Adam Rutherford tells Noah Carl on Twitter: Darwin just a man of his times
In 2017 woke was at it’s peak. There was a spurt of interest in Charles Darwin’s alleged racism. Columnists, writers and editors, some with Scientitic American even went so far as to explicitly label Darwin a racist. The Darwin was a racist line first emerged largely from a book by AN Wilson, Oxford Research Fellow on Anthropology.
See the BBC interview with Wilson here.
The far left The Guardian wrote a review, Aug, 2017,
Charles Darwin by AN Wilson review – how wrong can a biography be?
It turns out that Wilson has no evidence for this egregious slur. All he can muster is the whiskery argument that, because Darwin saw black and brown people (not to mention Jews, Slavs, Celts and anyone who didn’t come from his native belt of central England) as lesser, he was a proto-eugenicist. What he actually was, however, was an Englishman with the usual prejudices of his time. To blame Darwin for being racist is like accusing Freud of not being a feminist, which is to say both blindingly obvious and slightly beside the point.
Larry Alex Taunton, a writer for USA Today, posed a similar question Aug 15, 2017.
“Here’s a statue of another white supremacist you can tear down: Charles Darwin. A racist if ever there was one. Literally”
Dr. Noah Carl, formerly of Oxford University, posed the question on June 10 on Twitter: “Will Darwin survive the purge?”
Hours later, Tony Costa, professor of Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary responded to Carl’s Tweet:
“It’s time for Charles Darwin to go including his statues. He was a racist and believed Africans were inferior.”
Dr. Adam Rutherford, a far left anthropologist who we have covered extensively at this site, retorted to Noah:
“You can recognize that though CD expressed sexist and racial aided views, that were typical of his era, FG, KP and FP expressed views that were extreme and exceptional for their time, and lead movements to promote those views?”
Note – FG refers to Francis Galton. (Not sure why Rutherford would end with a ? mark in that sentence?)
Taxonomy is White Supremacy?
Podcast, DNA, 2023,
So this is it’s white supremacy, but not in the contemporary usage of the words white supremacy. It’s white supremacy because all of these classifications done by many Europeans over this time period from the 17th century onwards, they are taxonomy, they are classifications of people using physical characteristics mostly erroneously, you know, mostly sort of nonsensically and non scientifically, but they’re also hierarchical with always with white
Europeans being at the top of that. So the argument presented in the book, which is often presented in history, but as I said, perhaps not well not as well known in our subject, is that um it is the marshaling of the birth of a new science, of studying human variation right at the root of this concept of the scientific revolution during the enlightenment, which forms the basis of the racism that we still have in our societies today. And you also mentioned that going along with this, that humans really like to categorize information.
In Adam Rutherford’s new book “Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics,” (W.W. Norton & Company, 2022) the British geneticist and science writer time travels to the very beginning of what he calls “a defining idea of the 20th century” to explain its persistent hold on our present. His starting point is his own university, University College London, where Darwin’s younger half-cousin, the polymath Francis Galton, first coined the term 140 years ago.
An on-line women’s magazine Bustle, that claims to have over 50 million monthly readers, is already floating the idea of removing Darwin’s statues and replacing them with a black anthropologist.
By Charlie Mock, June 10,
Black Changemakers From British History That Should Replace Colonial Statues in The UK
John Edmonstone
A key figure in 19th century scientific research, Edmonstone was born into slavery and learnt taxidermy upon gaining freedom – he went on to lecture at Edinburgh University where he taught Charles Darwin.
And:
non-Black Brits must pause to remember where the country currently stands. In the time since Britain erected a memorial glorifying a man who made his fortune from the oppression of Black people, Black communities and individuals have continued to face extreme racial discrimination, anti-Blackness, and systemic racism reinforced daily by those wielding power in the UK…
H/t – AynRand.org New Ideal on Charles Darwin
Yeah. He was super racist against the Irish. He said we were sub-negro.It wasn’t a compliment.