Eugenics is pretty much the opposite of natural selection. Nature has her own criteria for what survives and breeds. Our deliberate choices suit our own purposes, but they're not necessarily going to result in something that can survive nature's tests. For example, many of our agricultural products are somewhat fragile, and wouldn't prevail in a natural state. In particular, Hitler's preference for only Aryan stock, had he succeeded, would have resulted in an impoverishment of the gene pool, which in nature is usually a bad choice for the long haul.
As for Arnhart, we had a thread a while ago on his work. I agree that Darwin's work is inherently conservative (but then we'd be haggling about definitions). To shortcut that, if you think Adam Smith's work is something that conservatives should embrace, then the same reasoning goes for Darwin's work. The survival and flourishing of enterprises in an unplanned economy is analogous to the activities of species in nature. It's arguable that Darwin was influenced by Smith's thinking. Both are products of the Enlightenment, as is the American Revolution itself. The knee-jerk rejection of Darwin (and of almost all scientific thinking) that I see on this website is -- to me -- the antithesis of conservatism (defined as Founding Father-style thinking about politics and economics).
Sure--- that applies to Hitler.
But eugenicists such as Oliver Wendall Holmes or W.E.B. DuBois or Sanger would say that a sensible program of eugenics consists of weeding out the weak, not developing the singular racial purity Hitler desired.
I guess one of the questions I have in mind would be, in what sense are we involved in the sort of competition Darwin envisioned, especially if one accepts William Hamilton? He thought Darwinian natural selection encompassed competition beteen the races and nationalities i.e. Europe vs. the Ottoman Empire and perhaps a Samuel Huntington would agree.
As far as I can tell my LIMITED perspective from lurking, MOST people on this site don't have a problem with science in general or Darwin's theory of natural selection in particular...
What they have is a problem with the likes of leftists such as Eugenie Scott, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, who either either bluntly and honestly or subtly and sneakily push the "Blind Watchmaker thesis" and see Darwin's theory of natural selection as a "universal acid".
I think the reason is that the notion of it as a universal acid seems to go well beyond the science behind the theory, yet Dennett presents the "acid" idea quite dogmatically.
I mean, Thomas Sowell makes the point that one Hayek's unplanned order need not be extended into a metaphysics to be accepted as economics.
It's true that many of the Founders were rationalist Deists, but they believed the argument from design to be an aid to science--- it resolved the problem Hume had left of the uniformity of nature, without which assumption induction was unjustifiable. that didn't make them anti-science, did it?
Does one have to accept that, as Bertrand Russell said, that
that Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms… that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave… all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.
to not be anti-science?
Are you saying that Aryan's are BELOW average then?