This material is a reprint from Harun Yahya Books.

DARWINISM'S SOCIAL WEAPON

The twentieth century was one of the darkest and most deadly in all of human history. Vast amounts of blood were spilled and people subjected to the most terrible fear and oppression. Such dictators as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Amin inflicted genocide on millions. Hitler had those whom he regarded as “useless" exterminated in the gas chambers. Hundreds of thousands of people in many Western countries—from Great Britain to Germany, from the USA to Sweden—were compulsorily sterilized or left to die just for being sick, crippled or old. All over the world, people were oppressed and exploited because of ruthless competition. Racism became the ideology of certain states, and some races were not even regarded as human at all. Because of the conflicts and hot and cold wars between East and West, the peoples of communist and capitalist countries, and even brothers, became one another's enemies.

Not generally realized, however, is the nature of the ideological foundation that propelled the 20th century towards such disruption, chaos, war and conflict, and gave rise to such hatred and enmity. The groundwork of this ideological foundation was laid by the British economist Thomas Malthus. This twisted concept, widely accepted by people far removed from religious moral values, was further strengthened by another Briton, the sociologist Herbert Spencer, and disseminated by the theory of evolution put forward by yet another Englishman, Charles Darwin.

These three figures entirely ignored such religious moral virtues as cooperation, altruism, protecting the poor and weak, and regarding all human beings as equal. In contrast, they proposed the falsehood that life is a battlefield, that the oppression and even extermination of the poor and those races whom they regarded as “inferior" was justified; that as a result of that pitiless struggle, the “fittest" would survive and the rest would be eliminated—and that all this would lead to human “progress."

With his theory of evolution, Darwin sought to apply this philosophy of selfishness to the natural sciences. Ignoring the examples of solidarity and cooperation created by God in nature, he maintained that all living things were engaged in a ruthless struggle for survival. On the basis of no scientific evidence whatsoever, he even claimed that this same ruthlessness applied to human societies. When his theory of evolution was applied to human society, social Darwinism appeared on the scene.
Some people suggest that Social Darwinism was born in the second half of the 19th century and lost its influence during the second half of the 20th. But this theory has had far more permanent and damaging adverse effects. A twisted world view, in complete contradiction to religious moral values, has spread, alleging that life is a “struggle for survival," and that people need to compete in order to succeed in that struggle, or at the very least to survive. New lifestyles emerged that were the source of totalitarian and bloody ideologies like communism and fascism, ferocious capitalism that ignores social justice; racism, ethnic conflicts, moral degeneration, and many more disasters that inflicted catastrophes on humanity.

All of a sudden, Social Darwinism imparted an alleged scientific validity to existing evils, ruthless policies and practices. Adopting that trend, which lacks any scientific basis whatsoever, many people failed to live by religious moral values and began to regard ruthlessness, savagery and cruelty as unexceptional. They ignored the fact that religious moral values require virtues such as compassion, affection, understanding, self-sacrifice, solidarity and mutual support between individuals and societies. Perpetrators claimed a scientific foundation to their cruelty, and that therefore, the savagery they inflicted could be regarded as justified. These false claims and suppositions were of course a terrible deception.

In this book, we shall be examining and illuminating two main subjects: First, the dangers of educating young people in the light of Darwinism and of the theory's wide acceptance will be shown to people unaware of, or who ignore, the threat that it poses to societies and individuals.

Second, it will respond to those who maintain that Darwin and evolutionists are not in total agreement with Social Darwinists, and will show that every evolutionist who signs up to the theory of evolution is in fact signing up to Social Darwinism as well.

Throughout, we shall be emphasizing that the model proposed by the theory of evolution, regarding human beings as a species of animal, is an error based on ruthlessness, lovelessness, selfishness and self-interest. Darwinism seeks to construct a world where humans live and behave like animals. Social Darwinism's teachings and practices make this quite clear. According to its twisted views, it is perfectly acceptable for an elderly, needy person to be dragged out of his home and taken away to be killed; or for handicapped people to be rounded up and left to die in concentration camps. According to this distorted thinking, those in the “inferior" classes can be ruthlessly persecuted, exploited and eliminated. Those who believe that human society can progress only when these savage policies are implemented regard such slaughter, genocide, cruelty and ruthlessness as a kind of success. They maintain that individuals and societies—indeed, entire cultures and nations—unable to achieve that success, must be done away with.

Without doubt, that is a most perverted and dangerous way of thinking. Perceiving this danger is of the greatest importance for those who oppose the theory and the ideologies based on it. Societal models based on Darwin and Darwinism are models that will lead to the most dreadful catastrophes. On the other hand, the moral values that God commands to humanity and reveals in the Qur'an will always bring with them peace and well-being
SOCIAL DARWINISM
Racial inequality, and ethnic discrimination, unfair competition, the oppression of the poor, the exploitation of the weak by the strong, and the idea that might is right, are evils that societies have experienced throughout history. Thousands of years ago, for example, at the time of Prophet Moses (pbuh), Pharaoh regarded himself as superior to everyone else on account of his wealth and powerful army. He rejected Prophets Moses and Aaron (peace be upon them) and even sought to kill them, though they were clearly speaking the truth. Pharaoh also implemented discriminatory policies, divided his people into classes, describing some as “inferior," inflicted numerous tortures on the Israelites under his rule, killed their men aiming to bring their race to extinction. The Qur'an describes Pharaoh's perversions:
Pharaoh exalted himself arrogantly in the land and divided its people into camps, oppressing one group of them by slaughtering their sons and letting their women live. He was one of the corrupters. (Surat al-Qasas, 4)

“Am not I better than this man who is contemptible and can scarcely make anything clear?" (Surat az-Zukhruf, 52)

In that way he [Pharaoh] swayed his people and they succumbed to him... (Surat az-Zumar, 54)

And We bequeathed to the people who had been oppressed the easternmost part of the land We had blessed, and its westernmost part as well… (Surat al-A'raf, 137)
Ancient Egypt was by no means the only extremist society where only might was regarded as right, humans were divided into classes, those regarded as “inferior" were oppressed and subjected to inhuman treatment. There are numerous examples of other such regimes, right up to the present day.

In the 19th century, however, these evil practices acquired a whole new dimension. Up until then, measures and policies that had been regarded as cruel, suddenly began to be defended with the falsehood that they were “scientific practices based on facts of nature." What was it that suddenly justified all these forms of ruthlessness?

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was put forward in his book The Origin of Species. Published in 1859, it contained a number of conjectures about the origin of life that led to a most deceptive world view, devoid of any scientific evidence, and a perverted philosophy that denies the existence of God and regards "chance" as a creative force (surely God is beyond that). Views that man was a kind of animal, and life was a sphere of struggle and fierce competition were accepted as scientific truth.

Darwin did not develop this theory, which was advanced as a result of the 19th century's primitive understanding of science, on his own. Some 50 years earlier, in 1798, Thomas Malthus proposed a number of ideas that had nothing to do with reality, in his book Essay on the Principle of Population. This study—which has now been proven to have no scientific value at all—claimed that population increased far more quickly than food resources, and that therefore, population increase needed to be controlled. Malthus suggested that wars and epidemics acted as “natural" checks on population, and were thus beneficial. He was the first to refer to the “struggle for survival." According to his thesis, far removed from humane values, the poor must not be protected but allowed to live under the worst possible conditions and prevented from multiplying, and sufficient food resources must be reserved for the upper classes. “The History of Ruthlessness, from Malthus to Darwin.") This cruel savagery would certainly be opposed by anyone with a conscience and common sense. Although religious moral values require extending a helping hand to the poor and needy, Malthus—and his follower Darwin—said that these people should be ruthlessly left to die.

The British sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer headed the list of those who immediately adopted and developed these inhumane ideas. The term “the survival of the fittest," which sums up Darwinism's basic claim, actually belongs to Spencer. He also claimed that the “unfit" should be eliminated, writing that: “If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die."1 In Spencer's view, the poor, uneducated, sick, crippled and unsuccessful should all die, and he sought to prevent the state from passing laws to protect the poor.

Spencer possessed a great lack of compassion for people who should awaken feelings of compassion and protection and, just like Malthus, he sought for ways to get rid of them. In Darwinism in American Thought, the American historian Richard Hofstadter makes the following comment:

Spencer deplored not only poor laws, but also state-supported education, sanitary supervision other than the suppression of nuisances, regulation of housing conditions, and even state protection of the ignorant from medical quacks.2

Darwin, powerfully influenced by Malthus and Spencer's ruthless world views, proposed in The Origin of Species the myth that species had evolved by means of natural selection. Darwin was no scientist, and took only an amateur's interest in biology. Under the very primitive microscopes of Darwin's time, cells appeared to be nothing more than blurry blots, and the biological laws of inheritance had not yet been discovered. Darwin's theory, developed with very limited scientific knowledge and under inadequate scientific conditions, claimed that nature always “selected" the fittest with the most advantages, and that life developed accordingly. According to this theory, built on totally erroneous foundations right from the outset, life was the work of chance; Darwin thus rejected the fact that life was created by God (Surely God is beyond that!). After The Origin of Species, Darwin set about adapting his unscientific theory to human beings in The Descent of Man. In that book, he referred to how the so-called backward races would be eliminated in the near future, and that the more advanced ones would develop and succeed. Darwin's adapting his theory of evolution to human beings, in this book and certain other of his writings, shaped Social Darwinism.
Darwin's erroneous statement that the weak and powerless need to be oppressed, backed up by his unscientific theory, is one of the main factors behind the spread of inequality and injustice.

His determined followers then carried matters forward. The most prominent proponents and practitioners of Social Darwinism's were Herbert Spencer and Darwin's cousin Francis Galton in Britain, certain academics like William Graham Sumner in America, and Darwinists such as Ernst Haeckel, and later fascist racists like Adolf Hitler in Germany.

Social Darwinism quickly became a means whereby racists, imperialists, proponents of unfair competition under the banner of capitalism, and administrators who failed to fulfill their responsibility to protect the poor and needy attempted to defend themselves. Social Darwinists sought to portray as a natural law the oppression of the weak, the poor and so-called “inferior" races, as well as the elimination of the handicapped by the healthy, and small businesses by large companies, suggesting that this was the only way humanity could progress. They sought to justify all the injustices perpetrated throughout history under a scientific rationale. Social Darwinism's lack of conscience and compassion was depicted as a law of nature and the most important road to so-called evolution.

In particular, various American capitalists justified the climate of unrestrained competition they established, according to their own lights, with quotations from Darwin. In fact, however, this was nothing less than a huge deception. Those who attempted to give ruthless competition a so-called scientific basis were merely lying. For instance, Andrew Carnegie, one of the greatest capitalists and one of those caught up in that falsehood, said the following in a speech he gave in 1889:

The price which society pays for the law of competition, like the price it pays for cheap comforts and luxuries, is also great; but the advantages of this law are also greater still than its cost — for it is to this law that we owe our wonderful material development, which brings improved conditions in its train. ... While the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment; the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few; and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential to the future progress of the race.3

According to Social Darwinism the sole objective of a race is its physical, economic and political development. Individuals' happiness, well-being, peace and security appear unimportant. No compassion at all is felt for those who suffer and cry out for help, for those unable to provide their children, families and aged parents food, medicine or shelter, or for the poor and powerless. According to this twisted concept, someone poor but morally upright is regarded as worthless, and that person's death will actually benefit society. In addition, someone rich but morally corrupt is regarded as “most important" for the “progress of the race" and, no matter what the conditions, that individual is seen as very valuable. This twisted logic propels Social Darwinism's proponents towards moral and spiritual collapse. In 1879, another Social Darwinist, William Graham Sumner, expressed this perverted trend's deceptions:

... we cannot go outside of this alternative: liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; non-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members
The Nazis first sterilized children with mental or inherited illnesses, and then began sending them to gas chambers. Even children lacking just a thumb became the targets of eugenicist killing.

Such cruel savagery has absolutely no place in religious morality. God has commanded people to protect and nurture the needy. Meeting the needs of the poor, treating the handicapped with affection and compassion and observing their rights, and ensuring cooperation and solidarity in society are all required by religious ethics. Those who ignore the moral values commanded by God, however, propel towards catastrophe both themselves and the societies they live in.

Another catastrophe for which Social Darwinism provided alleged justification is colonialism. A number of administrators of colonial states tried to justify their ruthless exploitation of native populations with Darwinist theses lacking any scientific validity or logical consistency. They claimed that “inferior races" needed to be kept under the control of “superior races" because this was a law of nature, and founded their policies on this so-called scientific basis.

By using the twisted logic of Social Darwinism, combatants in the 20th century's two world wars sought to depict war as inevitable. They attempted to depict the killing of the innocent and the poor; the destruction of their homes, businesses, and livestock; the forcing of millions from their homes and lands; and the uncaring slaughter of babies and children as ways of ensuring human progress.

In conclusion, Social Darwinism was the motive force that cost the lives of millions in the 19th and 20th centuries. With it, many evils that had persisted for centuries acquired an alleged scientific justification. In his book The Mismeasure of Man, the late evolutionist paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould reveals this yet again in commenting on Darwin's Origin of Species:

Subsequent arguments for slavery, colonialism, racial differences, class structures, and sex roles would go forth primarily under the banner of science

Darwin Himself Was a Social Darwinist
No matter how much today's evolutionists try to separate Darwin's name from the sufferings that Social Darwinism gave birth to, Darwin used unambiguous Social Darwinist expressions, especially in his Descent of Man and other writings. As far back as 1869, in a letter to Hugo Thiel he stated that he saw no objection to his theory being applied to society:
You will really believe how much interested I am in observing that you apply to moral and social questions analogous views to those which I have used in regard to the modification of species
Benjamin Wiker is a lecturer in theology and science at Franciscan University and author of Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists. In an interview, he stated that Darwin was the first Social Darwinist, and continued:

Like it or not, it is quite clear when you read his Descent of Man that Darwin himself was the first Social Darwinist and the father of the modern eugenics movement. Social Darwinism and eugenics are derived directly from his principle of natural selection.

I think the real reason for people objecting to someone making connections between Darwinism and things like eugenics is that they don't want the theory to be tarnished by its moral implications. But the implications are there, not only in the text, but as evidenced in the social and moral effects Darwinism has had in the century and a half since it appeared

Benjamin Wiker's book Moral Darwinism

Darwin's book The Descent of Man

The perception of war as necessary for the advancement of races or nations is one result of Darwinist philosophy that wreaked such destruction. French streets shattered during World War II, one of the bloodiest wars ever, are proof of this.

many of Darwin's expressions and statements clearly reveal him to have been the original source of Social Darwinism. Modern evolutionists hesitate to accept these views on account of Social Darwinism's terrifying results in the 20th century. Yet competition, racism, and discrimination—fundamental elements of Social Darwinism—also lie at the basis of the theory of evolution. Whether or not evolutionists accept the fact, these are the consequences of adopting Darwinism. Any theory that views human beings as the product of chance, as a slightly more advanced form of animal; that claims that some races are less developed than others and are therefore closer to animals; and that humanity can progress by means of the strong oppressing the weak, will inevitably have tragic consequences. Evolutionists' apparent rejection of Social Darwinism is no solution. Our hope is that those whom has the theory deceived will finally come to accept that the theory of evolution is scientifically bankrupt.
The Error of Applying Nature's Laws to Human Beings
The primitive microscopes of Darwin's time gave the impression that the cell was merely a simple structure of undifferentiated protoplasm.

At the time when Darwin proposed his theory, science was still rather backward in many respects. The electron microscope had not yet been invented, for which reason the minute details of living organisms were unseen. The cell still resembled a simple blot, and no one knew that it possessed a structure no less complex than that of a city, made up of a great many different organelles. There was no science of genetics; the biological laws of inheritance remained to be discovered. Many biologists and scientists, including Darwin himself, were sufficiently ignorant as to believe that “acquired" characteristics could be passed on to subsequent generations. For example, they believed that if a blacksmith developed powerful muscles because of his work, his sons would have equally strong muscles. In that primitive scientific climate, Darwin developed his theory. Neither Darwin nor any who supported him was able to submit evidence for the theory of evolution from such branches of science as paleontology, biology or anatomy. Moreover, observations and experiments performed in the following years, and especially new findings obtained in the 20th century, revealed that the theory was clearly wrong. But despite the theory's scientific weakness, its providing a basis for materialist and atheist thought led to its immediate adoption by one part of the scientific world.
Certain circles began to apply the theory of evolution to the social sphere, on account of the ideological messages it contained. It took its place at the root of such 20th-century disasters as genocide, mass slaughter, civil wars in which brother slew brother, and world wars that ruined nations. Religious moral values and the virtues they bring with them, were abandoned in favor of the law of the jungle in which the weaker are oppressed and eliminated. This theory, devoid of any scientific validity, influenced an entire century.

One of Social Darwinists' major errors was their attempt to implement that theory to the social arena. Another of their errors was to assume that laws applying to animals also applied to human beings whom God has created with conscience, reason, consciousness and the ability to make judgments. Therefore, contrary to what Social Darwinists claim, the laws of the jungle do not apply to human beings, every one of whom is responsible for using his abilities as best as he can throughout his life. God has also created human beings with a finite life span. When it comes to an end, all individuals will die, and will then be resurrected to account for all their behavior during their life of this world.

In nature, living things may die or become extinct when they cannot adapt to the prevailing conditions. For example, a dark-haired rabbit in a snow-covered forest may soon fall prey to a fox who can see it clearly. Yet, contrary to what Darwinists would have us believe, dead dark-haired rabbits don't give rise to the emergence of a new lighter-haired species. Furthermore, animals are very different from human beings, who do not have to adapt to natural conditions in order to live. We possess the means to change our surroundings in accordance with our needs and wishes. For instance, we adapt our buildings, heating and cooling systems and clothing according to the climate where we live. There is no natural selection in human societies, because human beings' reason and abilities prevent such elimination.
On the other hand, modern-day microscopes have shown how complex and flawless the structure of the cell truly is.

If a society's needy are mistreated and abandoned to their own devices, this leads to tension and anger, unless patience and forgiveness prevail, encouraged by religious moral values.

Such errors lead Social Darwinists to look at societies from an inhuman perspective. An important example of that perspective, so devoid of reason and conscience, is how they thought that societies could progress by abandoning the weak and needy, the powerless and handicapped to their own devices. The fact is that such a selfish refusal brings with it decline, not progress. Those whom Darwinism maintains should be neglected and left uncared for are conscious human beings, able to think and reason. When abandoned to injustice and cruelty, unless they possess the virtues of patience, forgiveness and understanding imparted by religious moral values, they may feel great anger and hatred for those who inflict such treatment on them. To assuage that anger, as many recent examples have shown, they may then resort to violence, which can then give rise to conflict and chaos. As a result of all the material and spiritual means expended to resolve those conflicts, there will be a decline in all spheres—from art to technology, from the economy to science—rather than progress.
Furthermore, killing the sick or handicapped in the name of eugenics, is not only terribly brutal, but also contributes nothing whatsoever to social progress. Such an open acceptance of murder will bring enormous losses that will spell ruin for society. Today, some 6% of the world's population—some half a billion people, a very large number—are handicapped. That would mean that everyone would lose someone from his family or circle of acquaintances, and will have acquiesced in their deaths. This will open spiritual wounds that wreak great harm on people's psychological well-being. In any society where a mother cannot trust her children, children their mother, or brothers each other, where one can allow another to be killed at any time, there will be severe degeneration and depression. In any case, a society that kills people just because they are handicapped is undergoing a devastating moral collapse. It must already have lost all spiritual values, all humanity. Without doubt, to claim progress by means of murder indicates very serious mental and psychological problems.

The greatest suffering will be experienced by those condemned to “elimination," and that suffering will give rise to deep wounds in the consciences of others.

As the following pages will show, Social Darwinism sought, to apply to societies the theory of evolution—itself based on Charles Darwin's rather backward scientific understanding—but its world view is in total conflict with human nature. When put into practice, it belittles humanity and drags it back towards depression and chaos, bringing hatred that leads to conflict, warfare, and murder. Social Darwinism reached its peak during the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, but its adverse effects can still be seen in the present day. Under such names as “evolutionary psychology" and “genetic determinism," attempts are still being made to evaluate societies according to the errors of Darwinism. In order to protect the 21st century from further catastrophes, the dangers of Social Darwinism must be revealed in all their aspects, and the world must be told that there is no scientific evidence for the theory on which this philosophy is based.
Social Darwinist practices inflicted on humanity only hatred and anger, conflict, murder and war.

If the suffering of the last century is not to be repeated, and if this 21st century is to be one of peace, then people need to be made aware of Darwinism's deceptions and dangers.

THE HISTORY OF RUTHLESSNESS, FROM MALTHUS TO DARWIN
As we already made clear, Darwin's views in The Origin of Species were most influenced by the British economist and demographer Thomas Robert Malthus.

In Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future, first published in 1798, Malthus claimed that the human population was increasing every twenty-five years in a geometrical ratio (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256…), while the food supply was increasing in an arithmetical ratio (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9...); that as the population doubled, food resources showed a much more modest rise. Malthus claimed that within 300 years, the ratio of population to food resources would be 4,096 to 13. Again according to this unscientific claim, resources were insufficient for the rapidly rising population, and Malthus alleged that it was becoming essential to engage in a serious struggle for survival. This was the same claim expressed in the subtitle to Darwin's The Origin of Species: the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life...
Thomas Robert Malthus

In his Essay, Malthus stated that this rapid population rise needed to be halted, and came up with a number of solutions. According to him, misery and vice were the two main factors that checked population growth. Phenomena such as famine and epidemics were examples of misery, which kept population in check. Other examples were such phenomena as wars. Malthus wrote that rapid population increase could be checked by such means as war, famine, disease and the killing of newborn babies, to balance population and food resources. Anyone with common sense and a conscience will agree that such a claim is irrational, illogical, and horrendously brutal. Accurate planning of income and essential resources for the well-being and peace of societies is of course of the greatest importance for the future of those societies. However, it is also evident that planning wars, slaughter and murder will inflict nothing but tears and suffering on a society's future.

Malthus had a number of other illogical recommendations. For example, he suggested that all possible measures should be taken to prevent poor or laboring-class couples from having children. Malthus's views reached a peak in 1834 with a new law passed in England setting up special “workhouses” for the poor. Under that law, married couples in workhouses were kept apart by means of fixed rules to reduce the rise in population.

One of the factors underlying these measures was the longstanding fear that the rapidly rising numbers of the “lower classes” would eventually overwhelm more civilized individuals. That fear is groundless, of course, and the product of a grave deception. First, it is out of the question for an individual to enjoy superiority over anyone else because of his material status, social position, language, race or gender. God has created all human beings equal. What makes people valuable is the moral virtues and the fear of God they exhibit, not material means or physical attributes.

In the wake of the French Revolution, however, the British middle class provided enormous support for Malthusianism. Fearing that they might no longer maintain their former pre-eminence and power, they had no hesitation over adopting radical measures to preserve them. This is one of the characteristic errors made by those who distance themselves from religious moral values. The elite of that time thought that society's future lay in there being as many wealthy and as few poor as possible. Of course it is desirable to raise the number of wealthy people and the level of well-being in a society. However, the methods implemented to increase that well-being are of greatest importance. Raising the numbers of the wealthy by slaughtering the poor and oppressing the needy, as Social Darwinism suggests, is totally unacceptable, of course. Furthermore, increasing the number of wealthy individuals is, by itself, not enough for a society to progress. If those wealthy people lack such religious moral values as honesty, altruism, modesty, patience, and tolerance, their industry will damage a society instead of benefiting it. Plans aimed at advancing societies can achieve their objective only if that society reinforces its spiritual values at the same time as it makes material progress.

However, many in Malthus's time failed to realize this manifest truth and supported the perverted views that would later lead their societies into moral collapse.

To halt the rise in population, these were some of the ruthless solutions Malthus suggested:

Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate [strongly condemn] specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders
Malthus also encouraged the death of babies:

... we are bound in justice and honour formally to disclaim the right of the poor to support. To this end, I should propose a regulation to be made, declaring, that no child born... should ever be entitled to parish assistance... The [illegitimate] infant is, comparatively speaking, of little value to the society, as others will immediately supply its place... All the children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to this [desired] level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons
According to Social Darwinism's twisted propaganda—one of the most pitiless philosophies in history—the weak and powerless must be left to die.

Malthus possessed a sufficiently twisted logical framework as to justify letting newborns die for the future of society. You might well assume that such perverted views are a thing of the past and could no longer be accepted by anyone today. Yet that is not the case. In modern-day China, population planning is carried out by means of the killing of newborn babies—making it easy to see the permanent effects on societies of the destructive views of Malthus and his follower Darwin. The communist Chinese state seeks to prevent its own people from living by religious moral values, and looks at them through a Darwinist eye. For that reason, in addition to the enormous social and moral collapse, human beings are forced to work in labor camps devoid of the most basic humane conditions. Children of parents with already more children than the number permitted by the state are collected and killed. People are executed for “thought crimes,” the executions themselves having assumed the form of societal ceremonies. Contemporary China is an example of what awaits a society that falls under the influence of Darwinist views.

Malthus's theses not only prepared an oppressive law that further worsened the conditions of the poor in England, they also made social problems even more intractable. These theses, which still have their proponents today, and which led the way to a theory such as Darwinism which inflicted disasters like chaos, war, racism and atheism on the 20th century, have no valid scientific foundations whatsoever. Indeed, Malthus's ideas were inspired by a story relating to goats and dogs, the truth of which nobody could be sure of.
From Goats and Dogs to Darwinism
Malthus's real source of inspiration for his Essay was a story about goats on a Southeast Pacific island, said to have been left there by Juan Fernandez, a Spanish sailor. According to the tale, these goats multiplied and became a source of meat for mariners calling at the island. But the goats rapidly grew in number and began to consume all the sources of food on the island. In order to prevent British privateers—who molested Spanish trade—from making use of the goats' meat, the Spanish landed male and female dogs on the island. In time, the dogs began to grow in number, and killed most of the goats.

Condorcet Townsend, the French mathematician and revolutionary, wrote that in this way, a natural equilibrium was established. “The weakest of both species,” he went on to say, “were the first to pay the debt of nature; the most active and vigorous preserved their lives. It is the quantity of food which regulates the number of the human species.”10

As we already stated, various natural circumstances may have an effect on an animal's numbers increasing or declining and on species surviving or becoming extinct. Yet it is a grave error to suppose that this dynamic also applies to human societies, and experience shows the terrible results of putting such an error into practice.

Under the Poor Law then in force in Great Britain, the poor were not left to go hungry, but were forced to work very hard. Townsend maintained that these laws obliging the poor to work resulted in excessive difficulties and protests. Instead, he claimed that it was more reasonable to bring the poor to heel by means of hunger. According to Townsend, “hunger will tame the fiercest animals, and will teach them civility, obedience, and subjection.”11 At the root of that ruthless and unconscionable attitude lies the error of classing people according to their material means and physical attributes. Such discrimination, totally incompatible with religious moral values, has disrupted the social order and led to chaos, anarchy and conflict throughout history.

After Townsend, the story of the goats and dogs also constituted the basis of Malthus's theses. It also represents the source of inspiration for the error expressed in the term “the survival of the fittest,” used by Herbert Spencer, and of Darwin's error of “evolution by natural selection.”

As we have already emphasized, applying to human beings certain laws that apply to animals was a great error made by a chain of people, beginning with Townsend and followed by Malthus, Spencer and Darwin. They regarded humans as savage creatures that could be reined in only by radical measures and kept under control by war, hunger and poverty. The truth is, though, that human beings are endowed with reason and common sense. They act in accordance with logic and their conscience, not according to instincts, as animals do.
Malthus's Claims Not Based on Scientific Data
Malthus's theory received support from various circles at the time, and also constituted the foundation of a number of perverted ideologies and movements in the following century. Yet it rests on no scientific foundations and is riddled with inconsistencies. For example:
1) At the time Malthus wrote, there were no data regarding population increases at his disposal. The first national census in Great Britain was carried out in 1801, three years after Malthus wrote his Essay. In any case, for Malthus to calculate the rate of population growth, he would have needed statistics for years previous to 1801. He therefore had no reliable statistics on which to base a figure for that growth, and his claims were based entirely on presupposition.

2) Nor did Malthus possess any data with which to calculate the growth of food resources. At the time, there was no way of calculating how much land was under cultivation, not how many crops it produced. Again, he engaged in mere conjecture.

3) In any case, the law that Malthus proposed was contradictory in itself. He suggested that populations increased geometrically. In that case, animals and plant populations also increased geometrically, and these two form the basis of human life. In practice, however, animals, plants and human beings do not multiply geometrically: Their rates of increase vary according to prevailing circumstances. The entire ecosystem, humans included, exists within a most balanced equilibrium. The self-evident order in nature is a long way from “Eat or be eaten,” the so-called struggle for survival proposed by Malthus and Darwin.

In short, Malthus's erroneous and illogical claims rest on no scientific foundations whatsoever. Yet Darwin constructed his theory of evolution on Malthus's conjectures.
God commands people to protect the needy, and to be affectionate and compassionate. The spread of the moral values He commanded will resolve a great many problems.
THE CLAIM THAT “LIFE IS STRUGGLE” IS UNTRUE

Out of devotion to Malthus and Darwin, some have carried the idea that “life is struggle” to the ultimate extremes, claiming that not just animals, but all living things compete with one another. The German embryologist Wilhelm Roux claimed that organs were struggling with each other for nourishment, kidneys against lungs, heart against brain. T. H. Huxley even maintained that all the molecules within each organism were competing with each other!.1

Biological discoveries of the 20th century showed that no such struggle goes on in nature. Today's biologists refer not to competition as the basis of the organism, but to cooperation. For example, in his book The Lives of a Cell, the biologist Thomas Lewis writes:

Most of the associations between the living things we know about are essentially cooperative ones, symbiotic in one degree or another; when they have the look of adversaries, it is usually a standoff relation, with one party issuing signals, warnings, flagging the other off...2

Norman Macbeth, author of Darwin Retried: an Appeal to Reason, describes how Malthus and Darwin were mistaken and how there are no struggles to the death in nature:

Darwin took it over from Malthus, who was a sociologist (and a grim one) rather than a biologist. It was not derived from a loving contemplation of plants and animals. Such a contemplation... would not show that “each organic being was striving to increase at a geometrical ratio” or that there was continual struggle...3

In his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Peter Kropotkin describes the error into which Darwin and his supporters fell:

The numberless followers of Darwin reduced the notion of struggle for existence to its narrowest limits. They came to conceive the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved individuals, thirsting for one another's blood… if we take Huxley… the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiators' show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to, fight hereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day… But it may be remarked at once that Huxley's view of nature had as little claim to be taken as a scientific deduction.4

An article in the Turkish scientific journal Bilim ve Teknik (Science and Technology Magazine) admits the error in claiming that nature is a battleground:

The problem is why living things help one another. According to Darwin's theory, every organism carries out a struggle to survive and reproduce. Since helping others would reduce that creature's odds to survive, evolution in the long term should have eliminated that behavior. It has been observed, however, that living things can be altruistic.5

Together, these facts reveal once again that Darwin's theory, produced under primitive scientific conditions, is filled with errors and deceptions. A great many branches of science reveal the invalidity of the theory of evolution. Those who support it, supposedly in the name of science, must not ignore the responsibility they assume in supporting such an unscientific theory, and must abandon this error at once.

1. T. D. Hall, Ph.D., “Influence of Malthus and Darwin on the European Elite,” 1995, http://www.trufax.org/avoid/manifold.html
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 1902,; http://www.spunk.org/library/writers/kropotki/sp001503/ch1.html
5. Bilim ve Teknik (Science and Technology Magazine), No: 190, 4.
Darwin the Malthusian
In his autobiography, Darwin wrote:

In October 1838, that is fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence that everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances, favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, Ihad at last got a theory by which to work...

The concepts of evolution by natural selection and the struggle for survival took shape in Darwin's mind after reading Malthus. In The Origin of Species Darwin admitted that he had fully accepted Malthus's claims:

There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in less than a thousand years, there would literally not be standing-room for his progeny.13

Darwin described the relationship between Malthus's theory and the thesis of natural selection thus:

As more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.
Malthus's distorted logic was also applied to children, many of whom were forced to work under very harsh conditions.

These ideas of Darwin's, which found support in the twisted thinking of Malthus, possess no scientific value. Moreover, this cruel perspective maintains that population planning can be ensured by eliminating the weak and poor, and preaches that the weak need to be destroyed. Regarding life not as based on peace, security and understanding, but as a matter of mere survival necessitating a ruthless struggle, it inflicted the most terrible catastrophes on societies.
From Malthus to a Ruthless World ViewAlthough Malthus and Darwin's views lacked any scientific foundation, they received wide support. We need to seek the reason for this in the period in which they both lived, which was post-Industrial Revolution England. Following the Industrial Revolution, the British aristocracy feared it would surrender its status and power to the working class. On the other hand, they needed a larger, cheap work force. As a result of that dilemma, the ruling class in Britain drew the conclusion that the “lower class” had to be weakened, brought under control, oppressed, and put to work. In stating that food resources were insufficient in the face of a rapidly rising population, Malthus suggested that the solution lay in preventing the “lower orders” from multiplying, thus causing a number of measures to be taken against the poor. By applying Malthus's thesis to natural sciences and biology, Darwin provided the claim with a fictitious scientific guise.

In his book Social Darwinism in American Thought, Richard Hofstadter says this about Darwin's support for Malthus's thesis:

Malthusianism had become popular in England... it had also been used to relieve the rich of responsibility for the sufferings of the poor. Malthus had been proved wrong by the course of events; and just when his theory was dying out in political economy it received fresh support from Darwinian biology.
According to Malthus, the “lower class” had to be brought under control, oppressed, weakened and made to work. When his twisted view was accepted, the working class was forced to labor under the most appalling conditions.

In an article, researcher and author Ian Taylor has this to say about the degenerate ideas in Malthus's thesis:
The lesson in all this is that Darwin and others who reject both God and the promise of His providence and intervention have found in the Malthus principle a terrifying spectre of tragedy and despair that has driven them into unspeakable ethical and absurd scientific propositions. This in spite of the obvious weaknesses and deficiencies in Malthus argument.16

Although science refuted Malthus's “ruthless, despair-inducing, nonsensical” claim, it has still managed to remain influential up to the present day. Ian Taylor's book In the Minds of Men summarizes the chain of ruthlessness that began with Malthus and ended with Hitler:

The maxim on which Malthus based his thinking was what later became the “survival of the fittest” theme. The notion can be traced from Condorcet to Malthus, to Spencer, to Wallace, and to Darwin. It eventually mushroomed out to influence men such as Adolf Hitler, but we should be reminded that it all began in the tale of the goats and dogs.

As we have seen, various administrators and leaders sought to use Malthus's opinions to mask their own interests. Various opinion formers with their own ideological concerns played an important role in those views receiving such wide acceptance. The disasters caused by the support given to this ruthless world view, were on a scale never been seen before. In the following pages, we shall examine how this merciless world view that began with Malthus gained strength under the name of Social Darwinism—and what it cost humanity.
Those in need of a cheap workforce were the first to support Malthus's misguided views
THE “ROBBER BARONS,” DARWIN’S FOLLOWERS
Darwinism lies behind a great many dangerous intellectual trends, ideologies and practices that have persisted down to the present day. It is most interesting that it constitutes a foundation shared by ideologies that are completely opposed to one another. Darwinism played a role in the birth and spread of Nazism, fascism and communism, in the alleged justification of racist and communist massacres, and also constituted the alleged scientific basis for “unrestrained capitalism." In Victorian Britain and America, in particular, Darwinism received great acclamation and was hugely strengthened because of the support it offered to ruthless capitalists known as the “robber barons."
Savage capitalism's most important error is in putting no limit on the extent to which weaker businesses (and weaker individuals) can be crushed, exploited and eliminated. No doubt this cruelty and ruthlessness are totally unacceptable. Today this error is summed up in the saying, “Big fish eat little fish." In other words, small enterprises are eliminated—or acquired—by larger ones. That is Darwinism applied to the world of business.

During the 20th century, the world tried two main different economic models: the liberal one, based on private property and free intervention; and the socialist one, based on state property and a planned economy. Socialist economies failed in every country, inflicting poverty and misery on their societies. Liberal economics, on the other hand, displayed unquestioned success, bringing greater well-being to individuals and societies.

But by itself a liberal economy is not enough to bring well-being to a whole society. Thanks to the liberal economy, a society's economic well-being generally rises, but not everyone can enjoy his share of that increase. The poor remain poor, and the danger of social injustice begins to increase. To prevent that danger and to eliminate social injustice, two things are necessary:

1) The state must extend a hand to the down-and-out and the unemployed, as a requirement of the concept of the “social state" and take measures to help them.

2) Feelings of cooperation and solidarity, that religious moral values require, need to pervade society as a whole.
According to Social Darwinist's cruel morality, no helping hand should be extended to the poor and needy.

Maltreated people facing famine or impoverished by war and conflict deserve the help of the wealthy. Under Social Darwinist morality, however, people are not encouraged to assist one another or care for the needy.

The second requirement is particularly important because in the end, it tends to define the first. If a society attaches powerful importance to religious and moral values, then the liberal economy that society implements will provide both economic development and social justice. The rich will use part of their acquired capital to help the poor and establish social programs to support the weak. (Indeed, this is the economic model revealed by God in the Qur'an. Private property does exist in Islam, but its owners are charged to use part of their assets, in the form of alms, to assist the poor and those in need.)
If a society undergoes moral degeneration, then the liberal economy turns into “savage capitalism" in which the poor and down-and-out are oppressed and receive no help at all, in which there are no social welfare programs, and where social injustice is regarded not as a problem but as a “natural" state of affairs.

The economic model we shall be criticizing here is not the liberal economy—the free economic model based on private property and competition—but savage capitalism.

The source of inspiration behind it, as we shall show in due course, is Social Darwinism.

Those who first brought Darwinist practices into the business world were the Americans known as the “robber barons." They believed in Darwinism and thought that its claim regarding “the survival of the fittest" somehow justified their own ruthless practices.18 The result was the start of a ruthless competition in business, capable of ending even in murder. The robber barons' sole aim was to make even more money and gain even more power. They had no interest in social well-being, even for their own workers. Millions of lives were ruined when Darwinism entered the economy, causing extremely low wages, appalling working conditions, and long working hours. The lack of any safety precautions caused workers to fall ill, become injured, or even die.
In the light of Social Darwinist concepts, low wages, harsh working conditions, long hours of working and the lack of any safety precautions in workplaces led to workers falling ill, being injured or even killed.
The Cruelties of Darwinist Employers
With the Industrial Revolution that began in England and soon spread to the whole of the rest of the world, new factories were built and machines began to be used in them. People were frequently injured because some employers attached no value to human life, especially that of the workers, and refused to take the necessary safety precautions. Most of these injuries resulted either in death or in the loss of fingers, hands or arms. It has been determined that in the 1900s a million workers a year died, suffered serious handicaps or fell sick

In 19th-century factories and other industrial enterprises, Social Darwinist and capitalist practices were imposed in their most savage forms. Employers with that mindset regarded workers' lives as worthless and thought of their own interests only.

For workers who spent their lives in a factory, the loss of a limb or organ was almost inevitable. During their working lives, more than half of workers either fell ill or suffered serious injuries such as the loss of arms and legs, or of sight or hearing. For example, workers manufacturing stiff brim hats suffered mercury poisoning. Almost all radium dial painter workers ended up with cancer.
Although employers were fully aware of working conditions and the accidents taking place, some took no steps at all to improve conditions. Many steel mill foundry workers worked twelve-hour shifts in temperatures of 40 to 50 degrees C (117oF) for very low wages.21 In 1892, U.S. President Benjamin Harrison summarized these inhuman conditions by saying that every day, the average American worker faced the same hazards as a soldier at war.22

Some capitalist businessmen attached no importance to human life and regarded it as expendable. During the construction of the railroads alone, hundreds lost their lives due to bad conditions.23 One of the most striking examples of this ruthlessness is of the American businessman J.P. Morgan, who purchased 5,000 defective rifles at $3.50 apiece and sold them to the U.S. Army for $22. In other words, he had so lost any trace of moral comprehension that he was capable of cheating his own nation and endangering the lives of its enlisted men. Soldiers who used these defective rifles had their thumbs blown off.24 Troops injured by these rifles sued Morgan but lost, because in those days the courts generally decided in favor of the robber barons

When asked to build roof protection for his workers, one of the capitalist employers of the time replied, that “men are cheaper than shingles"—another example of the ruthlessness of those days.26

At the root of all this cruelty, the influence of Darwinism can be easily discerned. A world view that regards humans as a species of animal, and believes in the lie that some people are less developed than others, that life is a place of struggle where only might prevails, results in ruthlessness, pitilessness and oppression.
In the 19th century, not even children were pitied, being forced to labor for long hours at exhausting jobs.
The Damage Wreaked by Darwinism in the Business World
Most businessmen who supported unrestrained capitalism had actually been raised as believers in God. Later, however, under the influence of Darwinism's false suggestions, they abandoned their belief. For example, the American industrialist Andrew Carnegie, one of the foremost names in the steel industry in the 19th century, had first been devoted to Christianity. In his autobiography, Carnegie openly described how he and many of his friends had fallen under the deceptions of Darwinism.

However, the theory of evolution that Carnegie regarded as a fact, consisted of falsehood in its entirety. In the years that followed, advances in the world of science revealed the true face of that deception. Yet at that time, other businessmen who made the same error as Carnegie accepted savage capitalism as a result of Darwinist suggestion. This led them into regarding ruthless competition as perfectly justified to make even more money, and into attaching no value to altruism and human life.

Carnegie thought that competition was an inevitable law of life and constructed his entire philosophy upon that error. He maintained that, although the law of competition made it difficult for some people, it was best for the race, because it ensured the survival of the fittest in every department
Andrew Carnegie

Those who first introduced Carnegie to Darwinism were a number of so-called free and enlightened thinkers seeking a new “religion of humanity," whom he met at the home of a New York University professor.28 One of the members of Carnegie's intimate circle was Herbert Spencer, the follower of Darwin and one of the most important figures in Social Darwinism. These businessmen adopted the twisted thinking of Spencer and Darwin, but were unable to calculate the impasse into which it would drag both them and their society.

Richard Milner, an anthropologist from the American Museum of Natural History and author of The Encyclopedia of Evolution, describes how Carnegie fell under the influence of Darwinism:

Carnegie rose in business to become a powerful, ruthless tycoon who exploited man and Earth, crushed competition, and justified his actions by a philosophy of Social Darwinism. Entrepreneurial competition, he believed, does a service to society by eliminating the weaker elements. Those who survive in business are “fit," and therefore deserve their positions and rewards.
John D. Rockefeller

Carnegie and those who thought like him made a grave error to assume that being powerful and ruthless was part of business life. It is perfectly natural that people should earn a living in order to live at ease and in comfort. However, it is completely unacceptable to cause harm to others, to turn a blind eye to people in difficult circumstances for the sake of one's own interests, or to oppress the weak in order to increase one's own power still further. God has commanded people to be honest in business, as in all other spheres, and to protect the rights of the needy. It is an enormous lie to suggest that by oppressing the weak and even seeking to eliminate them altogether, one is aiming for the good of society.

In his later years, Carnegie always used Darwinist expressions in his conversations, statements and writings. In his book Andrew Carnegie, the historian Joseph F. Wall says this:

Not only in his published articles and books but also in his personal letters to business contemporaries, Carnegie makes frequent and easy allusions to the Social Darwinist credo. Phrases like “survival of the fittest," “race improvement," and “struggle for existence" came easily from his pen and presumably from his lips. He did see business as a great competitive struggle...30

Another of those taken in by Darwinist suggestions was the famous American industrialist John D. Rockefeller, who said that: “growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest ... the working out of a law of nature…"31

One can see one of the clearest instances of the effect of Darwinism on the business world in Spencer's American trip, which Richard Hofstadter describes in Social Darwinism in American Thought:

However imperfect the appreciation of the guests for the niceties of Spencer's thought, the banquet showed how popular he had become in the United States. When Spencer was on the dock, waiting for the ship carry him back to England, he seized the hands of Carnegie and Youmans. “Here," he cried the reporters, “are my two best American friends." For Spencer it was a rare gesture of personal warmth; but more than this, it symbolized the harmony of the new science [Social Darwinism] with the outlook of a business civilization.32

One reason why some capitalists adopted Social Darwinism was that it absolved the wealthy from any responsibility for the poor. In societies that preserve moral values, the rich are expected to show an interest in helping the poor and needy, and Social Darwinism attempted to eliminate that virtue. In The Golden Door: The United States from 1876 to 1918, science writer Isaac Asimov comments on this ruthless aspect of Social Darwinism:

Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest" and in 1884 argued, for instance, that people who were unemployable or burdens on society should be allowed to die rather than be made objects of help and charity. To do this, apparently, would weed out unfit individuals and strengthen the race. It was a horrible philosophy that could be used to justify the worst impulses of human beings.33

Just as those who implemented savage capitalism supported Darwinism, so Darwinists supported them. For example, William Graham Sumner claimed that millionaires were “the fittest individuals in society," then made illogical deductions that they therefore deserved special privileges and were “naturally selected in the crucible of competition."34 In an article about Social Darwinism in The Humanist periodical, professor of philosophy Stephen Asma describes Spencer's support for capitalists:

Spencer coined the phrase survival of the fittest, and Darwin adopted the parlance in later editions of his Origin of Species. ... According to Spencer and his American disciples—business entrepreneurs like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie—social hierarchy reflects the unwavering, universal laws of nature. Nature unfolds in such a way that the strong survive and the weak perish. Thus, the economic and social structures that survive are “stronger" and better, and those structures that don't were obviously meant to founder.35

But as has already been emphasized, spiritual values and their preservation represent the principal element in the progress of societies. In societies where the spirit of cooperation and solidarity is strong, where people approach one another with compassion and respect, economic difficulties in circumstances can easily be overcome in a spirit of togetherness. But where human relations have disappeared, and people lacking any compassion and understanding regard everyone else solely as rivals, many more destructive effects began to arise, even if there is economic progress. Therefore, all individuals in a society need to produce solutions to raise the quality of life and well-being, to bring about an environment where people can enjoy not just economic but psychological security. Obviously, that can only happen by living by religious moral values. As has been proved countless times, no movement or ideology incompatible with religious moral values can ever provide the well-being, peace and security for which people long.
Savage Capitalism: The Joint Product of Social Darwinism and Irreligiousness
From the 19th century onwards, Darwinist capitalists maintained that only the rich and powerful had the right to live and that the poor, the weak, the crippled and sick were “useless burdens," establishing oppressive systems in a great many countries. In this climate of ruthless competition, it was seen as perfectly justified to exploit, oppress, intimidate, frighten, injure and even kill people. No forms of immoral or illegal activity were prevented or condemned, since these were regarded as “compatible with the laws of nature." In many countries where people do not live by religious moral values, this system still continues today. The gap between rich and poor is growing at an ever-increasing rate, and the conditions in which the needy live are ignored. According to the propaganda of Social Darwinism, protecting and caring for the poor and needy is a violation of the laws of nature, and since such people are regarded as a burden, no help is extended to them.

Great differences between levels of well-being exist not only within a country, but also between countries. As the level of well-being rises rapidly in the West, famine, sickness and poverty afflict many Third World countries, where people are dying from starvation and neglect. If used in a rational and conscientious manner, however, the world's resources are plentiful enough to provide for all those now abandoned to hunger and poverty.

In order for the world's resources to provide humane conditions, it is essential that Darwinism's intellectual influence be eradicated all over the world. When Darwinist views and understanding are replaced by the moral values of the Qur'an, such problems will naturally be resolved. That is because while Darwinism inculcates the idea of ruthless competition and the oppression of the poor, religious moral values impart compassion, protection, mutual cooperation, solidarity and sharing. For instance, our Prophet (may God bless him and grant him peace) says in one of the hadith, “A believer is not the [mature] one who eats his fill when his neighbor is hungry."36 These wise words of the Prophet (may God bless him and grant him peace) are one of the indications of Muslims' affection and compassion.

In many of His verses, God has commanded love, compassion, affection and altruism and given Muslims examples of proper moral behavior. While social Darwinism consists of the rich using the poor and needy as stepping stones in order to rise, Islamic moral values command the rich to protect them. Some of the verses on this subject revealed by God are as follows:

Those of you possessing affluence and ample wealth should not make oaths that they will not give to their relatives and the very poor and those who have migrated in the way of God. They should rather pardon and overlook… (Surat an-Nur, 22)

They will ask you what they should give away. Say, “Any wealth you give away should go to your parents and relatives and to orphans and the very poor and travelers…" (Surat al-Baqara, 215)
... Eat of them and feed those who are poor and in need. (Surat al-Hajj, 28)

[Believers are] those in whose wealth there is a known share for beggars and the destitute. (Surat al-Ma'arij, 24-25)

They give food, despite their love for it, to the poor and orphans and captives: “We feed you only out of desire for the Face of God. We do not want any repayment from you or any thanks. Truly We fear from our Lord a glowering, calamitous Day." (Surat al-Insan, 8-10)

The world has enough resources for everyone, but these must be used in a rational and caring manner. Food goes to waste in many parts of the world, while people in many other countries are dying from starvation and poverty. If these people are to attain justice, the Social Darwinist mentality must be entirely eradicated.

THE 19th CENTURY
Images of Great Britain in the second half of the 19th century. While part of the country enjoyed wealth and well-being, another lived in poverty.

THE 20th CENTURY

Nothing changed, despite the passing of one hundred years. Yet the world's resources are rich enough for everyone to live in comfort. What needs to be disseminated is the altruism, cooperation and solidarity required by religious moral values.

In the Qur'an, God also reveals that those who do not help the poor and weak will be rewarded with Hell:

They [the companions of the Right] will ask the evildoers: “What caused you to enter Saqar?" They will say, “We were not among those who performed prayer and we did not feed the poor." (Surat al-Muddaththir, 41-44)

Then bind him in a chain which is seventy cubits long. He used not to believe in God the Magnificent, nor did he urge the feeding of the poor. Therefore here today he has no friend. (Surat al-Haqqa, 32-35)

It must not be forgotten: It is Almighty God, the Lord of all existence and all the universe, Who gives everyone his earnings and success. A person does not become wealthy by engaging in ruthless competition in the “struggle for survival" or by oppressing the weak. It is God Who gives everyone all that they possess, distributing wealth among them in order to test them. A wealthy person is actually tested by means of that wealth. God reveals this fact in a verse:

We made everything on the Earth adornment for it so that We could test them to see whose actions are the best. (Surat al-Kahf, 7)

A person is responsible, therefore, for using all the blessings given him by God in the best manner possible, in order to earn His approval. A true believer must act in the knowledge that all he possesses are a blessing from God, and that just as our Lord can increase his possessions whenever He chooses, He can also take them away.
Those of you possessing affluence and ample wealth should not make oaths that they will not give to their relatives and the very poor and those who have migrated in the way of God. They should rather pardon and overlook… (Surat an-Nur, 22)
SOCIAL DARWINISM AND THE FAVORED RACES MYTH
Though racism can be found throughout history, Darwin was the first to give it an alleged scientific validity. The subtitle of The Origin of Species was The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin's writings about “the preservation of favored races,” and in particular the unscientific claims in his The Descent of Man, lent support to the Nazis' erroneous belief in the superiority of Aryan race, and a similar British belief about the Anglo-Saxons. In addition, Darwin's theory of natural selection spoke of a fight to the death, a “law of the jungle.” Applying it to human societies made conflict and war inevitable between races and nations. A great many prominent figures of the time, from warlike statesmen to philosophers, from politicians to scientists, adopted Darwin's theory. In The Twisted Road to Auschwitz, Professor Karl A. Schleunes of North Carolina University's history faculty describes how:

Darwin's notion of struggle for survival was quickly appropriated by the racists... such struggle, legitimized by the latest [so-called] scientific views, justified the racists' conception of superior and inferior peoples... and validated the struggle between them. With the claims put forward by Darwin, those who held racist views naturally imagined that they had found a scientific foundation for their views about human classes. But shortly afterwards, science revealed that in the same way that Darwin's claims had no scientific validity, a great many movements built around Darwin's ignorant views had committed an enormous error.

With the support it received from Darwinism, the Nazis practiced racism in the most violent manner. Yet Germany was not the only place where so-called “scientific” racism reared its head. A number of racist administrators and intellectuals arose in many countries, particularly in Great Britain and America, racist laws and practices also made a rapid appearance.

Evolutionists in the 19th and early 20th centuries held almost totally racist views. Many scientists had no hesitation about openly expressing such opinions. Books and articles written at the time offer the most concrete proof. In Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, John S. Haller, a professor of history at Southern Illinois University, describes how all 19th-century evolutionists falsely believed in the superiority of the white race and that other races were inferior. One article in American Scientist magazine calls Haller's book:

... extremely important... documenting as it does what has long been suspected: the ingrained, firm, and almost unanimous racism of North American men of science during the 19th (and into the 20th) century... Ab initio, Afro-Americans were viewed by these intellectuals as being in certain ways unredeemably, unchangeably, irrevocably inferior
A black slave who was tortured and flogged and eventually managed to escape in 1863. During those years before the Civil War, slaves in America were frequently flogged, or worse.
Another article in Science magazine made the following comment about some of Haller's claims:

What was new in the Victorian period was Darwinism... Before 1859, many scientists had questioned whether blacks were of the same species as whites. After 1859, the evolutionary schema raised additional questions, particularly whether or not Afro-Americans could survive competition with their white near-relations. The momentous answer was a resounding no. … The African was inferior because he represented the “missing link” between ape and Teuton.39

Of course, this claim is totally unfounded. That people have different skin colors or different racial or ethnic origins doesn't make them superior or inferior to anyone else. One main reason why this deception became prevalent in the 19th century was the widespread ignorance of the time, itself due to the primitive scientific conditions.

Another example of a scientist known for his racist views was Princeton University's American biologist Edwin G. Conklin who, like other racists, had no qualms about openly expressing his perverted opinions:

Comparison of any modern race with the Neanderthal or Heidelberg types show that... Negroid races more closely resemble the original stock than the white or yellow races. Every consideration should lead those who believe in the superiority of the white race to strive to preserve its purity and to establish and maintain the segregation of the races.40

William Sollas, a professor of paleontology and geology from Oxford University, set out his views in his 1911 book Ancient Hunters:

Justice belongs to the strong, and has been meted out to each race according to its strength ... It is not priority of occupation, but the power to utilize, which establishes a claim to the land. Hence it is a duty which every race owes to itself, and to the human family as well, to cultivate by every possible means its own strength: directly it falls behind in regard it pays to this duty, whether in art of science, in breeding or in organisation for self-defence, it occurs a penalty which Natural Selection, the stern but beneficent tyrant of the organic world, will assuredly exact, and that speedily, to the full.
The middle of the 20th century saw another surge of racism in certain regions of the USA. The Ku Klux Klan, whose ideology was based on violence, was one of the most prominent supporters of American racism. This organization supported such errors as the superiority of the white race and caused the deaths of a great many people.

To say that justice belongs to the strong—a grave error—will lead to terrible social chaos. No matter what the conditions and circumstances, all people must benefit from true justice, regardless of their color, language or gender. The claim made by Darwinist racists that justice only applies to the strong in no way reflects the truth. Every individual may wish to acquire things of the highest quality and the most attractive for himself and for his society, but he is never justified in ignoring the harm he inflicts on others in doing so. To claim the opposite violates reason and good conscience.

One can encounter racist views in subsequent years also, even in the writings of evolutionists who claim not to be racist—as a natural consequence of their belief in evolution. One of these is paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson who, no matter how strongly he resents being termed a racist, claimed in an article published in Science magazine that racial differences appeared as a result of evolution, and that some races are more advanced or backward than others:

Evolution does not necessarily proceed at the same rate in different populations, so that among many groups of animals it is possible to find some species that have evolved more slowly, hence are now more primitive, as regards some particular trait or even overall. It is natural to ask—as many have asked—whether among human races there may not similarly be some that are more primitive in one way or another or in general. It is indeed possible to find single characteristics that are probably more advanced or more primitive in one race than in another.42

Despite its having no scientific basis whatsoever, Simpson's superstitious view was adopted by certain circles for ideological reasons. In defending the theory of evolution's unscientific claims in their writings, books, and speeches, other scientists of the time also supported racism. An article titled “The Evolution of Human Races,” by Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History and a prominent racist and evolutionist anthropologist of the early 20th century, made comparisons between races and came up with a number of deductions totally lacking any scientific evidence:

The standard of intelligence of the average adult Negro is similar to that of the eleven-year-old youth of the species Homo sapiens.43

As can be seen from such statements, most 19th- and 20th-century evolutionist scientists were racists who ignored the dangers posed by their twisted views. About the destructive effects of their so-called “scientific” racism, the American scientist James Ferguson has this to say:

In 19th-century Europe the concept of race was a preoccupation for the growing human sciences... These first physical anthropologists helped to develop the concept of Aryan supremacy, which later fueled the institutional racism of Germany in the 1930s, and of South Africa today.44

In an article about the racist views of evolutionist anthropologists, the late evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould says the following:

We cannot understand much of the history of late 19th and early 20th century anthropology… unless we appreciate its obsession with the identification and ranking of races.45

Once the theory of evolution acquired an alleged scientific validity, scientists were able to speak without hesitation of such illusory concepts as “inferior” races and some races being more closely related to apes than to human beings. Despotic dictators such as Hitler recognized such claims as a golden opportunity and killed millions of people because they were “inferior,” “inadequate,” “flawed” or “sick.” One of the main reasons why almost all 19th century evolutionists were racists is that their intellectual forerunner, Darwin, himself held such views.
Darwin, Too, Was a Racist
The great majority of present-day evolutionists say that unlike their 19th century counterparts, they are opposed to racism, and seek to free Darwin of racist imputations. Most writings about Darwin make great efforts to give the impression that he was compassionate, well intentioned, and opposed to slavery. The fact is, however, that Darwin believed that the theory of natural selection constituted a scientific justification for racial discrimination and conflict between races. Darwin's books, some of his letters, and his private notes contain openly racist expressions. For example, in The Descent of Man, Darwin claimed that certain races, such as blacks and Aborigines, were inferior and that in due course, they would be eliminated and disappear in the struggle for survival:
The native Australians or Aborigines, whom Darwinists regarded as inferior, are no different from any other race. The photo on the right shows the native Australian athlete Cathy Freeman lighting the 2000 Olympic flame.

At some future period not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes… will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as the baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.46

In those words Darwin equated certain races with primates and predicted that “civilized races of man” would eliminate “savage races” from the face of the Earth. In other words, Darwin was foreseeing genocide, a racial ethnic cleansing to take place in the near future. Indeed, Darwin's disastrous “predictions” actually did come about, and 20th-century racists saw the theory of evolution as offering them support to perpetrate terrible slaughter. Examples include the Nazis' murder of some 40 million people during the World War II, the South African government's apartheid system affording European races immense privileges over others, racist attacks against Turks and other foreigners in Europe, racial discrimination against blacks in the USA and against the native Aborigines in Australia, and the neo-Nazi movement that from time to time raises its head in various European countries. All gained strength from the alleged scientific support provided by Darwinism. (For further details on the connection between fascism, racism and Darwinism,
Nor were Darwin's racist statements limited to these. For example, in The Voyage of the Beagle, published before The Origin of Species, he speaks of encountering “backward” human races from Tierra del Fuego:

It was without exception the most curious & interesting spectacle I ever beheld. I would not have believed how entire the difference between savage & civilised man is. It is much greater than between a wild & domesticated animal... [I] believe if the world was searched, no lower grade of man could be found.47

This is how Darwin describes the native people of Patagonia, whom he calls “barbarian”:

Perhaps nothing is more certain to create astonishment than the first sight in his native haunt of a barbarian—of man in his lowest and most savage state. One's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like these?—men, whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals... I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilised man.48

In a letter to Charles Kingsley, Darwin described the Fuegian natives he saw:

I declare the thought, when I first saw in Tierra del Feugo a naked, painted, shivering, hideous savage, that my ancestors must have been somewhat similar beings, was at that time as revolting to me, nay more revolting, than my present belief that an incomparably more remote ancestor was a hairy beast. Monkeys have downright good hearts.49

All these are important indications of Darwin's racism. Disparaging certain races as much as he can, he humanizes and praises apes by referring to them as good-hearted animals. He openly maintained that “inferior” races needed to be eliminated, that this consequence of natural selection would make a major contribution to the advance of civilization, as in a letter to the scientist W. Graham in July 1881:
Darwin's book The Voyage of the Beagle

Slaves seeking their freedom in Western South Africa in 1904 were savagely put down.

I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.50

Darwin's racist nonsense extended even as far as the highly moral and glorious Turkish nation. (For more about Darwin's baseless and hostile statements regarding the Turkish nation, and how they are historically and scientifically unfounded, see Harun Yahya's Evrim Teorisinin Irkç? Yüzü: Darwin'in Türk Dü?manl??? (The Racist Face of the Theory of Evolution: Darwin's Hostility Towards the Turks), Kultur Publishing, Istanbul, October 2001.)

In predicting the elimination of “lower races” according to his own twisted lights, Darwin not only provided support for racism, but also established an allegedly scientific foundation for the race wars, slaughter and genocide to take place later in the 20th century.

Evolutionists make great efforts to disassociate Darwin's name from racism, but Harvard University's Stephen Jay Gould admitted the support Darwin gave to racism in a reference to The Origin of Species:

Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.51

Other prominent proponents of the theory of evolution, such as Thomas Huxley, were also racists. Shortly after the American Civil War and the emancipation of the black slaves, Huxley wrote the following:

No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man. And if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried out by thoughts and not by bites.52

Huxley refers to the black race as if they were animals, not human beings, and makes the oft-disproven claim that the blacks will inevitably lag behind in the conceptual race.

The seeds of racism, sown together with the theory of evolution in the mid-1800s, began to produce their real fruits towards the mid-1900s. Friedrich Nietzsche, a contemporary of Darwin's and a passionate adherent of the theory of evolution, popularized such baseless terms as the “superman” and “the supreme race.” National Socialism was the inevitable result. Hitler and the Nazis made Darwin's law of the jungle into state policy that left 40 million dead.
At the Genetic Level, There Is No Racial Difference between Human Beings
Particularly in the last ten years, the science of genetics has revealed that in biological terms, there are no differences between the races. The great majority of scientists agree on this. For instance, scientists attending the Advancement of Science Convention in Atlanta issued the following statement:

Race is a social construct derived mainly from perceptions conditioned by events of recorded history, and it has no basic biological reality.53

Research has determined that genetic differences between the races are very small, and that the races cannot be differentiated between in terms of genes. Scientists researching the subject state that typically there is a 0.2% genetic difference between any two people, even within the same group. Features that reveal racial differences such as skin color, and the shape of the eyes account only for 6% of this 0.2% variation. On the genetic level that means a 0.012% difference between races 54—so small as to be irrelevant.
These latest findings are summarized in an article by Natalie Angier, “Do Races Differ? Not Really, DNA Shows,” in the 22 August 2000 New York Times:
An article titled “Do Races Differ? Not Really, DNA Shows,” published in the New York Times

Two young blacks hanged in 1902, for being members of a different race. In the 21st century, however, it has been realized that in biological terms, there are no differences between races.

Scientists have long suspected that the racial categories recognized by society are not reflected on the genetic level. But the more closely researchers examine the human genome — the complement of genetic material encased in the heart of almost every cell of the body — the more most of them are convinced that the standard labels used to distinguish people by “race” have little or no biological meaning. They say that while it may seem easy to tell at a glance whether a person is Caucasian, African or Asian, the ease dissolves when one probes beneath surface characteristics and scans the genome for DNA hallmarks of “race.”55

Dr. J. Craig Venter, head of the Cilera Genomics Corp. that runs the Human Genome Project, says that “race is a social concept, not a scientific one.56 Dr. Venter and scientists from the National Institutes of Health mapped the entire human genome and concluded that there was only one single human race.
Dr. Harold P. Freeman, president of North General Hospital, NYC, sums up the results of his work on the issue of biology and race:
If you ask what percentage of your genes is reflected in your external appearance, the basis by which we talk about race, the answer seems to be in the range of 0.01 percent. This is a very, very minimal reflection of your genetic makeup.57

Another scientist to arrive at the same conclusion is Alan R. Templeton, a professor of biology from Washington University, who analyzed the DNA of members of different human populations. He observed that despite the great genetic variety among human beings, most of such variations were on the individual level. There may be some variations among populations, he states, but these are very small. Templeton summarizes his conclusions, as well as maintaining his preconceived belief in evolution, in these terms:

Race is a real cultural, political and economic concept in society, but it is not a biological concept, and that unfortunately is what many people wrongfully consider to be the essence of race in humans — genetic differences... I wanted to bring some objectivity to the topic. This very objective analysis shows the outcome is not even a close call: There's nothing even like a really distinct subdivision of humanity.58

According to Templeton's conclusions, the genetic similarity between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans, and between Europeans and the Melanesians inhabiting islands northeast of Australia is greater than that between Africans and Melanesians. However, sub-Saharan Africans and Melanesians resemble each other in many ways, sharing dark skin, hair texture, and cranial-facial features. Though these features are typically used in describing a race, these populations resemble each other very little, genetically speaking. This finding, Templeton states, shows that “racial traits” are not observed in the genes.59

In their book The History and Geography of Human Genes, population geneticists Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza arrive at the following conclusion:

Once the genes for surface traits such as coloration and stature are discounted, the human “races” are remarkably alike under the skin. The variation among individuals is much greater than the differences among groups.
Then when the Trumpet is blown, that Day there will be no family ties between them; they will not be able to question one another. (Surat al-Muminun, 101)

Time magazine's analysis of their book had this to say:

In fact, the diversity among individuals is so enormous that the whole concept of race becomes meaningless at the genetic level. The authors say there is “no scientific basis” for the theories touting the genetic superiority of any one population over another... Despite the difficulties, the scientists made some myth-shattering discoveries. One of them jumps right off the book's cover: a color map of world genetic variation has Africa on one end of the spectrum and Australia on the other. Because Australia's aborigines and sub-Saharan Africans share such superficial traits as skin color and body shape, they were widely assumed to be closely related. But their genes tell a different story. Of all humans, Australians are most distant from the Africans and most closely resemble their neighbors, the southeast Asians.
LITTLE NIGERIAN GIRL USED FOR EXPERIMENTAL PURPOSES
Certain drugs companies test their new products on the citizens of countries in Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia and South America, and during the course of these experiments, moral and professional laws are violated. In 1996, a 10-year-old girl weighing only 18.5 kg (40 pounds) and living in the Nigerian city of Kano suffered terrible pain due to meningitis. A world-famous American drug company was testing an antibiotic—which had not yet been licensed—on children in a camp it had set up. The drug being tested was of great importance to the company: stock exchanges estimated that if the Food and Drug Authority granted permission for the drug to be used, it would bring the company some $1 billion a year. The firm was unable to find test subjects in America, and so had come to Kano.

The firm's doctors began giving the girl an experimental daily dose of 56 mg of this drug. On the third day the girl died. Investigations by the Washington Post showed that drugs testing for profit was becoming increasingly widespread in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and South America. In order to circumvent the American FDA's strict rules, some American firms were cooperating with doctors in these countries, and tens of thousands of Third World country citizens were being used as guinea pigs in experiments. Although a spokesman for the firm in question stated that the experiments had received the necessary permission, experts stated that the meningitis experiment in Nigeria incident was incompatible with medical ethics and regulations in a number of regards. For example, although experiments of this kind should last at least a year, the one in Nigeria lasted only six weeks. Meningitis sufferers in America were generally given quick-acting drugs intravenously, but the Nigerian girl was given by mouth a drug that had never been tested on children. Again, in the event of negative affects in tests of this kind, the drug should immediately be stopped and another drug administered. But the drug company continued to give the little girl the same drug until she died.

The drug in question never received permission to be used with children. In America, it was restricted in adult use on the grounds that it led to kidney disorders and deaths, and was completely prohibited in Europe. This shows just how dangerous it actually was.1
DARWIN’S BODY SNATCHERS
Following the publication of The Origin of Species, various enthusiastic Darwinists began looking for the “missing link” in the so-called human evolution. Racist evolutionists believed that the native aboriginal peoples of Australia were one of the primitive stages of human evolution. In order to prove this misconception, they began stealing corpses from Aborigines' graves and selling them to American and European museums. Shocking information appeared in the Australian weekly The Bulletin in 1991, under the byline of David Monaghan.2 He worked on the story for 18 months, carried out research in London, and produced a documentary called “Darwin's Body-Snatchers,” screened in England on 8 October 1990. Some of the information Monaghan provided was along the following lines:

• US evolutionists were also strongly involved in this flourishing “industry” of gathering specimens of “subhumans.” The Smithsonian Institution in Washington holds the remains of 15,000 individuals of various races. [These collected samples, of course, were by no means human beings of an inferior race, as claimed, but humans of different ethnic origin and races with different physiological structures.]
Discriminatory practices against native Australians still go on today. The photo above shows a group protesting against their lands being taken from them.

• Along with museum curators from around the world, some of the top names in British science were involved in this large-scale grave-robbing trade.3 These included anatomist Sir Richard Owen, anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith, and Charles Darwin himself. Darwin wrote asking for Tasmanian skulls when only four full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines were left alive, provided his request would not “upset” their feelings. Museums were not only interested in bones, but in fresh skins as well. These would provide interesting evolutionary displays when stuffed.
• Pickled Aboriginal brains were also in demand, to try to prove that they were inferior to those of whites.

• There is no doubt from written evidence that many of the “fresh” specimens were obtained by simply going out and killing the Aboriginal people.

• Edward Ramsay, curator of the Australian Museum in Sydney for 20 years from 1874, was particularly heavily involved. He published a museum booklet which appeared to include Aborigines under the designation of “Australian animals.” It also gave instructions not only on how to rob graves, but also on how to plug up bullet wounds in freshly killed “specimens.” Many freelance collectors worked under his guidance. Four weeks after he had requested skulls of Bungee (Russell River) blacks, a keen young science student sent him two, announcing that they, the last of their tribe, had just been shot.4

• A German evolutionist, Amalie Dietrich came to Australia asking station owners for Aborigines to be shot for specimens, particularly skin for stuffing and mounting for her museum employers.5
Another study documenting this maltreatment and slaughter inflicted on the Aborigines is the book Aborigines in White Australia: A Documentary History of the Attitudes Affecting Official Policy and the Australian Aborigine 1697–1973 edited by Sharman Stone, Parliamentary Secretary to the Australian Minister for Environment and Heritage. Apart from a few comments by the editor, this book consists of such documents as parliamentary records, examination reports, letters to editors and anthropological reports.
In 1859 Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species popularized the notion of biological (and therefore social) evolution. Scholars began to discuss civilization as a unilinear process with races able to ascend or descend a graduated scale. The European was the “fittest to survive.” [The Aboriginal] was doomed to die out according to a “natural law,” like the dodo and the dinosaur. This theory, supported by the facts at hand continued to be quoted until well into the twentieth century when it was noticed that the dark-skinned race was multiplying. Until that time it could be used to justify neglect and murder.Sir Douglas Nicholls, the first native Australian to be knighted, and his wife.

As the book's editor makes clear, some European Darwinists portrayed the deaths of Aborigines as proof that this race was condemned to disappear as a consequence of “natural law.” In the 20th century, however, it was realized that these alleged proofs were invalid. The Aborigines had died not because of any laws of nature, but from the maltreatment they'd received. Also, of course, when the numbers of dark skinned people were observed to be increasing, it was realized that these Darwinist claims were untrue.

The replies given by a police officer to an investigation carried out by the Royal Commission in 1861 help clarify how racist basis and the maltreatment of the Aborigines were regarded as perfectly natural at the time. The officer was asked:

“And if we did not punish the blacks, they would look upon it as a confession of weakness?”

“Yes, that is exactly my opinion.”

“It is a question as to which is the strongest race—if we submit to them they would despise us for it?”

“Yes.” 7

According to Stone's account, a news report from 1880 said:

Nothing that we can do will alter the inscrutable and withal immutable laws which direct our progress on this globe. By these laws the native races of Australia were doomed on the advent of the white man, and the only thing left for us to do is to assist in carrying them out with as little cruelty as possible. We must rule the blacks by fear.8

These lines again reveal the ruthlessness at the heart of the Social Darwinist perspective. These people were regarded as a species of animal, but were treated in a way nobody would treat an animal, simply because their skin was of a darker color and because they possessed certain different physical characteristics—yet another proof of the cruelty of Social Darwinists. A letter to a newspaper also dated 1880 described the oppression of the Aborigines:

This, in plain language, is how we deal with the aborigines: On occupying new territory the aboriginal inhabitants are treated exactly in the same way as the wild beasts or birds the settlers may find there. Their lives and their property, the nets, canoes ... are held by the Europeans as being at their absolute disposal. Their goods are taken, their children forcibly stolen, their women carried away, entirely at the caprice of white men. The least show of resistance is answered by a rifle bullet... [those] who fancied the amusement have murdered, ravished, and robbed the blacks without let or hindrance. Not only have they been unchecked, but the Government of the colony has been always at hand to save them from the consequences of their crime.9

What has been recounted here is only a tiny part of Social Darwinism's dark face, but is enough to suggest the full scale of the disasters that atheism and Darwinism wreaked on humanity.

1. Joe Stephens, “The Body Hunters:As Drug Testing Spreads, Profits and Lives Hang in Balance,” Washington Post, December 17, 2000.
2. David Monaghan, “The Body-Snatchers,” The Bulletin, November 12, 1991, pp. 30-38.
3. Ibid., p. 33.
4. Ibid., p. 34.
5. Ibid., p. 33.
6. Sharman Stone, Aborigines in White Australia: A Documentary History of the Attitudes Affecting Official Policy and the Australian Aborigine 1697–1973, Melbourne: Heinemann Educational Books, 1974.
7. Ibid., p. 83.
8. Ibid., p. 96.
9. Ibid., p. 93.
THE THEORY OF RECAPITULATION AND RACISM
According to the theory of recapitulation proposed by the German atheist and evolutionist Ernst Haeckel, developing embryos repeat the evolutionary process undergone by their alleged ancestors. This claim maintains that during its development in the mother's womb, the human embryo first exhibits fish characteristics, then reptilian ones, before finally turning into a human baby. For long years this was depicted as evidence for the theory of evolution, but eventually it was seen through as completely unscientific and nothing more than a work of imagination.1
Ernst Haeckel

In order to supposedly prove his unscientific theory, Ernst Haeckel falsified drawings, trying to make fish and human embryos resemble each other. When this fraud was unmasked, his defense was that other evolutionists had done the same kind of thing.2

Yet the imaginary scenario that Haeckel backed up with forged drawings laid a seemingly scientific foundation for racism in a great many countries, particularly in Germany.

According to the claims of the theory of recapitulation, the features possessed by a human at the embryonic stage or in early childhood are left over from evolutionary adult ancestors. For example, Haeckel and his followers maintained that a “civilized” child possessed the same intelligence and behavioral characteristics as a “savage” adult, and used these claims to prove the superiority of the white race. In his book Ever Since Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould summarizes the support that the theory of recapitulation provided for racism:
Ernst Haeckel and his forged embryo drawings

Recapitulation was Haeckel's favorite argument… Haeckel and his colleagues also invoked recapitulation to affirm the racial superiority of northern European whites, ... Herbert Spencer wrote that “the intellectual traits of the uncivilized… are traits recurring in the children of the civilized.” Carl Vogt said it more strongly in 1864: “The grown up Negro partakes, as regards his intellectual faculties, of the nature of the child…”3

Of course, this claim put forward by Spencer, Vogt and others did not reflect the truth in any way. These claims were gradually invalidated by science itself and abandoned. In his The Panda's Thumb, Gould wrote:

This theory, often expressed by the mouthful “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” held that higher animals, in their embryonic development, pass through a series of stages representing, in proper sequence, the adult forms of ancestral, lower creatures. ... Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the pervasive racism of white scientists...4

Professor George J. Stein, director of the International Security Studies Core at the Air War College, published an article headed “Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism” in American Scientist. “In essence,” he wrote, “Haeckel and his fellow social Darwinists advanced the ideas that were to become the core assumptions of national socialism,”5 thus summarizing the deadly relationship between Haeckel, Social Darwinism and racism.

1. Keith S. Thompson, "Ontogeny and Phylogeny Recapitulated," American Scientist, vol. 76, May/June 1988, p. 273.
2. Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong, New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1982, p. 204.
3. Stephen Jay Gould, "Racism and Recapitulation," chapter 27 of Ever Since Darwin, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977, p. 217.
4. Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb, New York:W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1992, p. 163.
5. George J. Stein, "Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism," American Scientist, vol. 76, Jan/Feb. 1988, p. 56.
The New Imperialism and Social DarwinismLong before Darwin, colonialism began growing in 16th-century Europe. Exactly like racism, however, colonialism later drew strength from Darwin's theory and turned to a new target. Following the Industrial Revolution especially, commercial aims fueled the spread of European states to new continents and countries. Looking for new markets and raw materials, Europeans set about exploiting countries on other continents. Imperialist initiatives of the 19th century were based on different motives, however, which is why they became known as the new imperialism.

Social Darwinist suggestions dominated the new imperialist view of the world. One of the Darwinist causes of the new imperialism was the race for superiority. The British, French, Germans and other nations competing with one another were deceived into thinking that they needed to acquire new lands in order to emerge victorious as the most powerful nation in the race for superiority.
A picture by Adam Willaerts showing a British ship sailing to East India.

They were also driven by the mistaken goal of proving their superiority over other races. The Anglo-Saxons and Aryans regarded it was their natural right to assume control over the Africans, Asians and native Australians, whom they regarded as “inferior races,” and to exploit their workforces and natural resources. Thus 19th-century imperialism developed more as a result of Darwinist aims than out of any economic concerns.62

The 1946 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica says that:

This new period of imperialism at the end of the 19th century found its spiritual support in Bismarckism and social Darwinism, in all the theories glorifying power and success, which had swept over Europe... Racial theories seemed to give to this new attitude, which was in opposition to all traditional [i.e. Christian] values of morality, a justification by “science” and “nature,” the belief in which was almost becoming the dominant faith of the period.
A great many researchers and authors accept that Social Darwinism represents the origin of the 19th century's new imperialism. For instance, in Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, Professor of History Gertrude Himmelfarb says this about the close relationship between Social Darwinist racism and imperialism:

Social Darwinism has often been understood in this sense: as a philosophy exalting competition, power and violence over convention, ethics, and religion. Thus it has become a portmanteau of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, and dictatorship, of the cults of the hero, the superman, and the master race.64

The well-known German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler describes this aspect of Social Darwinism in these terms:

... it [Social Darwinism] allowed the emancipatory aspirations of the workers or colonial peoples to be dismissed as the futile protestations of inferior subjects in the struggle for existence. Vested with an aura of 'irrefutable' scientific knowledge, it was this versatility of application that gave Social Darwinism its power in its very real connection with the ruling interests. As an ideology it proved virtually ideal for justifying imperialism, [and] was kept alive by a host of popularizers in the industrialised nations.65

One can see Social Darwinist views in lines written in favor of imperialism in the retired German General Friedrich von Bernhardi's 1912 book, Britain as Germany's Vassal:
Above: A procession of the Britain's Royal Family in India under British colonial rule. Below: The arrival of British forces occupying Palestinian lands in the wake of the Ottoman Empire. Palestine had enjoyed peace and security for hundreds of years under Ottoman rule, but colonial administration brought with it chaos, conflict, and oppression.

In the interest of the world's civilization it is our duty to enlarge Germany's colonial empire. Thus alone can we politically, or at least nationally, unite the Germans throughout the world, for only then will they recognize that German civilization is the most necessary factor in human progress. We must endeavor to acquire new territories throughout the world by all means in our power, because we must preserve to Germany the millions of Germans who will be born in the future, and we must provide for them food and employment. They ought to be enabled to live under a German sky, and to lead a German life.66

The hunger to acquire new territories, caused by the new imperialism, led to conflicts between the imperialist countries themselves. Again based on the errors of Darwinism, regarding local peoples as “inferior races” led to enormous cruelties. Imperialists maintained that they were setting out to bring civilization to the lands in question, but inflicted a terrible amount of tears and suffering.
Social Darwinism and Conflict between Races
One of the aspects of God's having created different races, tribes and nations on Earth is cultural exchange among them. In the Qur'an, God reveals that He has created different human societies “to know each other.” (Surat al-Hujurat, 13)

According to Social Darwinism's worldview, human beings exist not to get to know one another, but to fight. Accordingly, the most important impetus for human progress is conflict between races and nations. Social Darwinism's irrational assumptions state that in order to emerge victorious from the conflict between races, new discoveries will be made. As a result, the “civilized” and “superior” will come out on top, and humanity will thus progress. To suggest that people will progress by killing and massacring one another, persecuting and oppressing others, is nothing more than barbarism. Disagreements and problems will arise from time to time. Yet all difficulties can be resolved by peaceful means. To imagine that violence offers a solution only makes the difficulties in question even more intractable. As already made clear, nations are perfectly justified in taking precautions to protect their future interests. But it is both illogical and a violation of good conscience to frame a policy ignoring the rights of other nations or believing that one nation's interests lie in destroying those of others.
The American Civil War (1861-1865) between the northern states, who demanded that slavery be abolished, and the southern states, who wanted it to continue. The idea of the superiority of the white race became a casus belli, and for four years, countrymen were to fight against one another. Slavery was finally abolished in the United States when the North emerged victorious.

Present-day evolutionists seek to portray Darwin, as “humane” and opposed to racism, but actually he was a proponent of conflict between races and advanced the lie that the “civilized”—at least in their own lights—white race would emerge victorious from such conflict. Some lines from Darwin's The Descent of Man read as follows:

When civilised nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race... The grade of their civilisation seems to be a most important element in the success of competing nations.67

Elsewhere in his book, Darwin refers to the conflict between “savages” and the “civilized,” and claims that the latter will emerge superior. By these totally illusory assumptions, he prepared the groundwork for the chaos and suffering that would continue for nearly a century.

A great many Darwinists who came after him treated conflict between races as if it were scientific fact. For example, National Life from the Standpoint of Science by Karl Pearson, a 19th century evolutionary theorist regarded as a follower of Francis Galton, is important in revealing contemporaries' view of inter-racial conflict and the causes behind the new imperialism. Like other Social Darwinists, Pearson claimed that conflict between races is necessary, and that struggle within a single race is insufficient for evolution. Some of these claims of Pearson, which are devoid of any scientific truth, read as follows:

What I have said about bad stock seems to me to hold for the lower races of man. How many centuries, how many thousand of years, have the Kaffir or the negro held large districts in Africa undisturbed by the white man? Yet their intertribal struggles have not yet produced a civilization in the least comparable with the Aryan. Educate and nurture them as you will, I do not believe that you will succeed in modifying the stock. History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race.68

Twisted statements like these provided imperialism with an allegedly scientific backing. The Europeans who occupied the African continent and a large part of Asia, as well as persecuting the Australian native peoples, claimed that their occupations were based on natural law and the only way for humanity to progress. (That this claim had no foundation was later proven by subsequent advances in the scientific world.) According to Pearson, wars formerly conducted in an unconscious manner would now have to be waged in a conscious, pre-planned fashion:

There is a struggle of race against race and of nation against nation. In the early days of that struggle it was a blind, unconscious struggle of barbaric tribes. At the present day, in the case of the civilized white man, it has become more and more the conscious, carefully directed attempt of the nation to fit itself to a continuously changing environment. The nation has to foresee how and where the struggle will be carried on... I have asked you to look upon the nation as an organized whole in continual struggle with other nations, whether by force of arms or by force of trade and economic processes. I have asked you to look upon this struggle of either kind as a not wholly bad thing; it is the source of human progress throughout the world's history.69

In the 19th century, this deviant belief that conflict between races and nations was a path to progress and which regarded races and nations other than its own as “inferior,” took control over large parts of the world. Some imperialist Europeans behaved most ruthlessly towards the inhabitants of their conquered lands. From the measures they adopted, it was evident that they regarded these peoples as weak and inferior, denigrated them, and refused to accept them as humans who enjoyed equal rights with themselves. The new imperialism was a 19th-century implementation of Social Darwinism on a world scale.

One reason why Darwinist ideas received such wide support was that Europeans of the time had moved away from religious moral values, which require people to live in peace. God has commanded people to be tolerant and forgiving toward one another. Corrupting order in the world and inciting war and conflict are evils that bear a heavy responsibility in the sight of God. In the Qur'an, God has revealed that He does not love corruption or harm being inflicted on people:

When he leaves you, he goes about the Earth corrupting it, destroying crops and animals. God does not love corruption. (Surat al-Baqara, 205)
Ruthless Practices in the Colonies
The Social Darwinist views that dominated the colonial elites revealed themselves in policies adopted towards the native peoples. These administrations did not regard these peoples of the countries they ruled as human, but as primitive, intermediate life forms, and usually inflicted suffering, destruction and unhappiness. Social Darwinism was one major factor in these countries' ruthless policies. As already seen, the aggressive measures adopted by some nations, that in their arrogance regarded other nations as inferior, acquired false legitimization through Social Darwinism. These countries regarded themselves as perfectly justified in adopting such policies, which only increased their greed and aggression.

The Opium Wars are an interesting example. Great Britain began selling opium to China in the early 1800s, even though at the time the production, sale and consumption of opium were forbidden in Britain itself. The English governing class, who scrupulously protected their own people against this scourge, soon made the Chinese people dependent on opium. After his son died of excessive opium consumption, the emperor decided to put a stop to the British importing the drug into his country. A government official, Lin Zexu (Lin Tse-Hsü), was sent to Canton—the East India Company's largest port—about putting an end to the trade. Since the British merchants did not favor cooperation, Zexu had the opium warehouses closed. The British immediately followed this with military intervention. The Chinese were routed and forced to accept a humiliating treaty, under which the opium trade in China was regarded as legal. Lin Zexu lost his post in the government and was sent into exile.

The Portuguese, for their part, exercised their “superiority” by effectively making slaves of the natives. They kidnapped natives from their colony of Angola and sent them far across the sea as “contracted” workers for five years. But very few of them survived long enough to make the return trip.70 In the great majority of occupied countries, colonizing powers took for themselves such territories and resources as they considered appropriate and gave them to settlers or companies from their own countries. They took no interest in the people who had lost their lands, and totally exploited their workforces, goods and mineral resources.

From their colonies, the British sent raw materials like cotton, tea and minerals to Britain, and later sent products made from them back to the colonies, to be sold at high prices. Cotton from India was processed in Britain, and the sale of Indian cotton was prohibited in India. In other words, they could use only cotton sold by the British. The Indians were also able to buy only salt produced by the British.

Another practice of the new imperialism was their belittling and behaving disrespectfully towards rulers of the countries they colonized. But in earlier times, from the era of Elizabeth I up until Napoleon, administrators had treated foreign leaders equally. The deviant idea of regarding oneself as superior gained increasing strength in 19th-century Europe, bringing with it insolence and rudeness.

Darwinist imperialists portrayed their colonization of other nations as the result of their races being “inferior” and “backward.” According to such claims, the order of the superior race had to spread across the entire world, and if the world were to progress, the inferior had to be improved. Put another way, the colonialist powers alleged that they were bringing “civilization” to the lands they conquered. Yet their practices and policies in no way reflected their claims to be “well intentioned.” Along with their Social Darwinist ideas, the 19th- and 20th-century colonialist powers brought with them chaos, conflict, fear and humiliation, rather than well-being, happiness, culture and civilization. Even if one accepts that the colonialists did provide some benefits for their colonies, still the harm they wreaked was many times greater.
Top: Prince Edward, the Duke of Windsor, receiving gifts from the Maharajah of Koihayur Bottom: Zulus entertaining British troops celebrating Queen Victoria's birthday by holding a sack race

Top: British forces brutally suppressing Indians demanding their freedom.
Bottom: A British soldier selecting soldiers for the Indian Army

In 1827, the French began occupying Algeria. As part of the colonialist mentality of the time, the French regarded nations other than their own as second class, and constructed a system based on oppression of and violence against the Algerians. First of all, education and even speaking in Arabic were banned. Then Algeria was made economically totally dependent on France. Opponents were bloodily suppressed. A picture showing the torture and mistreatment of the Algerian people.

Karl Pearson's words cited below, devoid of any humanity or compassion, summarize these Darwinism-based views:

The struggle means suffering, intense suffering, while it is in progress; but that struggle and that suffering have been the stages by which the white man has reached his present stage of development, and they account for the fact that he no longer lives in caves and feeds on roots and nuts. This dependence of progress on the survival of the fitter race, terribly black as it may seem to some of you, gives the struggle for existence its redeeming features; it is the fiery crucible out of which comes the finer metal. You may hope for a time when the sword shall be turned into the ploughshare, when American and German and English traders shall no longer compete in the markets of the world for their raw material and for their food supply, when the white man and the dark shall share the soil between them, and each till it as he lists. But, believe me, when that day comes mankind will no longer progress; there will be nothing to check the fertility of inferior stock; the relentless law of heredity will not be controlled and guided by natural selection. Man will stagnate... The path of progress is strewn with the wreck of nations; traces are everywhere to be seen of the [slaughtered remains] of inferior races, and of victims who found not the narrow way to the greater perfection. Yet these dead people are, in very truth, the stepping stones on which mankind has arisen to the higher intellectual and deeper emotional life of today.
Inset left: In Nebraska in 1919, a group of some 5,000 whites besieged the courthouse and captured a black prisoner and beat him senseless before shooting him more than 1,000 times and finally burning the body. Large picture: Two young blacks, Thomas Shipp and Abraham Smith, were lynched in Indiana in 1930. Thousands of Whites armed with baseball bats beat the two to death before hanging them. In the 1930s, the Ku Klux Klan began to grow. These lynchings are just two of the countless examples of the hatred and ruthlessness that racism brings with it.

This “world view” that regards most nations as inferior, and their suffering and death as a step on the path to so-called evolution, poses a danger to all humanity. If individuals join forces to depict an idea as scientific fact, no matter how dangerous or how unscientific and illogical it may be, and engage in propaganda on its behalf, then soon that idea and its byproducts will be accepted by those who lack sufficient information on the subject in question. This is where the hidden danger of Darwinism lies. People believing in concepts such as “the struggle for survival” and “conflict between superior and inferior races” carried out all kinds of ruthless actions under the shelter of these claims—or at least kept silent while others did so. As a result, racist, aggressive, and ruthless dictators such as Hitler, Mussolini and Franco emerged, and millions applauded their words. And because of these cruel ideologies, tens of millions lived and died in pain, fear and suffering.
Social Darwinism and War
The deceptive idea that inter-racial conflict could lead to nations' progressing also laid the foundation for wars. Before World War I, when Social Darwinism was widespread, war was considered the “most appropriate means” for the elimination of the weak and the eradication of people seen as burdens, the survival of the strong, and the development of the human race.

Throughout history, many wars have been fought, but usually they took place within limits, not aimed directly at civilian populations, between the armies of the nations concerned. But in wars waged by Social Darwinist means, the real target was the people, to reduce the “surplus population” of the so-called “unfit” and the allegedly “inferior.”

The Darwinist claim that conflict is an essential part of human nature encourages war between nations. Yet the impact of wars have on innocent civilians is obvious.

Before World War I, numerous writings and speeches described the Darwinist bases of war. Richard Milner, a contributing editor to Natural History, the magazine of New York's American Museum of Natural History, writes of the warlike Darwinist views of German intellectuals at the time:

During World War I, German intellectuals believed natural selection was irresistibly all-powerful (Allmacht), a law of nature impelling them to bloody struggle for domination. Their political and military textbooks promoted Darwin's theories as the “scientific” basis of a quest for world conquest, with the full backing of German scientists and professors of biology.72

During those years, General F. von Bernhardi engaged in propaganda on behalf of Social Darwinism. In his book Germany and the Next War Bernhardi maintained that conflict was a biological obligation and the best way of ridding the world of the unfit: “War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind that cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow, which excludes every advancement of the race, and therefore all real civilization.”73

The idea that war is a “regulative element” cannot be justified in rational or logical terms, nor with scientific facts. War is a destructive force that causes enormous losses of life and property, and its effects on society are enormously difficult to repair.

Social Darwinist logic formed the basis of ruthless Nazi occupations, during which time millions of Russians were expatriated for slave labor and more millions executed for no crime at all.

Nonetheless, those who regarded constant war and slaughter as requirements of so-called civilization continued to call for them. Elsewhere in Bernhardi's book, for instance, he wrote:

War is not merely a necessary element in the life of nations but an indispensable factor of culture, in which a truly civilized nation finds the highest expression of strength and vitality. ... War gives a biologically just decision, since its decisions rest on the very nature of things. ... It is not only a biological law, but a moral obligation and, as such, an indispensable factor in civilization.
No doubt that one of the greatest errors made by those taken in by such ideas was to assume that war is compatible with human nature and thus, inevitable. In that view, the more people wage war, the more power and vitality they acquire. This is a great falsehood. God has created human beings in such a way that they are happiest when at peace. Chaos and conflict cause terrible tension in the human soul. The most rapid social, economic and cultural progress is made possible in a climate of peace and security. In her book Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, Gertrude Himmelfarb makes the following comment:

For the general [Bernhardi], it was the needs of war that came first, the imperialist adventures and nationalist experiments that followed. For others it was the reverse: the imperialist and nationalist aspirations brought war and militarism in their wake. There were even some who would have liked the virtues of war without the onus of militarism or nationalism; this was social Darwinism in its purest, most disinterested form.75

Sir Arthur Keith, an evolutionist anthropologist and biographer of Darwin, openly admitted that he was all in favor of war. Although he personally liked the idea of peace, he feared the results of such an experiment. Also, he made the illogical prediction that after 500 years of peace, the world would turn into “an orchard that has not known the pruning hook for many an autumn and has rioted in unchecked overgrowth for endless years.”76

Keith's words indicate just how ruthless Darwinist suggestions can make people. Keith believed that the world needed to be “pruned” from time to time, that those “elements” that delayed the strengthening of the world needed to be cut away and discarded. He was openly supporting savagery. The “pruning” referred to by Keith was war, and those who died in war, whom he felt needed to be discarded, were helpless men and women and children. Those taken in by the deceptions of Darwinism feel no sympathy for these innocent people. The theory that in order to strengthen and develop the white race, those regarded as weak may be eliminated led to cruelties never seen before.
Young people being obliged to fight, despite all the suffering that war brings with it, represents the dark face of Darwinism.

As long as they do not experience war, people may never realize what a terrible disaster it actually is. It must never be forgotten that war spells sorrow, loss and suffering for millions of innocents. The way to build a world without war and conflict, one full of peace and security, is by the eradication of ideologies incompatible with the religious moral values commanded by God.

Social Darwinism's twisted views are one of the main reasons for the wars, conflict and slaughter that have continued unabated since the 19th century. As a result of the constant calls for war, even some who knew nothing about Social Darwinism fell under its spell.

African-Americans lynched in 1906.
So long as love of God and feelings of compassion and sympathy for the human beings He created do not prevail, humanity will continue to experience such tragedies.

In the early 20th century, those who came to believe that war was essential were not just a group of marginal ideologues, but a great many journalists, academics, politicians and civil servants.77 They encouraged the eradication of women, children, the elderly and the needy, and the heedless expense of young lives on the battlefield supposedly for the “benefit of humanity.”

These views were shared at the very highest levels. For instance, German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg subscribed to the belief, common among the middle class when World War Ibegan, that conflict between Slav and Teuton was inevitable.78 The Kaiser is known to have held similar views. Many historians regard the wicked claims that war was unavoidable and the cleansing of inferior races was natural and useful as some of the principal causes of World War I.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was also one of the most prominent supporters of Social Darwinism in Germany. According to him, the ideal social system should be based on armed conflict: “Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior; all else is folly.”79 According to Nietzsche's twisted view, life consisted solely of war, and war contained everything within it.

Hitler, a fanatical Social Darwinist and great admirer of both Darwin and Nietzsche, put their warlike views into practice. Combining militarist thinking with the theory of evolution, Hitler said:

The whole of nature is a continuous struggle between strength and weakness, and eternal victory of the strong over the weak.
These ideas advanced by Hitler and others like him were products of a terrible ignorance. Those who imagined that with the theory of evolution they were basing their militaristic and aggressive thinking on a scientific foundation were merely deceiving themselves. Yet with the tens of thousands of people they induced to follow them, they inflicted ruin on the world on an unprecedented scale.

In an article titled “The Philosophy and Morals of War,” Max Nordau—one of the leaders of the Zionist movement—identifies Darwin as the primary supporter of war:

The greatest authority of all the advocates of war is Darwin. Since the theory of evolution has been promulgated, they can cover their natural barbarism with the name of Darwin and proclaim the sanguinary instincts of their inmost hearts as the last word of science.81

In Darwin, Marx, Wagner:Critique of a Heritage, Jacques Barzun, a history teacher at Columbia University, stated that Darwin stoked the fires of militarism and warfare everywhere:

War became the symbol, the image, the inducement, the reason, and the language of all human doings on the planet. No one who has not waded through some sizable part of the literature of the period 1870-1914 has any conception of the extent to which it is one long call for blood... The militarists of the second half of the century poeticized war and luxuriated in the prospect of it. With relative impunity for themselves, they took it for granted that all struggles in life must be struggles for life, and the death of the loser its “natural” goal.82

In the same book, Barzun described how Europe in particular fell under the influence of Darwinism's racist, militaristic tenants:

The 20th century, dominated by Social Darwinist philosophy, has gone down in history as one of war and bloody conflict. For decades, expressions of suffering never left the faces of millions.

In every European country between 1870 and 1914 there was a war party demanding armaments, an individualist party demanding ruthless competition, an imperialist party demanding a free hand over backward peoples, a socialist party demanding the conquest of power, and a racialist party demanding internal purges against aliens—all of them, when appeals to greed and glory failed, or even before, invoked Spencer and Darwin, which was to say, science incarnate. ... Race was biological, it was sociological; it was Darwinian.
In wartime, not only the civilians suffer. Soldiers forced to fight as a result of a philosophy that has inflicted nothing but blood and sorrow on the world are also part of war's cruel face.

These deceptions, identified and described by many academics, account for the 20th century's history of war, slaughter and genocide.
In God's Sight, Superiority Lies in Piety, Not in Race
Such savagery was not limited to the Nazis. Many parts of the world have experienced terrible catastrophes because of racism. Because of it, hundreds of thousands have been regarded as worthless, humiliated, forced from their homes and enslaved, killed or abandoned to die, treated like animals, and used in pharmaceutical experiments. The examples cited in this book are just a few of the many documented instances of savagery and violence.
White students attacking a black lawyer. Racism is a cause of anger, hatred, aggression and conflict. These students have so taken leave of their humanity as to kill an innocent man solely because of the color of his skin. They are living under the influence of Social Darwinism, whether consciously or otherwise. Top: An Alabama passenger bus in 1930. A separate section marked “Colored Passengers” was set aside for blacks.

The social structure envisaged by Darwinism needs to be accurately identified. Like all other materialist theories, Social Darwinism, maintaining that people are selfish creatures who live solely for their own interests, responsible solely to themselves, can never bring proper moral values and happiness to individuals or to society as a whole. In order to acquire proper moral values and happiness, a person needs to abandon selfish desires. Religious moral values, as commanded by our Lord, teach people how this will be. People's responsibility towards God and the kind of moral values they need to attain His approval are revealed in the Qur'an.

If people have faith in God's commandments and the Book revealed by Him, then they will feel compassion and affection towards others.

Those who love and fear God and obey His commandments, see other people as beings He created, and make no distinctions between them on grounds of race, nation, skin color or language. In every human being, they see beauty created by God, and take pleasure in that beauty. Their faith makes them loving, compassionate and protective. However, someone brainwashed by Darwinism's falsehoods looks down on other races and nations, feels justified in oppressing and even eradicating them, and spreads nothing but tension, unhappiness and fear. The racism and imperialism witnessed in the 19th and 20th centuries are the result of this Darwinist world view.

In the Qur'an, God has forbidden discrimination on grounds of race and has revealed that people can attain superiority in His sight through faith and their fear of Him:

O humanity! We created you from a male and female, and made you into peoples and tribe so that you might come to know each other. The noblest among you in God's sight is the one with the most fear of God. God is All-Knowing, All-Aware. (Surat al-Hujurat, 13)
...Help each other to goodness and heedfulness. Do not help each other to wrongdoing and enmity. Fear God... (Surat al-Ma’ida, 2)

To Be Continude............