Worst Science Article of the Week: The "Dark Side" of Darwin

2009 represents a double-dip of Charles Darwin milestones. A plethora of Darwin stories in the press have marked his 200th birthday. And today, as 80beats has already noted, is the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, an occasion that sparked another round of Darwin fever. TIME, however, observed the day by posting a Q&A with British author Dennis Sewell, who is selling a book on "how often — and how easily — Darwin's big idea has been harnessed for sinister political ends." Sewell isn't an evolution denier, but rather among the crowd crowing that Darwin was a racist and responsible for inspiring eugenics. Sigh. While it's probably true that Darwin was influenced by the racial attitudes of his time and place—Victorian England–DISCOVER has covered the other side of that coin: that the scientist was an abolitionist and rather progressive for his day. Even Ray Comfort, in his rambling, Darwin-bashing introduction to a "new edition" of Origin that creationists passed around college campuses recently, concedes: "However, after much research, I do concede that you won't find anything in Darwin's writings that would indicate that he in any way felt blacks were to be treated as inferior or that his views of them were due to their skin color." Even if the opposite were true, and Darwin the man was actually a howling racist, Darwin's theory of evolution would still smash the fallacy that different races belong to different species. Still, Sewell claims that eugenics is Darwin's fault because he supposedly believed that the poor were "genetically second-rate." School shootings, he asserts, are Darwin's fault because his theory means that human life has no more value than animal life and killers like the Columbine High School shooters latched onto this idea. But blaming Darwin for the fact that dictators twisted his ideas and teenage murderers used those twisted ideas to shoot their classmates a century and a half later is ridiculous at best. Sewell, asked about Darwin's status as a scientific luminary, concludes with this gem: