Real Racism: the Early Darwinists

Francis Galton was Charles Darwin's cousin. He coined the word eugenics in 1883. He founded the biometric approach to heredity, and to further this theory, Karl Pearson established the influential Biometrika journal in 1901. Well, perhaps the fact that Pearson's papers were getting rejected elsewhere had something to do with it too. Which is why Pearson installed good right-hand men like Weldon, Davenport, and himself as editors. Peer review, you see. Galton's most important legacy was the Eugenics Education Society, later re-named simply the Eugenics Society. It still exists today, though under a different name. By the way, do you like the k in Biometrika? Perhaps it was a habit of Karl Pearson, to substitute k for c everywhere. Biometrika delved deeply into that peculiar field of study popularized by Charles Darwin, which holds for Darwinians an irresistibly gripping fascination. That is, the meticulous qualitative and quantitative comparison of Black people with apes.

By this I do not just mean such things as this eugenic collection, or this passage...

"...anatomically there is a greater difference between the lowest type of monkey and the highest type of ape than there is between the highest type of ape and the lowest savage..." -- Hunter, Civic Biology, pg.195

...but also the more elaborate line of work undertaken by more thorough, more able, and more persistent Darwinians. The kind of work which leaves no stone unturned, where all dimensions of African and Australian 'savages': moral, physical, anatomical, cultural, and behavioral, are compared to those of gorillas and birds.

It would not be hard to fill an entire book with examples of this sort of thing, the meticulous comparison of blacks and savages to monkeys and birds. Happily, I need not do so, for Darwin himself filled an entire book with such things. It is called Descent of Man.

One of Darwin's many points of man-ape comparison concerned the anatomy of the foot. He suggested that "savages" have vestiges of the opposable toe found in apes. He wrote: "With some savages, however, the foot has not altogether lost its prehensile power, as shown by their manner of climbing trees, and of using them (sic) in other ways." Which, if anything, serves to prove that Charles knew little about anatomy. But this man-monkey opposable toe myth dies hard. See for example... this image. Note carefully the separated big toe of the "Negro fetus." It is intended to mislead you into thinking that blacks retain, in vestigial form, a characteristic trait of apes which whites do not have. This is a critical point, because the opposable toe is considered to be one of the defining anatomical differences between apes and man. You can find these "opposable toe" illustrations in many Darwinian books, if you bother to look. Which you should, by the way. Just recently I ran into a fairytale, buried deep in some Darwinian book, about a sub-tribe of the Chinese who paddle boats with their vestigial opposable big toes. I wonder what fairytale Darwinians would concoct about the odd feet of Cambodian rice-paddy workers, if they were made aware of it.

Early Darwinians laboured in the infancy of this pathological obsession without the benefit of more modern methods developed by Galton and Pearson. Here, for example, is Richard Owen, fiddling with millet seed and foolishly indulging an audience of Darwinians in their favorite vice...

A ready way to obtain the capacity of the cranial cavity is to fill that cavity with millet-seed, to weigh the skull, and then deduct the weight of the empty skull from the filled one. The range of capacity in the male Gorilla was thus found to be from 17 oz. 3 dr. to 19 oz. 5 dr. whilst in the male Negroes' skulls the range of capacity was from 38 oz. 5 dr. to 51 oz. 6 dr. Tiedemann records an Ethiopian skull with a capacity of 54 oz. 2 dr. 33 gr. troy; the highest capacity in an European skull being 57 oz. 3 dr. .56 gr. troy. The weight of a Negro's brain has been found to be from 3 lb. 1 oz. to 3 lb. 9 oz. 4 dr. troy; that of a full-grown male Gorilla may be estimated at from 10 oz. to 12 oz. troy. In regard to the principal parts of the brain, the difference of size of the medulla oblongata is rather in favour of the Gorilla: the cerebellum of the Gorilla is smaller, the cerebrum is much smaller than in the Negro. -- Owen, The Gorilla and the Negro, 1861.

Important as these facts must be to those who never cease to enjoy hearing about them and meditating upon them, Owen was being a fool, as is anyone who involves himself in serious and detailed technical disputes with Darwinians, be they about computer algorithms, monkeys and africans, religion, philosophy, the evolution of sea-cucumbers, morality, nature-versus-nurture, or any of the countless other things Darwinians like to rave about. You see, Owen, who was not a Darwinian, was actually arguing that blacks are not apes. But think about it, dear reader. Why should anyone waste their time with laborious skull-analyses and millet-seed measurement in order to refute a Darwinian who says that blacks are a kind of ape? Alas, this is the nature of Darwinian controversies. Every one of them is pointless, time and money-wasting, life-wasting and, eventually, destructive. I can list a large number of such mindless, burdensome and destructive controversies imposed upon the world by Darwinians. In fact I will, in a later essay.

There is a curious lesson of history in this. Owen defended what needed no defence in the first place: that humans are not apes and therefore black people are not gorillas either. We have repaid Owen for this indiscretion by remembering him as an intellectual fraud, a plagiarist, a liar, and an all-round nasty fellow. Which is how Darwin and his friends wanted Owen to be remembered. We have repaid Darwin and his friends, who taught us that blacks and savages are closer to the gorilla end of the totem-pole, by remembering them as knights in the service of truth and defenders of science against blind religious bigotry. Darwin in particular we remember as the gentlest and ablest of the lot, and the finest englishman in England on top of it. Think about that, dear reader.

Mivart's fate was curiously similar to Owen's. Mivart being another fellow who foolishly indulged Darwinians in one of their favorite vices--arguing about religion. Perhaps it's unfair to call them fools, drawing as we can from 150 years of hindsight. How were they supposed to know they were dealing with something more closely analogous to Marxism or shamanism than biological science?

Enough of that digression. In Biometrika you can see the science developing to a high art. Complex formulae are derived for the calculation of Negro skull volume, intricate regression analyses of skin coloration are discussed, with papers like A Study of the Negro Skull with Special Reference to the Congo and Gaboon Crania appearing, and so on. I am sure that Pearson et al. discovered many crucial Darwinian facts and evidence for yet more Darwinian truths about primitive peoples, such as the one reported by Julian Huxley in one of his essays--that evidence now exists showing that Eskimoes have mating heat like cats.

It should be pointed out that both Pearson and Galton won the Darwin Medal for work of acknowledged distinction in the broad area of biology in which Charles Darwin worked. It should also be pointed out that Karl Pearson was both a eugenicist and a racist, albeit a scientific one. He held the first Chair of Eugenics at the University of London.

Galton was honorary president of the Eugenics society until he was succeeded by Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin. Leonard Darwin was chairman of The Eugenics Society from 1911 to 1928, when he became honorary president. The Eugenics Society spawned many other societies in many nations. It helped create them, and encouraged them in various ways. Keeping track of them all involves considerable investigation. There are family planning bureaus, human betterment societies, racial hygiene organizations, human heredity foundations, etc. There was even an American Institute for the Study of the Feeble-Minded -- though it should have properly been called the American Institute for the Extermination of the Feeble-Minded. By 1912, when the First International Eugenic Congress was held, eugenics was well on its way as a world-wide movement. Alfred Ploetz and Ernst Rudin collaborated with eugenicists in both Britain and America. They were proponents of the notion that the weak, sick, old, or otherwise undesirable or defective, can be cured with a painless lethal injection.

To manage statistical and hereditary records, the Eugenic Records Office was established by Charles Davenport at Cold Spring Harbour laboratory. Davenport also ran the Station for Experimental Evolution. He was president of the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations (IFEO), and was succeeded by Ernst Rudin. Davenport was probably the most famous american biologist of his time. There is some suspicion that Davenport was involved in the notorious Tuskegee Experiments. Well, ok, that was an understatement. The ERO was a major contributor to eugenics in Germany. If you got this far, dear reader, you should have already read one of Davenport's reports to Leonard Darwin concerning the progress of eugenics in Germany.

When you consider how profoundly rooted the world-wide eugenics movement was in the fertile soil of the Darwin family, it is no surprise that the Darwin family should find itself exemplified as the model of good eugenic breeding, as they were in this poster: Galton-Darwin-Wedgwood Family. If I were an adherent of the Darwinian view of heredity and variation, I would be tempted to conclude, after looking at that chart, that the eugenical cast of mind is hereditary, just like imbecility, feeble-mindedness, prostitution, and chronic unemployment. But I'm not.

Following the thread of history, we see that Davenport served on the board of directors of the American Eugenics Society, along with Harry Laughlin and a fellow named Paul Popenoe. Popenoe wrote a popular textbook called Applied Eugenics. In order to understand the eugenics movement in america, you must read this book.

Popenoe presents the usual bleak eugenical picture of a catastrophic future: humanity's germ-plasm is threatened by the procreation of imbeciles, idiots, morons, cripples, the feeble-minded, prostitutes, alcoholics, and shiftless bums, who must be sterilized or segregated to avert corruption of the nation's genetic material. In chapter 6 he discusses the theory of evolution and natural selection. It is well worth reading this chapter because you will see how his Darwinian preconceptions lead him into all sorts of gross errors about human heredity. Just what those Darwinian preconceptions and gross errors are, I will discuss in a future essay.

Popenoe distills the central thesis into the form of a question...

To-day, how is it? The inefficients, the wastrels, the physical, mental, and moral cripples are carefully preserved at public expense. The criminal is turned out on parole after a few years, to become the father of a family. The insane is discharged as "cured," again to take up the duties of citizenship. The feeble-minded child is painfully "educated," often at the expense of his normal brother or sister. In short, the undesirables of the race, with whom the bloody hand of natural selection would have made short work early in life, are now nursed along to old age.

In chapter 8, we get to the best part, the hillbillies. Along with the serious threat posed by the feeble-minded to the nation's germ-plasm, Popenoe introduces us to a new biological terror: the hillbillies of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Old "Sore-Eyed Hank" here...



ought to be sterilized so he can't reproduce his kind, he says. Historically speaking, Darwinian contempt for hillbillies is comparable to their contempt for clerical celibacy, a contempt also well-documented. But for whatever the reason, Darwinians spent considerable time and effort grinding out studies and books blasting "dysgenic" families. For example, Goddard's Kallikak Family, and the famous Juke family studies, begun by Richard Dugdale in 1877 and then continued by Estabrook at the Eugenics Record Office. Estabrook also wrote Mongrel Virginians (1926), which was described in a review by Dr. Abraham Myerson as "a really absurd and useless book". Absurd, yes, but of course not useless to Darwinians, who appealed, liberally and frequently to Estabrook, Dugdale, and Goddard without the slightest twinge of skepticism. Why, this seminal scientific material even made its way into Hunter's Civic Biology--the Scopes Trial textbook. Jukes, Nams, Kallikaks, Zeros, Dacks, Ishmaels, Sixties, Hickories, Hill Folk, Piney Folk... most of that, and the studies of other "dysgenic" families turned out to be fraudulent or worthless. But they made the headlines. And they are firmly fixed in popular culture. Think X-Files, Deliverance, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and all that.

Popenoe elaborates on positive methods to solve these difficult eugenical problems: sterilization and segregation. He gives helpful suggestions about putting moron boys and idiot boys to hard labor. Then, in chapter 14, called The Color Line, he comes to the issue of Blacks, as you knew he would, sooner or later. Popenoe writes,

Quote:

The social heritage of the Negro has been described at great length and often with little regard for fact, by hundreds of writers. Only a glance can be given the subject here, but it may profitably be asked what the Negro did when he was left to himself in Africa. If the number of original contributions which it has made to the world's civilization is any fair criterion of the relative value of a race, then the Negro race must be placed very near zero on the scale. As a result of the careful measurement of many skulls, Karl Pearson has come to the following conclusions: "There is for the best ascertainable characters a continuous relationship from the European skull, through prehistoric European, prehistoric Egyptian, Congo-Gaboon Negroes to Zulus and Kafirs. The indication is that of a long differentiated evolution, in which the Negro lies nearer to the common stem than the European; he is nearer to the childhood of man."

And now, with the re-appearance of Darwin Medalist Dr Karl Pearson, our short introduction to Darwinical history concludes. The inbred nature of inbred science comes back full circle. Full circle to that compulsive tendency of the Darwinian--that irresistible practice which consists in obsessively, meticulously, methodically and relentlessly comparing human beings to monkeys and apes.