Darwinists in denial about Darwinism's negative social and political influences
Jerry Coyne says on his "Why Evolution is True" blog,
"Shame on the Times for publishing tripe like this"? I agree that the Times article exaggerates in some places, but a lot of material in the article is factual and not just opinion. Darwinists are in a state of denial about the negative social and political influences of evolution theory. For example, evolution theory helped inspire American eugenics programs which helped inspire the Nazis. Some evidence: In 1920, the Eugenics Record Office merged with the Station for Experimental Evolution to form the Carnegie Institution's Dept. of Genetics.
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Some students are not just taught evolution -- they are brainwashed into thinking that evolution is the greatest thing since sliced bread (or, since evolution theory predated sliced bread by many years, maybe I should have said that sliced bread is treated like the greatest thing since evolution). For example, the new Florida state standards for science education have the absurd statement that evolution "is the fundamental concept underlying all of biology." Does teachers' excessive enthusiasm for evolution encourage students to act out natural selection?
Nazi anti-Semitism was not Social Darwinism per se, because the Nazis targeted fit Jews as well as unfit Jews. IMO Social Darwinism's main contribution to Nazi anti-Semitism was promotion of the idea that it is morally OK to get rid of undesirables. To my knowledge, the Nazis never claimed that Jews were genetically inferior.
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Whoever Dennis Sewell is, he has, as the Brits say, “gone badly wrong.” Check out what seems to be a precis of his book, The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics, in the online Times of London. The paper has published an article that, in essence, holds Darwin responsible for not only the Columbine massacres and the Nazi Holocaust, but also the decline of morality in today’s world . . . .
. . . . Shame on the Times for publishing tripe like this. I’d expect to see this flatulence in a creationist pamphlet, but not in a reputable newspaper.
"Shame on the Times for publishing tripe like this"? I agree that the Times article exaggerates in some places, but a lot of material in the article is factual and not just opinion. Darwinists are in a state of denial about the negative social and political influences of evolution theory. For example, evolution theory helped inspire American eugenics programs which helped inspire the Nazis. Some evidence: In 1920, the Eugenics Record Office merged with the Station for Experimental Evolution to form the Carnegie Institution's Dept. of Genetics.
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Some students are not just taught evolution -- they are brainwashed into thinking that evolution is the greatest thing since sliced bread (or, since evolution theory predated sliced bread by many years, maybe I should have said that sliced bread is treated like the greatest thing since evolution). For example, the new Florida state standards for science education have the absurd statement that evolution "is the fundamental concept underlying all of biology." Does teachers' excessive enthusiasm for evolution encourage students to act out natural selection?
Nazi anti-Semitism was not Social Darwinism per se, because the Nazis targeted fit Jews as well as unfit Jews. IMO Social Darwinism's main contribution to Nazi anti-Semitism was promotion of the idea that it is morally OK to get rid of undesirables. To my knowledge, the Nazis never claimed that Jews were genetically inferior.
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Labels: Darwin-to-HItler (new #2)
posted by Larry Fafarman | 11/10/2009 03:51:00 AM
3 Comments:
>>>>>> So they did, in effect, say Jews were inferior. <<<<<<<
But the first Jews targeted by the Nazis were the fittest Jews, e.g., Jewish managers in the civil service and professional Jews.
Talking about killing sprees....
Exodus 32
Then he said to them, "This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: 'Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.' " The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. Then Moses said, "You have been set apart to the LORD today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day."
Even when I believed in Darwinism, as I did for decades, I was aware of the key influence of Darwinism in helping to spawn Nazism. It's obvious when one reads Mein Kampf, in which Hitler rambles on about "Nature's higher breeding" or "Nature's higher development" of "races," over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, der Fuehrer tells us. A "race" to Hitler meant any hereditary group, which might be a species, a genus, family, etc. Thus he spoke of the "race" of foxes. "Higher development" according to Hitler takes place through competitive struggle, essentially as Darwin fantasized. It's impossible to miss the Darwinist influence on Hitler's thinking, although his Darwinism was somewhat unorthodox in some respects. Apparently those who are ignorant of it haven't studied Hitler's notions.
Many prominent Nazis were more orthodox Darwinists than Hitler, according to prominent Darwinist evolutionary biologist Michael R. Rose, in his 1998 book Darwin's Spectre. The more honest Darwinist biologists such as Rose sometimes admit that Darwinism was an essential ingredient in Nazi ideology: without Darwin, there would have been no Nazis. Rose also admits that Darwinism had many other "regrettable, and sometimes actually vicious" effects on social life in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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