Darwin's Bodysnatchers
People deliberately killed to provide 'specimens'
for evolutionary research
by Dr. Carl Wieland
A gruesome trade in 'missing
link' specimens began with early evolutionary/racist ideas. But this trade
really 'took off' with the advent of Darwinism.
In a previous Creation
magazine we related evidence that perhaps 10,000 dead bodies of Australia's
Aboriginal people were shipped to British museums in a frenzied attempt to
prove the widespread belief that they were the 'missing link'.1
Now a major item in a leading Australian weekly, The Bulletin, reveals
shocking new facts.2 Some of the points covered in the article,
written by Australian journalist David Monaghan, include:
- US evolutionists were
also strongly involved in this flourishing 'industry' of gathering specimens
of 'subhumans'. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington holds the remains
of 15,000 individuals of various races.
- Along with museum curators
from around the world, Monaghan says, some of the top names in British science
were involved in this large-scale grave-robbing trade.3 These
included anatomist Sir Richard Owen, anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith, and
Charles Darwin himself. Darwin wrote asking for Tasmanian skulls when only
four full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines were left alive, provided his request
would not 'upset' their feelings. Museums were not only interested in bones,
but in fresh skins as well. These would provide interesting evolutionary
displays when stuffed.
- Pickled Aboriginal
brains were also in demand, to try to prove that they were inferior to those
of whites. It was Darwin, after all, who wrote that the civilized races
would inevitably wipe out such lesser-evolved 'savage' ones.
- Good prices were being
offered for such specimens. There is no doubt from written evidence that
many of the 'fresh' specimens were obtained by simply going out and killing
the Aboriginal people. The way in which the requests for specimens were
announced was often a poorly disguised invitation to do just that. A death-bed
memoir from Korah Wills, who became mayor of Bowen, Queensland. in 1866,4
graphically describes how he killed and dismembered a local tribesman in
1865 to provide a scientific specimen.5
- Edward Ramsay, curator
of the Australian Museum in Sydney for 20 years from 1874, was particularly
heavily involved. He published a museum booklet which appeared to include
Aborigines under the designation of 'Australian animals'. It also gave instructions
not only on how to rob graves, but also on how to plug up bullet wounds
in freshly killed 'specimens'. Many freelance collectors worked under his
guidance. Four weeks after he had requested skulls of Bungee (Russell River)
blacks, a keen young science student sent him two, announcing that they,
the last of their tribe, had just been shot.6 In the 1880s, Ramsay
complained that laws recently passed in Queensland to stop Aborigines' being
slaughtered were affecting his supply.
Angel of Black Death
- A German evolutionist,
Amalie Dietrich (nicknamed the 'Angel of Black Death') came to Australia
asking station owners for Aborigines to be shot for specimens, particularly
skin for stuffing and mounting for her museum employers.7 Although
evicted from at least one property, she shortly returned home with her specimens.
- A New South Wales missionary
was a horrified witness to the slaughter by mounted police of a group of
dozens of Aboriginal men, women and children.8 Forty-five heads
were then boiled down and the 10 best skulls were packed off for overseas.
- Darwinist views about
the racial inferiority of Aborigines (backed up by biased distortions of
the evidence since shown to be false) drastically influenced their treatment.
In 1908 an inspector from the Department of Aborigines in the West Kimberley
region wrote that he was glad to have received an order to transport all
half-castes away from their tribe to the mission. He said it was 'the duty
of the State' to give these children (who, by evolutionary reasoning, were
going to be intellectually superior) a 'chance to lead a better life than
their mothers'. He wrote: 'I would not hesitate for one moment to separate
a half-caste from an Aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic her momentary
grief'.9
Such separation policies
continued until the 1960s.
- The demand has not
entirely abated. Aboriginal bones have still been sought by major institutions
in quite modern times.
Men of One Blood
And where was the church
in all this? It was much more influential back then, but it had already begun
to be white-anted by the 'new thinking' about origins and was not prepared
to take a stand on creation issues. However, the Apostle Paul's ringing declaration,
backed up by the facts of human history revealed in Genesis, was that God
had 'made all men of one blood' (Acts 17:26). This is now reinforced by modern
biology as well. See also The Fallacy
of Racism.
The issue of these pilfered
remains is becoming politically sensitive. There is now much pressure from
Aboriginal leaders and others for the remains to be returned.
Aboriginal rage at this
desecration of their ancestors would also be appropriately directed at the
antibiblical thought patterns of evolution responsible for this outrage.
This phenomenon, of mild-mannered
museum officials, respected scientists and mayors, for example, casually going
about their daily respectable lives, while they were involved in monstrous
acts justified by a scientific doctrine, was unparalleled in history to that
point.
A similar horror reappeared
in the 1930s, when the blatantly evolutionary doctrines of Nazism allowed
the consciences of hundreds of doctors, scientists, psychiatrists and other
officials to be seared as they set up the machinery to help nature eliminate
the unfit. First, the genetically 'inferior' -the mentally and physically
disabled. Next were gypsies, Jews and others. The rest of the story is well
known.
Today, evolutionary thinking
enables ordinary, respectable professionals, otherwise dedicated to the saving
of life, to justify their involvement in the slaughter of millions of unborn
human beings, who, like the Aborigines of earlier Darwinian thinking, are
also deemed 'not yet fully human'.
References
1. 'Darwin's Bodysnatchers',
Creation 12(3):21, June-August 1990.
2. David Monaghan,'The
body-snatchers', The Bulletin, November 12. 1991, pp. 30-38. (The article
states that journalist Monaghan spent 18 months researching this subject in
London, culminating in a television documentary called Darwin's Body-Snatchers,
which was aired in Britain on October 8, 1990.)
3. Monaghan. p. 33.
4. According to the records
of the Bowen Shire Council.
5. Same as Ref. 3. In
The Bulletin article, Monaghan quotes two long paragraphs from Korah Wills'
five-page manuscript.
6. Monaghan. p. 34. Monaghan
identifies the student as W.S. Day.
7. Monaghan. p. 33. Monaghan
is here quoting Dr Rae Sumner, a lecturer at the Queensland Institute of Technology's
School of Language and Literacy Education.
8. Monaghan. p. 34. Monaghan
identifies the missionary as Lancelot Threlkeld.
9. Monaghan. p. 38.
Dr.
Carl Wieland is in great demand as a speaker on
the scientific evidence for creation/Flood, and its relevance to Christianity.
Able to hold audiences (both academic and lay) with his knowledge, easy-to-listen-to
style, and ever-present humour, he has lectured extensively in Australia and
overseas.
Dr. Wieland is CEO of
Answers in Genesis in Brisbane, Australia. This ministry organisation produces
the family magazine Creation Ex Nihilo (now going to over 36,000 subscribers
spread over 110 countries), which he founded in 1978, and of which he is currently
editor-in-chief.
He has also authored numerous
articles on the subject in both Creation magazine and the associated Technical
Journal. He is the author of the compact booklet Stones and Bones, and co-author
of Answers Book. Both are among the most popular creation books of recent
times, and have been translated into several languages. Although his formal
qualifications are in medicine and surgery, Carl has not practised in the
medical profession since 1986. He was a past president of the Christian Medical
Fellowship of South Australia.
He also serves on the
Board of Directors of Answers in Genesis ministries in the United Kingdom
and the United States, as well as on the Advisory Board of the Indonesian
Association for Creation Research.
