No, you’ve confused the two books.
The Origin of Species
doesn’t discuss human evolution at all. “Races” in that time, meant species of organisms.
And plants.
The Descent of Man came later, but of course, that title doesn’t use “races” since that meant something different then.
As you learned, Darwin considered humans an entirely different issue. For Darwin, man was not merely a highly evolved animal. That is why he said that humans deserve life and liberty, unlike animals.
You know better than that, Mary. Everyone knows you know better. Why bother denying it?
Humans are not in a distinct kingdom. We are animals. Primates, to be more precise. But as Darwin says, science cannot evaluate all that we are:
**“Spiritual powers cannot be compared or classed by the naturalist: **but he may endeavour to shew, as I have done, that the mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind,****although immensely in degree.” Charles Darwin Chapter 4 Decsent of Man
So we are animals, but also something more, something that science can’t be classed by science.
But Darwin has classed it…he is saying we are the same in every aspect as animals, only that we have developed certain instincts to a very high degree…nothing other than that. Read his quote. He does not make a separate category for the human person. We are highly evolved apes…
That is not what our Catholic faith teaches us. That is my point The Darwinian ethic , which Pope Benedict charcterized as a bloody ethic of tooth and claw’ is what BenSte4in was referring to as at the heart of the eugenics movement during WWII and the Nazi regime.
“Eugenics (coined from the Greek for ‘well bred’) implied the antonym dysgenics (‘ill bred’). According to Galton, who was a cousin of Charles Darwin (1809-1883), civilization diminishes the rigor of natural selection or ‘survival of the fittest’ and preserves the unfit who otherwise would have perished. The leading biologist, Sir Julian Huxley (1887-1975) president of the British Eugenics Society 1959-62, held that ‘the elimination of natural selection is largely… rendered inoperative by medicine, charity, and the social services’. According to the philosopher, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) speaking in 1930, ‘There can be no doubt that the civilization produced by the white races has this singular characteristic, that in proportion as men and women absorb it, they become sterile… At the present, the most intelligent sections of the Western nations are dying out’ (Lynn 2001, 21, 23).
Such views were widely held in the first half of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic and of the political divide. The British Fabian Socialists Beatrice & Sidney Webb carried out research in the 1890s confirming the high fertility of the ‘improvident’: the ‘degenerate hordes … unfit for social life’. In the USA, Margaret Sanger (1883-1966) advocated birth control for eugenic reasons, and a British follower declared, ‘more children from the fit, less from the unfit – that is the chief issue of birth control’ (Lynn 2001, 33).
A distinction is often made between positive and negative eugenics. Negative eugenics describes the attempt to prevent the birth, growth and development of individuals with undesirable traits. According to Galton, ‘stern compulsion ought to be exerted to prevent the free propagation of the stock of those who are seriously afflicted by lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality, and pauperism.’ (Lynn 2001, 12). In the twentieth century, the most notorious examples of this were the programs of compulsory sterilization seen in many countries such as the USA (60,000 sterilizations up to 1970: half mentally-retarded, half criminals and insane), Sweden (60,000 1934-76, or 1 per cent of the total population), Japan (16,500 women 1949-95) and Nazi Germany (300-400 sterilized up to 1939).”
1
eprints.lse.ac.uk/3079/1/Eugenics_(LSERO).pdf
So was Abraham Lincoln, and almost every other person of European descent at the time. Darwin and Lincoln differed from most of their fellows by asserting that while blacks were not the equal of whites in many ways, they were equal in rights to life and liberty.
So why was Darwin in the Descent of Man referring to studies that showed different races as having skulls that showed they had not advanced as much as other races. He clearly saw some groups of people as inferior. Look at what some of his predecessors were writing concerning ‘race’. In fact Christopher Meiners was a Germ Anthropologist who came up with the idea that the Germanic ‘race’ was superior:
German anthropologist Christoph Meiners devised a “binary racial scheme” of “two races” with the Caucasian whose racial purity was exemplified by the “venerated… ancient Germans” with some Europeans being impure “dirty whites” and “Mongolians” who consisted of everyone else.[4] He characterized Caucasians as having “lightness” and “beauty” with the “whitest, most blooming and most delicate skin”. On the other hand, he characterized Mongolians as being “weak in body and spirit, bad, and lacking virtue”[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_definitions_of_race
…"18th century anthropologist Christoph Meiners, who first defined the Caucasian race, posited a “binary racial scheme” of “two races” with the Caucasian whose racial purity was exemplified by the “venerated… ancient Germans” with some Europeans being impure “dirty whites” and “Mongolians” who consisted of everyone else.[7] Meiners did not include the Jews as Caucasians and ascribed them a “permanently degenerate nature”.[16] "
answers.com/topic/caucasian-race-1
Can you see where Darwin, and other got the idea of racial hierarchies? Can you see that Hitler was folowing these men’s lead thinking he was doing what was scientifically correct.
I am glad you admit that Darwin’s theory has limited the definition of the human being to nothing more than an evolved animal. he even specifically said there was nothing spiritual about the human being…that what we think of as being ‘spiritual’ is nothing more than evolved animal instincts.
The fact that Darwin and others reduced the human being to just being an animal had far reaching effects.
"Viewing humans and animals as equals might somehow
raise the ethical standards by which all species are treated.
However, the early twentieth century social Darwinists
used this idea to treat some humans in ways that previously
had been reserved for animals. Rather than elevating
the status of all species, they rejected belief in the inherent
dignity of all human life and justified the killing of innocent
humans believed to be of lower status than some animals.
The same agenda is apparent in the title of Singer’s
previously cited book, Unsanctifying Human Life. Rejection
of the idea that human life is somehow ‘set apart’ from
other species is found throughout Darwinian literature.
Just as earlier social Darwinists and Nazis advocated killing
off weak and unfit humans, Singer similarly justifies
infanticide and euthanasia, and claims that some animals
have a higher moral standing than certain humans.
3. Human gradation
Having eliminated any special status for humans, Singer
and those who hold similar views, must use some criteria
to grade humans lives. This, we saw with the social Darwinists
and Nazis, becomes arbitrary. Today, we see similar
decisions being made about human lives, especially
where ethical dilemmas abound at the beginning and
ending of life. One of the infertility experts attempting to
clone a human baby responded to concerns about adverse
effects in resulting babies by replying, “We can grade
embryos. We can do genetic screening. We can do quality
control” [62].
Some claim that such quality control is different when
applied to human embryos. However, when accepted for
some members of the human species, it can quickly
spread. ‘Quality control’ for humans was accepted at the
beginning of the twentieth century, and it is already
expanding again at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Professor John Harris is a member of the British
Medical Association’s ethics committee and in 2004 he
declared:
“There is a very widespread and accepted practice of
infanticide in most countries…What do we really
think is different between newborns and late foetuses?
There is no obvious reason why one should think differently,
from an ethical point of view, about a foetus
when it’s outside the womb rather than when it’s
inside the womb” [63]. Harris used the same relativistic argument used by Haeckel and Hitler:
Darwin’s view of the human being is not compatible with Christian /Catholic beliefs about the human being and the effect of it is something that all of us should fight against.
Stop supporting these killers Barbarian.
In Christ, maryJohnZ
