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To: A. Pole
Hitler was a child of his time, and a Darwinist.

There is nothing Darwinian about Hitler's atrocities (or any type of forced sterilization program). Natural selection means just what it says: a natural process. Hitler's atrocities were entirely unnatural.

18 posted on 07/30/2006 9:30:27 AM PDT by freespirited (No pair has been more wrong, more loudly,more often than the two Senators from Massachusetts.-Zell)
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To: freespirited
There is nothing Darwinian about Hitler's atrocities (or any type of forced sterilization program). Natural selection means just what it says: a natural process. Hitler's atrocities were entirely unnatural.

He wanted to speed up this process, same way as animal breeder is using the principles of selection.

23 posted on 07/30/2006 11:28:52 AM PDT by A. Pole ("Gay marriage" - Karl Rove's conspiracy to defeat Democrats?)
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To: freespirited

"Hitler was a child of his time, and a Darwinist.
There is nothing Darwinian about Hitler's atrocities (or any type of forced sterilization program). Natural selection means just what it says: a natural process. Hitler's atrocities were entirely unnatural."

Darwin was a promoter of artificial selection.

"Finally, although the gradual decrease and ultimate extinction of the races of man is a highly complex problem, depending on many causes which differ in different places and at different times; it is the same problem as that presented by the extinction of one of the higher animals- of the fossil horse, for instance, which disappeared from South America, soon afterwards to be replaced, within the same districts, by countless troups of the Spanish horse. The New Zealander seems conscious of this parallelism, for he compares his future fate with that of the native rat now almost exterminated by the European rat. Though the difficulty is great to our imagination, and really great, if we wish to ascertain the precise causes and their manner of action, it ought not to be so to our reason, as long as we keep steadily in mind that the increase of each species and each race is constantly checked in various ways; so that if any new check, even a slight one, be superadded, the race will surely decrease in number; and decreasing numbers will sooner or later lead to extinction; the end, in most cases, being promptly determined by the inroads of conquering tribes.

On the Formation of the Races of Man.- In some cases the crossing of distinct races has led to the formation of a new race. The singular fact that the Europeans and Hindoos, who belong to the same Aryan stock, and speak a language fundamentally the same, differ widely in appearance, whilst Europeans differ but little from Jews, who belong to the Semitic stock, and speak quite another language, has been accounted for by Broca,* through certain Aryan branches having been largely crossed by indigenous tribes during their wide diffusion. When two races in close contact cross, the first result is a heterogeneous mixture: thus Mr. Hunter, in describing the Santali orhill-tribes of India, says that hundreds of imperceptible gradations may be traced "from the black, squat tribes of the mountains to the tall olive-coloured Brahman, with his intellectual brow, calm eyes, and high but narrow head"; so that it is necessary in courts of justice to ask the witnesses whether they are Santalis or Hindoos.*(2) Whether a heterogeneous people, such as the inhabitants of some of the Polynesian islands, formed by the crossing of two distinct races, with few or no pure members left, would ever become homogeneous, is not known from direct evidence. But as with our domesticated animals, a cross-breed can certainly be fixed and made uniform by careful selection*(3) in the course of a few generations, we may infer that the free inter-crossing of a heterogeneous mixture during a long descent would supply the place of selection, and overcome any tendency to reversion; so that the crossed race would ultimately become homogeneous, though it might not partake in an equal degree of the characters of the two parent-races."



Darwin ch 7


28 posted on 07/30/2006 1:44:46 PM PDT by budlt2369 (I tried to warn them about Peter Singer, but they wouldn't listen.)
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