Nice article bound to ruffle a few feathers.
http://coelsblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/ ... darwinism/

Among those who dislike Darwin’s explanation of human beings as the product of evolution a common accusation is that Darwinian thinking has led to horrors such as the Nazi holocaust. For example the American religious commentator Ann Coulter writes: “From Marx to Hitler, the men responsible for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century were avid Darwinists”(which is wrong on all the others, not just Hitler). So widespread is the claim that even many who accept that Darwinian evolution has been established as true, well beyond any reasonable doubt, also believe that Darwinian ideas were misused to justify Nazi atrocities. For example the British political commentator Andrew Marr writes that Darwinism was “used to justify … the Nazi holocaust”.

Are these claims correct? Remarkably, for a claim so widely accepted, no they aren’t.

Couldn't fit this above thanks to PS3 character limit - Thanks to Gawdzilla and Jerry Coyne.

Good find!

Check out the butt-hurt in the comments -

Very well researched and written, too bad you missed one major issue with your argument. Go read “The Prince” by Niccolo Machiavelli.

Besides, if you read “Mein Kompf” you can see how he uses Darwinian evolution to justify classifying the Jews as a lesser species. There is no way a Christian would write such things.

I'm not sure what Machievelli has to do with all of this unless he's claiming his secular ideals influenced the Nazis
He obviously didn't read the section on Mein Kampf.

No True Scotsman fallacy - check.
Not actually checking sources to see whether they say what you've been told they say - check.
Irrelevant material brought in as if it supports your point of view - check.

Well, I'd say that comment is a real winner!

The reference to Machiavelli probably is meant to be parsed as follows: leaders say whatever they need to to gain and maintain their power. Even pretending to believe things they don't.

It's quite likely some of the higher Nazis were atheist or at least non-believers wrt Christianity - and popular misunderstandings even to this day of evolution make people believe in various racist ideas, lower vs. higher on an evolutionary scale etc. Heck, there's posters on this forum that have similar misunderstandings of evolution, altho' don't try and use these misunderstandings for malevolent purposes. Still, in the late 19th century and early 20th century, evolution was misunderstood by a lot of people in academia - you had people thinking that all kinds of social phenomena could be graded by how far up on an evolutionary ladder they were - languages, religions, societies, races, etc. They failed to realize that generally, evolution isn't a strive upwards towards some goal - it's a constant attempt to optimize. Every language is spoken in a slightly different context, and therefore will have different pressures working on it, religions do evolve in similar ways but have even less easily measurable pressures on them, societies as well.

And added complication when it comes to race and eugenics, is how dog-, horse- and livestock-breeding all tend to strive for keeping lineages pure. This easily is reinterpreted as a good goal per se - but that's only really a sensible goal if we have races that have been designed by intentional breeding, and we know what the members of the race will be expected to do during their lives. We know some races of horse will be well fitted to pulling carts, some will be well fitted on the race track, some races of dog will be good at various kinds of hunting, some at guarding, some at being pets in general, others have traits that are very beneficial when it comes to assisting the blind, etc, and it's reasonable we want to keep those traits relatively intact. With humans, conditions change - conserving the current races may be of no benefit five generations down the line, and even then, the varieties within every 'race' no matter how you define them are wide enough to make such a conservation effort rather useless. Evolution, in reality, is the best thing in this context- it favors traits that currently give benefits, and that's all there is to it. The nazis that did think they were serving evolution failed to understand it entirely - but I do not doubt they figured they were helping evolution.

I've no doubt such people existed. People with a 'survival of the fittest' attitude prevalent in many today. The article is against the assertion by many Christians that Nazism was an atheist regime informed by Darwinism.

Even if it were true, that is no fault of Darwin. All he did is to describe what he saw around him, he cannot be held accountable for other people turning his "is" into their "ought".

trubble76 wrote:Even if it were true, that is no fault of Darwin. All he did is to describe what he saw around him, he cannot be held accountable for other people turning his "is" into their "ought".

Yes, obviously. So the real problem really is anti-intellectualism or lazy intellectualism, both of which are things common everywhere, but probably more so among Christians than among atheists these days. In those days, though, seems this approach even was respected in academia in most fields. Darwin is a victim, really, of people not even trying to understand his ideas, but rather jumping to flawed conclusions form just reading the first few chapters.

Animavore wrote:I've no doubt such people existed. People with a 'survival of the fittest' attitude prevalent in many today. The article is against the assertion by many Christians that Nazism was an atheist regime informed by Darwinism.

Yes, hatred of Jewish people was prevalent throughout Europe long before Darwin came along. Indeed, so too was the notion of 'superior race' - which is what justified slavery and racism being rife throught most (all?) of the developed countries, throughout history. Racism still persists to this day... and none of it is grounded in what Darwin had to say.

Hitler didn't hate Jews and think that the Germanic peoples were 'super' because of Darwin. That's a nonsense, since such feelings are rooted deeper in cultural history. Perhaps Hitler subsequently saw/used Darwin as a scientific or objective means to justify his mindset and actions, but history would have been no different with or without Darwin. Millions would have been murdered regardless.

Mentioned in the article and worth a read, the second famous anti-Semetic writing in history. Martin Luther's On the Jews and their Lies. Not one you hear much about.

jamest wrote:Yes, hatred of Jewish people was prevalent throughout Europe long before Darwin came along. Indeed, so too was the notion of 'superior race' - which is what justified slavery and racism being rife throught most (all?) of the developed countries, throughout history. Racism still persists to this day... and none of it is grounded in what Darwin had to say.

I don't buy this - not at least without some quite rich supporting evidence. As far as I can tell, what race a slave was of made no difference throughout most of European history, for as long as slavery was permitted. Race as a significant concept in slavery seems to have seen the light of day only in the American colonies. In medieval Europe, religion, far more often, was the important factor - e.g., the popes forbade having Christian slaves, altho' that was not adhered to very properly either.

That, of course, was subverted in Europe by serfdom replacing slavery. Race doesn't seem to have entered into that either.

Besides, if you read “Mein Kompf” you can see how he uses Darwinian evolution to justify classifying the Jews as a lesser species. There is no way a Christian would write such things.

That sounds like exactly the type of thing a Christian would write, besides, a Christian DID write Mein Kampf.

With a bit of Aryan and Nordic mythology thrown into the mix....

Some believed in Aryan and Nordic mythology - others didn't. It's pretty well covered in the material in the OP.

So I'm not the only one getting the feeling no one has actually read the article

Weaver wrote:Some believed in Aryan and Nordic mythology - others didn't. It's pretty well covered in the material in the OP.

tl;dr , but yes, I agree, not all of them, which is way I said a little bit.

Animavore wrote:So I'm not the only one getting the feeling no one has actually read the article

My apologies, feeling lazy today.

Look, Poop Pious the twelfth signed a concordat, with many fascist nations, including his champion against socialism, communism, secularism and various degrees of liberalism, Good old Adolf. Why do you think that was?

He thought Hitler and the fascists were indefatigable, the future and more importantly, the past. This is an absolute monarchist thinking here. He ( the absolute monarch, having being enthroned by Mussolini, a fascist) Only began to have doubts, and became a double agent, when the Soviets had big victories against his tools. Why did so many Nazis, upon their defeat, escape to so many Catholic/Muslim countries?

Could it be, they were "believers", worthy of rescue? So they could carry on the crusade? Look at the countries they went to.