And yet even to this day the "theories" of Marx's great epigones Engles and Oparin form the basis of NASA's research into "origins of life":
NASA is totally committed to the Oparin dialectical materialist speculation on the origin of life. Most of the origin of life projects supported by NASA ... are "proteins first" and are due to go the way of perpetual machines. They may produce interesting chemistry but they have nothing to do with the origin of life....One must suppose that the epigones were intimately familiar with the thought of their master, and were faithful proselytizers of it, the comparative publication timing of Marx's and Darwin's principal works notwithstanding. I imagine that Darwin would not have approved of his theory being reinterpreted into the categories of dialectical materialism. But seemingly this has been done anyway, as NASA's commitment to Oparin (that nasty Soviet beast!) clearly shows.It is a characteristic of the true believer in religion, philosophy, and ideology that he must have a set of beliefs, come what may.... Belief in a primaeval soup on the ground that no other paradigm is available is an example of the logical fallacy of the false alternative. In science, it is a virtue to acknowledge ignorance. There is no reason that this should be different in the research on the origin of life. The best advice that one could have given to an alchemist would have been to go study nuclear physics and astrophysics, although that would not have been helpful at the time. We do not see the origin of life clearly, but through a glass darkly.... [Hubert Yockey, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life, 2005, p. 182f.]
Hitler's racialist policies were undoubtedly justified on "survival of the fittest" grounds, that entailed that people considered to be "less fit" could be expunged. Peter Singer continues to make that argument today, from the hallowed halls of Princeton. You don't think he got that idea from the Gospel of Saint John, do you?
FWIW Doc. Thanks so much for writing!
The idea probably came from Plato, the first advocate of compulsory eugenics. He recommended state-supervised selective breeding of children.
Actually no. Yeah, Hitler and other Nazis often made rather superficial appeals to evolution, in general though these were in support of militarism, and of the desirability of "struggle," and of the destiny of Aryans to rule over lesser races. But I've yet to find, by any Nazi, any specific elaboration of racial theory -- e.g. why, for instance, Aryans were "natural" militarists, conquers and slave masters -- in terms of any sort of evolutionary theory.
In fact Nazi race theory was based on creationism, although it was admittedly a mystical sort of creationism that wouldn't appeal much to your typical fundamentalist.
Read Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century. This was the most complete statement of Nazi race theory, and was the second most important work in the Nazi cannon after Hitler's Mein Kampf. You can find the full text online, although you might have to go to a racist website to do so. (IOW it remains an important and influential work among ideological racists.)
Rosenberg asserts that the various races were originally created with distinct and very different "race souls". (He appears not to have believed in individual souls.) The Aryan "soul" was, like all race souls, carried in "the blood". It had been diluted by race mixing, which of course was a plot of the Jews who knew that the destiny of the Aryan race was to rule over them and the other races.
The whole point of Nazi race policy was to restore the original created order: to restore the purity of the blood and thereby the purity of the racial soul. This had nothing to do with evolution, but to the extent you can put it in those terms the purpose of the Nazis was not to advance evolution, but to reverse it.
Betty Betty Betty
Godwin's Law -- *sigh* Non Sequiteur (and such a grand one) *sigh* *sigh*
I had such great hopes for you.