This is a very interesting statement from a proponent of evolutionary thought, Linear. as I mentioned breifly above, you can probably find hypocrisy of some form or another no matter where you look. However, Thomas Jefferson probably did not consider his slaves to be his equals, on a human level, as deserving the same rights of religious and personal freedom as himself.

In fact, evolution is the means through which the american and european slave-owning upper classes convinced themselves of that. Though the ideas expressed verbally may not have made much press during Jefferson's day, they most certainly abounded. A century later, those ideas did make press and in great numbers, likely perhaps in vocal opposition to the idea of freedom for the negro slaves. The ideas of evolution you work with today are directly decended from the same school of thought. You might want to do some research concerning it. Evolution may seem fair and friendly as you look at fossils and microbes, but that was never truly it's primary purpose. It's primary purpose, judging from the amount of literature concerning evolution and racial selection, from the very beginning, appears quite strongly to have been to promote racism and the 'superior' white race and upper classes in particular.

Here are just a few examples of evolutionary thought in the late 19th century, which also led to what is known as 'eugenics':


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Definition of Negro

'By the nearly unanimous consent of anthropologists this type occupies ... the lowest position in the evolutionary scale . . . the cranial sutures . . . close much earlier in the Negro than in other races. To this premature ossification of the skull, preventing all further development of the brain, many pathologists have attributed the inherent mental inferiority of the blacks, an inferiority which is even more marked than their physical differences . . . the development of the Negro and White proceeds on different lines . . . in the former the growth of the brain is . . . arrested by the premature closing of the cranial sutures ... The mental [differences] are at least as marked as the physical differences . . . No full blooded Negro has ever been distinguished as a man of science, a poet, or an artist . . .'


Encyclopaedia Britannica,1898,TheWernerCo.,NewYork,Vol. 17 pp.316-318

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'No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average Negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible [to assume] that, when all his disabilities are removed, ... he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried out by thoughts and not by bites.

Huxley, Thomas, 1871. Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews Appleton, New York, p. 20


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'At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes. . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla. ... It has often been said ... that man can resist with impunity the greatest diversities of climate and other changes; but this is true only of the civilized races. Man in his wild condition seems to be in this respect almost as susceptible as his nearest allies, the anthropoid apes, which have never yet survived long, when removed from their native country.'


'I could show [that war had] done and [is] doing [much] . . . for the progress of civilization . . . The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date . . . an endless number of lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.'

Darwin, Charles, 1896. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex; The Works of Charles Darwin, D. Appleton and Company, New York pp. 241-242, 343




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There is plenty more out there, Linear. and it's hardly a dead idea.



'we must rid ourselves of the false prophets of cultural salvation and the witless preachers of human equality. The future of our species . . . is dependent on [the application of evolutionary] biology. We must have fewer and better men, not more morons . . .

Hooton, Eamest Albert, 1941. Why Men Behave Like Apes and Vice Versa or Body and Behavior, Princeton University Press, Princeton.