WorldNut Daily has a story up about a new "documentary" which will try to show how Darwin's theory led to the abomination that was the Holocaust.
First, there is a truth which right-wing religious fundamentalists leverage in these sort of claims: during the early 20th century "progressives" of all stripes, Left and Right, promoted the science of eugenics, which was explicitly Darwinian. Books like Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity illuminate this "lost history." Karl Pearson, the father of biometrics and a major influence in American eugenicists such as Charles Davenport,1 and Francis Galton's protege, was a socialist and a believer in equal rights for women (Pearson's fair attitude toward women contrasted with R.A. Fisher's more sexist sensibilities during their disputes in the 1930s as the latter was eclipsing the former).
But second, the relationship of evolutionary theory to eugenics, and in particular negative eugenics, is similar to the relationship of the teachings of Jesus Christ to all the pogroms and persecutions of the world: final judgement must pass to the perversion of man, not of ideas. Were the Christian fundamentalist whites who the likes of H.L. Mencken had wished were sterilized for the fitness of the race any less bigoted against non-whites because of their Christianity? That, I doubt.
1 - Davenport was a director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
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Well, it was the Catholic clergy who always fought against outright enslavement and/or genocide in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. Meanwhile, secular conquistators would have been happy to simply acquire some new non-human-maybe-kinda-sorta-human "possessions" - or kill those cladistically vague beings and take their possessions.
Darwinism doesn't necessarily imply "Social Darwinism" (i.e., the idea that upper classes and Europeans should dominate or destroy other "races"). The human mind tends to confuse "fitness" with "social status."
However, real Darwinian fitness is best measured by the quantity of viable offspring produced. By this Darwinian measure of fitness, it is the "civilized races" who are least fit. And within big nation-states, it is the upper classes in particular who are least fit (producing the fewest viable offspring).
Also, Western humans tend to measure success by winning wars, modifying the environment. But from a Darwinian point of view, these behaviors might reflect a lack of environmental fitness. Viable organisms don't need to frenetically build, struggle and move: they just hang out and make healthy babies.
Of course, Darwinism is supposed to be descriptive, not proscriptive. Merging a scientific hypothesis with social policy is where the problems emerge.
What secular conquistadors would you be referring to?
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This Hitler-Darwin thing is causing some grief; apparently they have been listing Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project in their ads, which seems to have occurred without Collins' knowledge or consent. There is much discussion at Pharyngula and over at Panda's Thumb as well.
By this Darwinian measure of fitness, it is the "civilized races" who are least fit. And within big nation-states, it is the upper classes in particular who are least fit (producing the fewest viable offspring).
only today. after all, the aboriginals or pygmies are not a numerous folk. until the late 19th centuries demographic records from europe show that the upper classes were far more fecund than the masses (and younger sons and daughters were the ones who later became part of the lower classes).
Eugenics is the opposite of Darwinism. It is an attempt to short-circuit natural selection.
According to Natural Selection, those who survive are by definition most fit. Eugenics is an attempt to subvert and replace that idea with romantic (or racist) notions.
Re: conquistadors and Jesuits (sic)
I had in mind the 1550 Vallodolid Debate between the Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda organized by King Charles V. The subject was whether New Worlders were humans possessing souls and worthy of Christian treatment or else soulless "natural slaves" worthy of subjugation.
Razib: "Were the Christian fundamentalist whites who the likes of H.L. Mencken had wished were sterilized for the fitness of the race any less bigoted against non-whites because of their Christianity?"
I'm sure that today, according to just about any and all people who are calling themselves Christians globally, a white racist cannot simultaneously be a Christian. It's now included in the definition of a Christian that he or she be non-racist.
DB: "Eugenics is the opposite of Darwinism. It is an attempt to short-circuit natural selection.
According to Natural Selection, those who survive are by definition most fit. Eugenics is an attempt to subvert and replace that idea with romantic (or racist) notions."
Darwinism is the theory that species develop through selection, which is generally of the kind called "natural". Eugenics is meant to be the science of how to take control of this natural process as regards to the evolution of man, and thus to turn it into the other other main kind of selection, artificial selection, i.e. selection under the supervision of man. In a broader sense of nature however, even artificial selection is natural. So if I'm not somehow mistaken here, it's hard to see how eugenics can ever be short-circuiting darwinism. It might in some sense short-circuit the main process darwinism claims species develop by, but then of course not ever the theory itself.
nu,
i assumed so.
*WorldNut* lol, you bring the most hillarious stories to the table. lol
If by the Holocaust you mean genocide, then, yes, we must acknowledge that there is a connection: even Darwin suggested that the superior races of man might naturally exterminate the inferior ones. (This was a passing observation in I believe the first edition of The Descent of Man, which was later retracted.) And of course the late 19th century Germans in their God-Is-Dead intoxicated rampage for world domination were not uninfluenced by their social darwinist notions of group competition and survival of the most ghastly. This is an elementary fact of intellectual history which has nothing to do with eugenics per se and ought not to be forgotten. It was William Jennings Bryan by the way who warned of this precise consequence of Darwinist thinking at the time, which was why he opposed extending the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools to include the appearance human beings. (For the rest he accepted the theory.) In hindsight I think we can say that Bryan was the wiser and more prudent soul -- and that asshole, racist anti-Semitic, Nieztsche loving scum like H.L. Mencken should live in infamy.
Just thought I'd post a few things on this general topic:
The link between Nazi ideology and Darwinism is pretty old stuff, though there's been a lot of activity on the link of late. Panda's Thumb had a couple of posts on writings in this area a while back: Hitler & Darwin 1 Hitler & Darwin 2.
Personally I'm not as skeptical of the link as some of the folks at Panda's Thumb are. An ideological influence does not imply cause. Darwinism may have been an important part of the intellectual background that allowed Nazism to thrive, but that doesn't mean Darwinism is to blame for Nazism. It is not at all ridiculous to trace these influences where they exist and to think about what they might mean.
The latest book on the topic clearly wants to push far beyond a mere claim of influence, though.
Here's a chapetr from an earlier work that claimed to see a pretty strong chain of influence from Darwin to Haekel to Hitler: Daniel Gasman.
This chapter strikes me as interesting, anyhow.
And lastly Mencken and Nietzsche were men with definite faults, but are still well worth reading. Not something I'd readily say about Bryant.
I think it is a mistake to see the holocaust as some kind of definitively modern phenomenon in need of some definitively modern explanation. The roots causes of this sort of thing go back way farther than the 1800s and have nothing to do with whether we believe ourselves to be made in the image of god.
Was it Darwinism that gave Hitler the idea of wiping out the Jews? No.
Did appealing to a Darwinist rhetoric give his ideas more legitimacy and power than they might have had otheriwse? Maybe.
i agree with oran. i will post a follow up...i'm actually reading some books on the topic. but the short if it is that i have always held that racism as we knew it between 1850-1950 was given greater rigor and power by science.