Darwin = Hitler!
A modern myth spread by those who want to discredit evolution itself is that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection provided the scientific basis for the Nazi eugenics programme.
This is false on many grounds,
By definition Darwin’s theory of natural selection couldn’t be implemented by humans because that would be human selection, not nature’s selection in the sense that Darwin meant it. While humans are a part of nature the type of nature that Darwin was talking about was clearly not intentional human intervention and direction.
The knowledge that human children were a result of mixing their parents traits such as height, skin colour, and so on has been common knowledge since the birth of humanity and controlling this process was advocated as far back as Plato.
The Darwinian theory’s primary metaphor of a Tree of Life with branching species was unused by human breeding conducted by the Nazis, they just wanted to kill and breed within the human species which was an old idea. As I understand it the eugenics program wasn’t trying to cross the species boundary, though the same couldn’t be said of Stalin. That the Nazis labeled other humans as lesser species is a separate issue and more about semantics than the evolutionary tree described by Darwin.
A less mechanised form of racist human breeding was practiced before Darwin in most cultures that preferred relationships within races. These cultures tried to control who could have a long-term relationship, and with whom, which would affect offspring (Eg, interracial marriage was illegal for a long time). Some backwards people still believe this, but thanks to Darwin we now know that race doesn’t exist in any significant way, especially not in the way that Nazi’s talked about.
The idea of Darwin’s theory providing the scientific underpining for the Nazi breeding program is nonsense on scientific grounds when you consider that (1) it was done by humans not nature, (2) eugenics was an old idea advocated by Plato, (3) it wasn’t based on the Tree of Life or non-human breeding, (4) it was a mechanised version of cultural racism that was common at the time.
Darwin’s theories have as much to do with nazi eugenics as Copernican theories have to do with ballistic missiles.
Update November 18th 2009: a final word from Hitler himself who — not content with burning books on Darwin — spoke against Evolution and Atheism,
“Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental law–one may call it an iron law of Nature–which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind.”
“I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work.
We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.”
“”Christ was the greatest early fighter in the battle against the world enemy, the Jews . . . The work that Christ started but could not finish, I–Adolf Hitler–will conclude.”
November 22nd, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Reinhard Heydrich used the Darwinian term “natural selection” to explain why he felt the Holocaust was necessary. Wannsee, January 20, 1942. Heydrich said that those Jews who survived the forced labor program would eventually breed a race of stronger Jews would could pose a threat. (Apostate Jews in the 1910s and 1920s had supplied a large quotient of the brain power for the German and Russian communist movements. Heydrich, as a Darwinian, believed that the entire Jewish “race” was a matrix for communism. This is nonsense, of course — many Jews were German patriots and Heydrich himself was a quarter Jewish –but this is cited as a actual reason to turn a useful forced labor program into an extermination program. Natural selection. Ever heard of it?
NB – Hitler also believed himself to be a quarter Jewish — this has never been either proven or refuted. The worst hatred is self-hatred. Hitler was a neo-pagan rather than a Christian, cited Darwinian princples in “Mein Kampf” and elsewhere and approved “Neo-Darwinism” as the basis of a eugenics program that starved retarded Aryans, sterilized Aryans with low IQs, and was later expanded to exterminate all Jews except for decorated or crippled war veterans or those who were over 65 and unlikely to breed. The Holocaust was explicitly Darwwinian.
Last Tag — We all know Hitler was cracked, and the fact that he considered himself as greater than Jesus is not an evidence of Christianity but of mental ilness. Consult any expert on abnormal psychology and ask whom people with delusions of grandeur claim to be….
November 22nd, 2009 at 10:42 pm
Despite a lot of words your entire comment doesn’t even respond to a single thing I’ve said.
Eugenics, much like ‘pure-bred’ dog breeding, usually produces specialized and brittle freaks, unable to cope with the slings and arrows of nature. Humans selection of humans isn’t nature’s selection, despite your claims to the contrary. Nor do you respond to the fact that eugenics was within one species, and that this breeding within this species was an very old idea indeed.
This blog post is about evaluating whether the new ideas proposed in Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection provided the scientific basis for the Nazi eugenics programme. When you speak nonsense like “The Holocaust was explicitly Darwwinian (sic)” you throw a lot of mud but fail to provide any evidence.
We can see whether his scientific work was necessary or comparable to Nazi eugenics by looking at the text. If you think the text of OoS or any other works makes theories and predictions that were used by Nazis then produce them.
Darwin’s theories have as much to do with nazi eugenics as Copernican theories have to do with ballistic missiles. They’re in similar fields of science, but that’s it. Nothing Darwin advanced was necessary to eugenics, and nothing in it was used in Nazi eugenics.
I suggest in the future that you first read and understand the blog posts you respond to.