Darwin and the Nazis - 4/16/2008

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Darwin and the Nazis
By Richard Weikart
Published 4/16/2008 12:07:03 AM


Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and some other Darwinists are horrified
that the forthcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,
will promote Intelligent Design to a large audience when it opens at
over a thousand theaters nationwide on April 18. Ironically, their
campaign to discredit Ben Stein and the film confirms its main point,
which is to expose the persecution meted out by Darwinists to those
daring to criticize Darwinian theory.

One aspect of Expelled that troubles Dawkins and some of his
colleagues is its treatment of the ethical implications of Darwinism,
especially its discussion of the historical connections between
Darwinism and Nazism. Isn't this a bit over-the-top, suggesting that
Darwinism has something to do with Nazism? After all, Darwinists today
are not Nazis, and Darwinism has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

However, what is most objectionable about the Nazis' worldview? Isn't
it that they had no respect for human life? Their rejection of the
sanctity of human life led the Nazi regime to murder millions of Jews,
hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, and about 200,000 disabled Germans.
Where did the Nazis get the idea that some human beings were "lives
unworthy of life"?

As I show in meticulous detail in my book, From Darwin to Hitler:
Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, the Nazis'
devaluing of human life derived from Darwinian ideology (this does not
mean that all Nazi ideology came from Darwinism). There were six
features of Darwinian theory that have contributed to the devaluing of
human life (then and now):

1. Darwin argued that humans were not qualitatively different from
animals. The leading Darwinist in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, attacked the
"anthropocentric" view that humans are unique and special.

2. Darwin denied that humans had an immaterial soul. He and other
Darwinists believed that all aspects of the human psyche, including
reason, morality, aesthetics, and even religion, originated through
completely natural processes.

3. Darwin and other Darwinists recognized that if morality was the
product of mindless evolution, then there is no objective, fixed
morality and thus no objective human rights. Darwin stated in his
Autobiography that one "can have for his rule of life, as far as I can
see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the
strongest or which seem to him the best ones."

4. Since evolution requires variation, Darwin and other early
Darwinists believed in human inequality. Haeckel emphasized inequality
to such as extent that he even classified human races as twelve
distinct species and claimed that the lowest humans were closer to
primates than to the highest humans.

5. Darwin and most Darwinists believe that humans are locked in an
ineluctable struggle for existence. Darwin claimed in The Descent of
Man that because of this struggle, "[a]t some future period, not very
distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will
almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the
savage races."

6. Darwinism overturned the Judeo-Christian view of death as an enemy,
construing it instead as a beneficial engine of progress. Darwin
remarked in The Origin of Species, "Thus, from the war of nature, from
famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of
conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly
follows."

These six ideas were promoted by many prominent Darwinian biologists
and Darwinian-inspired social thinkers in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. All six were enthusiastically embraced by Hitler and many
other leading Nazis. Hitler thought that killing "inferior" humans
would bring about evolutionary progress. Most historians who
specialize in the Nazi era recognize the Darwinian underpinnings of
many aspects of Hitler's ideology.


BUT WHAT DOES THIS have to do with the present? Darwinists today are
not Nazis.

If you look back at the six points outlined above, however, you will
find that many Darwinists today are advancing the same or similar
ideas. Many leading Darwinists today teach that morality is nothing
but a natural product of evolution, thus undermining human rights. E.
O. Wilson, one of the most prominent Darwinian biologists in the
world, and Michael Ruse, a leading philosopher of science (the latter
is in Expelled) famously stated that ethics is "an illusion fobbed off
on us by our genes."

Many leading Darwinists today also claim that Darwinism undermines the
Judeo-Christian conception of the sanctity of human life. Dawkins
wrote in 2001 that we should try to genetically engineer an
evolutionary ancestor to the human species to demolish the
"speciesist" illusion that humans are special or sacred. In the same
article he expressed support for involuntary euthanasia. Another
critic of "speciesism," Peter Singer, one of the leading bioethicists
in the world, argues that Darwinism destroyed the Judeo-Christian
sanctity-of-life ethic, so infanticide and euthanasia are permissible.
James Watson, one of the world's most famous geneticists and a staunch
Darwinist, has railed at the idea that humans are sacred and special.

Today's Darwinists are not Nazis and not all Darwinists agree with
Dawkins, Wilson, Ruse, Singer, or Watson. However, some of the ideas
being promoted today by prominent Darwinists in the name of Darwinism
have an eerily similar ring to the ideologies that eroded respect for
human life in the pre-Nazi era.


Richard Weikart is professor of history at California State
University, Stanislaus, and author of From Darwin to Hitler:
Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (Palgrave
Macmillan).