Re: Sometimes Backsliding Can Be A Good Thing

Creationist JerryK wrote:
A blog entry detailing a conversation he had with an evolutionist. He implied that because Darwin’s famed book contains the subtitle “by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,” that evolution naturally led to the conclusion that some human races are superior to others. Thus, under the evolutionary scenario for the origin of biodiversity, racism was justified. His friend, an anti-racist, was understandably stunned by these “revelations” and decided to rethink his perspective on evolution.

I posted the following rebuttal in his comments section:

Do you really not have any clue how evolution works, or are you just being a sophist? Whether you realize it or not, you used the term race much more literally than it was originally meant. Darwin used the term in a loose sense to mean any distinct groups with inherited differences. Obviously human races do qualify technically, but the tone you used implied that Darwin, a British 19th century evolutionary biologist, meant “race” in the same way that an American 21st century layman would mean it.

This subtle bit of dishonesty gave the term a pointed emotional aspect the term otherwise would have lacked. Your discussion is a testament to the effectiveness of such methods in rhetoric, but such verbal manipulation only muddies the water of discourse. Not the attitude of someone interested in the truth, just someone interested in winning arguments. Just like the sophists Socrates held in such low regard.

As for the “favoured human race,” your insinuation that natural selection logically leads to racist conclusions is absurd. Different environments exert different selective pressures. Evolutionary fitness can only be assessed within the context of the given environment and its selective pressure. Adaptive “superiority” is a completely relative phenomenon, and as Dan said, only discernible in retrospect. And by retrospect I mean “Looking back after thousands or millions of years.”

If you want to know what human race has been “favoured” in a given environment, on the other hand, it’s a rather simple task: you only have to observe what race is native to the area. Note how fair-skinned people are native to higher latitudes and darker skinned people tend to have ancestors that lived closer to the equator. Natural selection is directly responsible for the biogeography of human races.

Comparing groups of people in different environments with their differing selective pressures is a useless exercise of the apples-to-oranges variety. Dan is on the right track when he says the Chinese currently hold the closest position to “highest Darwinian fitness level among humans” (well, they did before the One Child Policy anyway).

However, it should be stressed that there is nothing about the Asian race biologically that is increasing its fitness. So really, they don’t have any well-founded claim to being evolutionarily “more advanced” at all. If you study the differences between human races you will find that the differences are so slight and so closely tied to minor environmental differences in their respective places of origin that evolution cannot be sensibly invoked to justify racism. Your obliviousness to this fact betrays your level of understanding of evolution and its implications. I recommend that you invest time into additional study of evolutionary ideas before participating in similar discussions in the future.

Sorry to sound so hostile,
~ Abyssal