Darwin’s Sad Legacy

By Ken Ham

If asked what they consider to be the legacy of Charles Darwin, most people would say “evolution.” Many could tell you the title of his book On the Origin of Species, [See Publisher’s Note] or even mention his lesser-known work, Descent of Man, published 12 years later. Evolution and Darwin are virtually synonymous.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of his birth and the 150th anniversary of his famous book On the Origin of Species. It’s a good time to evaluate the man’s legacy.

What is not so commonly known is that there have been unfortunate parts of Darwin’s legacy that many of his followers have either denied or kept from public knowledge. Ideas, it is said, have consequences. What people believe about their origins and the purpose and meaning of life affects their entire worldviews. It molds how they view themselves and others.

The atheistic German philosopher Nietzsche, commenting on English society over 100 years ago, wrote: “They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality….When one gives up Christian belief, one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality.”

Nietzsche understood that if there is no absolute authority determining how life is to be lived, and if there is no acknowledgement of a Creator who owns us and has a right to define right and wrong, then there is no basis for absolute morality. Everything, then, is relative. Thus, it becomes a matter of whose opinions are “best” and how they can be spread.

Darwin’s ideas concerning “molecules-to-man” evolution have left a significant legacy on society. For many secularists, it gave them ammunition to eliminate any consideration of the supernatural, including in the study of life’s origins.

For example, in Darwin’s house (now a museum) in England, there is an exhibit that refers to those who believe in creation. A caption reads: “[E]very living creature looked the way it did because God had designed it that way. Darwin’s theory made nonsense of all of this.”

This exhibit declares there is no God connected to why and how life exists. This idea plays out regularly in discussions of life’s origins in America’s classrooms, too. God has been outlawed there. “Science” is now defined as “naturalism,” really, atheism--it’s the only explanation for the origin of life currently allowed, and any hint of the supernatural is not permitted.

The situation in public schools has only gotten worse in recent decades. Witness the recent Texas board of education ruling on the state’s science curriculum, which basically ruled that evolution cannot be questioned and thus must essentially be presented as fact to students.

I would submit that if we continue to subject generations of students to an educational system that teaches them they are just animals and the result of natural process--a 1995 Scientific American article stated: “We are all animals, descendants of a vast lineage of replicators sprung from primordial pond scum”--we will continue to see a growing moral collapse in society as this worldview is applied to life.

The horrible school shooting in Finland in 2007 is a prime example. The killer stated: “I am prepared to fight and die for my cause…I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection. I am just an animal, a human, an individual, a dissident…It’s time to put natural selection and survival of the fittest back on tracks!”

This student was only carrying out in practice what he had been taught concerning his origins as well as the lack of purpose and meaning in life. Was he not consistent with the atheistic evolutionary teaching he received at school, which led to his belief that he was just an animal? After all, if unwanted cats are euthanized at pet shelters, and we can hunt animals like deer, why not kill humans if you want to--regardless of what others believe about your actions? In fact, by what absolute standard would you say that what the Finnish student did was wrong?

Herein lies Darwin’s legacy, which affects all of life. Consider the continuing problem of racism. Darwin wrote that within the human kind, some people groups were closer to their ape-like ancestors than others. No wonder the late evolutionist Stephen J Gould wrote: “Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1850, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.”

Sadly, racism has been fueled by the public education system, as its instruction builds upon Darwin’s ideas. This was clearly seen in a 1914 public school biology textbook, A Civic Biology Presented In Problems, used at the time of the Scopes trial many years later, in which students were indoctrinated to believe the following statement: “At the present time there exist upon the earth five races…the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.”

We have witnessed generations of young people who learn that they are just animals that arose as a result of natural processes. Why, then, should we be shocked when we see students only becoming more consistent in carrying out these beliefs than preceding generations? After all, in light of Darwin’s legacy, they are acting out who they believe they really are.

Publisher’s Note: The full title of Darwin’s book On the Orgin of Species is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. As one might observe, the full title is almost never quoted by the secular media or highlighted in discussions regarding Darwin’s work due its extremely racist view point. A point, I might add, that was not over looked by such infamous people as Adolf Hitler and Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.

Ken Ham is the president and CEO of Answers in Genesis and founder of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY (near Cincinnati)—a 6-hour drive from St. Louis. He is the co-author of Darwin’s Plantation: Evolution’s Racist Roots.