Alright so a friend of mine had recently heard the argument that accepting evolutionary theory leads to racism, that the theory of evolution is inherently racist, and she asked my thoughts on this. So that's what follows, my explanation of why evolutionary theory is not only not racist, but actually shows racism to be a logically untenable position. On to basics.
Racism is a belief or conviction that one "race" is superior or inferior to others. The problems with such a belief are legion, and I'll get to that in just a second, but first we must address a problem of language.
In the field of biology, the definition of the word race bears very little resemblance to the common parlance definition of the word. This is actually a common problem and is the source of many communication troubles between the scientific community and the scientific illiterates(not an insulting term, just means that they don't have a scientific education), the word "theory" is an excellent example of this. In common parlance race means skin color or in rare cases a genealogical line, in science race means "An interbreeding, usually geographically isolated population of organisms differing from other populations of the same species in the frequency of hereditary traits". In layman's terms that means two groups of a species, usually separated by distance, who can interbreed but don't and have varying physical traits. Now these definitions can overlap, however they rarely do. The Nazis used the common parlance definition, of course, which is where their bullshit started.
This is but semantics one might say, and in a way they'd be right. This only covers definitions, not concepts and it's the concept of racism that we want to address here. However it's important to note the different definitions so that one can understand what scientists mean when they say things. If we don't take the steps to learn what words mean in different contexts then we can't understand what's really being said. And if we don't understand what a theory says then we can't correctly interpret it.
One of the problems facing the argument that evolutionary theory leads to racism is the matter of genetics. The genetic differences between the different "human races" are so minute as to be negligible. In fact the difference is so small that most geneticists just ignore it as inconsequential. This is a relatively recent discovery, but not unexpected as humans are a worryingly genetically homogeneous species(meaning that our gene pool is smaller than it should be), which is why inbreeding is so devastating to humans and not so devastating to most other animals. That alone kills the idea that evolutionary theory is inherently racist or leads to racism.
Of course there is the worrying question of where such an idea came from, as anyone with a basic understanding of the theory of evolution could tell you that it's not racist in the least. However the idea came from somewhere so we must ask ourselves from where it came and why.
Well the most obvious place to look is at those who constantly spout that the theory of evolution is racist, and those are the fundamentalist Christians. Their reasons for doing this are varied, many of them being dishonest attempts to shoehorn their creationist crap into science classes, but that's far from the only reason. The other big reason is that many christian, indeed many people in this country regardless of their religious beliefs, have wholly the wrong idea of what evolutionary theory says. The wrong view is this, that evolution is like a ladder with the weaker and less complex organisms at the bottom on the and the stronger and more complex organisms(humans) at the top. This is a flawed view for many reasons and I don't think I'll be able to list them all here, so I'll try to isolate some of the bigger problems.
The biggest problem is the view that the "fittest" in "survival of the fittest", a layman's level explanation of natural selection, means the strongest, fastest, and smartest will survive. Sometimes this is the case, but that's not what it means. What it means is that the organisms best adapted to their environment(which includes the organisms around it) is more likely to survive and thus produce more organisms like it. Thus, sometimes it is the smaller and weaker animals which survive because they need less food and the food in the area is scarce. Other times it might be the organisms that cooperate the best that survive as such a trait would give them an edge over stronger predators(this is thought to be one of the evolutionary origins of morality in humans). So survival of the fittest doesn't mean the physically fittest, it means the best adapted to the environment.
The other really big flaw in the misunderstanding is the thought that evolution advances in a set direction, from simple to complex. This is often coupled with the naive and arrogant assumption that humans are the pinnacle of evolution, the end goal of the process. This is just plain not the case. I won't get into too many of the details here as there's not enough space and I don't have the time, but evolution doesn't work like that. Remember that evolution is adapting to one's environment which means that complex is not always the best way to go, the fact that bacteria are some of the most successful(in terms of numbers) organisms on the planet is proof enough of this. Or look at the tardigrades, relatively simple multi-cellular organisms that can survive just about any environment you put them in. These are relatively clear evidence that bigger, stronger, faster, or more complex is not always best. To put it another way, evolution is without a goal or endpoint, it's non-directional.
So one might then ask why we've seen it go from simple to complex throughout history, and that would be a fair question for which we fortunately have answers. There's a complex answer and a simple answer, so I'll give you the complex(i.e. interesting) answer first. The main reason that evolution has had a tendency to go from simple to complex is competition among replicators. At first the replicators had free access to the materials needed to replicate, but as more and more replicators were created they swiftly ran out of freestanding materials and so developed new and interesting ways of both cannibalizing each other for raw materials and defending themselves from other replicators. This evolutionary arms race, as it may be called, set into play the ingredients for a positive feedback loop, with each generation getting more and more complex as they met more complex cannibals and defenses.
However, as I said, there is a simpler answer to this question, though it's likely that both answers had something to do with it. The simple answer is that in the beginning there was only one "direction" for evolution to proceed in, and that was towards complexity from simplicity. A great illustration for this is imagining that you put a blind drunk in a room next to a wall labeled "simple" and you labeled the opposite wall "complex", no matter which way the drunk stumbles he's going to be moving towards complexity. And until he makes it half way across the room he's more likely to move towards complexity than towards simplicity.
Another aspect of evolution that is often forgotten is that every organism alive today has had the exact same amount of time to evolve, there is no one organism that is more or less evolved than another. Every single species that exists today(less than one percent of all that have existed) has roughly four billion years of evolution behind it. While a species may be primitive in the exact sense of the word(resembling the ancestor), they are not "less evolved".
In short, the theory of evolution does not produce or support racism, it goes a long way towards debunking and declawing racism. It shows that no person with a knowledge of evolutionary theory and intellectual honesty can be a racist.
If you want a more thorough explanation of this then I recommend reading "The Ancestor's Tale" and "The Selfish Gene", both by Richard Dawkins(and neither of them discuss god or religion). Dawkins, while controversial in some of his views, is a brilliant author who's very good at explaining evolutionary theory to laymen.
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