Mr Darwin's shooters: on natural selection and the naturalizing of genocide

Abstract

Among Charles Darwin's first writings are reports on his encounters with indigenous peoples and the violence of European colonization. When he turned to evolution, the furore over mankind's place in natural history overshadowed the problem of how ‘natural selection’ might apply in human history. It was easy, in a nineteenth-century worldview, to see the disappearance of ‘savages’ as a ‘natural’ consequence of the advance of civilization. From a later perspective, colonialism often involved genocide, only belatedly recognized as such, even after the concept came into use. Barta's essay re-examines Darwin's efforts to comprehend the extinction of peoples as a phenomenon both natural and historical, and the implications of his attempt to combine the two. It begins with his first observations, and looks for evidence of their influence in the theory of natural selection. The problems of ‘natural’ selection in human history are then traced along the paradoxical paths Darwin opened up. It becomes plain that he had an unusually sharp perception of the historical relations of genocide—economic, social, political and cultural—but confused matters by trying to integrate colonialism into an evolutionary history of civilization analogous to natural history. Always fascinated by human intervention in nature, he was also attracted by the potential of eugenics, so that a legacy intended to be cautiously scientific fed into ideologies of conquest and human selection far removed from his measured theorizing and humane ethics.