Just So Stories

IT’S THE POINT OF DARWINISM:

What I Learned from Teaching Darwin (C. Brandon Ogbunu, 04.23.2026, undark)

On the first day of class, I joked with students that I would play the role of their politically conservative uncle. That is, there would be no trigger warnings and none of the cushioning that has become standard in college courses that include exposure to ideas and readings with offensive language or content. I told them that we would read Darwin’s books as they were written and try to understand them, and if they didn’t like that, to enroll in a different course. The larger lesson was simple: To study a complex world, you must read difficult material and learn to interpret it with rigor and empathy.

I was priming the class for Darwin’s views on race and gender, ideas that complicate many of our largely positive opinions of him (mine included). Some of my selective memory, which demotes his problematic takes, has support: There is a literature on how progressive he was compared to scientists like his cousin Francis Galton, who coined the term “eugenics” in 1883. But reading Darwin’s 1871 book “The Descent of Man” in a classroom with several young women from around the world softened my rigid stance that the right response to backward takes is to simply get over them. I still believe that refusing to read or interpret such work is unscholarly. But I also came to admit something I had been too eager to brush aside: Even when we consider historical context, there is still something painful about reading a giant of science describe human differences in the language of hierarchy, rank, and levels of civilization.

If his ideology did not place white men at the pinnacle, no one would ever have heard of him.

APPLYING DARWINISM:

Trump, his ‘low IQ’ slur, and the right’s race obsession (Michael Mathes, with Raphaelle Peltier in New York, 4/22/26, AFP)

“Trump’s characterization of people of color as ‘low IQ’ is a racist dog whistle with a long history in the US,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a professor of communication studies at Colorado State University, told AFP.

During the periods of colonialism and 19th century slavery, “white male elites took for granted that they were cognitively superior to women and people of color and, thus, divinely appointed for leadership.”

Trump’s recent repeated use of the expression dovetails with the American far-right’s apparent obsession with genetics and phrenology, a pseudoscience of cranium size and shape as a supposed marker of intelligence.

THEY ARE DARWINIST BECAUSE OF, NOT DESPITE:

Donald Trump’s Racism Mirrors Jeffrey Epstein’s (Clarence Lusane, April 16, 2026, Fair Observer)

Reporters culling the most recently released Epstein files discovered numerous pieces of evidence in emails and other documents suggesting that he advocated the faux “science” of racial eugenics and held racist views not distinct from those Trump promoted for decades. Epstein built (or at least tried to build) ties and developed friendships with some of the most notorious eugenicists and white nationalists around the globe, including Nobel Prize laureate and geneticist James Watson, political scientist Charles Murray and artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, among many others. He also circulated posts from white supremacist websites that promoted bogus, supposedly genetically-based intellectual differences between the races.

Eugenics is the “race science” that was developed in the latter part of the 19th century to justify European slavery and colonialism. Proponents contended that humans were biologically and genetically separated into distinctly unequal “races.” Everything from intelligence, criminality and attractiveness to morality was, so the claim went, genetically determined. It should surprise no one that, in such an imagined hierarchy, whites were at the top and, in most configurations, people of African descent at the very bottom, with Asians and indigenous people somewhere in between. Those four (or five or six) categories were considered immutable. And it mattered remarkably little that, for a long time, social and natural scientists had overwhelmingly argued with irrefutable evidence that racial categories were social constructs invented by humans and distinctly malleable over time as political and social life changed.

The real-world impact of racial eugenics theory long shaped public policy, political status and life opportunities. In the United States, a belief in the genetic inferiority of blacks helped foster slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, and led to tens of thousands of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and individuals with physical and mental disabilities, as well as prisoners being sterilized. By 1913, 24 states and Washington, DC, had passed laws allowing enforced sterilization. President Theodore Roosevelt was a firm believer in such eugenics and supported sterilization in order to prevent what he termed “racial suicide,” a perspective that echoes today’s “Great Replacement Theory.”

In Nazi Germany, eugenics led not only to the sterilization of Jews, blacks and the disabled, but to the state-organized mass murder of millions of people. It was a core tenet of Nazism that all non-Aryans were genetically inferior and a threat to the white race. The Nazis railed against Jews “poisoning the blood” of white Germans, a term Trump used in describing non-white immigrants from the Global South.

Despite this history, Epstein came to deeply believe in eugenics and genetic determination, as has Trump.

APPLIED DARWINISM:

The Creator of the SAT Was an Infamous Eugenicist (Jake Currie, April 6, 2026, Nautilus)

Was Carl Brigham a racist? The short answer is yes. The long answer is also yes, and his racism led him to twist his own data to arrive at faulty—and bigoted—conclusions.

During World War I, Brigham was tasked with developing psychological tests to measure the cognitive abilities of newly drafted soldiers representing a cross-section of American military-aged men. It was a golden opportunity to gather data, and the tests Brigham developed were the ancestors of the modern SAT exam.

During the early 20th century, there was also a eugenics movement sweeping the country, and like many white Americans of the era, Brigham bought into the notion that some races were superior to others. While he viewed Blacks as inferior to whites, this wasn’t his primary concern. Instead, he was focused on the influx of “inferior” white immigrants coming into the country.

Brigham and other eugenicists of the day split white people into three groups: Nordic, from Northern Europe; Alpine, from Central and Eastern Europe; and Mediterranean, from Southern Europe. Based on his testing, Brigham came to the conclusion that the Nordics had the highest intelligence, followed by the Alpines, with the Mediterraneans scoring the lowest. Because of this, he warned that the waves of newly arriving Alpine and Mediterranean immigrants threatened to lower our collective national intelligence level.

Never “just trust the science.”

DARWINISM WAS NOT THE ONLY EVIL MALTHUS UNLEASHED:

The Nonsense Explosion (Ben Wattenberg, 1970, New Republic)

Finally, we must take note of the new thrust by the Explosionists: population control. Note the phrase carefully. This is specifically not “family planning,” where the family concerned does the planning. This is control of population by the government and this is what the apocalyptics are demanding, because, they say, family planning by itself will not deduce us to a zero growth rate. The more popular “soft” position of government control involves what is called “disincentives;” that is, a few minor measures like changing the taxation system, the school system, and the moral code to see if that won’t work before going onto outright baby licensing.

Accordingly, the demographer Judith Blake Davis of the University of California (Berkeley) complained to a House Committee: “We penalize homosexuals of both sexes, we insist that women must bear unwanted children by depriving them of ready access to abortion, we bind individuals to pay for the education of other people’s children, we make people with small families support the schooling of others. . . .” (Italics mine.)

Now, Dr. Davis is not exactly saying that we should go to a private school system or eliminate the tax exemption for children, thereby penalizing the poor but not the rich – but that is the implication. In essence, Senator Packwood recently proposed just that: no tax exemptions for any children beyond the second per family, born after 1972.

The strong position on population control ultimately comes around to some form of government permission, or licensing, for babies.

Dr. Garret Hardin, a professor-biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says, “In the long run, voluntarism is insanity. The result will be continued uncontrolled population growth.”

Astro-physicist Donald Aiken says, “The government has to step in and tamper with religious and personal convictions – maybe even impose penalties for every child a family has beyond two.”

Dr. Melvin Ketchel, professor of physiology at Tufts Medical School, writes in Medical World News: “Scientists will discover ways of controlling the fertility of an entire population . . . the compound . . . could be controlled by adjustments in dosage, [and] a government could regulate the growth of its population without depending upon the voluntary action of individual couples . . . such an agent might be added to the water supply.”

And Dr. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford: “If we don’t do something dramatic about population and environment, and do it immediately, there’s just no hope that civilization will persist. . . . The world’s most serious population-growth problem is right here in the United States among affluent white Americans. . . .”

What it all adds up to is this: why have a long-range manageable population problem that can be coped with gradually over generations when, with a little extra souped-up scare rhetoric, we can drum up a full-fledged crisis? We certainly need one; it’s been months since we’ve had a crisis. After all, Vietnam, we were told, was “the greatest crisis in a hundred years.” Piker. Here’s a crisis that’s a beauty: the greatest crisis in two billion years: we’re about to breed ourselves right into oblivion.