Darwin and “Scientific” Racism Meet Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Kant

Friedrich Nietzsche: “The first law of human charity: anyone who is weak ought to be given a shove so that he will go down faster.”[1]

….by Jonas E. Alexis

It can easily be argued that the Western intellectual or philosophical tradition was carefully shaped and crafted by ancient Greek philosophers, most specifically Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. As A. N. Whitehead adequately put it, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”[2]

Plato and his student Aristotle established the idea that human beings are living in a moral and comprehensive universe. This universe, they argued, can be understood by rational creatures like us. For them, rationality inexorably leads to practical reason, and practical reason is simply another word for morality. “Moral virtue,” says Aristotle, “is a state of character concerned with choice,” and is therefore “practical.”[3] Choice, Aristotle continues, “cannot exist without reason and intellect or without a moral state.”[4]

People who can “see what is good for themselves and what is good for men in general” do possess something called “practical wisdom.”[5] This practical wisdom “issues commands, since its end is what ought to be done or not to be done.”[6] Wisdom, not just plain knowledge, “must plainly be the most finished of the forms of knowledge.”[7]

Aristotle emphasizes again and again that “the work of man is achieved only in accordance with practical wisdom as well as with moral virtue.”[8] In other words, if practical wisdom is banned, then man would quickly fall into irrationality and contradiction. For Aristotle, “it is not possible to be good in the strict sense without practical wisdom, or practically wise without moral virtue.”[9]

Without practical wisdom, or practical reason, or telos, then everything becomes chaos. This telos, in a nutshell, is what kept the West alive for the past millennia. But Darwin challenged that telos in the 19th century and unleashed an essentially irrational and wicked ideology onto the universe, which is still intellectually crippling its finest proponents. Without telos as a guiding principle, then you’ll eventually end up with strife or “survival of the fittest,” which, by the way, is arguably a tautology.[10] William Shakespeare seemed to have understood this principle. He wrote:

Take but degree [or telos] away, untune that string

And hark what discord follows! Each thing meets

In mere oppunancy. The bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores

And make a sop of all this solid globe.

Strength should be the lord of imbecility.

And the rude son should strike his father dead.

Force should be right, or rather right and wrong,

Between whose endless jar justice resides

Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite,

And appetite, a universal wolf,

So doubly second with will and power

Must make perforce a universal prey,

And last eat itself up.[11]

Telos, which logically leads to Logos and inexorably to “practical wisdom,” is the intellectual patrimony of the West. Immanuel Kant picked that theme up and philosophically expanded it to the moral universe. Kant convincingly argued that human beings cannot live rationally and consistently without practical reason or morality. As he put it in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals:

“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”[12]

Both Shakespeare and Kant kicked Darwin’s project out the window because there is no Darwinian maxim that can logically become a universal or moral law. In fact, Darwin denied a universal moral law and specifically excluded morality from his intellectual project. This eventually led him to a weltanschauung which philosophically is contradictory and ultimately repugnant. As I have argued elsewhere, the quickest way to fall into a torrent of contradiction is to attack or ignore or dismiss morality from its intellectual matrix.

As soon as Darwin dropped morality, say biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore, he began to embrace “a terrifying materialism,” according to which “the human mind, morality, and even belief in God were artifacts of the brain…”[13]

In that sense, Darwin believed that morality was created, not discovered, by evolution.[14] The “moral faculties of man” are not something that are inherent but evolved from “social qualities.”[15] At the urging of a lady by the name of Frances Power Cobbe, Darwin reluctantly read Kant’s Metaphysics of Ethics, but he could make neither heads nor tails of it.[16] In fact, he admitted:

“It has interested me much to see how differently two men may look at the same points, though I fully feel how presumptuous it sounds to put myself even for a moment in the same bracket with Kant—the one man a great philosopher looking exclusively into his own mind, the other a degraded wretch looking from the outside thro’ apes & savages at the moral sense of mankind.”[17]

British historian of science Janet Browne says: “By now Darwin was reluctant to grapple with any of the great European thinkers unless he was chivvied into it or persuaded that he would find something directly useful for his work, much preferring to hear about philosophical systems in colorful synopsis of Huxley.”[18]

In other words, Darwin was willing to drop any thinker’s ideas if they were not enhancing his own work. Now, how can we “Render unto Darwin,”[19] as some have argued in the past, when Darwin himself was not willing to render unto morality? But since Darwin was not able to grapple with metaphysical issues, he was intellectually crippled, and his theories inexorably became philosophically worthless. The sad part of this entire story is that some of his staunch defenders have never been able to solve the contradictory matrix. On many occasions they resort to ideological motives in order to cover Darwin’s contradictory thesis.

For example, Thomas Huxley was often accused of criticizing philosophers without even reading them. Vernon Lushington, a Comtean and a supporter of Darwin’s ideas, urged Darwin to tell Huxley to read Comte carefully before he started lambasting him. Lushington believed that Huxley was doing a disservice to Darwin and his devoted followers when he started to dismiss his opponents unscrupulously. But Darwin wouldn’t listen because Huxley, as “Darwin’s bulldog,” was willing to do just about anything to protect Darwin’s ideas.

Darwin later quoted Kant to postulate or buttress his own ideas that a sense of duty itself is biological.[20] By this time, Darwin began to use “science” to smuggle in irrational ideas into the West. According to historian of biology Peter J. Bowler, Darwin

“was trying to turn morality into a branch of biology through the proposal that our instinctive behavior can only be understood as a product of natural processes that have adapted us to a particular way of life based on the family unit as a means of raising children.”[21]

Darwin’s intellectual children are still clinging to biology in order to explain morality,[22] a philosophically vacuous enterprise that always locks them into an intellectual mumbo jumbo. If everything, including morality, is the artifact of the brain, if our behavior is “instinctive, programmed by evolution into the very structure of our brains,” and if “morality is merely the rationalization of these social instincts,”[23] then there is no moral responsibility whatsoever.

In the same vein, if morality is genetic, as Frans de Waal and other Darwinists argue, then logically genes, not people, are responsible for bad behaviors. Philosopher of science Michael Ruse declares that morality is “a collective illusion of the genes…We need to believe in morality, and so, thanks to our biology, we do believe in morality. There is no foundation ‘out there,’ beyond human nature.”[24] The best way to get rid of problem, it seems, is to get rid of the bad genes.

We simply cannot condemn immoral acts and immoral people like Benjamin Netanyahu and oligarchic empires like Goldman Sachs or the Rothschilds. If Darwin’s intellectual children are right, then people like Netanyahu commit immoral acts because they are genetically defective.

This is really dangerous and inevitably leads to cutthroat competition—or survival of the fittest. In fact, the capitalists, as philosopher James Rachels points out, were elated when Darwinism came on the political scene; they saw it as “an ethical precept that sanctioned cutthroat economic competition.”[25]

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Darwin also believed that the concept of morality itself was relative and that it is not innate. Darwin clearly departed from Kant here. Kant himself wrote in the Critique of Practical Reason:

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more oftener and the more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”[26]

Obviously, says Kant, there is indeed a moral law that is engrained within every human being. Darwin contested that idea and proposed something else. As British historian of science Janet Browne writes, “If honey-bees ever became as intelligent as humans, [Darwin] continued wickedly, unmarried females would think it a ‘sacred duty to kill their brothers and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.’”[27]

There is more: Darwin believed that “man’s mind had emerged from the worm’s in the first place. This was the crux.”[28] In response to Plato’s “necessary ideas” of good and evil, Darwin said, “read monkeys for preexistence.”[29] Here we see again and again that Darwin was essentially deconstructing Plato and Aristotle, and one can logically argue that the West The Descent of Man, which came out in 1871, sent the West into an intellectual darkness. Why? Because Darwin attacked the metaphysical foundation of morality. This is one reason why modern Darwinists like Michael Ruse can say things like “Morality is flimflam… Morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothache and marking student papers.”[30]

Morality, like mathematics, is independent of anyone’s mind. In other words, we did not invent morality; we just happened to discover it. Our job as human beings is to submit our will or passion to it. Once a person ceases to live according to the dictate of practical reason, then he becomes dangerous to society and to himself. And that applies to Darwin himself.

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Sadly, after Darwin came on the scene, intellectuals dropped telos or Logos and embraced “survival of the fittest.” And it was inevitable that Darwin would write in his Descent of Man:

“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 Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”[31]

Darwin even argued that “the weaker and inferior members of society” ought not to be allowed to marry as they so choose.[32] This idea obviously had a disastrous effect on the West. Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, took Darwin’s principle and spread it across the intellectual spectrum. Like Darwin, Galton attacked morality by saying that

“I have no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality.”[33]

Galton did not stop here. Like Darwin, he had more interesting things to say:

“The time may hereafter arrive, in far distant years, when the population of the earth shall be kept as strictly within the bounds of number and suitability of race, as the sheep on a well-ordered moor or the plants in an orchard-house; in the meantime, let us do what we can to encourage the multiplication of the races best fitted to invent and conform to a high and generous civilization, and not, out of a mistaken instinct of giving support to the weak, prevent the incoming of strong and hearty individuals.”[34]

Darwin’s project was again picked up by another British theoretician by the name of Herbert Spencer, who actually coined the term “survival of the fittest” in his book Principles of Biology. Like Darwin, Spencer believed that it was “immoral” or “unscientific” to preserve what he called “the weakly creatures.”[35] According to Spencer, “the fittest” ought to be brave enough to pursue a course of action which can be “at variance with customs that are perceived to be socially injurious.”[36] According to science historian Rob Boddice of the Free University of Berlin,

“With such a vision, the preservation of the weak seemed to Spencer more clearly to be an immoral act because it adversely affected the welfare of the whole society. To be genuinely sympathetic—that is, to have fellow-feeling with other men—was to act in such a way as to reduce the aggregate of suffering, and not enhance it. To eliminate what Spencer could readily identify as the ‘weak’ of society—although Spencer was not sure how to do it—seemed like the moral thing to do.”[37]

Again, one can say that these ideas changed the moral and intellectual outlook of the West. And it is historically and intellectually dishonest to say that the Social Darwinism of the 1920s and 30s did not logically flow from Darwin’s own pen.

Galton put Darwin’s ideas into action in 1883 when he coined the term eugenics, which to him meant “‘the science of improving stock.’”[38] This is survival of the fittest applied to human beings, with the strong eliminating the weak. Galton made it clear that one of the goals of eugenics is to give “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.” He even declared in Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development that “natural selection improves a race.”[39]

And how should eugenics be applied to improve a race? “Whenever a low race is preserved under conditions of life that exact a high level of efficiency,” he said, “it must be subjected to rigorous selection. The few best specimens of that race can alone be allowed to become parents, and not many of their descendants can be allowed to live. The most merciful form of what I ventured to call ‘eugenics’ would consist in watching for the indications of superior strains or races, and in so favouring them that their progeny shall outnumber and gradually replace that of the old one.”[40]

Galton was aware that his ideas were incompatible with the moral order. He wrote, “It may seem monstrous that the weak should be crowded out by the strong, but it is still more monstrous that the races best fitted to play their part on the stage of life, should be crowded out by the incompetent, the ailing, and the desponding. The population of the earth shall be kept as strictly within the bounds of number and suitability of race, as the sheep on a well-ordered moor or the plants in an orchard-house.”[41]

Galton was writing these things around 1869, and he did not have the political mechanism to bring these ideas to fruition. For him, it was incoherent to “preserve the sickly breeds for the sole purpose of tending them, as the breed of foxes is preserved solely for sport and its attendant advantages.”[42] These new ideas, said Galton, must be “introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion.”[43]

Galton inexorably found himself squaring off with the Church, which teaches compassion and sympathy. The Church, he reasoned, had “brutalized human nature by her system of celibacy applied to the gentle” and essentially weakened the strong like himself by teaching them to be compassionate.

Galton even hoped that his ideas would establish “a sort of scientific priesthood,” where people would learn the eugenic idea and practically used it among humans. These ideas could only take form, said Galton, if theoreticians like himself could establish “a new religion, a religion which should not depend on revelation.”[44] This “master race” idea, according to Boddice, would require “social engineering.” And Galton was hastening to see that day. “When the desired fullness of information shall have been acquired then,” he said, “and not till then, will be the fit moment to proclaim ‘Jehad’ or Holy War against customs and prejudices that impair the physical and moral qualities of our race.”[45]

In order to proclaim this “Holy War,” charity must be redefined and must be “distributed as to favour the best-adapted races.”[46] Galton himself encouraged “charitably disposed persons” to essentially leave “substantial sums of money to the furtherance of Eugenic Study and practice,” as opposed to “wasting it on the alleviation of suffering.”[47]

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 Karl Pearson, Galton’s famous disciple, picked up where Galton left off and began to propagate the eugenic idea virtually everywhere. He hopelessly tried to make a science out of eugenics and forced it upon England in particular and upon much of the English-speaking world in general. “The old method of approaching social problems,”[48] he said, must be abolished.

In that sense, Pearson appealed to “science.” He said that it would take “scientific knowledge to control our blind social instincts.”[49] Through “academic judgement,” he continued, people like himself could liquidate the weak, the blind, the deaf, and the dumb. The “welfare of humanity,” he postulated, is cotangent upon “the destruction of the less fit.”[50]

Since medical science was in the business of taking care of the weak, Pearson categorically rejected that enterprise as well. Humanity’s survival will is “the bitter struggle of race with race, the result of man, like all other life, being subject to the stern law of the survival of the fitter.”[51]

Though many modern scientists deny that Darwin’s idea had any connection to eugenics, Galton and many intellectuals of the latter part of the nineteenth century would beg to differ. Keep also in mind that Darwin, Spencer, Galton, and even Pearson thought that their ideas were strictly “scientific.” To them, eugenics was, in principle and practice, the best way to move forward.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Darwin, Spencer, Galton, and Pearson’s “survival of the fittest” began to flourish both in Europe and America. In the fullness of time, tens of thousands of people were sterilized both in Europe and America from the 1920s to the 1970s.[52] Using what one scholar calls “false biology” and tampered statistics,[53] eugenicists forced their ideas upon the public and upon biology in particular.

Galton and his disciples had hoped that one day eugenics would become a religion, and it seems that their wish had somewhat come true—at least in many academic circles. Evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne of the University of Chicago has argued that “we euthanize our dogs and cats when to prolong their lives would be torture, so why not extend that to humans?”

So, when you hear Darwin’s intellectual children begin with dogmas such as “science says that behavior is genetic,” then you can be sure that you are in for a long trip—or a crafty trap. You can also start laughing when these people start worrying about the decrease in the population. To them, you cannot touch Darwin and his ideas, but they always seem to have a heart attack when they look at what some have called the demographic winter. How can these people hold these two contradictory statements while their heads do not explode?

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The principles behind eugenics, as well as its practical application, are both immoral and irrational. Who is to decide what characteristics make a person undesirable? Galton believed that a person’s worth should be judged based on intelligence, or “hereditary genius,” a method that would give preference to a small percentage of the human race.

The eugenicists of the early twentieth century were forced to rethink their theories when confronted with the rise of Zionism, which puts more value on Israel than anything else.

Whether eugenicists like it or not, their words and deeds paved the way for euthanasia and other social evils. Also, taken logically and consistently, eugenic principles are 100% compatible with what Zionism. Those who embrace theoretical principles like natural selection and eugenics but shy away from the logical, practical implications of these principles are deceiving or deluding themselves and others.

On a practical level, consider the fact that Francis Galton, the man who proposed the eugenics as “the science of improving the stock,” lived and died with no children. How should eugenic ideals be applied to him, since he failed to personally improve the human stock? Should those with high intelligence (surely Galton would have considered himself among the elite) be penalized for withholding their “superior” genes from the human race? Why wouldn’t Galton begin putting his theories into practice in his own life? This is as hypocritical as Jean Jacques Rousseau telling his followers how to raise their children in Emile when in real life he abandoned his own children. E. Michael Jones put it best when he said:

“The modern intellectual is, for the most part, a lecher and a fool. His theories are propounded for everyone but himself. Rousseau, the writer of Emile, the first modern book on child rearing sent all five of his illegitimate children to the orphanage shortly after they were born, which, given the condition of orphanages in the 18^th century, meant to their deaths.

“Marx, the champion of the proletariat, knew only one proletarian in his life, his maid, Lenchen, to whom he paid not one single penny in wages. In addition to this economic exploitation, there was also the sexual exploitation. Marx fathered an illegitimate child by her and refused to acknowledge it.”[54]

Our modern age is certainly inundated with fools. They think they can condemn Zionism and at the same time cling to Darwinism. Those fools always lock themselves in a torrent of contradictions precisely because they either do not fully understand Darwinism—an ideology which Michael Ruse himself has recently called a religion[55]–or they simply refuse to give up their cherished belief, despite the fact that they know that Darwinism is metaphysically incoherent and existentially worthless. As Rachels himself puts it:

“If Darwinism is correct, it is unlikely that any other support for the idea of human dignity will be found. The idea of human dignity turns out, therefore, to be the moral effluvium of a discredited metaphysics.”[56]

Rachels was a Darwinist, but he had some intellectual courage to admit that the “implications of Darwinism is morally pernicious.”[57]

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Over the years, many theoreticians, including Alfred Kinsey,[58] have taken Darwin into a new height. Kinsey himself was called “a second Darwin.” Throughout his school life, Kinsey also lived in an environment in which it was taught that “only the fittest survive.”[59] Kinsey also loved Darwin because Darwin cut the teleological “explanation for the existing characteristics and peculiar adaptations of all living organisms, including man.”[60]

Plato agreed that there is a telos in the universe, and Darwin metaphysically rejected that telos. Kinsey, according to one of his own biographers, dropped Plato and embraced Darwin. “Kinsey learned to follow Darwin and to reject Plato, becoming a splitter, not a lumper.”[61] The interesting thing is that Kinsey was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.[62] The same foundation was in the business of promoting contraceptives and abortion throughout Europe and even in Asia.[63]

So, the next time someone starts complaining about a “demographic winter” among Europeans and at the same time refusing to address how institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation were involved in essentially depopulating the earth, you can be sure that you are in the presence of either a useful idiot or an ideologue.

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It has gotten so bad that there are some biologists who are now even arguing that there is a biological or evolutionary basis for rape! Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer argue that people who have “relevant background in evolutionary biology,” like they do, will come to the conclusion that rape is essentially biological. Thornhill and Palmer inveigh against those who don’t know the “scientific” literature this way:

“We find that the majority of the researchers on whose theories today’s attempts to solve the problem of rape are based remain uninformed about the most powerful scientific theory concerning living things: the theory of evolution by Darwinian selection. As a result, many of the social scientists’ proposals for dealing with rape are based on assumptions about human behavior that have been without theoretical justification since 1859, when Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species was published.”[64]

In other words, if those researchers study Darwin’s theory long enough and think through these issues seriously, they would come to the conclusion that there is a Darwinian explanation for rape. Thornhill and Palmer admit in the introduction of the work: “We realize that our approach and our frankness will trouble some social scientists, including some serious and well-intentioned rape researchers.”[65] Then they move to the inexorable truth:

“The social science theory of rape is based on empirically erroneous, even mythological, ideas about human development, behavior, and psychology. It contradicts fundamental knowledge about evolution. It fails to yield a coherent, consistent, progressive body of knowledge. The literature it has produced is largely political rather than scientific…

“Most people don’t know much about why humans have the desires, emotions, and values that they have, including those that cause rape. This is because most people lack any understanding of the ultimate (that is, evolutionary) causes of why humans are the way they are. This lack of understanding has severely limited people’s knowledge of the exact proximate (immediate) causes of rape, thus limiting the ability of concerned people to change the behavior.

“For 25 years, attempts to prevent rape have not only failed to be informed by an evolutionary approach; they have been based on explanations designed to make ideological statements rather than to be consistent with scientific knowledge of human behavior.

“One cannot understand evolutionary explanations of rape, much less evaluate them, without a solid grasp of evolutionary theory. Failure to appreciate this point has caused much valuable time to be wasted on misplaced attacks on evolutionary explanations.”[66]

Way back in 1983, Randy and Nancy Thornhill wrote in the prestigious journal Ethology and Sociobiology that:

“human rape is an evolved facultative alternative that is primarily employed when men are unable to complete for resources and status necessary to attract and reproduce successfully with desirable mates. According to this hypothesis males that cannot effectively compete may employ rape as the only behavioral alternative, or depending on circumstances of relative status and family composition, they may incorporate rape into a repertoire of other behavioral patterns, including low commital pair-bonding with one or more females and/or investing available resources toward sister’s offspring.”[67]

On a Darwinian basis, there is no rational justification for condemning rape. If “’good’ traits are those that promote an individual’s reproductive interests,” then “A trait that increases this ability is ‘good’ in terms of natural selection even though one might consider it undesirable in moral terms.”[68]

So, rape can be undesirable from a moral point of view, but it might be advantageous and therefore preferable from an evolutionary perspective. If the rapists are the “fittest,” then it follows that they will survive by sexually terrorizing their victims. You see, these ideas cannot be upheld morally at all. This is one reason why many scientists are abandoning this sinking ship.[69] Richard Lewontin himself has argued that biology has been hijacked by ideology.[70]

The hilarious thing is that the Darwinists who have criticized Zionism have done so on a moral basis, not on a Darwinian principle, which means that they obviously disagree with Darwin. These people are trying to have it both ways.

[1] Quoted in E. Michael Jones, Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict between Labor and Usury (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2014), 131.

[2] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 39.

[3] Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 103.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 106.

[6] Ibid., 112.

[7] Ibid., 106.

[8] Ibid., 115.

[9] Ibid., 117.

[10] Here is how it goes. How did it survive? Well, because it is the fittest. How do you know it is the fittest? Because it survived! People like Michael Shermer try to circumvent that tautology by saying that “Sometimes tautologies are the beginning of science, but they are never the end. Gravity can be tautological, but its reference is justified by the way this theory allows scientists to accurately predict physical effects and phenomena.” Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1997), 143. In a similar vein, Ernst Mayr writes: “What Darwin says, and I agree, is that it is the possession of certain characteristics which determines evolutionary success and that such characteristics have, at least in part, a genetic basis. An individual property that has these genetic properties will survive and reproduce with a much greater probability than another that lacks them. It is obvious that this correct formulation is not at all tautological.” Ernst Mayr, Evolution and the Diversity of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976 and 1997), 13. Perhaps chemist and Nobel Prize winner Manfred Eigen would have had a good laugh about those guys trying to circumvent what one ought to call a square circle. Eigen wrote: “One day my Japanese colleague and friend, Motoo Kimura, came to me and asked me [a] question. He said, as I remember, ‘Manfred, shouldn’t we reformulate the Darwinian principle as ‘the survival of the luckiest’?  My answer was: ‘Yes, Motoo, we may do so; but then we have to add that the ‘luckiest’ always has to be a member of the very elite club of the fittest.’” Manfred Eigen, From Strange Simplicity to Complex Familiarity: A Treatise on Matter, Information, Life and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 195.

[11] Quoted in E. Michael Jones, Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict Between Labor and Usury (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2014), 489-490.

[12] Emmanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 39.

[13] Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), xvii.

[14] For further studies on this, see Peter J. Bowler and David Knight, Charles Darwin: The Man and His Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 183-184.

[15] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 162.

[16] One can say almost the same thing of people like Michael Shermer. Shermer has written an entire book called The Moral Arc and has even quoted Kant saying “Sapere Aude!—dare to know!” Michael Shermer, The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom (New York: Henry Holt, 2015), 147-148. Shermer could not even address Kant’s fundamental work on morality, which is known as the categorical imperative.

[17] Quoted in Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 297.

[18] Ibid.

[19] James H. Fetzer, Render Unto Darwin: Philosophical Aspects of the Christian Right’s Crusade Against Science (Chicago and LaSalle: Open Court, 2007).

[20] Browne, Charles Darwin, 342.

[21] Darwin, The Descent of Man, 183.

[22] See for example Frans de Waal and Stephen Macedo, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Penguin Books, 2003).

[23] Knight, Charles Darwin, 85.

[24] Michael Ruse, Evolutionary Naturalism: Selected Essays (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 250, 268.

[25] James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 63.

[26] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (New York: Classic Books International, 2010), 163.

[27] Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 342.

[28] Desmond and Moore, Darwin, 239.

[29] Adrian Desmond, James Moore, and Janet Browne, Charles Darwin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 38.

[30] Michael Ruse, “God is dead. Long live morality,” Guardian, March 15, 2010.

[31] Darwin, Descent of Man, 201.

[32] Ibid., 168-169.

[33] Quoted in Nicholas Wright Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 12.

[34] Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (New York and London: Macmillan, 1925), 343.

[35] See Rob Boddice, The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution, and Victorian Civilization (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2016), chapter 6.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ian Dowbiggin, A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 15.

[39] Francis Galton, Inquiries into the Faculty and Its Development (New York: Dutton, 1919), 198.

[40] Ibid., 199-200.

[41] Quoted in Boddice, The Science of Sympathy, chapter 6.

[42] Quoted in ibid., chapter 6.

[43] Quoted in ibid., chapter 6.

[44] Quoted in ibid., chapter 6.

[45] Quoted in ibid., chapter 6.

[46] Quoted in ibid., chapter 6.

[47] Quoted in ibid., chapter 6.

[48] Quoted in ibid., chapter 6.

[49] Quoted in ibid., chapter 6.

[50] Quoted in ibid., chapter 6.

[51] Quoted in ibid., chapter 6.

[52]  For historical studies on this, see for example Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Decline of Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979); Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002); Paul A. Lombardo, ed., A Century of Eugenics in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2008); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985).

[53] Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, chapter 9.

[54] E. Michael Jones, Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2012), 15.

[55] Michael Ruse, Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[56] James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 5.

[57] Ibid., 4; other scholars like Rob Boddice have similar views. See for example Rob Boddice, The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution, and Victorian Civilization (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016).

[58] See for example Judith Reisman, Stolen Honor: How America Was Betrayed by the Lies and Sexual Crimes of a Mad “Scientist” (Orlando, FL: New Revolution Publishers, 2013).

[59] James H. Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 101.

[60] Ibid., 130.

[61] Ibid., 147.

[62] Ibid., 441-455.

[63] See E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000); The Catholic Church and the Cultural Revolution (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2016).

[64] Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), xi-xii.

[65] Ibid., xii.

[66] Ibid., xii.

[67] Randy and Nancy Thornill, “Human rape: An evolutionary analysis,” Ethology and Sociobiology, Volume 4, Issue 3, 1983: 137-173.

[68] Thornhill and Palmer, A Natural History of Rape, 5.

[69] See Steven Rose and Hilary Rose, Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Vintage Books, 2001).

[70] Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); see also Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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