Seeing the Unseen: Unearthing Evidence of Racism in Darwins Theories
Dr. Bhakti Niskama Shanta
Pre-dating Darwin's discoveries, imperialism was already entrenched, but his work lent a veneer of legitimacy to racist European perspectives. European nations exploited his natural selection theory to justify their treatment of Africans, often relying on physical characteristics like height to draw flawed conclusions. The smaller stature of certain African tribes was misrepresented as evidence of European superiority. Moreover, cranial size was wrongly cited as evidence of intellectual superiority, with Africans' supposedly smaller skulls indicating reduced cognitive capacity. Imperialism was disingenuously portrayed as a civilizing force, while European powers exploited African resources, converting them into goods to sell back to Africans, thereby equating whiteness with civilization. Furthermore, Darwin's theory had a profound impact on the Nazi party's persecution of Jews, resulting in the devastating loss of six million lives during the Holocaust. Evolutionary theories, including Darwin's, have significantly contributed to societal marginalization, perpetuating racism and division based on physical traits despite false claims of theory's scientific substantiation with empirical evidence.
http://youtube.com/post/Ugkx7cE2M_nEYfkT037rAsXvGac0fvfByNnW?si=120PJhevf9u6XooD
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First International Conference on a Dialogue between Vedanta and Science on the Origin of Life and Evolution
(Vedanta and Science Dialogue Series: VSDS — 2024)
November 23—24, 2024
Aksharaa School, Kathmandu, Nepal
First International Conference: Dialogue between Vedanta & Science
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University of Technology, Sydney
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Subject: [EXTERNAL] [Sadhu Sanga] Seeing the Unseen: Unearthing Evidence of Racism in Darwins Theories
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Idols of the Mind vs. True Reality
https://www.amazon.com/Idols-Mind-vs-True-Reality/dp/1734908955
First International Conference on a Dialogue between Vedanta and Science on the Origin of Life and Evolution
(Vedanta and Science Dialogue Series: VSDS — 2024)
November 23—24, 2024
Aksharaa School, Kathmandu
Why Biology is Beyond Physical Sciences?: http://dx.doi.org/10.5923/j.als.20160601.03
Life and consciousness – The Vedāntic view: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19420889.2015.1085138
Harmonizer: http://scienceandscientist.org/harmonizer
Darwin Under Siege: http://scienceandscientist.org/Darwin
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Krishna Keshava Dasa
Dear respected Prof. Paul Hager,
Namaste. Growing up in America’s educational system, I am very much aware of the unquestionable authority to which Darwinian evolution is taught to students. I’ve witnessed those skeptical of Darwin’s theory receiving emotional backlash instead of rational discussion, even from esteemed scientists. Interestingly, Chinese paleontologist Jun-Yuan Chen recognized “In China we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America, you can criticize the government, but not Darwin.” As someone who has also grown to be very skeptical of this theory, I’m extremely aware of the sensitivity with which any criticism of Darwinian evolution must be handled. In all sincerity, and with great respect for yourself as an educator of future generations, I humbly request that the following be considered with unbiased seriousness. Despite its lengthiness, I hope someone may find it valuable.
You may have heard that India removed the Darwinian theory of evolution from their 9th and 10th grade textbooks in 2022. [1] [2] South Korea did the same in 2012. [3] [4] Six years before that, in 2006, the European Parliament gathered for a seminar on “Teaching evolutionary theory in Europe. Is your child being indoctrinated in the classroom?” [5] [6] Aside from polarizing debates defending either Darwinian evolution or creationism — to which there are alternatives like the Third Way of Evolution project [7] — there are major problems with how evolution is taught to the masses. The five best-selling popular evolution books barely mention the cutting-edge discoveries of 21st-century biology, which empirically validate that all living entities from single cells to complex organisms are purposeful cognitive agents and that evolution is a goal-directed process influenced by decision-making, cooperation, and problem-solving, [8] where random genetic mutations play a minor role and “[n]atural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create.” [9] Such conclusions are crucial to teach both current and up-and-coming scientists, as they affect research areas as important as cancer, where embracing the view that all life is cognitive allows cancer to be treated as a cellular communication problem rather than haphazardly being blasted with radiation.
This dissent from Darwinism is justifiable from another perspective. The serious social repercussions of Darwinism that Dr. B Niskama Shanta raised have been acknowledged by serious scientific and academic institutions connected with the USA’s government such as the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Given the alternative name to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, also called Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life — a title meant to elaborate on the notion of natural selection [10] — it is not surprising that ideologies detrimental to human flourishing sprouted from this theory. Such ideologies include Social Darwinism, Eugenics, and Scientific Racism. Eugenics, first put forward by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, is the notion that a superior race could be cultivated through selective breeding. Here, those deemed inferior would dilute or tarnish the superiority of the ideal race, so they were to be eliminated. This influenced Adolf Hitler’s “racial hygiene” project, as acknowledged by the USHMM. [11] [12] Significantly, the NHGRI explains:
“When the HGP [Human Genome Project] began in 1990, there was widespread concern that genomics would lead to a new era of eugenics. [...] For more than three decades, the NHGRI ELSI Research Program has funded research on all aspects of the social and ethical implications of genomics, including the legacies of eugenics and scientific racism in the context of new and emerging genetic and genomic technologies. Building on a long tradition of these legacies, NHGRI is committed to taking proactive steps to provide leadership in the field of genomics in addressing structural racism and anything that would foster eugenics-based ideas. Together with efforts of the National Institute of Health, including the UNITE Initiative, NHGRI will continue to combat the legacies of eugenics and scientific racism and their present-day manifestations to develop an inclusive and welcoming genomics community.” [13]
This statement from their fact sheet on “Eugenics and Scientific Racism” represents the NHGRI’s position from May 2022 to the present. Prior to this, considerations of Social Darwinism and its corollaries were disregarded as misrepresentations of Darwinian evolutionary theory, as seen in a brief NHGRI publication from November 2021 [14] and a webpage from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). [15]
The AMNH webpage says:
“Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is entirely focused on an explanation of life's biological diversity. It is a scientific theory meant to explain observations about species. Yet some have used the theory to justify a particular view of human social, political, or economic conditions. All such ideas have one fundamental flaw: They use a purely scientific theory for a completely unscientific purpose. In doing so they misrepresent and misappropriate Darwin's original ideas.”
Don’t different races of human beings represent biological diversity? Is the social behavior of humans not an observation about species? Unfortunately, this self-forgetfulness of scientists has existed since 1620 when Francis Bacon asserted “Of ourselves we say nothing” (Latin: de nobis ipsis silemus). [16] However, something shifted in December 2021, when NHGRI held a two-day conference on “The Meaning of Eugenics: Historical and Present-Day Discussions of Eugenics and Scientific Racism.” [17] The in-depth May 2022 fact sheet uses much more delicate and nuanced language than the more crude November 2021 webpage.
In March 2023, Harvard’s Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences also recognized these ideas through the perspective of Ruth Hubbard (1924-2016), a respected and accomplished biochemist from Harvard and wife of Nobel laureate George Wald. Hubbard “saw in Darwin’s portrayal of the animal world as a ‘kingdom’ marked by cutthroat competition for scarce resources, not objective science but a reflection of the society in which the English naturalist lived. Looked at from a different perspective, Hubbard thought, one could just as easily see the centrality of cooperation in species survival and flourishing, as the Russian zoologist, geologist, and revolutionary Peter Kropotkin had in his 1902 book, Mutual Aid. Increasingly, she saw supposedly objective scientists ‘reading their social arrangements’ into nature.” [18]
The topics discussed in this post are of the utmost importance to both the progress of science and society, with which the Princeton Bhakti Vedanta Institute is very much concerned. This is why we regularly arrange conferences in various formats — such as our two upcoming 2024 conferences [19] [20] — to discuss such matters. In conclusion, we find some sage words relevant to the kind of mentality required to accommodate the current paradigm shift, offered by futurist Alvin Toffler back in 1970: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Humble and respectful regards 🙏
Krishna Keshava Das
Serving Assistant to Dr. B Madhava Puri
References
https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1583603/Natural_Code_popular_evolution_books.pdf
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2018.0015#FN3R
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/victims-of-the-nazi-era-nazi-racial-ideology
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/educational-resources/timelines/eugenics
https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/darwin/evolution-today/social-darwinism
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Dr. B. N. Shanta
more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.[1]
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.[2]
‘Social Darwinism’ is often taken to be something extraneous, an ugly concretion added to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing Darwin’s image. But his notebooks make plain that competition, free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality were written into the equation from the start — ‘Darwinism’ was always intended to explain human society.[3]
By biologizing colonial eradication, Darwin was making ‘racial’ extinction an inevitable evolutionary consequence…. Races and species perishing was the norm of prehistory. The uncivilized races were following suite [sic], except that Darwin’s mechanism here was modern-day massacre…. Imperialist expansion was becoming the very motor of human progress. It is interesting, given the family’s emotional anti-slavery views, that Darwin’s biologizing of genocide should appear to be so dispassionate…. Natural selection was now predicated on the weaker being extinguished. Individuals, races even, had to perish for progress to occur. Thus it was, that ‘Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal’. Europeans were the agents of Evolution. Prichard’s warning about aboriginal slaughter was intended to alert the nation, but Darwin was already naturalizing the cause and rationalizing the outcome.[4]
It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, will have spread & exterminated whole nations.” Desmond and Moore then provide this explanation of Darwin’s sentiments that he expressed in that letter: “While slavery demanded one’s active participation, racial genocide was now normalized by natural selection and rationalized as nature’s way of producing ‘superior’ races. Darwin had ended up calibrating human ‘rank’ no differently from the rest of his society.[5]
Bhakti Niskama Shanta, Ph.D.
http://youtube.com/post/Ugkx9q5_F6yuztEL_7HK8MAoKr0DXQgL-rvP?si=ouMBUI2cu7Y9bLSj
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First International Conference on a Dialogue between Vedanta and Science on the Origin of Life and Evolution
(Vedanta and Science Dialogue Series: VSDS — 2024)
November 23—24, 2024
Aksharaa School, Kathmandu, Nepal
Tina LIndhard
Novelty in the Scientific Approach Permits a New Way of Looking at Issues Surrounding Abortion and the Social Construct of Reality Theory
The present conversations are fascinating and very informative. I appreciate that the references are included.
Krisnas comments about evolutionary Darwinism serve me well and rather than just presenting them as mine I would like to have his permission to quote from his letter and use his name.
Thanking you
Tina
President CCAEspaña/Spain
CICA: Chair of Consciousness Research
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Krishna Keshava Dasa
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