falconjudge wrote:Has everyone just forgotten that The Origin of the Species was on Nazi ban lists?

Of course not - but JJ doesn't do factual reality, and history is just another topic to be manufactured for proselytizing purposes. The notion of evolution Hitler employed was Lamarckian - and even so, it doesn't make Lamarck's theory a nazi doctrine or inherently immoral.

Calilasseia wrote: Oh, and please, don't try and erect any of the duplicitous lies peddled by the likes of Richard Weikart, trying to misrepresent Darwin as a racist, because I'll happily come back and carpet bomb that bullshit too.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Richart Weikart had only complimentary things to say of Charles Darwin.

Calilasseia wrote: Oh really? You obviously haven't read Weikart's nasty little screed From Darwin To Hitler, in which he asserts that Darwin's ideas were the warm-up for the Holocaust. A notion that every relevant competent academic treats with well-deserved scorn and derision. Unsurprisingly, Weikart's book was financed by the Duplicity Institute.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Turn to page 3 of “From Darwin to Hitler” and share the last two sentences of paragraph 2 with this board. Turn to the back cover and read what Dr Richard Evans , Regius professor of modern history at Cambridge had to say of Weikart’s work. Evans is the author of the best-selling trilogy The coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power and The Third Reich at War.

Calilasseia wrote:[Possibly to Spearthrower]:Indeed, as we learn from this website, textbooks on evolutionary biology were placed on the list of seditious books by the Nazis. Viz:

6. Schriften weltanschaulichen und lebenskundlichen Charakters, deren Inhalt die falsche naturwissenschaftliche Aufklärung eines primitiven Darwinismus und Monismus ist (Häckel)

Translation:

6. Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel).

...

Calilasseia brought up Weikart himself, accusing him of misrepresenting Darwin as a racist. When I demurred, Calilasseia claimed I “obviously” haven’t read Weikart. Then instead of taking up my challenge to show that he had himself read Weikart, Calilasseia introduced something else.

What Weikart said on page 3 is this: “Politically Darwin was a typical Englsh liberal, supporting laissez-faire economics and opposing slavery. Like most of his contemporaries, Darwin considered non-European races inferior to Europeans, but he never embraced Aryan racism or rabid anti-Semitism, central features of Hitler’s political philosophy.”

The back-cover review from Richard Evans, eminent historian of the rise of Nazism said this, pre-publication:

“Weikart’s outstanding book shows in sober and convincing detail how Darwinist thinkers in Germany had developed an amoral attitude to human society by the time of the First World War, in which the supposed good of the race was applied as the sole criterion of public policy and racial hygiene.”

Spearthrower cited some unnamed post-publication reviewers but these must be read against the polarised positions taken up, especially with regard to the Discovery Institute.

For myself, I found "From Darwin to Hitler" a fascinating study of one aspect of the social developments that led to the terrible enigma of the Nazis. I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of social movements.

Jayjay4547 wrote:
Spearthrower cited some unnamed post-publication reviewers but these must be read against the polarised positions taken up, especially with regard to the Discovery Institute.

Why 'must' they?

They're not unnamed - I provided the link that has all their names, professional background, credentials etc - I just couldn't be arsed to type them out. You can click the link though, right?

An interesting way to dismiss contrary positions when you've basically just relied on a single source (Evans) to validate Weikart. Cherry picking much?

Jayjay4547 wrote:For myself, I found "From Darwin to Hitler" a fascinating study of one aspect of the social developments that led to the terrible enigma of the Nazis. I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of social movements.

And if those people are interested in historical fact, they'd be better looking elsewhere.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Spearthrower cited some unnamed post-publication reviewers but these must be read against the polarised positions taken up, especially with regard to the Discovery Institute.

Oh, so the fact that the so-called "Senior Fellows" of this organisation have been demonstrated to be peddling lies about valid evolutionary science, is another inconvenient fact you're going to ignore because it doesn't genuflect before your presuppositions? Such as Jonathan Wells' nasty little screed, in which he accused Kettlewell of fabricating his results with respect to the Peppered Moth, a charge that was roundly refuted by Mike Majerus' subsequent work, demonstrating empirically that Kettlewell was right?

Jayjay4547 wrote:For myself, I found "From Darwin to Hitler" a fascinating study of one aspect of the social developments that led to the terrible enigma of the Nazis. I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of social movements.

Why am I not in the least surprised, that you would find a blatant ad hominem attack on Darwin, and a duplicitous misrepresentation of evolution, based upon blatantly selective interpretations and quote mining, "fascinating"? Weikart is nothing but a shill for Duplicity Institute propaganda, which is hardly surprising, since he's one of the co-called "Senior Fellows" of that organisation. His book is a blatant act of well poisoning, a mendacious attempt to try and disparage valid evolutionary science by erecting an entirely specious "guilt by association" causal link that simply does not exist. As I've demonstrated in a previous post by reference to Mein Kampf, if anything, Hitler's views on biology were far closer to creationism than evolutionary science, and of course, Weikart ignores inconvenient facts that refute his assertions, such as the fact that the Nazis placed textbooks on evolutionary biology on their list of seditious books to be burned, and the fact that Hitler's fatuous "monoculture" view of humanity is massively at variance with actual evolutionary theory, which requires variation to be present in order for evolutionary processes to work.

In case you never bothered paying attention in actual history classes, Hitler regarded variation as something to be exterminated, and if he had succeeded in this hideous endeavour, it probably wouldn't have taken long for evolution to bite his beloved Aryan monoculture on the arse hard, making a mockery of his assertions that the so-called "Aryan" race he waxed so lyrically about was purportedly "superior" - we have enough evidence from the susceptibility of agro-business monocultures to rapidly evolving pests, and the need to keep injecting genetic diversity into our crops to keep one step ahead of the pests, to know that any monoculture, regardless of the species involved, will eventually be hit hard by some other species taking ruthless advantage of a nice easy food source. Hitler's crapulent "Aryan" vision of the future would, had he realised this sad wet dream, have become in time a population of inbreeds ripe for attack by any of a number of pathogenic bacteria and viruses. The idea that Darwin inspired this cretinous racial vision simply doesn't stack up against known facts, but then facts tend to be brushed under the carpet by ideological stormtroopers for doctrine, as creationists keep demonstrating time and again.

Amongst other instances of discoursive malfeasance, Weikart takes one snippet from Darwin's work about the purported fate of various human races, and tries to spin an entirely typical creationist fairy tale about this being the warm-up for the Holocaust. Of course, he never bothered to note that people were making the same observations for a good number of years before Darwin published his work, and that some of those people were creationists. The quote about "extermination" that Weikart mines and presses into duplicitous apologetic service, was nothing more than a prescient observation, couched in the language of the era, the observation in question being that any tribe equipped with nothing more advanced than bows and arrows or spears, is likely to be ill-suited to repelling the advances of determined colonists brandishing artillery pieces and ironclad warships. An ill-organised group armed with rocks, is likely to find itself overwhelmed pretty quickly by trained professional armies toting rifles and cannons. Even 19th century European weaponry was so far ahead of the weapons possessed by various indigenous tribes, that a clash between the two was virtually a foregone conclusion. Faced with the extant facts of the era, namely that European nations were driving hard toward the construction of empires, engaging in territorial conquest on a scale hitherto undreamed of by previous would-be emperors, with all the military and technological aces in the hands of those territorial conquerors, Darwin simply came to the conclusion that if circumstances continued in this vein for any significant period of time, those assorted indigenous peoples were doomed to extinction. Of course, he did not foresee the end of European imperialism, nor did he foresee the emergence of a British Empire whose underlying ethos was one of paternalism rather than outright subjugation, but the simple fact is, Weikart takes this one quote from all of Darwin's work, ignoring numerous other passages in which Darwin's concern on these matters is manifestly voiced, and his admiration for some of the qualities exhibited by what was then termed "savage races" also enshrined in print.

Indeed, with respect to those concerns, these were shared by an astronomer by the name of Johann Bayer, who, when filling in new constellations for the southern sky, included the constellation Indus in his collection, because he wanted a permanent memorial to the Native American peoples, whom he considered to be at peril from the encroachments of Europeans even as far back as 1603.

And, of course, returning to Darwin, not only did he make his disgust at slavery manifest in The Descent Of Man, but over twenty years before the publication of On The Origin Of Species, he is known to have had an extremely heated argument with the captain of HMS Beagle (Robert Fitzroy) over the issue of slavery.

So please, before trying to pass off this tiresome screed as a real work of historiography, you might want to check some basic facts first. Not the least of these being that one of the seminal influences on Hitler's thought came not from Darwin, but from a defrocked monk by the name of Lanz von Liebenfels, who wrote a particularly weird little tome, boasting the wonderful title of Theozoology, Or The Account Of The Sodomite Apelings And The Divine Electron, in which he interwove anti-Semitic racial hatred with a truly bizarre Biblical exegesis. He later published a racist and anti-Semitic magazine, The Ostara, and Hitler is known to have visited Liebenfels personally to request back issues. I suspect Weikart never bothered with this information, despite it being familiar to any competent Hitler scholar.

Calilasseia wrote:So please, before trying to pass off this tiresome screed as a real work of historiography, you might want to check some basic facts first. Not the least of these being that one of the seminal influences on Hitler's thought came not from Darwin, but from a defrocked monk by the name of Lanz von Liebenfels, who wrote a particularly weird little tome, boasting the wonderful title of Theozoology, Or The Account Of The Sodomite Apelings And The Divine Electron, in which he interwove anti-Semitic racial hatred with a truly bizarre Biblical exegesis. He later published a racist and anti-Semitic magazine, The Ostara, and Hitler is known to have visited Liebenfels personally to request back issues. I suspect Weikart never bothered with this information, despite it being familiar to any competent Hitler scholar.

Ye gods, I'd forgotten all about that guy. Probably 'expunged from my memory' is closer.

falconjudge wrote:Really, even if the boldfaced lie that Nazis loved Darwin as true, it wouldn't make the theory of evolution untrue. It would still just be another case of humanity misusing information.

Indeed, - just as creationists lie like cunts about what science actually says when they think it suits them.

And taking the 'the Nazis [mis]used it, so it's wrong' line, didn't the Nazis get to their position of influence by [mis]using charismatic speeches to large public gatherings to gather support for the system and ideas they were pushing, talking about how wicked and decadent everyone else was?
If (fat chance) the creationists were actually going to be honest and consistent in their approach, having society eschew that kind of manipulation of the gullible would leave evangelists pretty much fucked.