Acting White: The Real Charles Darwin

We are approaching the bicentennial of the birth of British naturalist, Charles Darwin, Thursday February 12, 2009. I have always found myself nearly alone as both black and an admirer of the man most commonly associated with the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’. I first learned of Darwin early in high school, from the Jesuits, and have never associated him with the racist labels too quickly attached in the crossfire of racial rhetoric.

Darwin dismissed the scientific arguments of more than one human species, a centerpiece to propositions of white superiority. To this day, and still consistent with his beliefs, science has yet to show more than rare mutative hints of physiological differences in our most recent version, homo sapiens sapiens. This is not to ignore the differing empirical deposits of humankind spread around the globe, but rather to say the drivers are not genetic difference, but rather genetic distribution. Our version of humankind simply has not been around long enough and/or isolated enough to genetically split off; compared to other species Darwin studied.

The most popular jabs taken at Darwin stem from the association of eugenics, a term coined by his half-cousin F.Galton in the year after his death in 1882. While Darwin acknowledged the existence of heredity, he was always clear on the folly of selective breeding in humans with the goal of a master race. He thought the idea of ‘hereditary improvement’ to be impractical, and that people would reject it. Genetic engineering ran counter to Darwin’s belief that sympathy was ‘the noblest part of our nature’ and incompatible with purposeful 'weeding'.

Darwin was strongly against slavery and the rank-ordering of humans into so-called races of sub-species. Nonetheless, others of his day, and long after his death, abused his ideas under the Darwinism brand, for exploiting people and circumstances for greedy purposes. He does not deserve this continued besmirching of his good name.

My own thanks go to the man whose work encouraged me to search for the connection between the distributions of intelligence we see around the world today, and how it came to be, beginning with our oldest known relative, an Ethiopian woman, mother to modern humankind, who lived and died 160,000 years ago in Africa.

The original Chuck D, a great man in my book.

James C. Collier

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