Darwinism, Racism, and Victorian Anthropology

Contemporary critics of Darwinian evolution (e.g. over at Uncommon Descent) are often also interested in criticizing Darwin himself, as well as making connections between Darwinism and racism, eugenics, and the view of social progress known as Social Darwinism. There are indeed connections between these ideas, but neither those who would demonize Darwin nor those who hold him up as a sort of saint have got the full picture. The truth is, of course, more complicated.

The idea of evolution undoubtedly had a strong effect on Victorian beliefs and attitudes. An evolutionary idea of progress permeated Victorian culture; one might say it was the zeitgeist of the 19th century and even the beginning of the twentieth. Europeans saw themselves as the pinnacle of progress, while nonwhite peoples were seen as inferior and less intelligent, with the primates just below them, and so on. But, this cultural bias towards other races existed before Darwin and his theory of evolution. As early as the 17th century (Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859) naturalists were studying human skulls from various cultures and concluding that whites were the superior race. Louis Agassiz, Samuel Morton, and Robert Knox were prominent 19th century writers/scientists who, before Darwin, concluded that blacks were an inferior race, even the “lowest grade of humanity.”

While we certainly cannot blame Charles Darwin for these prejudices, his theory was seen to provide scientific support for them. His specific theory of evolution, suggested that all life forms compete in the struggle for existence. The more fit will survive while the less fit die out. It was clear, then, that European culture, having survived and progressed far beyond any others, was superior to other cultures. In other words, Darwin’s mechanism could explain, scientifically, how some races could come to be superior to others. It was also used to validate slavery. For example, it was argued that if blacks were set free that they would inevitably go extinct. Blacks, being inferior to other races, would lose in the struggle for existence; it was therefore charitable to keep them as slaves and preserve their race (besides, it was also well-known that blacks became vicious when given freedom and an education). We must remind ourselves again, though, that the idea of evolution did not originate with Darwin and was already quite well-known by the time Darwin published his book. The idea of a struggle for existence, both biological and social, had also already been made popular by Thomas Malthus and Herbert Spencer. In other words, Darwin’s theory was built upon, and was in some sense a product of, preexisting Victorian values.

Victorian anthropologists, before Darwin, were ethnocentric: Europeans were seen as the highest, most advanced race, while other races were viewed as lower and inferior. However, these anthropologists were largely monogenist, meaning they viewed all races as being part of the same human species. In the late 19th century, after Darwin published The Origin of Species, many physical anthropologists became polygenist, viewing other races as separate species from Europeans. Eventually a developmental view of society emerged. In short, this developmental viewpoint saw native peoples as relics of our evolutionary past; people who had not evolved much higher than the apes, and whose adults had intelligences similar to that of European children (a side note: many Victorians also saw European women as having intelligences similar to a child’s). This evolutionary, developmental view of culture did not exactly encourage an equitable view of races and cultures.

It is safe to say that Darwin’s theory was used to support the ethnocentric and racist Victorian view of other races. It also perhaps tilted physical anthropology into a slightly more racist mode (it also eliminated previously strong ties with missionary work). But we cannot place too much blame on Darwin. Racism was a general prejudice of the time, and cannot be linked solely to Darwinism (even the general idea of evolution cannot take all the blame: Louis Agassiz, mentioned above, was a creationist who viewed blacks as having been separately created and inferior to whites). Darwin's theory may be responsible for adding scientific credibility to racism, but not its genesis.

Darwin himself, on the other hand, was an abolitionist and was convinced that the differences between races was one of education and upbringing, not inherent natures. This was made clear to him through his experiences with "civilized savages," men from primitive cultures who had been raised in England and whose behavior and intellect were indistinguishable from Europeans.

Information Theory and Biological Evolution

The question of the origin of species, which Darwin was concerned with, or the origin of the first life form can be more broadly stated as the question of the origin of biological information. Whether one is interested in the origin of the first protein or in the development of new structures such as an eye or a wing, a successful explanation of these requires an accounting for an increase in biological information (e.g. DNA, RNA, or proteins). Darwin's theory of natural selection and mutation became famous because it proposed a natural explanation for such increases in information (though Darwin of course would not have phrased it quite that way), which previously had been widely regarded as requiring an intelligent agent (which would have been God, for most).

Darwin's combination of chance and natural selection was crucial; chance by itself (random mutations in the genetic code or random conglomerations of organic chemicals) is a hopeless approach to constructing even the simplest biological molecule. Take a small protein which consists of a chain of around 100 amino acids; the chance for a small functional protein to form in a random search is around 1 in 1270000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000. This is well beyond any reasonable probability limit, as would be the probability for any other biological feature (e.g., a strand of DNA). But, with natural selection preserving the individual random changes that are beneficial, larger changes can gradually accumulate. Richard Dawkins illustrates this with the following scenario: take the phrase "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL." Imagine a computer randomly generating phrases out of the 26 letters of the English alphabet; the probability of producing this phrase through random letter generation is practically zero. However, if whenever a letter that is part of the phrase appears, the computer keeps that letter, then gradually (in fact, quite easily) the target phrase will be generated. In the biological world, natural selection and mutation achieve something similar: natural selection preserves the beneficial random mutations, resulting in new biological information.

But can information really be gotten so easily? It turns out that Dawkin's illustration is fatally flawed. Consider: the computer had a target phrase, and preserved incremental changes by comparing the randomly generated letters to this target phrase. In nature there can be no targets; natural selection and random mutation do not have a goal in mind. In nature, only beneficial changes can be preserved, not changes that will be beneficial in the future. An intelligent agent (Dawkins, in his illustration) may know that the gibberish is gradually turning into something that makes sense (METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL), but blind natural forces cannot possibly be shooting for such a target. So it turns out that the illustration meant to show how blind natural forces can generate information actually contains the target information ahead of time, put there by an intelligent agent.

William Dembski and Robert Marks II are working on what they are calling the Law of Conservation of Information. Essentially, it states that you cannot get more information out of a computational algorithm than you put in initially. If this is true, nonteleological evolution cannot in principle explain the origin of new biological information. See their paper here: http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/life%E2%80%99s-conservation-law-why-darwinian-evolution-cannot-create-biological-information/