"Exhilarated by his 'discovery', Darwin jotted down these sentences: 'Origin of man now proven. Metaphysics must flourish. Anyone who understood the baboon would do more for metaphysics than Locke did." Darwinian metaphysics placed all wickedness, all cruelty, all evil at its origins, in the bestial. Carrying this thought to extreme consequences which are certainly not Christian, Darwin placed the Devil at the origin, he made man a redeemed demon. "The origin of our kind," he wrote, "is the cause of our evil passions! The Devil in the form of a Baboon is our grandfather." This doctrine was cultivated and developed by Darwin's cousin, the great statistician Francis Galton. [...] Ā«The sense of original sinĀ» he wrote in 1865 Ā«would not demonstrate, according to my theory, that man has fallen from a superior condition, but rather that he is rapidly recovering from an inferior oneĀ»."
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As quoted in Il Tao della biologia: saggio sulla comparsa dell'uomo (2015), Lindau, Turin,p. 39. ISBN 9788867084111
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Sermonti
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Giuseppe Sermonti
Giuseppe Sermonti (October 4, 1925 ā December 16, 2018) was an Italian Roman Catholic biologist and essayist.
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