foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] as distasteful and demeaning as we might conceive the exploitation of less fortunate people as animalistic Sideshow freaks this whole industry helped propagate a much more Insidious belief that gained Steam and became more normalized in Western Society increasingly to this day and that's the concept of scientific racism the most egregious result from it was the Eugenics movement and resultant horrors of the Holocaust and other genocides Darwin's Publications catalyzed this concept into mainstream acceptance because many now felt that there was scientific justification for believing that some persons were less human
than others While others were Superior it provided intellectual jet fuel to the ideological concept of the supposed superiority of certain people groups over others and many now felt that they and for their race were literally higher on the evolutionary ladder than some of the more primitive and less developed races even the American paleontologist evolutionary biologist and historian of science Dr Stephen J Gould admitted biological Arguments for racism may have been common before 1859 but they increased by orders of magnitude falling in the acceptance of evolutionary theory understand that Gould was an atheist a Marxist and
a giant amongst naturalist he worked at the American Museum of Natural History a Harvard professor and one of the most influential authors of popular science of his generation Gould was also one of the most honest evolutionists of his day and was willing to admit that evolutionary ideas often had negative consequences that racism increased by orders of magnitude is no overstatement in the same year that Darwin's Descent of Man was released Thomas Huxley commonly called Darwin's Bulldog described people with light skin as bigger brained and smaller jawed and had the following to say about people with
dark skin no rational man cognizant of the facts believes that the average negro is the equal still less the superior of the white man while it's almost never mentioned in today's popular articles movies or School curricula the supposed racial superiority of caucasians was boldly described In Darwin's treaties one that Huxley and many others fully embraced Darwin declared at some future period not very distant as measured by centuries the Civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the Savage races at the same time the anthropomorphous Apes will no doubt be exterminated the break between
man and his nearest allies will then be wider even than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon instead of us now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla although the more Victorian sounding terminology he used may sound strange to Modern ears Darwin's intermingling references to ape anthropomorphous Apes I.E the Apes that appear more human-like baboon gorilla Negroes Australian Aborigines and Caucasians suggested an evolutionary hierarchy a conclusion that Huxley and many of his contemporaries also came to which grossly stated was that black people or Negroes were less evolved than white people or
Caucasians and could be seen as lesser persons and all of this hearkens back to the descriptive terminology used in the promotional material commonly used to describe the sideshow freaks that we've previously discussed baboon orangutan ape man found swinging from the trees in Africa man monkey Missing Link brute creation marvelous hybrid semi-human being gorilla-like between a black person and an ape ape-like human throwback to the ape-like stage of humanity Sideshow ads featuring ape men with other animalistic descriptions of humans served as subtle evolutionary sermons grooming the general public towards a more evolutionary worldview however after Darwin's
work was published the subtlety largely disappeared indeed American literary critic Leslie Aaron Fielder concluded such racist mythology did not play a determining role in the perception of non-europeans by Europeans until the Triumph of the theory or organic evolution In Darwin's Ascent of the species 1859 and its extension by analogy into early developmental anthropology although lacking any true observational confirmation for it the story of supposed human evolution was quickly promoted and codified as proven science among mainstream scientific circles in the west as an examination of popular literature published consecutively Beyond this point in time confirms and
a small sampling follows as early as 1907 Scientific American described pygmies this way the personal appearance characteristics and traits of the Congo Pygmies conclude they are small ape-like elfish creatures published just seven years later in 1914 the popular U.S textbook Civic biology presented an overtly race depiction of mankind in a supposed evolutionary hierarchy it identified five races of man theopian Malay American Indian Mongolian and finally the highest type of all the Caucasians represented by the Civilized white inhabitants of Europe in America and in 1924 the New York Tribune featured Australian Aborigines as missing links in
a top story where headlines declared Kindred of Stone Age men discovered on Antarctic Island missing links with Mankind in early Dawn Of History such examples are too numerous to mention and can be traced throughout the rest of the 20th century racist ideas such as these proliferated Nazi propaganda undergo Jim Crow laws throughout the U.S and contributed to the forced segregation initiatives in Canada through the residential school program and while some today would say such thinking has largely passed from modern society examples of scientific racism still commonly persist news reports describing light-skinned fans with hands bunched
up under their armpits screeching monkey noises at dark-skinned soccer players for example are still far too commonplace we understand that such actions are racist but what's the real message conveyed through using monkey sounds or throwing bananas towards someone with dark skin the answer is literally Illustrated in the popular and supposedly scientific ape to man diagram seen in textbooks t-shirts classrooms and coffee cups it almost always depicts dark-skinned hairy Apes turning into Caucasians supposedly over millions of years which provides a simple visual concept once again illustrating that the less melanin you have in your skin the
more advanced you are I.E darker people are closer to the Apes and less evolved therefore white people are superior to blacks which is the exact same racist monkey man messaging portrayed by the crude Carnival markers of yesteryear again remember the gorilla girl and man monkey references among the circus freaks that we've discussed the entire concept of human evolution undergirds racist ideas and Darwin the father of modern Evolution clearly expressed those ideas from the beginning scientific racism is still promoted throughout all major educational institutions via the teaching of evolution even in its modified forms though much
more under the radar today for the most part likely because of the fear of treading on the eggshells of the more politically correct segments in modern society however much to my home country of Canada's shame as recently as 1997 Professor Philip Rushton from Western University produced a work called race Evolution and behavior that openly rehashed these views in Berry mailers a professor at Ferris State University review of rushton's work he reports blacks according to Rushton have smaller brains making them less intelligent than whites and Asians using 60 different measures rushed in ranks the races along
an evolutionary scale with blacks at the bottom and Asians at the top the fact is these ideas have been embedded into the consciousness of Western Society over not just several decades but over hundreds of years now and indeed ideas have consequences and these evolution-based ideas resulted in some of the most horrific consequences ever imagined