Between 1934 and 1939, in the interests of evolutionary hygiene, the eugenic program in Nazi Germany forcibly sterilized about 400,000 people. The victims were men and women suffering from hereditary and mental illnesses along with the deaf, the blind, alcoholics and others judged unfit to reproduce. At the time, another government was also busy sterilizing citizens it deemed racially unhygienic. Measured for eugenic enthusiasm, this other state entity ran second to Germany worldwide. And what state was that?
Why, the United States, but in particular the state of California. In the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. sterilized 60,000 Americans, to which California contributed a very robust 20,000. One of the more haunting features of an excellent new cable documentary coming out this summer, What Hath Darwin Wrought?, is the setting where many of its interviews with scholars were conducted: the grounds of the old Stockton State Hospital in Stockton, California.
A leading center for coerced sterilization in that dark era, the hospital today looks quite picturesque as the backdrop to conversations with my Discovery Institute colleagues, political scientist John West and historian Richard Weikart (who teaches at the Cal State University campus of which the state hospital building is now a part). Along with philosopher and mathematician David Berlinski, another Discovery fellow, they do a remarkably lucid and informative job of sketching a side of 20th-century history -- the malign cultural and moral influence of Darwinian evolutionary thinking -- that tends to get overlooked.
Or willfully suppressed? Huffington Post regular Steven Newton, of the National Center for Science Education, scolded me here the other day for writing about such a sinister side to Darwin. Steve would do well to check out this documentary. It can be seen on FamilyNet Televison, which reaches 15 million households nationwide. For airdates and times, visit the website.
While barbarism has been going on for as long as there have been human beings, there was something different about the 20th century. The world had never seen anything quite like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot. And it was not only a matter of the technology available to them. Treating people as vermin to be exterminated was a new thing under the sun. Eugenics programs in United States and later Germany were warm-up acts for the mass slaughters that were to come.
Hitler's ideas, Dr. Berlinski carefully notes, "came from many different sources but no honest account will omit Darwin." A reading of Mein Kampf makes that clear. Certainly, Berlinski says, the men who formulated Nazi ideology "weren't reading the Gospels."
Darwin elaborated a picture of how the world works, how creatures war with each other for survival thus selecting out the fittest specimens and advancing the species. In this portrait of animal life, man is no exception. Any animal that strives to preserve the weak, as man does, is committing racial suicide. "Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind," Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, a policy "highly injurious to the race of man."
Hitler did nothing more than translate the competition of species into obsessively racial terms. John West reminds us that while it's true that Darwin himself was by all accounts a kind and gentle man, he was "better than his [own] principles." The outline of a campaign of extermination -- of whatever groups might be deemed unfit -- is right there in the notorious fifth chapter of the Descent. Darwin assured readers that human sympathy would prevent such a horror, but his own concept of morality was itself an evolutionary one. Moral ideas evolved along with the species. There is nothing transcendentally compelling about our "sympathy."
Darwinism was itself a major agent of dispelling sympathetic sentiments. Evolutionary thinking inspired modern scientific racism. For Darwin, evolution explained the phenomenon -- so he saw it -- of racial inferiority. Some races were farther up the evolutionary tree than others. Thus, in his view, Africans were just a step above gorillas.
In the hands of American racists, such observations came to justify not only eugenics but ugly restrictive immigration legislation like the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, authored by a congressman from Washington State, Albert Johnson. He was inspired by the bestselling eugenics advocate of the time, Madison Grant, whose influential book The Passing of the Great Race sold more than a million and a half copies. The Johnson-Reed law, which excluded Asians from immigrating to the United States, was one of the irritants in U.S.-Japanese relations that led ultimately to the Pacific side of World War II.
"Ideas have consequences" -- that is the often repeated mantra of this meaty documentary. Which is, come to think of it, another fact of history that tends to get lost, or suppressed, in discussions of Darwinism.
A picture of how the world works carries implications about how the world should work, must work. If morality is stitched into the fabric of reality rather than being merely a useful fiction, then here is no observation about reality that has no moral consequences. That much the victims of moral Darwinism, over the past century and a half, have found out to their sorrow.
Social Darwinism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Modern History Sourcebook: Spencer: Social Darwinism, 1857
Race should never play into this consideration, but surely there is something that could serve as an applicable standard for sterilization.
I personally advocate the steralization of Palin's followers, but yeah, I see how that could go awry.
Nonetheless, the human race cannot continue on this route. It's simply unsustainable!
Science is not about the personal lives of individual scientists, either. It is about the enduring concepts that advance human understanding of the world around us, and which give us the opportunity to make everyone's life better, should we choose to use it to that end.
One could easily make the argument that this alone proves there must be higher intelligence than us by virtue of the fact that even our own ideas eventually imprison us to failure or poor decision simply on the basis that our limited understanding and inability to see fourth dimensionally exposes our blase arrogance, which your response to this article displays in your dismissive position.
Perhaps lack of tolerance is not always on the "right" side of the aisle.
This argument is nothing new. Ever since there has been creationism there has been the charge that evolution leads to racism, and all other sorts of immorality. I find it baffling that no one has looked at evolutionary biologists and simply asked if they are more racist than the average person. I am an evolutionary biologist and interact with my like minded colleagues all the time. I was also raised in a creationist household and know many who reject evolution. By pretty much any metric I can think of the evolutionary biologists I know are considerably less racist than the average creationist I know. It seems a big blow to the theory that evolution leads to racism that the people who know the most about evolution also happen to be less racist?
No. Racism is neither modern, scientific, nor inspired by our awareness of evolution as fact and theory.
1. The only thing that matters about a scientific theory is whether it is true (as in provable) or false: Does it explain observable facts? Can it make testable predictions? Does it have a necessary circuit breaker, in form of asking the question 'My theory X will be proven false IF...'
2. Theory of evolution does not care, does not take sides and does not have direction from 'less important' (lower) forms to the 'more important' ones (higher). To the theory of evolution, human conscience is as equally a good job as a hard armor of a cockroach (they serve equally their respective purposes, in a very different circumstances)
3. The fact that scientific theory is proven ('true') does not imply at all that it should be used as a golden rule or a moral standard in human society. The human race is way past the evolution as a primary source of how we develop as a species and I, for one, am truly grateful for that.
See, I would not like to rely too much on my evolutionary traits (genes and immunity) to cure pneumonia - I'd rather go with an 'anti-evolutionary' (sort-of) approach - by taking a medicine.
That's much too politely neutral. The blurb should have been:
"David Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, which is an organization/think tank supporting the pseudoscience of intelligent design creationism."
After all, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences and essentially every actual science organization in America have agreed that intelligent design creationism is not science but pseudoscience. This disclaimer should have been made before Klinghoffer was allowed to spew his poisonous propaganda.
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David Klinghoffer is entitled to write what he chooses and Huff-Po is entitled (if not wise) to offer him a slot as a featured blogger. But the blog entry shouldn't just have his name.
Nor is the blurb that comes up when you click on his name sufficient.
"David Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute "
What it should say at the top of the blog entry and the blurb is:
David Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, which is an organization/think tank supporting intelligent design"
Why? Because unlike many other issues, this is one where the motives matter as the degree to which Darwin/Darwinism/Evolutionary Theory contributed to evil things is much more a matter of picking and choosing the evidence to present.
Science also formulated the Theory of Gravity. But if Klinghoffer were truly concerned with humanity, he might have decried the terrible results from Hitler's bombs that rained down upon other countries. And then the title of Klinghoffer's article would have been THE DARK SIDE OF NEWTON'ism, for his Law of Universal Gravitation. Or maybe THE DARK SIDE OF EINSTEIN'ism for Albert's General Theory of Relativity because it is used in modern Physics to describe Gravitation.
Klinghoffer failed to describe any details about events leading up to the formation of the Nazi Party and Hitler's Third Reich. Nothing about WWI and German popular thought that they were winning the war, nothing about the severe effects of The Treaty of Versailles, and nothing about Supremacism which is a common human trait regarding race, culture, and particularly Religion.
Particularly Religion because that is the force behind the Discovery Institute's war against the Theory of Evolution. Religion was reason for the early attack on Darwin's Origin Of The Species, and fundamentalist religious groups still cannot accept a Scientific Theory that seemingly contradicts the literal interpretation of the Bible.