Monkey Chants: Darwin’s Long Shadow on European Soccer

Charles Darwin believed that some races were more evolved than others.




Joel Kontinen

From time to time, spectators insult footballers who have a darker skin tone than others. Recently Brazilian midfielder Everton Luiz, who plays for the Serbian team Partizan Belgrade, got to hear monkey chants for a full 90 minutes from Rad Belgrade fans.

The obvious idea behind monkey chants is that dark-skinned people are less evolved than lighter skinned one.

We can thank – or blame – a Victorian gentleman called Charles Darwin for this trend. He gave us an entirely false idea of races.

Darwin introduced this idea in his book Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871):

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes. . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.” (vol. 1, p. 201).

Descent of Man inspired many other works. The book that John Scopes of the monkey trial fame used in his classes was Hunter’s Civic Biology (1914). It includes some interesting speculations about humans:

"At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; The American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America."

Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have bad consequences.

The Bible shows us clearly that there is only one human race. We are all descendants of Adam and Eve.

Source:

Racist Serb fans torment Brazilian footballer Everton Luiz. BBC News (20 February 2017).

Darwin Gave Us a False Idea of Races

They all belong to the same human race. Image courtesy of G. Mützel: Nordisk familjebok (1904), vol.2, Asiatiska folk, public domain.




Joel Kontinen

Darwinian evolution has a huge problem with credibility. On April’s Fool Day in 2009 National Geographic published the images of four of the most famous hoaxes in science.

Three of them were assumed transitional forms: Piltdown man, Archaeoraptor liaoningensis and bigfoot (an imaginery apeman).

In a recent article on The Conversation, Darren Curnoe highlights yet another hoax that we can thank evolutionists for: the view that there are several human races. This easily leads to racism.

This view was introduced by Charles Darwin in his book Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871):

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes. . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.” (vol. 1, p. 201).

Descent of Man inspired many other works. The book that John Scopes of the monkey trial fame used in his classes was Hunter’s Civic Biology (1914). It includes some interesting details about humans:

"At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; The American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America."

Curnoe, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales, suggests that the very idea of different races is “the biggest mistake in the history of science.”

I would disagree. I would say that Darwinian evolution is the biggest mistake. Others, such as eugenics, are the fruit of evolutionary thinking.

Bible-believing Christians would not be surprised that there is only one human race to which we all belong.

After all, the apostle Paul says (in Acts 17:26) that all humans are the descendants of one man, and Genesis 3:20 tells us that Eve was the mother of all people.

Modern genetics has finally caught up with this biblical truth.

Source:

Curnoe, Darren. 2016. The biggest mistake in the history of science.. The Conversation (December 20):

Charles Darwin Inspired Chinese Revolutionists

Charles Darwin’s ideas inspired Chairman Mao. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

Nature continues its celebration of Darwin year by relating how his ideas reached China at the end of the 19th century. A naval engineer called Yan Fu studied in England from 1877 to 1879. After returning to China, he introduced the ideas of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley to his countrymen.

James Pusey, professor of Chinese studies at the University of Bucknell, surveys the early days of Chinese Darwinism. He points out that Yan Fu misunderstood some of Darwin’s key concepts. Thus, natural selection became natural elimination and evolution became jinhua lun or the theory of progressive change.

The Western powers used Darwin’s ideas to justify imperialism. The writings of this Victorian gentleman inspired them to oppress those who were weaker than them.

China, embroiled in inner turmoil and a prolonged struggle against Japan and the European powers, began to see evolution as change.

Inspired by Darwin, Lenin and Marx, the revolutionaries fought against the Emperor’s forces that had been weakened by war and unrest, believing that the more powerful would eventually overcome their weaker adversaries.

Professor Pusey apologizes that the Chinese adopted the European view that some races are fitter than others.

However, the racist view stems from Darwin’s book Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) in which he predicted, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”

In other words, racism is part and parcel of Darwinism.

The Chinese felt that the Western powers had let them down at the Treaty of Versailles (1919), by giving Japan the Chinese areas occupied by Germany. Darwin’s ideas, flavoured by Marxism, came to their help. They could now only put their trust in power.

Pusey thinks that China would not have embraced Marxism if Darwin's thoughts had not prepared them for a revolution.

”A tree is known by its fruit”, said Jesus (Matt. 12:33). The Cultural Revolution and other experiments remind us of the sombre fact that even in China the fruits of Darwinism were rotten.


Source:

Pusey, James. 2009. Global Darwin: Revolutionary road. Nature 462:7270, 162-163.

Still Too Much Hatred Around – on Holocaust Memorial Day

When all German Jews were hated: A Star of David at the Judisches Museum in Westphalia, Dorsten, Germany. Image courtesy of Daniel Ullrich, Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

Sixty-four years after the end of the holocaust in which six million Jews were killed in Hitler’s Final Solution, anti-Semitism has by no means abated.

Yesterday, on the eve of the Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran took a swipe at Israel at the UN Anti-racism conference.

The timing could not have been more inappropriate. Just as Israel lighted candles in memory of the millions killed at the hands of the Nazis, Mr. Ahmadinejad, always the holocaust-denialist, said the nation of Israel was racist.

The latter-day Haman would want us to forget history. But the holocaust is something we should never, ever forget.

Evolution and the Decadence of the West

Many philosophers doubt Darwinian evolution.

Joel Kontinen

Many Darwinists assume that critics of evolution are mostly motivated by religion. They also suppose that creationism and intelligent design are American phenomena that have only recently set foot in Europe.

However, reality is much more complicated. William Thomson (1824-1907), who is better known as Lord Kelvin and for his many inventions, was an Irish-born mathematician and engineer who fiercely resisted the theory of evolution popularised by Charles Darwin.

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) was a German historian and philosopher who is known for his book Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1919). Recently, I found its English translation The Decline of the West in a small flea market in Manhattan. Spengler discusses western cultural trends in the book. He had some interesting thoughts about evolution.

Spengler was not very impressed with Darwinian evolution. He suggested that paleontology refuted Darwinism. The fossil record did not contain the transitional forms Darwin desperately needed. “Instead of this [i.e. transitional forms] we find perfectly stable and unaltered forms persevering through long ages, forms that have not developed themselves on the fitness principle, but appear suddenly and at once in their definitive shape; that do not thereafter evolve towards better adaptation, but become rarer and finally disappear, while quite different forms crop up again.” (quote from page 231; italics in original)

Almost a hundred years later, there is nothing really new under the sun: no one has found credible transitional forms and even many of the examples that in Spengler’s days were thought to provide evidence for evolution have lost their credibility.

Even some more recent finds, such as Lucy or Australopithecus afarensis and Tiktaalik roseae, are highly questionable.

Evolution was popularised at a time when people had a very optimistic view of the future. Great Britain had an empire on which “the sun never set” and many revolutionary inventions promised a wonderful future for mankind.

But then the unsinkable Titanic sank and two bullets fired in Sarajevo ushered in World War I. Pessimism set in.

Although the title of Spengler’s book refers more to decline than decadence, the Spanish translation of the book, La decadencia de occidente, also includes the word “decadence” (decadencia). The association is not as far-fetched as one might suppose. Darwinism became an ideology that inspired Karl Marx (1818- 1883) to write about a socialist utopia and probably also Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) to declare the death of God. When man was no longer thought to be responsible to God, Australian imperial lords were free to hunt down aboriginals for scientific purposes and German scientists could experiment with people whom they regarded as less evolved than the “pure-bred” Aryans.


Spengler was not the only philosopher to doubt Darwinian evolution. In our time, Antony Flew and David Berlinski take an extremely skeptical view of Darwin’s idea. And they are not the only ones.

Alvin Plantinga, for instance, also rejects orthodox Darwinism, believing that God was necessary in the creation process.


Source:

Spengler, Oswald. 1962. The Decline of the West. Edited by Helmut Werner, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.