Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December, 2007

Darwinism’s True Colours?

It turns out that a teenager who killed seven students and one adult at a school in Finland claimed his inspiration came from Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Describing himself as "a cynical existentialist, anti-human humanist, anti-social social-Darwinist”, Pekka Eric Auvinen declared, "I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection." A pretty shocking interpretation, but it’s by no means the first time Darwin ’s theory has been taken to that kind of extreme. It was Darwin's cousin Francis Dalton who developed the idea of eugenics – the genetic improvement of the human race by selective breeding. This led directly to the Nazi doctrine of Aryan supremacy and all its offshoots; their attempts to breed a 'super-race' of people in human stud farms, the forced sterilization of at least two million people, and ultimately, the holocaust. The fact is that if y