The demeaning exploitation of people as sideshow freaks helped propagate a much more insidious belief which gained steam and became normalized in Western society—the belief in scientific racism. Darwin’s publications catalyzed scientific racism into mainstream acceptance, justifying the belief that some people were less human while others were superior—higher on the evolutionary ladder than some more primitive and less developed races. The result was the eugenics movement and resultant horrors of the Holocaust and other genocides.
Up Next in Freakshow
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S1E4 Freakshow: The Holocaust before ...
The Herero genocide was a systematic campaign of racial extermination that included the use of concentration camps and medical experimentation and is considered the first genocide of the 20th century. Belief in Darwin’s missing links led directly to belief in Darwin’s law of survival of the fitte...
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S1E5 Freakshow: The Search for Scient...
From its inception, the scientific proofs offered to support human evolution have been riddled with holes. In fact, just like the dubious side-show examples touted by circus shysters, many of the earliest proofs were fraudulent, and modern research shows that many proofs were driven by scientific...
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S1E6 Freakshow: Removing God from the...
For many people, the story of evolution removes God from the equation of life, concluding if there is a naturalistic, scientific way to account for the universe and everything in it, then God’s law is irrelevant. However, if we are simply evolved animals, how does morality apply at all? If “Thou ...
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