Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2007

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Claim CA005:

Source:

Response:

1. When properly understood, evolution refutes racism. Before Darwin, people used typological thinking for living things, considering different plants and animals to be their distinct "kinds." This gave rise to a misleading conception of human races, in which different races are thought of as separate and distinct. Darwinism helps eliminate typological thinking and with it the basis for racism.
   
   
2. Genetic studies show that humans are remarkably homogeneous genetically, so all humans are only one biological race. Evolution does not teach racism; it teaches the very opposite.
   
   
3. Racism is thousands of years older than the theory of evolution, and its prevalence has probably decreased since Darwin's day; certainly slavery is much less now. That is the opposite of what we would expect if evolution promotes racism.
   
   
4. Darwin himself was far less racist than most of his contemporaries.
   
   
5. Although creationism is not inherently racist, it is based upon and inseparable from religious bigotry, and religious bigotry is no less hateful and harmful than racism.
   
   
6. Racism historically has been closely associated with creationism (Moore 2004), as is evident in the following examples:
   
   
   • George McCready Price, who is to young-earth creationism what Darwin is to evolution, was much more racist than Darwin. He wrote,

     The poor little fellow who went to the south
       Got lost in the forests dank;
     His skin grew black, as the fierce sun beat
     And scorched his hair with its tropic heat,
       And his mind became a blank.

     In The Phantom of Organic Evolution, he referred to Negroes and Mongolians as degenerate humans (Numbers 1992, 85).
     
     
   • During much of the long history of apartheid in South Africa, evolution was not allowed to be taught. The Christian National Education system, formalized in 1948 and accepted as national policy from 1967 to 1993, stated, among other things,

     that white children should 'receive a separate education from black children to prepare them for their respective superior and inferior positions in South African social and economic life, and all education should be based on Christian National principles' (Esterhuysen and Smith 1998).

     The policy excluded the concept of evolution, taught a version of history that negatively characterized non-whites, and made Bible education, including the teaching of creationism, and religious assemblies compulsory (Esterhuysen and Smith 1998).
     
     
   • The Bible Belt in the southern United States fought hardest to maintain slavery.
     
     
   • Henry Morris, of the Institute for Creation Research, has in the past read racism into his interpretation of the Bible:

     Sometimes the Hamites, especially the Negroes, have even become actual slaves to the others. Possessed of a genetic character concerned mainly with mundane, practical matters, they have often eventually been displaced by the intellectual and philosophical acumen of the Japhethites and the religious zeal of the Semites (Morris 1976, 241).

7. None of this matters to the science of evolution.

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