Darwin, Hitler, and the Culture of Death

LifeSiteNews ^ | 5/6/08 | Michael Baggot

[wagglebee]

May 5, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Ben Stein has suffered extensive media criticism for drawing the connection between Darwin, Hitler, and the modern eugenics movements in a powerful 10-minute section of his film "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed".

In an MSNBC.com review, Arthur Caplan calls the connection Stein draws between Darwin's theory and the Holocaust "despicable".  Neo-Darwinians on the whole have unleashed a barrage of insults at Stein and his work. They have also, however, completely failed to address the intimidating body of evidence Stein presents to support his claims. 

While Stein has explicitly asserted that not every neo-Darwinist is a eugenicist, an examination of the historic record reveals that neo-Darwinism can and has provided the philosophic justification for numerous horrific eugenic projects. 

According to Darwin, the survival of the fittest is the engine for progress for men as well as the rest of the animal kingdom.  In his "Descent of Man," Darwin laments that the misguided care of the weaker members of society has come as a detriment to the whole.  He warns that measures must be taken to "prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men," which is essentially nothing less than the mission statement of eugenicists the world over. 

Less than a century after Darwin's death, in his chapter on "Nation and Race" in "Mein Kampf," Adolf Hitler described the struggle for existence in Darwinian terms: "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 evolution of organic living beings would be unthinkable."

The Nazi party framed its mission in terms of a Darwinian struggle to achieve a more evolved life form.   According to the Hitler-approved pamphlet "Why are We Fighting?", "Our racial idea is only the 'expression of a worldview' that recognizes in the higher evolution of humans a divine command." 

Another Hitler-approved booklet, "Racial Policy", outlined the Nazi vision of man as follows: "The preservation and propagation, the evolution and elevating of life occurs through the struggle for existence, to which every plant, every animal, every species and every genus is subjected.  Even humans and the human races are subject to this struggle; it decides their value and their right to exist."

There is a ruthless consistency to the Darwinian-phrased Nazi propaganda.  After all, if Darwin has rendered the "God hypothesis" superfluous and hence any notion of man as the intrinsically valuable creature made in God's image and likeness, what better criteria is there for human worth than power?

According to Darwin, man is different from the rest of the animals only by a matter of degrees.  There is nothing that essentially distinguishes man from the other beasts.  At best, man is a more complex machine than the rest of the animals.  It should not be surprising then that the prominent bioethicist Peter Singer appeals to Darwinian evolution when attacking the sanctity-of-life ethic and defending abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia.  According to Singer, Darwin "undermined the foundations of the entire Western way of thinking on the place of our species in the universe." 

Likewise, Darwinian philosopher Daniel Dennett calls Darwin's views the "universal acid" that erodes traditional moral convictions rooted in the dignity of the human person.  His strictly biological assessment of human worth lets Dennett speaks of the "gradations of value in the ending of human lives," as he offers a case for euthanasia.

In a particularly powerful portion of "Expelled," Stein lets Cornell historian of science William Provine detail the implications of neo-Darwinism.  Without qualification, Provine adamantly affirms that neo-Darwinism demonstrates that there is no meaning to life.  Not surprisingly, he claims that he would put a bullet through his own head if his brain tumor reemerged.  Provine chides his brother for clinging to this life for so long. 

One is then led to wonder if Provine has a more sympathetic view of the large quantity of apparent drains on our society that fill our nations hospitals and nursing homes. The materialistic nihilism Provine honestly insists is entailed in neo-Darwinism seems to be completely incompatible with traditional humanitarian aspirations to defend the weak and vulnerable of society. Instead the weak and vulnerable are to be considered as obstacles to the progress of the human species in its evolutionary journey. They are to be eradicated. And, if not actively eradicated, then, at the very least, they should not be allowed to reproduce. 

If man is the accidental byproduct of blind natural forces and not the planned creation of an Intelligent Creator, then his worth is something to be earned rather than gratefully received.  The denial of man's intrinsic human dignity is at the heart of every eugenics movement from Hitler's Germany to early 20th century America to Planned Parenthood's continued mission to eliminate the "unwanted" children of the world. 

Is every neo-Darwinian a racist bent on genocide? No. But as Darwinian thinkers themselves admit, the neo-Darwinian outlook provides a handy foundation for the Culture of Death's rejection of human dignity and thus opens the way for the host of attacks on human life that continue to infect nations across the globe.  Thank you, Mr. Stein, for reminding us that ideas have major consequences.

(author's note: I am indebted to the Discovery Institute's Richard Weikart for compiling important passages from Hitler and Nazi propaganda in his recent article "Was It Immoral for 'Expelled' to Connect Darwinism and Nazi Racism?")

Learn more about Expelled:
http://www.expelledthemovie.com

Learn more about the Darwin-Hitler connection:
http://www.darwintohitler.com

Read more about Darwin's devaluation of the human person:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=vi...

[Soliton]

Ben Stein has done more to set back science than Al Gore.

[Soliton]

More ID propaganda to try and give Expelled free publicity as it sinks. Why is Ben Stein in hiding?

[NicknamedBob]

This is outrageous!

Let’s get our pitchforks and torches and surround Darwin’s castle. He and his monstrous creation must be destroyed!

.

In the meantime, I wonder if anyone has tried to figure out why isolated groups of animals tend to become different from others?

[Soliton]

You can present all the logical arguments you want. No one will address them. ID is a fraud. No one EVER supports it. They just attack science.

[Gene Eric]

>> Ben Stein has done more to set back science than Al Gore.

That’s a load of crap but then again intelligence is relative which may serve to justify your comment.

[Soliton]

Do you have any positive evidence for ID?

[muleskinner]

Hitler never mentions Darwin by name? If Darwin was the foundation of Nazism you claim, why wouldn’t Adolf give credit?

BTW, the Soviets arrested people and worse for teaching Darwinism. They thought he was as much a threat to their political philosophy as you apparently do. The Soviets replaced the teaching of Darwin with something called Lysenkoism - as much of a fraud to science as I.D.

[Coyoteman]

So you think Stein is praising science when he says the following:

Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. [PZ] Myers, talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed.

…

Stein (speaking about the Holocaust): …that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.

"That's where science leads you." Sure sounds like ol' Ben is trashing science to me.

[kinghorse]

The cult of death beget a culture of death. And the only way to rehab someone infected is through surprisingly enough, death. The free men of Pershing and Roosevelt’s time understood this. We let a Guatanamo cultist free and what did we get for our efforts? He blew himself up along with a dozen people in Iraq the other day. One way cruise ship to the Cayman Trench departing from Guatanamo sounds about right.

[Milhous]

Do you have any positive evidence for ID?

milhous taps Soliton on shoulder to ask, "Can I have this dance?"

Leaping into Trouble

...

Have we found that protein structures, and therefore sequences, are mostly accretions of junk, with just a handful of amino-acid residues forming the equivalent of his four-letter words?

Quite the opposite. I was present in 1997 when the champagne was uncorked at the MRC Centre in Cambridge in honor of John Walker. He was to share the Nobel Prize in chemistry that year with Paul Boyer and Jens Christian Skou for his work on the structure of the enzyme complex that uses pH gradients to drive ATP synthesis. Known as F-type ATPase, this molecular machine is built of dozens of protein chains of seven specialized types. Boyer was not exaggerating when he described it as “a splendid molecular machine”. [6] With design elegance and miniaturization wholly unrivaled in human technology, the F-type ATPase is a double energy transducer, first converting gradient energy into rotational energy, and then using the rotational energy to make ATP, the chemical energy currency used in all life—all in a package 1/500 the size of a small pollen grain.

There is no junk here. The ATPase is made not of four amino acids but four thousand—more like an essay than a paragraph (much less a word). Could it have started out much smaller? Not much, in view of the two sections that have to be coupled for it to work. Like an essay, it might withstand trimming in some places, and some of the parts might be reworded if we knew the rules of composition for proteins. Typos can be tolerated to an extent, as with essays. But none of this explains how random single-letter changes can produce new essays, whether from scratch or from existing essays on other subjects. According to intuition, there’s only one way to get an essay.

So, Maynard Smith’s beautiful analogy ends up supporting the design intuition that troubles Darwinism so. And the funny thing is, it’s awfully hard to find an analogy that doesn’t do that. Maybe that’s why so many people are unwilling to leap along with Darwin’s imagination. And maybe that’s why the leapers keep resorting to the same arguments, long after their flaws are known.

[kinghorse]

We could tell the vacationers about the origins of the trench and how maybe a piece of the moon broke off and landed there. They could be islamic heros deep sea diving without tank or regulator to try and recover a piece of the black rock at the bottom. Make it an adventure!

[Dog Gone]

The movie is a box office dud, and the attempt to paint Darwin to Hitler was a very bonehead move.

You see, it insults the intelligence of a lot of people.

Not those, of course, who have seized on ID as the Trojan Horse to reintroduce creationism into the classroom using any tactic, but to the average American.

The truth is, and you can’t accept it, is that millions of people are both conservatives and accept evolution as the accepted scientific theory.

Even the Catholic Church is okay with it.

Munch on those trilobites.

[NicknamedBob]

"You can present all the logical arguments you want. No one will address them. ID is a fraud. No one EVER supports it. They just attack science."

When I look at what has been "designed", I see a lot of cleverness, but I also see a lot of randomness. I don't see much in the way of purposeful designs.

We tend to speak as if it were so. We say, "The Cheetah is designed to run fast."

Boy! Is it! The stride length of the cheetah equals that of a racehorse, and it gets that by stretching its spine. It runs by a series of incredibly fast leaps.

But that design has a price. The cheetah often loses its kill because it is too exhausted to defend it.

The primary designer of the cheetah is the antelope, by its habit of running very fast. If antelopes were slower, cheetahs would be too.

[Soliton]

Well said

[Soliton]

That’s a long way to go to admit you have no evidence for design.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

I know that Stein tried to popularize his point, but I expect that most of the movie went over the heads of most of the audience.

My impression is exactly the opposite: Stein made an intellectual argument illustrated by examples and by the unedited arguments of darwinists. And it went over the heads of the "intellectual" darwinists.

They grew up being the smartest people in the rooms they were in - but they have eyes to see, but cannot see. And you can bet that there will be someone come along on this thread to heap contempt on me for saying so. But maybe I'll be small potatoes on this thread, since the starting article itself makes the same argument, better.

[Coyoteman]

The cult of death beget a culture of death. And the only way to rehab someone infected is through surprisingly enough, death.

Since this thread is about "Darwinists," I can only assume you are urging death for all "Darwinists."

What do you recommend? Wholesale, like the Holocaust, or retail, more like the Inquisition? Or something more traditional, like torches and pitchforks? Will you start with a little old fashioned book burning, or what?

[Dog Gone]

Okay, so you’re saying that the average American undestood and loved the movie, but it was too intellectual for the scientists.

[Marysecretary]

Yes, there ARE people who support it. You just don’t want to consider that.

[Soliton]

Please just provide POSITIVE evidence for the existance of a designer, not just more nitpicking of evolution.