I'd like to take a look at some of the insights we have recently gained about ourselves through the study of human evolution. I will also discuss how science, when ethics and morality fails, has been misused to justify some of the worst things that humans can do to other humans. This will take us into social Darwinism, Eugenics, and current politics and religion.
On November 20th, 1974, in the remote Ethiopian campsite of anthropologist Donald Johanson, there was much singing, dancing, and yes, drinking. Johanson’s team had been searching for hominid fossils and had been very lucky. The family Homonidae includes ourselves and our immediate ancestors. We are the only living hominids, unless someone proves the existence of Bigfoot. Over a three week period the team had collected several hundred pieces of bone, which was 40% of a single female individual, Australopithecus afarensis. She was between 3.2 and 3.8 million years old. Finding this much of a single skeleton was very unusual. Normally, all you find are teeth and bits of skull, which are more resistant to weathering. As they were celebrating a Beatles tape was playing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Perhaps helped along by an alcohol infused mood (I say this because none of the participants remember exactly how it happened) the new fossil gained a nickname that was much easier to pronounce: Lucy.
A question plaguing anthropologists for a long time was, which came first in human evolution, a big brain or erect bipedal walking. Most assumed that a larger brain came first. Lucy’s legs and pelvis showed she walked erect, stood, three and a half feet tall, and weighed sixty pounds. But, she had a brain about the size of a chimp. So, erect walking came first. In addition, in Tanzania, Mary Leakey found a set of 70 perfect footprints that had been made by the same species, walking along in soft lava as it cooled. What a feeling it must have been to gaze at those beautiful prints, showing an ancient ancestor clearly walking erect along the plain, over three million years ago.
Charles Darwin did not have the luxury of hominid fossils to fuel his speculations. He did assume, based on physical similarities, that the great apes (Orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees), were our closest relatives. They all lived in Africa. So, he said, we would probably find evidence of our ancestors in Africa. How right he was.
You don’t need fossils to see the similarities between humans and apes. Look for a moment at your fingers. Notice that you have hair going down to the first knuckle and then it stops. Were our ancestors knuckle walkers? You can also look at your teeth. We have the rounded teeth of an omnivore; similar to bears, pigs, and raccoons. Some of us though have sharply pointed canines; others don’t. In the other great apes, the canines are quite prominent and pointed. Males use them in threats against other males, like antlers in elk. We have mostly lost the large canines but the vestigial trait still persists. We might still grimace and make threats, but we lack the weapons.
Look at the picture of a baby chimpanzee . Isn’t he cute! His 
cuteness comes from his large bulbous cranium with his head sitting erectly on top of his spine. Note that his face is pushed in and flat. As he matures his jaws will grow, but not his cranium, giving his face a sloping ape look. His head will rotate forward on his spine so he looks forward while knuckle walking. He will lose his cuteness.
cuteness comes from his large bulbous cranium with his head sitting erectly on top of his spine. Note that his face is pushed in and flat. As he matures his jaws will grow, but not his cranium, giving his face a sloping ape look. His head will rotate forward on his spine so he looks forward while knuckle walking. He will lose his cuteness.Now, look carefully at the people you know. Note all the flat faces and bulbous craniums, sitting erect on top of spines. We look like baby apes, not adults. The resemblance is striking. The term neoteny is used in science where the adult of one species has traits of an embryonic or young ancestor.
There are also some striking resemblances between humans and embryonic apes. Your big toe lies straight alongside the other toes. Both humans and apes have the same type of big toe while they are embryos. As the ape develops its big toe rotates to the side becoming opposable. This is very helpful when climbing. Our toe stays straight in the embryonic position. This helps us walk erect. Again, this is neoteny. In both embryonic human and ape females the vaginal canal points ventrally (forward). It remains in that orientation in humans but rotates to the rear in apes as they develop. Male apes consequently find it more comfortable to mount from the rear when mating. Humans find it more comfortable to mate face to face.
Chimps and humans are very close and diverged from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago, gradually evolving on separate tracks into what we see today. Present day chimps are not our ancestors. Gorillas and orangutans branched off earlier, so chimps are actually more closely related to humans than they are to gorillas. Chimp and human DNA is about 98.6% the same. Chimps are our closest living relatives, almost kissing cousins. I don’t really think I like the idea of kissing a chimp.
A major difference between chimps and humans is that human skulls continue to grow for some time after birth. Chimp brains don’t. We thus develop a much larger brain and greater intellectual capacity. This does not mean we are more evolved, it just means we are different. In the mid 1800’s assumptions were made that cranial capacity could be used to compare the intelligence of the different human races.
Samuel Morton (1799-1851), an American was a prominent researcher promoting this idea. He assumed that whites had a greater intellectual capacity than other races and set out to prove it. He took skulls of various races from his collection of 600 and poured lead shot in through the foramen magnum. He then poured the shot into a vessel where he could measure the volume and thus the cranial capacity. This is a valid method. He found exactly what he was looking for, and concluded that whites had larger brains and therefore were smarter than other races.
The late Stephen Gould of Harvard, one of the foremost evolutionary theorists of recent times, tried to duplicate Morton’s results and couldn’t. Neither could anybody else. Gould didn’t feel that Morton was cheating. He said if he had been cheating it wouldn’t be interesting. He thinks Morton may have subconsciously fudged, getting the results he wanted. His error may have come because he didn’t take enough care to make sure he picked representative skulls. This is not an unusual mistake in science. There is no statistical difference in the cranial capacity of the different races.
Here are a few of Morton’s conclusions. “The Caucasian Race is characterized by a naturally fair skin, hair fine, long and curling, and of various colors. This race is distinguished for the facility with which it attains the highest intellectual endowments.” “The Mongolians…so versatile are their feelings and actions, that they have been compared to the monkey race, whose attention is perpetually changing from one object to another…”
“The American Race (Native Americans) are crafty, sensual, ungrateful, obstinate and unfeeling. They devour the most disgusting foods uncooked and uncleaned, and seem to have no idea beyond providing for the present moment. Their mental faculties, from infancy to old age, present a continued childhood.” “The Negro is joyous, flexible, and indolent’ while the many nations which compose this race present a singular diversity of intellectual character of which the far extreme is the lowest grade of humanity”. Was Morton racist? Yes! Did he subconsciously misuse science to justify his racism? Apparently!
The proponents of these racial biases embraced Darwin’s ideas on evolution. Borrowing from natural selection its proponents argued that it was normal and natural that the strongest or fittest people should survive at the expense of the weak and unfit. This came to be known as “social Darwinism.”. The term, “survival of the fittest,” was coined, not by Darwin, but by Herbert Spencer, who is associated with social Darwinism. The social Darwinists envisioned a ladder of evolution with blacks at the bottom, Orientals in the middle, and white European males at the top.
Social Darwinism justified colonialism because of the assumption that people of color were weaker and more unfit to survive so it was okay to seize their land and resources. Since whites were superior it was only fitting that they should commit genocide against the Native Americans. Slavery was simply a normal and natural process. Even after the American Civil War these philosophies were the backbone of the vicious “Jim Crow” laws that lasted for 100 years in this country. Social Darwinism also provided a justification for exploiting workers and refusing to acknowledge labor unions. Government should not interfere with private business. The poor were poor because they were less fit. Ironically, the majority of the people promoting this claimed to be Christians. You wonder if they had any idea what Jesus Christ taught about helping the poor.
Social Darwinism was a perversion of evolutionary theory and Charles Darwin repudiated these ideas. He was a long time abolitionist and believed that our urge toward helping the weak was part of our evolved instinct of sympathy. He said we “could not check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.” Darwin never clearly stated his religious views but it is worth mentioning that his wife, Emma, was a long time Unitarian. She must have been a pretty spirited lady because, when attending the Anglican village church, she had the family turn their backs to the podium, and stand in silence, when the Trinitarian Nicene Creed was recited.
Modern science gives us a very different view of the races. Genus Homo, the toolmakers, evolved from Astralopithecus. Four species of Homo are generally recognized: habilis, erectus, neanderthalensis, and sapiens. The Neanderthals were not ancestral to humans, but lived at the same time and died out about 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. They were very close to sapiens and a very recent DNA study shows there may have been a bit of “hanky panky” between the species. Both fossil and mitochondrial DNA evidence shows Homo sapiens emerging from Africa just 100,000 years ago, and then spreading across much of the world. In evolutionary terms 100,000 years is not a long time and the differences between the races, including intelligence, is insignificant. You can not justify racism by turning to science.
Between 1910 and the 1930’s in America social Darwinism led to the pseudoscience of eugenics. By the mid 1920’s twenty five states had passed laws allowing sterilization of mentally deficient, criminally insane, and “genetically inferior people.” Marriage between selected races was illegal and California led the way. The idea of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race did not originate with Hitler. Financing came from the Carnegie Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman railroad fortune, among others. Eugenic practitioners ultimately subjected 60,000 people to undergo coercive sterilization and barred the marriage of thousands. The stated goal of the practitioners was to defend the nation against national degeneration. Social Darwinism is not science and has no valid relationship to biological Darwinism.
The increasingly powerful Nazi party in Germany copied America but went even further. Nazi eugenics dictated who would live and who would die to create a master race. By 1934 sterilizations of German citizens determined to be mentally or physically disabled went beyond 5,000 per month. Eventually 70,000 Germans were executed. People were being killed simply because they were mentally deficient. This was before the Holocaust. What is the tipping point causing a country to go in such a brutal and tragic direction? Ethics and morality failed. The Nazis used an immoral interpretation of science as an excuse. Ironically, we know from genetics, that inbreeding in a small population (i.e. the Aryan Nation) creates greater risks because of the exposure to recessive genes, which are more frequently harmful.
Although few today promote eugenics, social Darwinism has not gone away. I am going to cite three examples and I’m sure you could come up with many more.
During the last presidential election Pat Buchanan, a one time presidential candidate, should have heeded the words of Mark Twain who said “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” Buchanan made the statement that “America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?” Does he want us to forget the chains, the slavery, the ten decades of Jim Crow? Here again the basic tenant of social Darwinism is evident; the idea that one group is innately superior to another.
Many of the loudest political voices of today are strongly influenced by the thinking of Ayn Rand. She first achieved fame for her writings with the publication of “The Fountainhead” in 1943. Later she said, “My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty.” She felt that the government had no obligation to the poor and less fortunate in society. After all, nature intended that the strongest should survive. Does this theme sound familiar? If you don’t have to concern yourself with the less fortunate life is so easy. Her views were completely contrary to the views of Unitarian Universalists.
“Social justice” is a central concept in the philosophy of this fellowship and most Christian churches. Its basic tenant is that we should not just give to the poor, but should also work to correct unjust conditions. I don’t think many of us would question this. But Glenn Beck, another influential voice to many on the right, said about social justice on his TV show, “If you find it run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words (for Nazism and Communism). Am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!” I think Glenn Beck is a fool but it is not uncommon in history for fools to gather great followings.
I don’t want to live in a country that lacks compassion for the unfortunate. I don’t want to live in a country that denies people social justice and I don’t want to live in a country that treats some as lesser people because they are seen as different or poor. I believe strongly in the principles of this fellowship and I agree with Hubert Humphrey who said, “Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.”
In concluding I would like to briefly go back to science. Last year the discovery of a new hominid, Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus, was announced. She lived 4.4 million years ago, long before Lucy, and was very complete. She looks like she may have been a quadriped in the trees and a biped on the ground. Even though much older than Lucy her canines were already reduced in size, a modern feature. Because of this, researchers speculate that fighting among males for mates may have declined. Instead, a male would probably have supplied one female with gathered foods, gaining sexual loyalty, and possibly a partner in return. Although the competitive side of evolution is usually emphasized, social and cooperative behavior is as old and important as competition in human culture and history.
An anthropologist friend of mine pointed out that young children are often frightened by people who appear different, especially when confronted by people of another race. This is understandable with children. But as adults, even if we are neotenous apes, why can’t we outgrow these childish fears.
