Darwinism

It's a poorly kept secret that eugenics was enjoyed widespread support amongst intellectuals and politicians in the decades before World War II. It got a bad name due its enthusiastic support by the Nazi Party in Germany. After the war, it never went away but was simply euphemistically rebranded using terms like human biodiversity (HBD). Here is a description of HBD from Forward:

“Human biodiversity” appropriates scientific authority by posing as an empirical, rational discourse on the genetically proven physical and mental variation between humans. It uses the language of genetics to underscore, for example, the prevalence of Mongolians in sumo wrestling, the IQ scores of black people or the inbreeding patterns of Ashkenazi Jews. The refrain of HBD bloggers and forum commenters is that the (gene-driven, according to them) dissimilarities they outline are “non-negligible” or “non-trivial” and have, accordingly, social policy implications. Though it has a rational, policy-wonk zing to it, that’s just Internet forum-ese for “you’re genetically distinct from us and should be treated differently.”

Having recently read The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin by Benjamin Wiker, I've realised that the rise of Darwinism in the nineteenth century fuelled the eugenics craze of the twentieth century. To quote from the book:

As biographer Janet Browne notes: in the decades following the publication of the Origin, Darwin’s defenders came to occupy influential niches in British and American intellectual life. Together, these men would also control the scientific media of the day, especially the important journals, and channel their other writings through a series of carefully chosen publishers—Murray, Macmillan, Youmans, and Appleton. Towards the end they were everywhere, in the Houses of Parliament, the Anglican Church, the universities, government offices, colonial service, the aristocracy, the navy, the law, and medical practice; in Britain and overseas. As a group that worked as a group, they were impressive. Their ascendancy proved decisive, both for themselves and for Darwin.

The triumph of Darwinism had major implications for the twentieth century but it was just one approach to what powers evolution, "a reductionist, materialist approach". To quote again from the book:

The truth of the matter is this: the methodical exclusion of divine causation was an assumption deriving from the particular secular Enlightenment goal of systematically excluding the divine as a matter of human progress. Darwin shared that vision and hence that goal, and it determined the way that he defined evolution. That was the problem with Darwin’s theory, and that is the problem with Darwinism. Darwinism is not a synonym for evolution. Darwinism is a particular approach to the evidence for evolution, a reductionist, materialist approach that excludes the Divine on principle. Evolution is a complex and difficult thing we are still trying to understand.