Darwin versus Compassion
The full title of Darwin’s Magnum Opus is Origin of the Species by
means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle
for Life. Darwin’s other writings reveal how barbarous evolutionary
philosophy can be:
With savages, the weak in body and mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand,
do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile,
the maimed and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their
utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment. There is reason to
believe that vaccination has preserved thousands who, from a weak constitution,
would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilised society
propagate their kind.
No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this
must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of
care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but,
excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his
worst animals to breed.
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result
of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social
instincts, but subsequently rendered in the manner previously indicated more tender
and more widely diffused. Nor can we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard
reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature … We must,
therefore, bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating
their kind.
(Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd Ed., pp. 133–134,
1887)
(Article also available in Polish)
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