![]() The Russian scientist was not a lone gunman, so to speak. ![]() One startling iteration of Social Darwinism occurred under the guise of tactical warfare in the 1920s, when a Russian scientist sought to produce a race of super-soldiers for Stalin’s army by impregnating women from French Guinea with the sperm of a dead chimpanzee - black African women, mind you, who were presumed to be less highly evolved and thus closer to chimpanzees than were white European women. Though it goes by many camouflaging names, Social Darwinism is the pseudo-scientific ideology which posits that the biological principles of Darwin’s scientific theory of random mutation and natural selection bear analogy to human society. What Precisely is This Dangerous Creature? This book is an invitation to readers, and to African scholars particularly, to look around them and determine to what extent Social Darwinism has mauled their respective societies and nations. As shall be shown in these pages, a large portion of Northern Nigeria’s suffering can be laid directly at the feet of this tiger and its parent. However, Social Darwinism is not merely as tricky and insubstantial as a tiger moth. Social Darwinism rests like a tiger moth on Darwinism, its mother theory when challenged with facts, it flits to a slightly different position and poses anew, where its camouflaging coloration allows it to survive a bit longer. It reminds me of a Mandinka proverb widely recognized in Africa which says, “An empty bag cannot stand.” It is, however, resourceful. Social Darwinism is a rickety notion, rich in assumptions but destitute of facts. Olufemi Oluniyi is adapted from his preface to his recently released book, Darwin Comes to Africa: Social Darwinism and British Imperialism in Northern Nigeria (Discovery Institute Press, 2023). Editor’s note : The following article by the late Dr.
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