Richard Weikart on Darwinian Racism, Eugenics, and Slavery
On this episode of ID the Future, historian Richard Weikart continues his conversation with host Michael Keas about “scientific” racism. The evil of racism was nothing new when Darwin and his evolutionary theory came on the scene, but according to Weikart, racist thinking, increased “by orders of magnitude” under the influence of Darwinism and evolutionary thinking, and became mainstream science. The idea of a Malthusian “struggle for existence” meant there must be winners and losers in the fight for population survival, and Darwin believed that the best, and inevitable, outcome would be that the supposedly superior European races would overcome the supposedly inferior black Africans.