In spite of his influence on evolutionary biology and his role in the scientific study of emotion, Darwin’s prognostications read today as remarkably prejudicial. ![]() While Darwin’s scientific contributions remain ever significant, it’s worth remembering he was also a man of his era-privileged, white, affluent, commanding-who generalized as much as, if not more than, he analyzed, especially when it came to objectifying people’s looks. But what really interested him was not so much the specificity of the individual as the universality of the tribe: If expressions could, as de Boulogne had suggested, be physically localized, could they also be culturally generalized?Īs a man of science, he set out to analyze the visual difference between types, which is to say races. Only a decade after the anatomist Duchenne de Boulogne’s produced the first neurology text illustrated by photographs, Darwin claimed to be the first to use photographs in a scientific publication to actually document the expressive spectrum of the face.Ĭombining speculation about raised eyebrows and flushed skin with vile commentary about mental illness, he famously logged diagrams of facial musculature, along with drawings of sulky chimpanzees and photographs of weeping infants, to create a study that spanned species, temperament, age, and gender. David lives near Seattle, Washington, with his wife and children.In 1872, with the publication of “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” Charles Darwin went rogue. magna cum laude in comparative literature and religious studies. Born in Santa Monica, California, he graduated from Brown University in 1987 with an A.B. ![]() Photo by Casey Sernaqué David Klinghoffer Senior Fellow and Editor, Evolution News David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and the editor of Evolution News & Science Today, the daily voice of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, reporting on intelligent design, evolution, and the intersection of science and culture. Klinghoffer is also the author of six books, a former senior editor and literary editor at National Review magazine, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Seattle Times, Commentary, and other publications. Listen to the excellent conversation here. The question of who would replace or swamp whom has been a preoccupation of pseudo-scientific racists ever since. But replacement could work in the reverse direction: Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin who first advanced the idea of eugenic theory, worried that people of what he regarded as inferior stock would “swamp” (Weikart’s word) their betters by out-reproducing them. What I found particularly interesting is that Darwinism and eugenics, going back to the 19th century, were haunted by ideas of “replacement.” Darwin in The Descent of Man predicted, “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” (emphasis added). The interview was conducted before the event in Buffalo unfolded, though Weikart and Hanegraaff discuss a similar crime, a 2019 shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, also fueled by the killer’s reading about evolution. ![]() Now a new podcast by Hank Hanegraaff with historian Richard Weikart provides some very relevant historical background, drawing on Weikart’s recent book Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism. Arguments drawn from evolution have been prominent in the ideologies of many mass shooters in recent years.” But recognizing this reality would do nothing to advance political agendas, so the partisans ignore it. What the cynical manipulators don’t tell you is that “the Buffalo shooter’s evolutionary racism is not an outlier among recent mass killers. ![]() West found that the latter’s racism derived from online study of mainstream evolutionary theory. Unlike agitators in the media and politics, John West actually took the time to read the shooter’s manifesto to see what drove him. Image: Francis Galton, National Portrait Gallery, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.Īfter the horrific Buffalo, NY, shooting of last weekend, “replacement theory” is suddenly on everyone’s lips.
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