In “People Matter: Robert Zubrin’s powerful critique of antihumanism” (City Journal, 22 June 2012, 22 June 2012), Bruce S. Thornton reviews Robert Zubrin’s Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, revealing the Darwinism that Darwin’s lobby does notwant taught to schoolchildren:
Charles Darwin embraced Malthus’s apocalyptic theories, too. Overpopulation, he believed, would eventually be cured by natural selection, the “weeding out of ‘unfit’ individuals and races.” As Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man: “At some future period . . . the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” Like Malthus, Darwin had no patience with sentimental Christian or Enlightenment ethics that sought to alleviate suffering and improve human life with medical advances such as vaccinations, or with asylums and other social-welfare institutions that cared for the sick, insane, or poor. Because of this effort “to check the process of elimination,” Darwin maintained, “the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.” As Zubrin summarizes Darwin’s argument: “Peace, plenty, care, and compassion were interferences in the course of nature. All progress was based on death.”
The mixture of Malthusian and Darwinian theory soon conjured up racist eugenics.
Too bad someone doesn’t go to court to force the whole story of Darwinism to be taught, if any of it is.
Or should we just let it collapse on its own?
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