Replies

Here is a sample of the subject of the article:

http://www.coralridge.org/darwin/legacy.asp?ID=crm&ec=I1301

"It changed his life. Francis Galton was 37 years old in 1860 when he read The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The book, Galton wrote, “made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally.”

"Most notably, Darwin’s book liberated him from the authority of the Church. “Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers” and “arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities....”

“Judicious Marriages”

"After reading Origin, which is subtitled, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Galton reasoned that a better breed of men could be produced with proper guidance and “judicious marriages.” He wrote in his book, Hereditary Genius that “it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.”

"Darwin congratulated Galton on the publication of Hereditary Genius, telling his younger cousin in a letter that, “I do not think I ever in all my life read anything more interesting and original.” While Darwin did not distance himself from cousin Galton, contemporary apologists of Darwin do. They seek to distinguish Darwin from those who made unseemly social application of his ideas.

"Evolutionist Niles Eldredge thinks that “Darwin would cringe at some of the movements undertaken in his name.” Eldredge does acknowledges that “social Darwinism,” which he regards as an illegitimate offspring of Darwin’s theory, “has given us the eugenics movement and some of its darker outgrowths, such as the genocidal practices of the Nazis in World War II—where eugenics was invoked as a scientific rationale to go along with whatever other ‘reasons’ Hitler and his fellow Nazis had for the Holocaust.”

"Galton coined the term “eugenics” (well born) in 1883, and campaigned extensively for socially engineered marriages which would over several generations produce, he thought, a highly gifted race of people. Galton wanted to limit marriage to the union of well-born partners and prohibit marriages of the “unfit.” By so doing, Galton thought that “what Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.”

"Well, maybe not that “kindly,” as it turned out later. Francis Galton replaced God with Darwinian Evolution and declared that there was no need for religion, because science is a valid alternative. In so doing, this disciple of Darwin devalued man and helped to weaken a moral brake that could have stopped the Nazi atrocities that followed.

"In his essay, “Eugenics as a Factor in Religion,” Galton laid out arguments that would lead to Nazi killing in the years to come. He left no doubt about the link between evolution and eugenics: “The creed of eugenics is founded upon the idea of evolution; not on a passive form of it, but on one that can to some extent direct its own course….”

Preserving the “Favoured” Race

"When Hitler came to power in 1933, he installed a dictatorship with one agenda: enactment of his radical Nazi racial philosophy built on Darwinian evolution. He sought, in Darwin’s terms, to preserve the “favoured” race in the struggle for survival. Brute strength and intelligence would be the driving force of the Nazi plan.

"The first task was to eliminate the weak and those with impure blood that would corrupt the race. These included the disabled, ill, Jews, and Gypsies. Second, the Nazis sought to expand Germany’s borders in order to achieve more living space, or “Lebensraum,” to make room for the expansion of the “favoured” race. Third, the Nazis set about to eliminate communism because of its threat to the Aryan race and because, according to Hitler, communism was the work of Bolshevik Jews.

"The plan quickly unfolded. An order to sterilize some 400,000 Germans was issued within five months of Hitler’s rise to power. The order, set to take effect on January 1, 1934, listed nine categories of the unfit to be sterilized: feebleminded, schizophrenia, manic depression, Huntington’s chorea, epilepsy, hereditary body deformities, deafness, hereditary blindness, and alcoholism. The Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935 to prohibit marriage between Jews and Germans and to strip Jews of their German citizenship.

"The Nazis established eugenic courts to ensure that the eugenic laws were enforced. To identify the unfit, German eugenicists compared the individual health files of millions of Germans with medical records from hospitals and the National Health Service. The American firm, IBM, aided the effort by automating a national card file system that cross-indexed the defective.

"American eugenicists celebrated the German sterilization program. A leading U.S. eugenics publication, Eugenical News, published an admiring article on a German eugenics institute and extended “best wishes” to its director “for the success of his work in his new and favorable environment.” The New England Journal of Medicine editorialized in 1934 that “Germany is perhaps the most progressive nation in restricting fecundity among the unfit.”

"Eugenics in America was not a fringe movement. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark 1927 ruling that authorized the sterilization of a “feeble minded” Virginia woman. In his majority opinion for the Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Killing the Weak and Disabled

"After Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, the Nazis became even more aggressive toward the weak. Approximately 100,000 Germans, labeled “useless eaters” by the Nazis, were killed. The victims were patients in nursing homes and medical facilities, as well as Jewish mentally disturbed and disabled. The Nazis ordered all of these exterminated. Ultimately, some 11 million people (and possibly more), six million from Jewish descent, were killed by the Nazi death machine.

"Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler, outlines in simplified fashion the route from Darwin to Hitler:

"First, Darwinism undermined traditional morality and the value of human life. Then, evolutionary progress became the new moral imperative. This aided the advance of eugenics, which was overtly founded on Darwinian principles. Some eugenicists began advocating euthanasia and infanticide for the disabled. On a parallel track, some prominent Darwinists argued that human racial competition and war are part of the Darwinian struggle for existence. Hitler imbibed these social Darwinist ideas, blended in virulent anti-Semitism, and—there you have it: Holocaust."

"Today when evolutionists are questioned as to how Darwinian evolution gave birth to Hitler’s Nazism, they immediately want to beg the question, answering that racism has nothing to do with science. They are correct! Racism has nothing to do with science, but it has everything to do with evolution—a fact that is unavoidable."