At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.

Darwin makes this remark in the course of discussing human evolution and the comparative “races” of humankind in the late Victorian era, when European imperial expansion and settler colonialism were rapidly displacing Indigenous peoples. In The Descent of Man (1871), he speculates about the likely future consequences of competition between human groups, drawing on contemporary ethnological language that divided peoples into “civilized” and “savage.” The sentence reflects both Darwin’s attempt to apply natural-selection reasoning to human history and the period’s common (and now discredited) racial typologies. It is a predictive claim about demographic and political outcomes under colonial pressure, not a prescriptive endorsement, though its framing has been widely criticized.

The quote expresses a bleak forecast: Darwin expects that, over long time spans, technologically and politically dominant societies will displace and eliminate less powerful societies. He frames this as an almost inevitable outcome of competition, echoing his broader interest in how selection pressures shape populations. The language (“civilized” vs. “savage”) embeds Victorian assumptions that rank cultures and peoples, which can make the passage read as justificatory even when presented as prediction. In modern terms, the sentence is often cited as an example of how evolutionary discourse could be entangled with colonial ideology, and it raises ethical questions about treating historical violence and genocide as quasi-natural processes.