http://www.crosswalk.com/blogs/mCraven/11558044/
Michael Craven
Author, Speaker, Founding Director of the Center for Christ & Culture
James Watson is Not a Racist; He's a Darwinist!
In a recent interview with London's The Sunday Times, noted scientist,
James Watson set off an international firestorm when he was quoted as
saying that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospects of Africa"
because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their
intelligence is the same as ours..." Watson then added that he would
like for everyone to be equal, but "people who have to deal with black
employees find this is not true."
Watson is not being bigoted in the sense that he is expressing a
personal prejudice against black people. In fact, he is being quite
"reasonable" given his evolutionary beliefs about the nature of man
and reality. According to Watson, "There is no firm reason to
anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically
separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically.
Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal
heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so." (James D.
Watson, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, Knopf,
2007)
James Watson is not some marginal quack operating on the fringes of
the scientific community. In 1953, he and Francis Crick discovered the
structure of DNA--one of the single most important discoveries of the
20th century for which they shared the 1962 Nobel Prize. The fact is
Watson is one of the most important scientists of our age and what he
inadvertently revealed is Darwinism's dark secret: evolutionary
ethics.
The fact is, if nature is the ultimate and final reality and there is
no God then Watson is absolutely correct in his condemnation of what
he believes are lesser evolved peoples. What few evolutionists are
willing to admit is that if time and chance are the truth of human
existence and reality, then everything that we have come to believe
about morality and ethics is completely wrong. Darwinism places all
human phenomena, including ethics and morality, under the sway of the
laws of nature.
Early advocates of evolution clearly understood the profound moral
implications of Darwin's theory. Robby Kossmann, a German zoologist
who later became a medical professor wrote in an 1880 essay:
The Darwinian worldview must look upon the present sentimental
conception of the value of the life of a human individual as an
overestimate completely hindering the progress of humanity. The human
state ... must reach an even higher level of perfection, if the
possibility exists in it, through the destruction of the less well-
endowed individual, for the more excellently endowed to win space for
the expansion of its progeny. ... The state only has an interest in
preserving the more excellent life at the expense of the less
excellent.
As repugnant as these statements may be, they were nonetheless the
consensus among those who understood and embraced Darwin's new idea.
By the early 20th century, these ideas were wildly popular throughout
Europe and America.
In fact, the prestigious biological research lab at Cold Spring
Harbor, Long Island where Watson served as the past director and
current chancellor is described as one that has "deep connections to
Darwinian racism of years gone by." A report states that, "Early in
the twentieth century it was the headquarters for one of the most
virulent American eugenics groups, the Eugenics Record Office, which
promoted forced sterilization and opposed immigration to America by
ethnic groups considered lower on the evolutionary scale than Anglo-
Saxon whites."
Francis Galton, cousin to Charles Darwin and founder of the eugenics
movement wrote:
This is precisely the object of eugenics. Its first object is to check
the birth rate of the Unfit, instead of allowing them to come into
being ... The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering
the productivity of the Fit...
Following discovery of Nazi Germany's monstrous eugenics program
carried out at places like Auschwitz and Treblinka, the public's
support for social Darwinism and the eugenics movement dropped
dramatically. However, it did not disappear; it merely retreated back
into the world of academia and elsewhere where it still remains a
dominant view among the so-called intellectual elite. The most obvious
expression of this today is found in such programs as the United
Nation's population control efforts that are focused almost
exclusively on the underdeveloped African nations.
However, in light of evolutionary theories these views cannot be
dismissed as moral aberrations. These views are perfectly consistent
with Darwinism in which the highest moral good becomes, by necessity,
evolutionary progress. Therefore anyone thought not to represent the
height of human evolution is deemed inferior or unequal. We find
racism loathsome because it violates the Judeo-Christian conception of
human dignity. Racism is a meaningful moral concept only when it is
placed within the Christian worldview. However, if human beings are
merely products of time and chance then the Judeo-Christian conception
of human dignity is not only "unnatural," it actually runs counter to
evolutionary principles.
According to the theories, there are significant evolutionary
differences between the races, and essentially the race that was
closer to apes (Blacks, according to Darwin) was less intelligent and
inherently inferior to whites. Darwin stated, "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." Of course this ignores decades of research suggesting
that race is not a meaningful concept and that there is no biological
basis for race. This underscores the biblical position of only one
race, the human race.
The aforementioned is often referred to as "scientific racism"--a term
intended to convey the idea that such interpretations of Darwinism are
obsolete--however, from an evolutionary perspective, it is no more
racist than regarding an ape as being superior to slug. Since
evolutionists regard all human distinctions, intellectual or
otherwise, as purely biological, these are simply two species on
different rungs of the evolutionary ladder. If you believe in
evolution, you simply cannot think otherwise and remain logically
consistent with the evolutionary explanation of reality.
However, if you accept the truth of our origins as revealed in
Scripture then you have a moral and ethical system in which all human
life is equally valuable regardless of our differences. You simply
cannot deny the Creator and keep the Creator's morality. You cannot
eliminate God and hope to maintain intrinsic human rights to life and
equality. As one Darwinian ethicist put it, "An ethic consistent with
Darwin's theory knows no natural or innate rights..."
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