Biological Evolution and Human Equality

Abstract

THE CRUCIAL FACT of our age is that people almost everywhere now take the idea of human equality quite seriously. It is no longer accepted as a nature’s law that people with darker skins are destined to be servants and those with lighter ones masters. Children of those at the bottom of the social ladder no longer acquiesce in being placed automatically in a similar position. Everybody is entitled to equality. But what is equality? On the authority of the Declaration of Independence, it is a self-evident truth “that all men are created equal.” Yet we hear that biology and genetics have demonstrated conclusively that men are unequal. Do biology and genetics really contradict what the Declaration of Independence holds to be a self-evident truth? Or are the words “equal” and “unequal” being used in different senses? Just what have biology and genetics discovered that is relevant to the problem of equality and inequality?