by Igor Alexander

Lately, I’ve been researching the origins of atheism, secular humanism, and organized skepticism, which has naturally led me to take a closer look at the origins of evolution theory, which lies at the bottom of these movements and ideologies. I’ve started to read an interesting book called The Evolution Hoax Exposed (originally published under the title Why Colleges Breed Communists), by A. N. Field, first published in 1941 (with additional printings in 1971 and 1984).

It’s a common assumption among both White Nationalists and Christians [1] that so-called “racist” ideologies stem from a belief in natural evolution. Here we have a book arguing that to the contrary, the idea of there only being “one race — the human race” [2] is a direct consequence of the widespread acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution. From pages 77-78:

Evolution teaches the mutability of species. Modern scientific observation is becoming increasingly impressed with the great stability of species as the outstanding fact about living organisms. Darwin in concluding the Origin of Species proclaimed that there was no essential difference between varieties and species, species being all the time in process of evolution into new forms, and varieties being merely incipient new species. “We shall at least be freed from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species,” he declared. Living organisms being nothing but a series of dissolving views with everything in transformation, Darwin laid it down that in future naturalists in labelling species would only have to decide whether any form happened to be “sufficiently important to deserve a specific name.”

This idea is in line with a notion freely advanced in intellectual quarters today: that there are no pure races of mankind, and that it therefore follows there is no difference between a white man and a negro. On these lines we had Mr. Bernard Shaw holding forth in South Africa a few years back that the uplift of that country would be brought about most quickly by the two million whites intermarrying with the seven million black inhabitants of the country.

On the Darwinian view individuals alone exist in nature, species being purely an arbitrary concept. Nevertheless, species seemed to be sufficiently real to Darwin for him to devote a book of 700 pages to trying to account for their origin. Louis Agassiz, in reviewing Darwin’s book in the American Journal of Science for July, 1860, commented on this anomaly, and asked: “If species do not exist at all, as the supporters of the transmutation theory maintain, how can they vary? and if individuals alone exist, how can the differences which may be observed among them prove the variability of species?” It does not appear that Agassiz ever got an answer to this conundrum.

According to evolutionist teaching, living things are a chance product of inorganic matter, and are being continuously pruned and moulded into new shapes by their environment. The living forms are, so to speak, mere jelly or plastic putty, struggling together for existence, in a given environment, and by natural selection attaining an endless succession of forms increasingly adapted to the environment. The environment is the determining factor, and heredity amounts to little or nothing. [3]

From page 86:

Current belief today is that the savage races of the world are in the same state civilised man is supposed to have been in a few thousand years ago, and if left alone would ultimately rise to civilised status by process of gradual “evolution.” Lord Raglan in summing up the diffusionist case in his most interesting little book, says all the evidence is in exactly the opposite direction, and that “no savage society, when left to itself, has ever made the slightest progress.” The only change that has ever been observed to take place in these isolated societies is a change for the worse.

If you want to read an anti-evolution book written from a Christian perspective that won’t insult your intelligence, The Evolution Hoax Exposed is one of the best I’ve come across. It’s well written, researched, and argued and doesn’t smack the reader over the head with quotes from the Old Testament on every other page. It’s thoughtful and nuanced but cuts straight to the point. As an agnostic, there was nothing in it that I found offensive or that made my eyes roll. The author is more concerned with debunking atheistic materialism in general than in promoting a particular religion, denomination, or cosmological dogma.

Some of the science is outdated, but that’s to be expected from a book written 70 years ago. It detracts little from the author’s central arguments. The book has shed light on issues that have been nagging at me for a while and has filled several gaps in my world-view.

Though out-of-print, copies are still available from a few online booksellers (e.g. Omni Books) and a .pdf file is available here.

Footnotes:

[1] See, for example, Chapter 18 of the Catholic book Creation Rediscovered, by Gerard J. Keane, which argues that Darwinism was at the root of the “racism” of German National Socialism.

[2] While the idea may have come from Darwin, the actual slogan “there is no race but the human race” comes to us from jewish anthropologist Otto Klineberg. For an explanation of how American anthropology came to be dominated by loxist jews, read Dr. Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique (.pdf available here).

[3] It’s interesting to note that Gregor Johann Mendel, whose research into heredity forms the basis of modern genetic science and which, according to some, invalidated Darwin’s theory of evolution, forcing evolutionists to abandon it and come up with a revised version, was an Augustinian priest.