Now how many massacres were initiated by differences in Scientific ideology? How many people were burnt at the stake for disagreeing about Science? How many wars were started over Scientific interpretation?
About 100 million were slaughtered in the century dominated by Darwinism. Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, but Darwin declined to save himself more controversy. And the wacky race based eugenic theories of the Nazis were tied to some of the evolutionary ideas espoused in Darwin's book, ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE OF LIFE .
Of all the forerunners of Hitler in Germany—Hegel, Comte, Nietzsche, Bernhardi and others—the most significant was certainly Ernst Haeckel, the atheistic founder of the Monist League and the most vigorous promoter of both biological Darwinism and social Darwinism in continental Europe in the late-nineteenth and early wentieth centuries.
Almost any 19th or even mid-20th century book on human evolution carries illustrations showing the progression: monkey, ape, Hottentot (or African Negro, Australian Aborigine, Tasmanian, etc.) and white European. Few of the early evolutionists were free of such arrogance, not even the politically liberal Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley.
"The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world."—*Charles Darwin, Life and Letters, p. 318.
"Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory."—*Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), p. 127.