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Editor's Note: After the publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species, scientists promptly developed theories of genetic racial inferiority Scientific racism, which was widely accepted, led to the field of eugenics which ultimately resulted in the sterilization of thousands of black Americans and culminated in the murder of 6 million European Jews.
DESPITE CHARLES DARWIN's idea that there were no fixed divisions between species, let alone races, polygenist notions of race, which assumed that the divisions between races were ancient and fixed, thrived in the new evolutionary thought. Moreover, the idea articulated by Herbert Spencer, that evolution was a struggle between races rather than between individuals, became a dominant fixture of twentieth-century racial thought. Finally, the notion that there were several European races, such as those sketched by William Z. Ripley, would begin to loom large in the twentieth century.
Evolutionary thought grew into a significant ideology that can be called "scientific racism" at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Scientific racism was the result of two lines of scientific thought merging. First, new ideas about heredity provided an explanation of the way traits could be held stable for generation after generation. Second, ideas flowered about the supremacy of the north European races - what was called Aryanism or Teutonicism in the nineteenth century and Nordicism in the twentieth. These two lines of thought were conceptually distinct. That is, one could firmly believe in the notion that heredity was fixed and immune from environmental influences while rejecting the idea that the Nordics were the supreme race. Alternatively, one could believe in Nordicism and reject the findings of modern science regarding heredity. However, among some thinkers these two ideas joined in the eugenics movement and changed how the Western world thought about race.
The Problem of Heredity
After the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin needed to answer a strong objection to his work: how were the characteristics that allowed organisms to survive transmitted from generation to generation? Natural selection turned on the idea that tiny advantages could accumulate in an organism's line of descent, but Darwin had no mechanism that could explain this process. Indeed, most ideas about heredity argued that it would be impossible for characteristics...