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.
Devolution is more likely.
you know what, you’re right, I hereby renounce my Christianity.
If that were the case, creationists wouldn't need to resort to deception and misrepresentation to convince those sympathetic to them that the supporting evidence for evolution was poor or to construct such ridiculous arguments as they have in the past in support the likes of "scientific creationism".
But, as you have said, 'everything in science is false', so alas, everything in these books must be false too.
The article makes clear the undeniable link between Darwinian thought and eugenics -- and how the Nazis put these ideas into practice.
The Gentle Darwinians
What Darwin’s Champions Won’t Mention...
The enthusiasm Nietzsche expresses in this passage is for eugenics, a theory of biological determinism invented by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s first cousin. However extreme Nietzsche’s recommendation might sound today, by the first part of the twentieth century eugenics came to be widely practiced. In 1933, little more than thirty years after Nietzsche’s death, the Hereditary Health Courts set up in Nazi Germany were enforcing a rigorous policy of enforced sterilization; to a lesser degree, similar policies were carried out in societies from the United States to Scandinavia.
In 1912, in his presidential address to the First International Congress of Eugenics, a landmark gathering in London of racial biologists from Germany, the United States, and other parts of the world, Major Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son, trumpeted the spread of eugenics and evolution. As described by Nicholas Wright Gillham in his A Life of Francis Galton, Major Darwin foresaw the day when “eugenics would become not only a grail, a substitute for religion, as Galton had hoped, but a ‘paramount duty’ whose tenets would presumably become enforceable.” The major repeated his father’s admonition that, though the crudest workings of natural selection must be mitigated by “the spirit of civilization,” society must encourage breeding among the best stock and prevent it among the worst “without further delay.”
Leonard Darwin’s recognition of his father’s role in the formation and promotion of eugenics was more than filial piety. ...
The difference is that Hitler didn't practice Christianity but he did attempt to put into practice the principles of Darwinian evolution. Or as Mr. Orwell might say.’the death of the cell is the health of the organism’. Stalin and his kind decided to skip the religious appeal and go straight to creating “the new Soviet man” by artificial selection instead of waiting on the natural.No they didn't. Hitler did "practice" Christianity the same way he "practiced" evolution. He took Christian symbols and rhetoric and used them as an excuse for genocide.Again, on what evolutionary basis would Darwin been able to object?
The ones he stated.
But, as you have said, 'everything in science is false', so alas, everything in these books must be false too.LOL... You enjoy parading your ignorance don't you? Don't worry I'm not going to stop you from looking stupid.
Uuuum... no. You *do* know that Nietzsche was *anti*Darwinian right?
True. It is impossible to have an effect on that which doesn't exist, such as the "accuracy of the theory of evolution." What a sadly self-absorbed joke on yourself you are.
"...and maybe even producing a few discoveries from my own work."
Uh-huh. How truly impressive, if nontheless overly vague and inconseqiential. You must really admire yourself. There is no evidence, whatsoever, supporting the theory of evolution. None. It is a myth created by a distrubed individual using the straw-men of intentionally distorted biological examples (like the similarity [sic] of fetuses of several different species at a given point in their gestation), and swallowed whole by a craven, gullible, Godless public all too willing to listen with fawning adoration and bated breath to anything that screeches out what their itching ears long to hear.
The good news is that this charade will go on only so long before every single one of us stands before Almighty God and gives Him an unvarnished account of the choices we made.
Be sure to include the really impressive part about the "discoveries of your own" you're holding out hope for.
What a sad joke.
;-/
Darwin was a racist. He wrote with scientific accuracy and style that at least one race was ignorant and closer to the animals/Apes.
His racism was couched in science. What a high falutin’ fraud.
On this subject he was more ignorant than a pack of Apes who know a human being when they see one and I doubt he could play the violin as well as Louis Farrahkan.
That's a good point, and an important one. What distinguishes the Nazis from, say, other varieties of garden totalitarians, is the biological nature of their politics. It would not be far from the truth to say that it became a religion for them, mixed in with nationalism and even with weird mystical elements. With that in mind, think about this statement of Galton's:
"I take Eugenics very seriously, feeling that its principles ought to become one of the dominant motives in a civilised nation, much as if they were one of its religious tenets."And, in his book Essays in Eugenics, Galton writes:
"The aims of Eugenics... 5. Persistence in setting forth the national importance of Eugenics. There are three stages to be passed through. Firstly it must be made familiar as an academic question, until its exact importance has been understood and accepted as fact; Secondly it must be recognised as a subject whose practical development deserves serious consideration; and Thirdly it must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion."And now consider this by Karl Pearson:
"The thorough conviction by a nation that no worthier object can exist for man than the improvement of his own race is for Galton in itself the acceptance of Eugenics as a national religion. If we examine the reasons for such irresistible streams of popular emotion as are vaguely symbolised in respect for the national flag, in the King as personifying our country, indeed in all phases of patriotism, we shall discover that their springs lie in Galton's "immaterial motives," and it is in precisely such almost instinctive motives that he hoped to find ultimately a foundation for that highest form of patriotism, eugenic morality."and now think about this, from Wetham's Heredity and Socitey. He is talking about the success of Eugenics.
"If we are right in believing that the religious instinct is the only force strong enough to influence mankind, consciously or unconsciously, to consider the race as distinct from the individual, it is clear that the character of the national religion, the correctness of the biological principles its teaching embodies, the devotion, fidelity and number of its adherents, will be the real criterion of success or failure"Do you get the picture? Listen to what Leonard Darwin said in his opening address to the First International Eugenics Congress in 1912:
"As an agency making for progress, conscious selection must replace the blind forces of natural selection; and men must utilize all the knowledge acquired by studying the process of evolution in the past in order to promote moral and physical progress in the future. The nation which first takes this great work thoroughly in hand will surely not only win in all matters of international competition, but will be given a place of honour in the history of the world."Keep in mind that Alfred Ploetz was a member of the Eugenics Society while Leonard Darwin was president. So why did eugenics take off the way it did in Germany? Erst Rudin, Alfred Ploetz's brother-in-law, answers the question this way...
"Even if our movement succeeded in silently and slowly winning over the brains and hearts of our best Germans, the lack of organization ensured that no racial hygiene measures could be taken. The importance of racial hygiene has only become known in Germany to all intelligent Germans through the political work of Adolf Hitler, and it was only through him that our more than thirty-year-old dream has become a reality and racial hygiene principles have been translated into action."In other words, Germany happened to have the right sort of leader: in full agreement with eugenics, and possessing the political power to do something about it.
I don't think this is true, no matter how many times you say it. There are many variations on the idea of Evolution, before and since Darwin. Hitler and his cronies were under the influence of various occult thinkers, including the famous Madam Blavatsky, and they advocated a quasi-mystical idea of evolution, as advanced for example in 2001: A Space Odyssey, wherein mankind is striving for a higher form of being.
Of course, it's very easy to identify any and all ideas of "Entwicklung" ( which has the primary meaning of "development"; "Entwicklungshilfe" = "aid to developing countries" ) with Darwinism, but it's completely unjustified.
There are more such undeniable links on my FR page.
Everybody thinks they are “good” in their own eyes.
I am sure little old ladies got helped across the street in nazi germany.
And, what does helping little old ladies across the street mean when you vote for euthenasia? The nazis started with birth control for undesirables, then forced sterilzation, and then went on to euthenasia and outright murder.
And it was all legal - voted on by the state.
So if Morals are just laws that we agree on and/or vote on, if we all decide killing babies is ok, then who is to say it’s wrong?
Just like in math there are immutable truths, so there is in morals. The problem is that this gets in most people’s way of defining their own idea of right and wrong, so they can justify their own behavior. This is the human condition. We want the rules applied to everyone but ourselves.
Darwin was a racist. He wrote with scientific accuracy and style that at least one race was ignorant and closer to the animals/Apes.Uuuum... you realize that Darwin was just reflecting the views of his time right? Is Newton an idiot because he was into Alchemy(a popular view in his day).His racism was couched in science. What a high falutin’ fraud.
On this subject he was more ignorant than a pack of Apes who know a human being when they see one and I doubt he could play the violin as well as Louis Farrahkan.
His racist pap is an insult to whatever little intelligence I posses.
How noble of him to sacrifice his most honorable scientific theories of creating supermen for the good of the weak and feeble.
What a laughing crock. Go back to the galopogos and watch turtles hatch.
Name me one scientific breakthrough created by using one of Darwins theories. Flight, nuclear physics, electricty and robotics don’t count.
Oh I forgot he probably taught that abortion was for the good of all mankind.
And he mesmerized the rest with the revelation that a fetus starts out with a tail.
The only thing he proved is that death and mutations cause change. Thank God we have something greater in our soul than a hope in the changes created by death and mutation.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.