Never said that science or scientists believe Darwin to be racist and that would be an appeal to authority, but his various writings speak for themselves.
Nature is not racist, it does not discriminate who or what it kills and it is not always the strongest that survives. Racism is a human concept since there is no biological basis for race, we are all humans with the same blood the same DNA structure and only really minor differences in outward appearance.
Stephen may have read it but here is the original edition and what it says:
ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.
OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVOURED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.
By Charles Darwin, M.A.,
Fellow Of The Royal, Geological, Linnaean, Etc., Societies;
Author Of 'Journal Of Researches During H.M.S. Beagle's Voyage Round The World.'
From the First Edition
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Darwin teaches there are favoured races. He coined the term "Natural Selection" that he believes determines and demonstrates which races are favoured, the natural selection being whatever survives or is fittest is determined to be stronger or favoured by evolution. With Natural Selection, he personifies nature continually in his descriptions, as if nature "selects" anything. What he means is what by chance "survives" survives. There is no "selecting" here. Sometimes those in an isolated harsher environment over time develop an immunity to some element that others less conditioned would not survive from. Perhaps their skin darkens to the sun through climatization and the trait is passed from generation to generation, protecting the individual better than those who are new to the environment. Thus, he believes some humans are not as evolved as others. His principle of macro-evolution (change from kind to kind) is not something proven but supposed by the principle of micro-evolution (adaption within the kind) which is demonstrable. The weaker are considered lesser or inferior which can lead to an elitist position that history shows results in discrimination against the "weaker" or less evolved. This discrimination led to social Darwinism as practiced by Hitler and others who took the principle into their own hands and tried to speed it up. Examples of discrimination against others cite the South African policy of Apartied based on some races as being more favourable than others. The caste system in India recognizes a hierarchy in place. Many societies can be shown to support a "we" versus "them" mentality, especially when cultures emerge such as with colocalization and conquests.
Believing that some "races" are not as developed or evolved creates an elitist mentality. Instead of viewing all human beings as equal we now get a hierarchy or superiority by those who are considered the stronger, who then exploit the "weaker" or less fortunate.
Darwin (ch. 4): "Natural Selection: its power compared with man's selection, its power on characters of trifling importance, its power at all ages and on both sexes...and unless profitable variations do occur, natural selection can do nothing...Man can act only on external and visible characters: nature cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they may be useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends. Every selected character is fully exercised by her; and the being is placed under well-suited conditions of life...natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life."
The personification is wide-spread.
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Darwin takes a process that intelligent human beings manipulate, crossbreeding of domestic stock, which he calls "domestication" or "domestic production" to show that change or variation in a kind of animal or plant can produce a change of a kind over time. That is his leap of faith.
Darwin (ch. 4): "We may conclude, from what we have seen of the intimate and complex manner in which the inhabitants of each country are bound together, that any change in the numerical proportions of some of the inhabitants, independently of the change of climate itself, would most seriously affect many of the others. If the country were open on its borders, new forms would certainly immigrate, and this also would seriously disturb the relations of some of the former inhabitants.
New forms? Do they stop being human beings and become other kinds of beings? Are there new kinds of beings that resemble us in some ways as human beings here on earth? Or do we just witness adaption taking place within a kind - human beings adapting to their environment?
