50 ~ ONE HUMAN FAMILY


exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”36


He personally leaned towards the view that man represented


a single species, and not several, as others were urging. For one thing it looked as though they could all interbreed, though he was not quite certain of this. But Darwin had no compunction in conceding as follows:


“From these several considerations, it may be justly urged that the perfect fertility of the intercrossed races of man, if established, would not absolutely preclude us from ranking them as distinct species.”37


Translated into today-speak, he is saying that even if it could be established that all human races were inter-fertile38


(as he


suspected would turn out to be the case), it might still be possible to classify them as separate species. This gives some indication of the huge biological differences he felt existed between the various groups of people on Earth.


Roman Catholic ethicist Benjamin Wiker, commenting on


Darwin’s Descent of Man (with extensive citation from it), summarizes a major thrust of Darwin’s viewpoint thus:


“The European race, following the inevitable laws of natural selection, will emerge as the distinct species, human being, and all the transitional forms—such as the gorilla, chimpanzee, Negro, Australian aborigine and so on—will be extinct.”39


Darwin’s chief public promoter, Thomas Huxley, the scientist who became known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, wrote:


36. Darwin, C., The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1st ed.),


London: John Murray, 1871, pp. 200–201. 37. Ref. 36, p. 116. 38. It’s now well established that all peoples everywhere are inter-fertile, of course. 39. Wiker, B., Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists, InterVarsity Press, Illinois, USA, p. 250, 2002.


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