More in honor of the founder of Scientific Racism:
The "Aryan" supremacist and anti-Semite, Ernst Haeckel, was the greatest promoter and popularizer of Darwin's theories in Germany. Haeckel learned his Darwinism directly from the Master himself when he journeyed to England as a young man to meet him and study under him, staying in Darwin's house while there. Haeckel was highly esteemed by DARWIN as a fellow scientist - note this glowing tribute to Haeckel from the introduction to 'The Descent of Man':
" ... and especially by Häckel. This last naturalist, besides his great work, Generelle Morphologie (1866), has recently (1868, with a second edit. in 1870), published his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, in which he fully discusses the genealogy of man. If this work had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine.
http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin/texts/descent/descent_front.html
Historian Daniel Gasman's book, ''The SCIENTIFIC Origins of National Socialism" (available online at http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Gasman.htm) reveals the formative influence of evolutionary theory taught by Haeckel on the development of Nazism in Germany:
". ... Haeckel was one of the most vociferous opponents of the Jews, and his importance for the history of anti-Semitism in Germany is that he did much to bring the Jewish question into the realm of biology. As in all questions the Jews were subjected by Haeckel to 'scientific' analysis and he, along with his other anti-Semitic contemporaries, discovered that the Jews possessed inborn racial characteristics which apparently were resistant to change."
Gasman goes on to reveal that "... a number of Hitler's conversations and the content of some of his writings emerge as an extended paraphrase and at times even plagiarism of Haeckel's Natiirliche Schöpfungsgeschichte and the Welträtsel."
Note that this Natiirliche Schöpfungsgeschichte is the same work DARWIN praised so highly: "If this work had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine."
Thus we see there was a direct intellectual connection between DARWIN and Haeckel, who shared the same SCIENTIFIC racial ideas, and a similar connection between Haeckel and Hitler.
The relationship between Darwinism and Nazi racial science was not always a matter of embarrasment as shown by the following qutoes from evolutionist Arthur Keith's (Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons) Evolution and Ethics:
"The leader of Germany is an evolutionist not only in theory, but, as millions know to their cost, in the rigor of its practice." (p.10)
"We see HITLER devoutly convinced that evolution provides the only real basis for a national policy." (p.27)
"The German Fuhrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution." (p.230)
Additional references on the subject:
Pat Shipman, The Evolution of Racism
George Stein, Biological science and the roots of Nazism
E. Jackel, Hitler’s Weltanschauung
K. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz
In regard to eugenics, again, DARWIN was the intellectual originator. As DARWIN wrote in The Descent of Man:
No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that [altruistic behavior toward the weak and infirm] must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race [of animals]; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
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Connecting Hitler and Darwin
By: David Berlinski
http://www.discovery.org/a/4739
Don't Doubt It
An important historic sidebar on Hitler and Darwin
By: David Klinghoffer
http://www.discovery.org/a/4679
What’s wrong with uttering “Darwin” and “Hitler” in the same breath?
William Dembski
http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/some-of-my-favorite-quotes-by-darwinists/
http://www.darwindayinamerica.com/chap7excerpt.pdf
DARWIN and the Nazis
By: Richard Weikart
http://www.discovery.org/a/4629
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/04/opening_up_mein_kampf.html
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/02/reexamining_the_darwinhitler_l.html
CommentsDARWIN and Hitler: In Their Own Words
by Benjamin Wiker
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=26346
The Darwin/Nazi Connection
Jack Cashill discusses the connection between DARWIN and Nazi racial ideology here:
DARWIN critics know Ernst Haeckel as the German philosopher whose faked embryo drawings helped generations of clueless students accept Darwinism--“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” and all that.
But there is still another problem with Haeckel, a darker one than mere fraud. Critics of the Ben Stein film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, apparently do not know this.
If they had, they would not have savaged Stein for daring to connect Adolph Hitler to Charles DARWIN . In SCIENTIFIC American, for instance, editor John Rennie describes this connection as “heavy-handed.” In Reuters, Frank Scheck calls it “truly offensive.”
It reality, it is neither. If anything, Stein and the makers of Expelled understate this historically irrefutable link, and the key to understanding it is Haeckel.
Born in Potsdam in 1834, Haeckel read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in the summer it was first published in German, 1860, and fell immediately under its sway. He could see straight off that DARWIN offered a useful exit strategy from a God-dominated cosmos.
Once liberated, Haeckel created his own secular religion called “Monism.” Not lacking for confidence, he imagined Monism as nothing less than a unified, naturalistic understanding of the entire universe.
“The modern science of evolution has shown that there never was any such creation,” claims Haeckel of the Judeo-Christian tradition, “but that the universe is eternal and the law of substance all-ruling.”
In his 1971 book, The SCIENTIFIC Origins of National Socialism, Dr. Daniel Gasman of John Jay College shows the “decisive” role that Haeckel played in the development of the German “Volkish” movement, a revival of pre-Christian German culture and spiritualism that found its eventual ecological outlet in the Holocaust.
As it happens, many of the most influential Volkish spokesmen were tied in with either Haeckel or his Monist followers. These were the semi-respectable zanies that found common cause in National Socialism, and they were problem enough.
But it was in the field of eugenics and racial science that Haeckel had the most direct and lethal impact. Germany’s leading advocates of racial anthropology and eugenics, notes Gasman, “were deeply and consciously indebted to Haeckel for many, if not for most, of their ideas.”
Otto Ammon, (1842-1916), a Haeckel disciple, went public with what many Darwinists prefer to keep private, and that is the oddly spiritual nature of the Darwinian experience.
“In obvious imitation of Haeckel,” writes Gasman, “Ammon taught that Darwinism had to become Germany’s new religion. It had to be accepted as a complete Weltanschauung and its ideas had to be encouraged in every facet of life.”
Haeckel’s co-editor at the leading Darwinian joumal Kosmos, Ernst Krause, introduced still another unhinged idea, one that proved to have serious geo-political consequences.
It was Krause who transformed Germans into “Aryans.” In his two influential books, he labored to trace the origin of his imagined Aryan race back to classical Greece and to show the natural fitness of this race of people over time.
When the Nazis came to power, their narrow reading of just who was and who wasn’t an Aryan might have even seemed comic were it not so catastrophic.
I would recommend that you go and read it in full. It makes a nice companion piece to my discussion of American scientists writing about evolution, RACISM, and eugenics.
If evolutionary theory was misused for genocidal purposes, that doesn't make evolution false. But let's not pretend, as the National Center for Science Education does, that there was no substantial connection--and a perfectly logical connection at that. Ideologies that lead to forced sterilization, genocide, and suppression of alternative viewpoints in the sciences (such as the denial of "Jewish physics" by the Germans) should make their proponents at least a little embarrassed when the connections are pointed out.
Labels: history, intelligent design
posted by Clayton
http://www.claytoncramer.com/weblog/2008_04_27_archive.html#7644077104935340355 |
