Read Darwin's The Descent of Man - Scientific racism / Eugenics - the dark side of Darwin's legacy:
Darwin was indeed the intellectual father of "scientific racism". In Descent of Man, Darwin:
- argued the races of man should be viewed as either sub-species or separate species with distinctly different "mental characteristics", including different emotional and "intellectual faculties"
- wrote that Africans and Australian aborigines were intermediate between civilized man and the apes
- predicted the "civilized races" would, at some not distant period, "exterminate and replace the savage races", specifically Africans and Australian aborigines, as well as the higher apes, leading to a widening of the gulf between civilized man and the lower apes, such as baboons.
Ref.: pages.britishlibrary.net
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 as he journeyed to England as a young man to meet Darwin 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.
pages.britishlibrary.net
Historian Daniel Gasman's book, ''The Scientific Origins of National Socialism" (available online at helsinki.fi reveals the formative influence of evolutionary theory taught by Haeckel on the development of Nazism in Germany:
"In the development of racism, racial eugenics, Germanic Christianity, nature worship, and anti-Semitism, Haeckel and the Monists were an important source and a major inspiration for many of the diverse streams of thought which came together later on under the banner of National Socialism. ,,,, in yet another sensitive area, the Jewish question, one may detect the influence of Haeckel and the Monists. ... 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: "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 racial 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.
Its no accident that the English Eugenics society was founded by Darwin's cousin and led by his son for many years. |
