Charles Darwin’s Influence on Politics

Charles Darwin’s influential 1859 book The Origins of Species introduced humanity to evolution, natural selection, and how humans and all other creatures, whether mammals, plants, or others, have evolved over thousands of years.

Darwin’s theory of evolution promotes survival of the fittest through the toughness of our environments, which allows creatures who have adapted and are the most successful to survive.

His revolutionary theories also negatively impacted political thinking throughout the 19th and 20th centuries inadvertently because Charles Darwin’s theory of human evolution led to some people’s belief that there are different species of humanity.

That is a false statement because Homo sapiens/humans in 2003, Phase 1 of the Human Genome Project (HGP) demonstrated that humans populating the earth today are, on average, 99.9% identical at the DNA level; there is no genetic basis for race.

There is more genetic variation within a race than between them.

Race is a social construct not based on scientific reality but a human-made view of perceiving humanity, which persists.

This can be seen drastically within the deeply heated debates in America and its race relations.

It was this belief which helped to legitimise wrongly the enslavement of black people, that people from around the planet with different skin colours belonged to other races and that it was the white person who was superior.