not science. The enemy is bad thinking wherever it occurs, no matter who does it. Scientists are just as capable of doing it. To deny that is to be guilty of a cover-up.
 
Professional science and science in the ideal are not the same thing. There is often a gap between the two. If we make out professional science to be sacrosanct, we create a situation as dangerous as what Coyne addresses. Religious officials once claimed for themselves the mantle of power. They falsely convinced people they had the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Most people don’t buy that anymore. The irony is that the mantle of power is now wrapped around scientists who claim to have the keys to the kingdom of truth. It is a terrible power to give anyone. Scientists are just human beings. Some will abuse their power. It is a human failing.
 
Good science demands constant vigilance. That vigilance is not on display in Coyne’s book, despite his admission that “venality, irrationality, and immorality” are universal human features (221). He portrays working science in too golden a light. Professional scientists need watching as much as anyone. Granting them power carte blanche is a bad idea.
 
Coyne acknowledges that science has done some bad things, but he blames this on individuals who have misused science, not on science itself (217-21). He is right. He just won’t allow the same defense to be raised when religion is abused. He has defined religion to make it inherently bad. This is typical of the stacked deck type of argument in this book: Let’s compare science at its best to religion at its worst. How is any of this fair?
 
The problem is not that religious belief blinds people to the evidence, as he frequently says. That is just one example of a deeper problem: Cultural values can hamper and skew looking at the evidence. This affects secularists as much as religionists. You can change your clothes, but the same human frailties lurk underneath.
 
Would it be fair if we judged science by its most egregious errors? Would it be fair if we rejected science just because Darwin and most of his fellow scientists took the wrong direction in their treatment of indigenous peoples? To the end of his days, Darwin insisted that most savage tribes were inferior to Europeans and, as a result, would gradually be exterminated. Humanity would rise higher, he said, when all the lower races were gone. Darwin had to violate his own basic tenets to maintain this. He had always insisted that natural selection acted slowly and locally. But indigenes were not endangered by changes in their local environment. Europeans had come from far away and the doom they were inflicting on natives was happening much too rapidly to be natural. This was closer to artificial selection, but Darwin never acknowledged this.
 
Only a handful of writers have recognized that Darwin naturalized or rationalized genocide (there was constant talk in his time of exterminating the natives). Most scholars are still in denial about this and refuse to look at the abundant evidence for this misuse of science. This twin belief in the inferiority of other races and their inevitable elimination was based on cultural ideology, not evidence. Many humanitarians of the day objected, but few paid heed. Shall we use this tremendous failure as indicative of science?
 
In 1898, Alfred Wallace, a more humane evolutionist than Darwin, bitterly lamented that science was being used to create weapons of mass destruction. Shall we condemn all of science for that? Wallace didn’t. Neither should we. Racism still occasionally rears its head in science. It has never entirely gone away. Shall we disparage science as a whole because of these problems and much more? Yet it is precisely this kind of unfair reasoning that Coyne arrogantly applies to religion. Whatever else Coyne’s book is, it is not an example of good science.
 
I can agree with a sentence here and there (e.g., about self-correction in science), but the overall effect of this book is to distort reality. Near the end, Coyne relates some horrific examples of what Christian Scientists have done to their children by withholding medical aid. Coyne implies this represents the essence of religious faith. I would despise anyone who argued that what Nazi doctors did represents science. For Coyne to indulge one argument while rightly condemning the latter is as double a standard as any I have ever come across.
 
The enemy is bad reasoning and failure to attend to the evidence. Remember that and eschew all ideological combat which serves only egos and not humanity.
 
That was the end of the review.
 
I feel the need to add a few words about how deceptive Coyne’s book is, and this is in addition to the fact that he employs a double standard to judge religion as a whole, not just religious extremism. Religious fanatics who defy and/or seek to undermine science are pretty out there. They make no bones about believing that their faith gives them knowledge superior to that of science. As such, I don’t consider them to be the greatest danger to science. Far more dangerous for any field of knowledge are the unconscious forces that subvert an honest look at the evidence. Coyne pays that no attention at all, and in failing to do this, he covers up the most serious problems of all.
 
Coyne pretends that when scientists make mistakes, it is the fault of this or that individual scientist, which of course is sometimes true. But the deeper problem is that cultural biases will influence scientific investigation. There are many examples of this in the history of science and they are often extremely difficult to correct. I gave one in the review. The scientific racism in the 19^th century, which included Darwin and which continued well into the 20^th, was not the error of just a few scientists. It was a huge cultural error. It infected mainstream science.
 
These scientists would have sworn up and down that their work was totally objective, when it was anything but. It is an extraordinary case of how mainstream science can sometimes be so blind. We are mostly over it now, but it still occasionally shows up in some scientist or other. It is a legacy that haunts us still.
 
When culture or any form of bias affects a scholarly field, it usually happens unconsciously. It is difficult to correct because no one likes facing and admitting that unconscious forces can take hold of us. Ignoring that is probably the most serious defect of Coyne’s book. He has created a false bogeyman so that the greater villains can escape undetected.
 
© 2015 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com

A PANORAMA OF HUMANITARIANS

Not all humanitarians in the 19^th century looked alike or sounded the same. There was quite a range. You could say it is like the gradation of species. There were many grades of humanitarians. All deserve some praise and those with deficiencies should be noted.

 
Sir George Grey, who served as Governor of New Zealand and then in South Africa in mid-century, was a low-level humanitarian. He took a very strong anti-racist position by arguing that all human beings were equal in intellectual endowments and that different races should be able to live together. He was opposed to the separation of races. But that was about as far as it went for him. He drew no conclusions that native peoples should be treated with justice or be given any power. He had no respect for native cultures. Despite his belief in equality, he was bent on taking all the land from the Maoris in New Zealand and the Xhosa in South Africa. They lost a lot because of him.
 
Way up there on the list of great humanitarians were people like Saxe Bannister and Charles Napier. They not only stood firmly for anti-racist views, they were not afraid to follow up with demands for justice. Equal treatment under the law was a theme that both struck. They were committed to colonialism, but they objected to its callousness towards native peoples and its unfairness.
 
Bannister, an Attorney General in New South Wales in the mid-1820s, wanted to see colonial expansion regulated with an eye to restraining the worst vices of colonists. He expressed so much concern for native rights (e.g., that there should be a board independent of the Colonial Office to oversee the interests of natives and that colored people should serve on this board) that an under-secretary would say he suffered from mental aberration.
 
Napier was a British military hero who was offered the Governorship of a new colony in South Australia in the 1830s, but his demand for enough soldiers and money to ensure success in case the colony ran into trouble resulted in his not getting the job. He despised people who ranked races and who looked at Australian Aborigines as the missing link between man and monkey. He saw no reason why natives should not be allowed to live as it suited them. He said that if he had been appointed Governor, he would have made sure that natives were treated the same under the law, equal to himself and the men who served under him.

There were many more who were somewhere in between Grey and Napier or Bannister. Those humanitarians who stuck by their convictions often suffered for it. They became outcasts, leading ruined lives. Others, when push came to shove, compromised so that they could continue to live in their society. The history of humanitarianism deserves better treatment than it has received so far.
 
Where does all this leave Darwin? Where does he fit into this spectrum? I am not sure that he even reaches the low level represented by Sir George Grey. In The Descent of Man, he is very clear that he does not regard all races as equal. Savages are generally ranked by him as intellectually and morally inferior to Europeans. It is their inferiority which he regards as the chief cause of their impending extermination and not immoral behavior on the part of colonizing Europe.
 
The only reason anyone thinks Darwin could be considered a humanitarian is because he was anti-slavery. But that was a very limited idea. It was legalized slavery that he abhorred. As far as I know, he never raised concerns about illegal slavery or forced labor. He totally supported colonialism which was a kind of de facto slavery, as far as indigenous people experienced it. Many humanitarians saw colonialism that way too and some thought it was worse than slavery, but Darwin never joined them.
 
It is hard to know everything about the relationship between Darwin and humanitarianism because he was basically silent on most of these issues, except for his firm belief in the inferiority of most natives. There were quite a variety of humanitarians around Darwin. Some of them, like Grey, he read. But none of it seems to have had an impact on him. He certainly did not agree with their humane views, but he never took the trouble to acknowledge them or dispute them. He gives them the silent treatment. And that is troubling.
 
© 2015 Leon Zitzer
zitzerleon@gmail.com