Posted on 11/15/2013 9:05:36 AM PST by Olympiad Fisherman
How evolutionary or Darwinian was Hitler’s Social Darwinism? Such a question has now been answered by Dr. Richard Weikart’s excellent book entitled, “Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress." Even though the answer to this question should have been easily settled long ago, too many scholars and academics committed to Darwinian evolution have obfuscated the clear historical facts on this disturbing truth ...
(Excerpt) Read more at 1024project.com ...
If the 1024Project discovers that Hitler was partial to milk, should we abandon milk?
Drinking milk and putting into political practice a eugenic form of Social Darwinism rooted in evolutionary theory are not exactly parallel ideas. By the way, Hitler used to drink hot milk with the mountain men that lived nearby his Berghof in the Bavarian Alps to sell the German folks the idea he was an authentic nature lover or ‘greener.’
Only if it leads us to be evil sociopaths in positions of power.
I’m not arguing by analogy.
If Hitler liked milk does that say anything about the goodness and value of milk? Of course not.
If Hitler accepted the theories of evolution does that say anything about value of the theories of evolution?
Guilt by association.
You are not really serious.
I know a lot about people just by watching who they associate with, and what they believe. These are not minor issues, and cannot be compared to drinking milk. I like milk, but do not believe in evolution ...
Good grief. Blaming Darwin for Hitler’s acts is like blaming Isaac Newton for those killed by artillery. Science is morally neutral.
I thought the term “social darwinist” was an epithet thrown at those who were opposed to eugenics and abortion back at the dawn of the “family planning” movement. As in, there was something ethically wrong with letting nature take its course with random breeding of humans, rather than subscribing to the eugenicists’ philosophy.
It is the fundamental beliefs that count in a person-—is there a God???
Hitler didn’t believe in the Judeo-Christian God. He mocked Jesus Christ and thought Christianity ruined the German Race—made men weak. He was a Darwinist/materialist/occultist.
This is from Wikipedia—the Mind of Hitler-—it shows the warped worldview of Hitler——which dehumanizes man whenever the concept of the Judeo-Christian God is removed. Only the “idea of God” gives meaning and hope to man—otherwise, we are just animals.
From Wikipedia — :0—Mind of Hitler: You can see why any “girlfriend” killed herself-—and he surrounded himself with homosexuals and sexual perverts.
“Langer’s report also concluded that Hitler loved pornography and masochistic sex, and in particular that he had “coprophagic tendencies or their milder manifestations” in his heterosexual relationships, and masochistically derived “sexual gratification from the act of having a woman urinate or defecate on him.”[16]”
I think some classic books written between 1915 and 1950 even have characters calling other characters “social darwinists”.
“Doctor Zhivago” for instance
I believe Newton’s gravity theory is neutral, but Darwinian evolution is so wrapped up in other philosophical issues, if not its own religion of origins, that you cannot equate the two. Newton’s science was based on physics, laws that can be observed. Since Darwinism attempts to explain origins, it gets away from observational science, and presumes that the same natural laws that maintain and grow nature are the same laws that created it. This is a false conclusion. Creation is one thing, growth and maintenance quite another.
"If nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in sun cases all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.
But such a preservation goes hand-in-hand with the inexorable law that it is the strongest and the best who must triumph and that they have the right to endure. He who would live must fight. He who does not fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist." (Adoph Hitler, Mein Kamph, 4th printing {London: Hurst & Blackett, 1939}, pp. 230-240, 242)
A central goal of Hitler and his government was the development and implementation of eugenics to produce a superior race, often called Aryan, Teutonic or Nordic race. The goal w as to prevent "inferior races" from mixing with those judged superior in order to prevent contamination of the human gene pool. In formulating these racial ideas Hitler relied heavily on Darwinism, especially the elaboration by Darwins's German disciples such as Fritz Lenz and Ernst Haeckel. The superior race belief was based on the theory of racial inequality within each species, a major presupposition and requirement of Darwins original "survival of the fittest" theory. This culminated in what the Germans call the Final Solution to the Jews and Poles, who were judged inferior. (Jerry Bergman, "Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview", pp. 37-38
Totally ridiculous. Even if Hitler was inspired by evolutionary theory, what he did with it represents a COMPLETE misunderstanding of the theory. Evolution is descriptive, not prescriptive. Evolution makes no moral judgements. An organism’s “fitness” is not a moral thing, just a reference to the fact that organisms with certain traits are more likely to survive and reproduce than other organisms lacking those traits.
Further, such fitness is relative to the environment. There is no one particular set of traits that is ultimate in fitness. In a given environment, one set of traits might be most fit, but that set of traits would change if the environment were to change. In fact, organisms with greater genetic variability tend to be more biologically successful. Such organisms are better able to spread out into diverse ecological niches and better withstand environmental changes than those lacking genetic diversity.
This is obviously in stark contrast to the ideas of Hitler as far as genetic diversity of the human race goes. Therefore, Hitler’s ideas represent a perversion of evolutionary thinking, and are not truly representative of what evolution actually says. Blaming evolutionary theory for Hitler is akin to blaming Christianity for the persecutions of the Inquisition, for instance. I don’t think anyone would argue that torturing or murdering heretics is an action that is truly based on the teachings of Christianity.
Then, he relied on a warped understanding of evolution. (Surprise! Hitler's views were warped, who knew?). See my post below yours. Evolution actually implies that those species with greater genetic diversity are more likely to survive long-term than those lacking genetic diversity. Hitler certainly was not in favor of increasing the diversity of the human gene pool, was he?
First of all, the fact that you refer to “Darwinian” evolution is telling. Do you really believe that the theory of evolution that is accepted currently is exactly the same theory as Darwin’s theory? Hint: it isn’t; much has been added to the theory since Darwin’s time.
Secondly, “Darwinian” evolution does no such thing as trying to explain origins, at least not any more so than does Newtonian physics. You do know, right, that one of the applications of Newtonian physics is the prediction of the behavior of a large cloud of diffuse gas particles that do not interact with each other except via their gravitational interactions. Such interactions tend to cause areas of increasing density in the cloud. Once increasingly dense areas form, these tend to grow and become ever more dense as time progresses. Eventually the densest area becomes hot (due to loss of gravitational potential energy) and dense enough that nuclear reactions begin to occur, and that dense area starts to emit radiation. While that is occurring, Newtonian physics predicts that forces exerted by gas particles on each other will cause outlying particles to begin to revolve around this central dense area and form a disk shaped structure. Further, but smaller, dense areas tend to form in this disk, and material from the disk accumulates forming higher density spherical areas that revolved around the larger central dense region. In case I’ve been too obtuse, this is the explanation, given by Newtonian physics, for the ORIGIN of the sun and the earth (as well as the other planets).
Evolution does give an explanation for the origin of new species, but look at what must be present prior to the origin of any new species. There must be spacetime (explained by the big bang cosmology, which contrary to creationist claims is NOT part of evolutionary theory. There must be matter within that spacetime, also explained by big bang cosmology. There must be accumulations of matter that can be built upon, explained by big bang plus Newtonian gravity (or General Relativity to give a more exact explanation). There must be a development of that matter accumulation into a star and planets (described above, and well explained by Newtonian mechanics). Focusing on earth, there must be a supply of organic chemical compounds, explained by the laws of chemistry. There must be an agglomeration of such compounds into more complex systems, also explained by chemistry. There must be a method developed by which such agglomerations can store information about themselves and use that information to reproduce, explained albeit speculatively by several hypotheses concerning abiogenesis. Only after all these “origins” are explained, can evolution be invoked to explain the appearance of new species of life.
Further, evolution IS observed, both in nature and the lab all the time. There have been examples of new species formed. There have been observed examples of beneficial mutations. What you are complaining is not observed is the transformation of one type of higher taxon into another. That, however, is not expected to be observed. We expect to see only small changes over small time scales. There is no mechanism, however, that prevents these small changes from accumulating over large time scales into large changes.
In case you don’t read my much longer reply to you, the short version: evolution deals with NO philosophical issues whatsoever. It deals only with the mechanism by which new species appear. Any philosophical issues are ones brought out by those who think evolution conflicts with their religious beliefs. Other scientific theories have the same “philosphical issues”.
-— Science is morally neutral. -—
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Darwinism isn’t scientific?
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