Posted on 08/22/2006 2:04:20 PM PDT by js1138
I'll accept that you believe that fundamentalists have overriding disdains for things. But logically, it doesn't follow that anyone who holds a disdain for something is a fundamentalist.
A fundamentalist would be one who holds to a very strict literal interpretation of their source material. Which can get might scary if the source material is flawed.
"All Darwin did was notice that it happend in nature without human intervention."
... and published theories of "racial hygiene" in "The Descent Of Man." Leading Darwinists of that era had no problem recognizing Hitler as one of their own. What changed, between now and then? What makes you so determined to pronounce eugenics as being "pseudoscience?" You know the answer to this.
Pretty facile conclusion. As js1188 notes, that line heads well past Darwin. The idea of breeding humans as one would livestock goes back to the Spartans, and filtered through European aristocracy for a very long time. With so many more obvious antecedents, the singular choice of Darwin's reference to artificial selection in his analogy to natural selection as the casus belli of Nazi criminality is fairly obvious -- demonization of the theory of evolution in lieu of scientific rebuttal.
Indeed, the Nazi expropriation of eugenic postulates appears more directly similar to the Lamarckian view of evolution as independent lineages progressing up a ladder.
And there is little doubt that eugenics' champion, Francis Galton, genuinely disagreed with Darwin concerning the mechanism of evolutionary change. Galton held that the small, incremental steps of natural selection would be subverted by "regression to the mean," a belief, in short, that evolution must proceed by discontinuous steps, or saltations, that he called "transiliencies." Pretty clearly a throwback to Huxley and Lyell.
Your straight line, RegulatorCountry, has some oddly curvilinear qualities.
Please cite a reference to the phrase "racial hygiene" in Darwin's writing. Every word he wrote in online, so it should be easy, if you are not lying.
Eugenics is not pseudoscience, and your claim that I have called it that is another lie. What the Nazis did was pseudoscience.
"Selective breeding of human beings was suggested at least as far back as Plato, but the modern field was first formulated by Sir Francis Galton in 1865, drawing on the recent work of his cousin, Charles Darwin. From its inception, eugenics (derived from the Greek "well born" or "good breeding") was supported by prominent thinkers, including Alexander Graham Bell, George Bernard Shaw, and Winston Churchill. Eugenics was an academic discipline at many colleges and universities. Its scientific reputation tumbled in the 1930s, a time when Ernst Rüdin began incorporating eugenic rhetoric into the racial policies of Nazi Germany. During the postwar period both the public and the scientific community largely associated eugenics with Nazi abuses, which included enforced "racial hygiene" and extermination, although a variety of regional and national governments maintained eugenic programs until the 1970s."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
Eugenics has never gone away and never will go away. Support for eugenics is widespread on FR. Just the other day there was a thread celebrating the likelihood that conservatives were having more children than liberals.
On other days there have been threads worrying about Muslims having more children than Christians.
Biology doesn't really have the concept of "fittest." Some individuals have more offspring than others. There is no necessity of selection by early death, although that does happen.
If a eugenics program were designed by science it would seek to maximize diversity rather than seek purity. Any animal breeder knows that inbreeding results in the more frequent expression of recessive genes, some of which are detrimental.
The Nazis had no interest in science. They were sloganizers.
"The Nazis had no interest in science."
Oh, please.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nazi+science&btnG=Google+Search
Results 1 - 10 of about 21,000,000 for nazi science. (0.49 seconds)
Nazi Science
Nazi Science: Human Experimentation vs. Human Rights. Experiments conducted on human prisoners in Nazi concentration camps were in fact brutal crimes ...
http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/naziscience.html - 3k - Cached - Similar pages
Nazi Medicine Readings and Links
Nazi Science: The Dachau Hypothermia Experiments. New England Journal of Medicine, 322, 1435-1440. Biaglioli, M. (1992). Science, Modernity and the 'Final ...
http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/naziscienceref.html - 8k - Cached - Similar pages
NAZI SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS
NAZI SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS. http://remember.org/educate/medexp.html (general info re: types of exp.) http://www.jlaw.com/Articles/NaziMedEx.html ...
http://www.scarsdaleschools.k12.ny.us/hslib/naziscience.htm - 8k - Cached - Similar pages
Real History and Nazi Science
the Nazi war against cancer was the most aggressive in the world. Robert N. Proctor's thought-provoking book, The Nazi War on Cancer recounts this ...
http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/cancer/Nazi_war_on.html - 9k - Cached - Similar pages
Ockham's Razor - 29/08/1999: Nazi Science
Should scientific results obtained by Nazis through atrocities be used?
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s47540.htm - 15k - Cached - Similar pages
Amazon.com: Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic Bomb ...
Amazon.com: Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic Bomb: Books: Mark Walker by Mark Walker.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0738205850?v=glance - 109k - Cached - Similar pages
Rudy Brueggemann's Nazi Medicine Photographs Page
These ambitious professionals joined numerous Nazi party bodies and institutes like the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which participated in criminal science ...
http://www.rudyfoto.com/hol/nazimedicine.html - 11k - Cached - Similar pages
Nazi Science@Everything2.com
Nazi science was often in advance of that of the United States and Great Britain during World War Two. The Germans were the first to develop long range ...
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1069709 - 27k - Cached - Similar pages
Deutsche Physik - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hentschel, Klaus, ed. Physics and National Socialism: An anthology of primary sources (Basel: Birkhaeuser, 1996). Walker, Mark, Nazi science: Myth, truth, ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik - 27k - Cached - Similar pages
ScienceWeek
BIOLOGISTS AND PHYSICISTS AND NAZI SCIENCE Fifty-five years after the end of the Nazi regime in Germany (1933-1945), studies of the active collaboration of ...
http://www.scienceweek.com/2004/rmps-5.htm - 10k - Cached - Similar pages
BIOLOGISTS AND PHYSICISTS AND NAZI SCIENCE Fifty-five years after the end of the Nazi regime in Germany (1933-1945), studies of the active collaboration of a number of German scientists with the Nazis continue to be a focus of attention. Perhaps part of the reason for the attention is puzzlement: These scientists actively collaborated with a tyrannical regime whose essence was totally opposed to the very spirit of science. Hitler, in fact, is said to have dismissed German physics with a wave of his hand and a statement that Germany could do without physics for a thousand years.
What was in the minds of these scientists when they chose to actively support the Nazis? Was it an arrogant belief that their expertise in a science gave them superior insights into the enigmas of political, social, and economic realities? Such questions will continue to be pondered by historians, sociologists, and psychologists. Meanwhile, the contemporary German science community is struggling to deal with its past.
That's just the first article I came to.
whether I like ToE is irrelevant the fact it was used as a premise by nazi germany.
here is a candid quote:
“TO MY STARTLED DISMAY, I FOUND MYSELF UNDERSTANDING WHY SO MUCH OF THE GERMAN MEDICAL ESTABLISHMENT ACTED AS IT DID. I REALIZED THAT, GIVEN THE CIRCUMSTANCES, I MIGHT HAVE DONE THE SAME . . . . WHAT WE LEARN FROM HISTORY COMES FAR LESS IN STUDYING THE EVENTS THAN IN THE RECOGNITION OF HUMAN MOTIVATION—AND THE ETERNAL NATURE OF HUMAN FRAILTY.”
— DR. SHERWIN B. NULAND, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR AT THE NEW REPUBLIC, SEPTEMBER 2004 REVIEW OF DEADLY MEDICINE: CREATING THE MASTER RACE EXHIBITION.
You've noted yourself that science is amoral. And yet, you continue to pursue a values assessment as to why scientists would "collaborate," as to why Nazis erred in their determination of just which people to elevate or destroy, based upon the science of eugenics, which was drawn directly from Darwin. You apparently are mounting this as a defense of amoral science, because of the immorality of Nazi actions, choosing instead to focus blame upon the religion that provided you with your definition of morality. Odd.
What does your quote have to do with anything, and what does selective breeding -- practiced for thousands of years -- have to do with the fact that variations are selected in nature without human intervention?
Lying isn't nice. You will burn in hell for it.
cherry picking an editorial opinion afterthought?
read the rest
2) According to the new report, Ruedin lobbied successfully for ever broader criteria, and on Ruedin's initiative, the sterilization came to include the "morally ill" -- the Nazi term for the mentally handicapped. This category covered 95 percent of the 400,000 sterilizations carried out between 1933 and 1945. At Ruedin's suggestion, the sterilized included 600 children of black French soldiers and German women in the state of Rhineland, which the French occupied after the First World War.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of all of this is that these policies, which now seem the product of deranged minds, were not proposed and implemented by a few mentally deranged political leaders, but were indeed proposed and implemented by at least part of the German scientific establishment. Why did this happen? And how can the present scientific community prevent such a thing happening again?
The new German investigation has so far focused on the history of four Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, three of which were in the biological sciences and the fourth the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Metal Research in Stuttgart. The head of the research group that produced the report, Carola Sachse, according to the Nature news report, says "it is not known whether Nazi sympathies were the exception or the rule among scientists."
"You will burn in hell for it."
You lack the authority to make that judgement, so, I beg your pardon, but I'm not too terribly shaken by your faux religious pronouncement. Eugenics was drawn directly from Darwin, by Francis Galton, the so-called "Father Of Eugenics."
You're starting to get a tad shrill. Maybe you should take another break and revisit this, when your emotions are more in check?
I didn't cherry pick. Saying that German scientists worked for Hitler doesn't imply they were doing science. Where does it say that anything useful came out of Nazi "science"?
Farmers and animal breeders sterilize animals every day. They are practicing a trade that goes back thousands of years. It has no connection to Darwin.
human intervention according to nazi rational is completely natural, thus nazi selection was completely natural....ie natural selection.
eugenics, genocide, reguardless of human technology,(no less natural in theory than a stick weilding chimp) by nazi definition would be natural selection.
do you agree that human are special, not merely just another animal?
The word was coined by Galton, but the practice has been around for thousands of years. Plato is the oldest source for its application to humans. It is still practiced everywhere, and even recommended by FReepers on a regular basis.
Humans are special and they are animals. False dichotomy.
"The word was coined by Galton, but the practice has been around for thousands of years."
But, but, but. Darwin and Galton were just more of the same-old, same-old. Nothing to see here that's not thousands of years old. Move along now, lol.
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