evolution

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After doing dome reseach, I have discovered that the theory of evolution, was not only the survival of the fittest, but the proof that the male gender was the strongest. Darwin, and Broca both stated that women where not nearly evolved. Broca stated that women's head were smaller, so they had smaller brains and where less evolved. Did anyone question the what these sciencists where trying to prove?? This also lead to racism, and quest for a superior race and a superior nation.

-- jennifer tobin (jtobin@nmu.edu), March 27, 2001

Answers

Blaming Darwin and Broca for the existence of misogyny and racism seems (to me, anyway) to get the cart well before the horse. Both misogny and racism existed long before Darwin and Broca. My guess is that both would have continued to exist had they never been born. For most 19th-century intellectuals (who were, of course, almost all white and male) it seemed plainly obvious that women and other races were, on the whole, intellectually inferior to themselves. The issue for them was not to question this apparent "fact," but rather to *explain* it. Evolutionary theory and differences in brain size may well have seemed to explain the "problem," as they saw it, but doing so was hardly the main aim of either evolutionary theory or cerebral localization. Today, other facts seem plainly obvious to us (among them, that women and non-white races are not intellectually inferior to white males). Evolutionary theory, however, endures despite these changes, as does cerebral localization.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), March 27, 2001.

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