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To: Dante Alighieri; freedumb2003

it seems that some people like to use any stick to thrash Darwin. Now they have turned (once again) to attempting to blame the Holocaust on poor old Charles's insight and theories.

It is, to them, an irrelevant trifle that facts and history do not support their assertions.

From what I can tell, the "link" (as such) as it exists is as follows:

1. Darwin published OotS and DoM
2. Spencer et alia came up with somewhat different models of evolution, and came up with "social evolution". Spencer also coined a phrase and concept ubiquitously misattributed to Darwin - "the survival of the fittest"
3. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, sociopolitical philosopher and writer, formulated the notion of the "ubermensch" and the proper role of his society as one of preparing the field for the emergence of such superior humans. ("Thus Spake Zarathustra")
4. Various "eugenics" movements, weakly derived from misunderstandings of the ToE and enormously derived from extant notions of racial superiority, came into vigorous existence in many western societies (including white Protestant America)
5. Hitler perverted these secondary and tertiary perversions of Darwin's work, mixed in Germanic folklore and extant Germanic Christian antisemitism (see: Martin Luther et omnia generis alia), and came up with Nazi Aryanism as a justification for his statism.

that's a pretty weak stick with which to cudgel the theory of an observant old man. The link to Luther is much more linear, much more pure.


340 posted on 08/20/2006 4:31:35 PM PDT by King Prout (many complain I am overly literal... this would not be a problem if fewer people were under-precise)
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To: King Prout
Good points.

...The link to Luther is much more linear, much more pure. ..

It is easy to find really vile ant-Semitism in Luther's writings. It is impossible to find any anti-Semitism in Darwin's.

512 posted on 08/20/2006 10:54:11 PM PDT by Virginia-American
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