Darwin's Dystopia : Darwinism and Hitler's Eugenics Program

tothesource.org ^ | May 8, 2008 | Dr. Benjamin Wiker

[SeekAndFind]

The folks at Scientific American are steamed at Ben Stein: (see links):

Ben Stein's Expelled: No Integrity Displayed (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=ben-steins-expelled-review-john-rennie)

Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn't Want You to Know...(http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=six-things-ben-stein-doesnt-want-you-to-know)

Stein's controversial movie Expelled links Charles Darwin to Adolf Hitler, the ultimate scientific hero to the ultimate manifestation of human evil. "A shameful antievolution film tries to blame Darwin for the Holocaust," shouts John Rennie's headline. Rennie then declares that its "heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency."

The problem is, that the link is quite real. In fact, undeniable. One doesn't need to see the film to make that link. Simply read Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Darwin's Descent of Man applies the evolutionary arguments of his more famous Origin of Species to human beings. In it, Darwin argues that those characteristics we might think to be specifically human—physical strength and health, morality, and intelligence—were actually achieved by natural selection. From this, he infers two related eugenic conclusions.

First, if the desirable results of strength, health, morality, and intelligence are caused by natural selection, then we can improve them by artificial selection. We can breed better human beings, even rise above the human to the superhuman. Since human beings have been raised above the other animals by the struggle to survive, they may be raised even higher, transcending human nature to something—who knows?—as much above men as men are now above the apes. This strange hope rests in Darwin's very rejection of the belief that man is defined by God, for "the fact of his having thus risen" by evolution to where he is, "instead of having been aboriginally placed there" by God, "may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future."

Second, if good breeding gives us better results, pushing us up the evolutionary slope, then bad or indiscriminate breeding drags us back down. "If…various checks…do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men," Darwin groaned, "the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule."

Now to Hitler. The first, most important thing to understand is that the link between Darwin and Hitler was not immediate. That is, nobody is making the case that Hitler had Darwin's eugenic masterpiece The Descent of Man in one hand while he penned Mein Kampf in the other. Darwin's eugenic ideas were spread all over Europe and America, until they were common intellectual coin by Hitler's time. That makes the linkage all the stronger, because we are not talking about one crazed man misreading Darwin but at least two generations of leading scientists and intellectuals drawing the same eugenic conclusions from evolutionary theory as Darwin himself drew.

A second point. We misunderstand Hitler's evil if we reduce it to anti-Semitism. Hitler's anti-Semitism had, of course, multiple causes, including his own warped character. That having been said, Nazism was at heart a racial, that is, a biological political program based up evolutionary theory. It was "applied biology," in the words of deputy party leader of the Nazis, Rudolph Hess, and done for the sake of a perceived greater good, racial purity, that is, for the sake of a race purified of physical and mental defects, imperfections, and racial inferiority.

The greater good. We need to remember that, even though we rightly consider it the apogee of wickedness, the Nazi regime did not purport to do evil. In a monstrous illustration of the adage about good intentions leading to hell, it claimed to be scientific and progressive, to do what hard reason demanded for the ultimate benefit of the human race. Its superhuman acts of inhumanity were carried out for the sake of humanity.

Hitler had enormous sympathy for the downtrodden he witnessed as a young man in Vienna. "The Vienna manual labourers lived in surroundings of appalling misery. I shudder even to-day when I think of the woeful dens in which people dwelt, the night shelters and the slums, and all the tenebrous spectacles of ordure, loathsome filth and wickedness."

He believed that the social problems he witnessed in Vienna needed a radical, even ruthless solution if true change were to be effected. As he says with breathtaking concision, "the sentimental attitude would be the wrong one to adopt."

"Even in those days I already saw that there was a two-fold method by which alone it would be possible to bring about an amelioration of these conditions. This method is: first, to create better fundamental conditions of social development by establishing a profound feeling for social responsibilities among the public; second, to combine this feeling for social responsibilities with a ruthless determination to prune away all excrescences which are incapable of being improved."

The proposed ruthlessness of his solution was in direct imitation of nature conceived according to Darwinism. "Just as Nature concentrates its greatest attention, not to the maintenance of what already exists but on the selective breeding of offspring in order to carry on the species, so in human life also it is less a matter of artificially improving the existing generation—which, owing to human characteristics, is impossible in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred—and more a matter of securing from the very start a better road for future development."

How do we secure a better road for future development? By ensuring that only the best of the best race, the Aryan race, breed, and pruning away all the unfit and racially inferior. That isn't just a theory; it's eugenic Darwinism as a political program. As Hitler made clear, "the State is looked upon only as a means to an end and this end is the conservation of the racial characteristics of mankind." Jews have to be pruned away, but also Gypsies, Slavs, the retarded, handicapped, and any one else that is biologically unfit.

That's Darwinism in action. Does that mean that Darwin would have approved? No. Does that mean that Darwin's theory provided the framework for Hitler's eugenic program? Yes.

[tacticalogic]

I am more concerned that” scientific research” not include immoral acts, because the Nazi experiences show us that it can happen. Furthermore, the evidence shows that unfettered science is often bad science. Despite their access to live human subjects, the Nazis produced little of lasting value. It was a bit like Tim O’Leary experiemnts with LSD.

What a crock of mealy-mouthed sophistry. Might as well sit around a campfire singing kum-ba-ya and talking about our "feelings".

[RobbyS]

Dramatic effect. The Nazis are bete noire to most liberals, so they loathe the comparison.

[Caramelgal]

The link offers convincing arguments that the temple stone could not be a recent addition for the sake of tourism. Cambodians would kill anybody who messed with those temples in any way, for any reason.

Interesting? Yes. Convincing? No.

Certainly the stone carvings are authentic and at least 800 years old but artistic depictions of mythical and fanciful creatures by the Cambodians or any other ancient or not so ancient culture is in no way proof that dinosaurs roamed abound with modern men as recently as 800 years ago.

First of all the carving resembles a rhinoceros more than a stegosaurus – the head and tail are all wrong to be any stegosaurus ever discovered.



It could be a fanciful depiction of an animal the Cambodians might have seen or heard about – the Sumatran Rhinoceros.



“Members of the species once ranged throughout rainforests, swamps and cloud forests in India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.”

Now if genuine stegosaurus bones were found in the same sedimentary layer as humans dating to approximately 800 years ago and or the bones of stegosaurus were found to have butchering marks – evidence of human hunting – then we might really be on to something. Of course that would necessitate something more that speculation based on solely on some fanciful and religious artwork - science-y kind of stuff like Archeology and Paleontology and radio carbon dating.

I would also direct you the carving at the bottom of this picture:



It appears to be an animal with a monkey face and tail and human body. Proof of the missing link? No of course not. Creationists would never say it was and neither would scientists.

The of course it perhaps the Cambodians were fans of Maurice Sendak.



Then again there is the question of Peruvian Ica stones:

The “discoverer” of the Ica stones is one Dr. Javier Cabrera. Hate to be the one to burst your bubble but they are most likely fakes.

The Ica stone craze began in 1996 with Dr. Javier Cabrera Darquea, a Peruvian physician who allegedly abandoned a career in medicine in Lima to open up the Museo de Piedras Grabadas (Engraved Stones Museum) in Ica. There he displays his collection of several thousand stones. Dr. Cabrera claims that a farmer found the stones in a cave. The farmer was arrested for selling the stones to tourists. He told the police that he didn't really find them in a cave, but that he made them himself. Other modern Ica artists, however, continue to carve stones and sell forgeries of the farmer's forgeries. In 1975, Basilio Uchuya and Irma Gutierrez de Aparcana claimed that they sold Cabrera stones they'd graved themselves and that they'd chosen their subject matter by copying from "comic books, school books, and magazines" (Polidoro 2002).

“Cabrera believes that Gliptolithic man knew of existing life in distant stars and had technical devices for space travel without the use of fuel consumption as we know it. Several stones show images drawn on the plains of Nazca that Cabrera interprets as an ancient "spaceport" based on the harness of electromagnetic energy for propulsion of space faring vehicles.”

“The cave where the stones were allegedly discovered has never been identified, much less examined by scientists. Skeptics consider the stones to be a pathetic hoax, created for a gullible tourist trade. Nevertheless, three groups in particular have endeavored to support the authenticity of the stones: (a) those who believe that extraterrestrials are an intimate part of Earth's "real" history; (b) fundamentalist creationists who drool at the thought of any possible error made by anthropologists, archaeologists, evolutionary biologists, etc.; and (c) the mytho-historians who claim that ancient myths are accurate historical records to be understood literally.

Ica stones

The Ica Stones and Dr. Javier Cabrera

why anybody would have done the fabulous amount of work needed to create thousands of these things before they knew whether or not gringos would pay for them.

Because “There's a sucker born every minute"?

[tacticalogic]

Dramatic effect. The Nazis are bete noire to most liberals, so they loathe the comparison.

OK. But don't drag a pantload of emotional manipulation in here and tell me it's "science".

[tacticalogic]

Do you think it was reasonable, rational, or logical for Nobel to blame himself for the deaths that resulted from the use of dynamite as a weapon?

[RobbyS]

Are you able to look at anything historically? The simple fact is that it took a long while for the Darwinian synthesis to be worked out. That is the reconciliation between what was true in Darwin’s theory and what was true in Mendel’s theory. Cobbled together loosely by Julian Huxley by about 1940. The molecular biology which make the thing plausible came after 1950. But the case is really just now being made by the detailed sequencing. But it is not all tied up neat and tidy, and we know that very often that as a theory seems to have been verified, new evidence, new tools etc. scrambles things again, and a new pattern has to be found. Talk about emotional: the reaction to the ID people verges on hysterical. If what they say is so ridiculous, then why all the fuss? One takes a machete to a rattlesnake, and lets the grass snake just slither away.

[hinckley buzzard]

Darwin's eugenic ideas were spread all over Europe and America, until they were common intellectual coin by Hitler's time

This is the key to the issue. Darwinism including social Darwinism and its eugenic technology was generally considered an acceptable school of thought up until the Third Reich revealed its ugly face.

To deny this is to ignore history, something the once respectable Scientific American has become rather good at.

[tacticalogic]

But it is not all tied up neat and tidy, and we know that very often that as a theory seems to have been verified, new evidence, new tools etc. scrambles things again, and a new pattern has to be found. Talk about emotional: the reaction to the ID people verges on hysterical. If what they say is so ridiculous, then why all the fuss? One takes a machete to a rattlesnake, and lets the grass snake just slither away.

If there's evidence for ID and the tools to find it, bring 'em on. The "ID people" are the ones making it emotional, because that's all they've got.

[RobbyS]

Kind of hard to “bring it on,” if you can’t get a job and can’t get published. But is it only them when their opponents brand them as “creationists,” as if the term meant they rejected the concept of evolution.

[tacticalogic]

Kind of hard to “bring it on,” if you can’t get a job and can’t get published. But is it only them when their opponents brand them as “creationists,” as if the term meant they rejected the concept of evolution.

You don't need a job or to be published to have an idea. Show me one concrete proposal for research that would provide empirical evidence of ID. You can't justify a job as a researcher pursuing a hypothesis that can't be tested. As far as being branded "creationists", they pretty much did that themselves by their association with organizations like the Discovery Institute.

[RobbyS]

Please point to a publication of the Discovery Institute that denies the theory of evolution. IAC, I suggest you read Creation and Evolution, which includes papers presented at the 2006 Schulerkreis with Pope Benedict XVI. Everyone there was a "creationist" and none believes literally in Genesis.

[tacticalogic]

Are they creationists, or not?

[The Evolutionist]

“Hitler could just as much say that his evolutionary make-up is different from Darwin's and his actions are simply the result of Darwinian selection.”

His actions may have been the result of wrong understanding of the natural selection process but the final Darwinian outcome of the survival of the fittest as it turned out had had Hitler and his Nazi cohorts thoroughly wiped and most of Germany razed.

[The Evolutionist]

“Or the evidence mustered by evolutionists to support their claim is generally very poor anyway.”

.....And what evidence have the creationist ever provided other a book called “The Bible”?

[SeekAndFind]

.And what evidence have the creationist ever provided other a book called “The Bible”?

Both sides look at the evidence, their INTERPRETATION of the evidence is the difference. And BTW, belief in Intelligent Design should not be equated with creationism. Volumes have been written explaining the difference.

[RobbyS]

Creationism is a theological doctrine. It is compatible with darwinism if one thinks of darwinism as a study of secondary causes and not of primary ones. No Catholic can accept the simplistic views of someone like Dawkins. However the darwinian mechanism of optimization through variation and seelection function, because these can be observed in the lab. More problematic is the use of the theory to reconstruct the history of the biosphere. Some people call the first "microevolution" and the second "macroevolution." The question is the explanatory power of the theory for events under the microscope and also for a reconstruction of the tree of life back into the virtually infinite past (How long does it take to count to 6 billion?

[Coyoteman]

And BTW, belief in Intelligent Design should not be equated with creationism. Volumes have been written explaining the difference.

Does these "volumes" include Of Pandas and People?

[RobbyS]

Creationism is a synthesis of Greek and Hebrew thought, each being a radical critique of the mythologies of western ages, and blended together in the last centuries before Christ and the first centuries after Christ.

[tacticalogic]

It sounds like creationism and ID aren’t mutually exclusive. What’s the problem with ID proponents being “branded as creationists” if, in fact, they are?

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

How was Mendel's thinking “more advanced” than Darwin's?

Darwin's was simply wrong, that's how.