rationalskepticism.org

SkyMutt wrote:Something that follows the quote shows a foreshadowing of Wilson's book on Darwin.

[Hitler] believed in a crude Darwinism as do nearly all scientists today, and as do all 'sensible' sociologists, political commentators and journalistic wiseacres. He thought that humanity in its history was to be explained by the idea of struggle, by the survival of the fittest, by the stronger species overcoming the weaker. Unlike the Darwinists of today, Hitler merely took this belief to its logical conclusion.

This passage you've alighted upon, is, of course, complete bullshit. Not least because, if you look at Hitler's actual words, his view of biology was actually closer to creationism than anything arising from Darwin. Here's the requisite passage from Mein Kampf (pages 245-246 of my searchable electronic copy thereof):

Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental law - one may call it an iron law of Nature - which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind. Each animal mates only with one of its own species. The titmouse cohabits only with the titmouse, the finch with the finch, the stork with the stork, the field-mouse with the field-mouse, the house-mouse with the house-mouse, the wolf with the she-wolf, etc.

This is practically as explicit an encapsulation of the creationist "kinds" fabrication as one could wish for.

Plus, the genetic monoculture that he and other racists love so much, is an anti-evolutionary a concept as one could wish for. Darwin himself recognised that variation was necessary in order for evolution to take place, as has every competent biologist since. Indeed, the drive toward monocultures has been in part some of the undoing of big agrobusiness, which now has to spend large sums of money protecting its monoculture crops from assault by an array of organisms, all capitalising upon our stupid provision of a superabundance of easily targetable food. The monoculture fetish has also contributed to a serious food waste problem in the developed world, where vegetables not conforming to an arbitrary aesthetic end up in the bin instead of on the supermarket shelves.

Plus, the sad 'survival of the fittest' soundbite did not even originate from Darwin, but instead from Francis Galton, an individual I have covered in a previous post, namely this one. Here's what I posted on the subject in that earlier post:

Indeed, I'm minded at this juncture that Darwin himself would characterise his ideas more correctly as "survival of the sufficiently competent". The tired "survival of the fittest" aphorism wasn't even his, it was due to Francis Galton, whose own views on a range of subjects were interesting to put it mildly, and I'm minded to note how Galton was described in the book Fly: An Experimental Life, covering the history of Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism in genetic research:

Martin Brookes wrote:At various times, an explorer, a scientist, an inventor and a professional racist. Sometimes he was all four things at once. He was also a regular visitor to the fringes of madness.

[Source: Fly: an Experimental Life by Martin Brookes, ISBN 0 297 64589 7]

Basically, Galton, who enjoyed far too much influence during his life with respect to eugenics (a term he also coined), latched onto this business of competition, in order to advance his own racist theories. Not that I would dispense with some of his other ideas, such as linear regression in statistics, or his contribution to forensic science with respect to fingerprints, or his prototype forays into meteorology. But among his documented racist exhortations, is a letter to The Times, published therein on June 5th, 1873, in which he advocated encouraging the Chinese to move into Africa, and displace the "inferior" blacks. You can read this letter in full here, and enjoy the combination of imperialist hubris and bigotry that Galton usually kept well hidden from too much public scrutiny, courtesy of his researches.