Posted on 05/24/2008 9:04:49 PM PDT by 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.
Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.Notice how it is the atheistic, Darwinian view of human life - humanity as a biological species only, without any reference to God - that makes the above cold-blooded discussion of human natural selection possible.The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival.
In the course of the practical execution of the final solution, Europe will be combed through from west to east. Germany proper, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, will have to be handled first due to the housing problem and additional social and political necessities.
The evacuated Jews will first be sent, group by group, to so-called transit ghettos, from which they will be transported to the East.
The complete text can be found here:
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/wannsee.htm
too busy with “real” science to ponder the moral implications of your work?
Sometimes something can be true, and bad.
Survival of the fittest only applies to animals and humans with no morals.
Unfortunately, people who don’t believe in 2000 year old books have no morals - they just make it up as they go.
The information and knowledge represented by the abundance of life is not the accumulated error of eons, rather it represents the diversity of adaptation. Graduated change or punctuated equilibrium are both not supported by the millions of years of fossil record that would be extant if indeed, these mechanisms were at play to produce type of life forms.
“The Origin of Species” To go from reading that is like going from Einstein talking about relativity theory to taking about politics.
Which says more about the pervasiveness of religion and superstition and the poor state of scientific education in the US than it does about evolutionary biology.
Notice how it is the atheistic, Darwinian view of human life - humanity as a biological species only, without any reference to God - that makes the above cold-blooded discussion of human natural selection possible.Nope. You don't get it. People have been coming up with excuses for genocide for ages(i.e. papists, hindus etc... don't deserve to live). Hitler's main invention was not apologia for genocide it was *the industrialization of genocide*. Do we blame Henry Ford for the holocaust? He was even one of Hitler's first backers.
We need to clarify first that neither Ben Stein nor anyone else in “Expelled” ever claimed that Darwinism was the sole culprit for the Nazi program for killing the disabled or exterminating the Jews. The argument was more circumspect: Darwinism was an important—but by no means exclusive—ingredient in the Nazi worldview that motivated them to pursue death for the “inferior” as a means to foster evolutionary progress. This is irrefutable, if anyone will simply examine the evidence (just read the chapter “Nation and Race” in Mein Kampf).
If we focus on the Nazi program to kill the disabled, we find that just about all historians who have examined the evidence have concluded that Darwinism did have something to do with it. The museum in Hadamar (which Stein visited in the film) and the accompanying book for sale there both explain the influence of Darwinism on the Nazi euthanasia program.
For the Nazis killing the disabled was a radical form of eugenics, i.e., the program to improve humans hereditarily. The father of the modern eugenics movement, Francis Galton, conceived the idea while reading Darwin’s _Origin of Species_. The organizer of the German eugenics movement, Alfred Ploetz, claimed that his main ideas about eugenics were drawn from Darwinism. Ploetz also recruited the two leading Darwinists in Germany—Ernst Haeckel and August Weismann—to became honorary members of the Society for Race Hygiene when he founded it in 1905. Ploetz was on the Nazi government’s committee that framed eugenics legislation, and Hitler personally honored him in 1936 for his contributions to the German eugenics movement.
And from Mein Kampf:
Originally posted by Adolph Hitler
Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable.
http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/
I'll try and remember that the next time I feel the urge to help an old lady across the street.
Correction
To go from reading that to reading “The Descent of Man,” is like going from Einstein talking about relativity theory toEinstein talking about politics.
And why should you have this urge? Natural slection would have her navigate the traffic by herself. The garbage men can takes care of the body if she doesn’t make it..
It could, but it doesn't. Most creationists I've ever discussed the issue with rule evolution out a priori - there is no evidence of any kind that could possibly convince them that the bible isn't literal history. Their knowledge of the actual details of evolutionary biology is generally very poor anyway.
No. The whole will to power and getting rid of the inferior came to the Nazis from Nietzsche. The darwinian stuff was a very small part. The revisionism trying to make Darwinism a big part of the Nazi program is just pushing an agenda.
And why should you have this urge? Natural slection would have her navigate the traffic by herself. The garbage men can takes care of the body if she doesn’t make it..Humans are *social* animals. Google "reciprocal altruism" and get some books on evolutionary psychology before you spout off anymore.
Well its got nothing to do with religion or the supposed wishes of magical, mystical beings anyway.
Yes, the American educational system, for all the money thrown at it, is not very good.
But that's why the relevant point was Coyoteman's...that Darwin's main points aren't overturned by evidence...not a popularity contest of what the public believes. Remember, the public believes in many other things (such as blocking any additional restrictions on abortion, or global warming, or that Obama is an appropriate candidate) at a higher rate than creationism. Does that mean they are all right?
Social Darwinism was popular in Germany since about World War I, and was a strong part of the Nazi belief system. It’s what they call “bad science”; thst is, science sculpted to fit one’s political views. Sort of like global warming today only without the mountains of bodies.
Which is it...atheistic or Darwinian?
Darwin made it quite clear that he was not an atheist.
Indeed, much is revealed when you stop reading evolution blog posters and hack into actual books written by Darwinians. That's where the real fun begins. Like say, with the online books on this page:
Euvolution: Darwinism-Eugenicswhich will hammer the point even further: that Darwinism is not a science. Pick up Sir Arthur Keith's Antiquity of Man, for example, and give it a read.
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