Naturally Selected

Naturally Selected

The common questions asked by the world: “where did we come from,” “what is the meaning of life,” these were the exact questions asked by Charles Darwin. Darwin looked at the world in a whole new way. He broke apart from the known life of religion and brought completely new views to the world. However, Darwin’s theories of evolution had a large influence on the world in a controversial, and sometimes, in a harmful way, by taking the thoughts of evolution completely out of context.

While aboard his ship The Beagle in the 1930’s, Darwin took note to the changes he saw in the many different species off the coast of the Galapagos, and developed a book entitled, The Origin of Species. He popularized the idea of “fit-of-the-fittest,” a key description of natural selection. This is the basic idea that if an organism was not born with the ability to pass their traits on to future generations, then they were not meant to populate the world. Another well known theory that Darwin created is adaptation. We as humans, as well as every living creature evolved into what we are today through adaptation. The idea of adaptation is best described as changing to be able to use the environment lived in by that animal to it’s advantage.

This broad theory of natural selection influenced those who disagreed with Darwin, and therefore looked deeper into religion for an accident answer. For those who agreed with this thought, like all ideas and philosophies, some can be taken to the extreme:

…used by German anthropologists and later Nazi theoreticians…it was believed, the unfit transmit their undesirable characteristics. A breeding program for human beings would see to it that the unfit did not transmit their undesirable characteristics. (Shermis)

This same thought is carried out today, however at a lower extent, CEO’s of large corporations, the famous rags to riches stories. And those who are “unfit,” those who are living off of welfare, and the homeless.

The philosophy of “survival of the fittest” is possibly the main idea that supports the theory to why the white race has surpassed other races. This is where the ideas of white supremacy and even fascism have overlapped with “fit-of-the-fittest” and caused great problems throughout United States history. As Herbert Spencer a white activist and his followers stated, “Human society is always in a kind of evolutionary process in which the fittest (which happen to be those who make large earnings) where chosen to dominate. There were armies of ‘unfit’ who simply could not compete. And just as nature weeds out the unfit, an enlightened society ought to weed out its ‘unfit’ and permit them to die off so as not to weaken the racial stock.”

Even simple quotes can be easily taken completely out of context, and used negatively to someone’s advantage. “I look at individual differences of small interest…as being the first step towards such slight varieties as are barely thought worth recording in works on natural history”