I reject this premise. You cannot lump all forms of eugenic thought into a single bag and hang that bag around the neck of Darwin. Darwin did not invent Natural Selection or attempt to apply its principles in an unnatural means to alter the composition of the human race. There are numerous examples of applied eugenics that predate Charles Darwin by thousands of years. If he could have implemented his theory ex post facto he really would have been something special.
Since you have linked the actions of Hitler, Mao and Stalin to Darwin would you also link the US' manifest destiny policy to Darwin? It was after all introduced in 1839? How about the prohibition in Leviticus against the taking of a non-Jewish wife while condoning the marriage of ones cousin? Did Gods command to Joshua to kill the Canaanites constitute applied eugenics of the type you ascribe to Darwin? Did the Spartan society rely on Darwinism or only on practices later identified by Darwin's relatives? Did the Roman law requiring that a deformed child be put to death require Darwin's theories as an antecedent? Could the European feudal system which reached it apex with the Hapsburg dynasty have been a pre-Darwinian attempt at applied eugenics? I could go on in a seemingly endless list of examples, but I think these make my point.
“You cannot lump all forms of eugenic thought into a single bag and hang that bag around the neck of Darwin. Darwin did not invent Natural Selection or attempt to apply its principles in an unnatural means to alter the composition of the human race.”
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True, Darwin did not invent natural (or man-made) selection. However, he did expect the “lesser races” and the “greater apes” to be soon “eliminated, leaving an even greater gap between man and his nearest relations than there is today.”
Further, Darwinist does not mean only of Darwin himself, but also his followers, who were not mere spectators, but, as noted, active agitators in ‘elimination.’ This is the ugly and inconvenient truth of Progressivism: national socialism (Nazis), international socialism (Communists), and democratic socialism (Progressives) are all the same people with different accents.
‘Defending Darwin from Luddite Fundamentalists’ is a straw man argument: what disturbs most people is not the science of genetics, which is hardly arguable, but the use of evolution to ‘disprove’ religious authority. This same authority, I should not have to tell you, is the basis of Natural Law.