v1.2.2 / chapter 5 of 28 / 01 aug 08 / greg goebel / public domain
* The eugenics ideas of Francis Galton and the Social Darwinist concepts associated with Herbert Spencer would have an evil history in the first half of the 20th century. They would provide an influence to Nazi ideology and atrocities; in modern times, they are totally discredited.
* One of the unfortunate fallouts of the discovery of Mendelian genetics and hard heredity was its influence on eugenic thinking. Richard Dugdale's Lamarckian ideas had allowed him to believe that the likes of the Jukes could be improved by improving their environment, but to a later generation armed with much more solid ideas about genetics, that seemed like nonsense. If the degeneracy of the Jukes was born and bred, they would stay degenerate, generation after generation, and there was no changing it. The notion would be expressed later by the phrase "biological determinism".
The brute-force solution was to make sure the Jukes and their kind didn't breed. The Eugenics Education Society of Britain was set up in 1907, with a focus on negative eugenics; an elderly Galton was made honorary president. Galton also provided funding for the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics at University College, London, which performed research for the Eugenics Education Society. Charles Darwin's middle son Leonard was its president from 1911 to 1925.
The primary advocate of eugenics in the USA was the Eugenics Record Office at the Carnegie Institution's Cold Spring Harbor genetics laboratory, set up in 1910 by Charles Davenport (1866:1944). Davenport had a strong liking for the sort of hereditary statistics pioneered by Galton. He took it to something of an extreme, writing that the Twinings family was inclined to have characteristics including "broad shouldered, dark hair, prominent nose, nervous temperament, temper usually quick, not revengeful. Heavy eyebrows, humorous vein, and sense of ludicrous; lovers of music and horses."
Later generations of researchers would laugh at his notions, particularly at an analysis of the Herreshoff family of boat-builders, in which it almost seemed Davenport was suggesting there was a gene for boat-building. In any case, in 1915, the office published an updated edition of Dugdale's study of the Jukes. Psychologist Henry H. Goddard (1866:1957) of prominent Training School for Feeble-Minded Boys & Girls in Vineland, New Jersey, summed up the mindset of the updated report by pointing out that if the Jukes were feeble-minded "then no amount of good environment could have made them anything else but feeble-minded." The conclusion of the report was that the likes of the Jukes should be sexually segregated to prevent them from reproducing, or simply sterilized.
Goddard relied on the new "intelligence quotient (IQ)" tests to figure out who the feeble-minded really were. Goddard suggested that a minimum threshold be set at an IQ level comparable to that of a 13-year-old; in his view, those below this level, who he dubbed "morons" (from a Greek word for "foolish"), should not be allowed to reproduce. Goddard was thinking small: other eugenicists believed that persistent criminals and others with antisocial tendencies, as well as those with deformities and other conditions believed to be hereditary, ought not reproduce either.
* The British novelist H.G. Wells (1866:1946) was a true believer in Darwinism. In his novel THE TIME MACHINE, a time traveler visiting the far future encountered two post-human races, the pretty and useless Eloi -- a race of dumb blondes, so to speak -- and the brutish troglodyte Morlocks, evolved (or maybe devolved) from the aristocratic elite and the working class of our times respectively.
Wells was a particular enthusiast for eugenics, writing in his 1902 speculative book ANTICIPATIONS about the enlightened leaders of his hoped-for utopian "New Republic" in a way that makes odd reading to a later generation: "They will naturally regard the modest suicide of incurably melancholy, or diseased or helpless persons as a high and courageous act of duty rather than a crime." As for any lawless sort who just refused to get with the program, the New Republicans would "consider him carefully, and condemn him, and remove him from being. All such killing will be done with an opiate, for death is too grave a thing to be made painful or dreadful, and used as a deterrent from crime."
After considering the horrors of unregulated reproduction and suggesting greater supervision of the matter, Wells goes on to ask: "And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races?" Despite their inferiority, he certainly thought there was a place for them in his New Republic: "Whatever men may come into its efficient citizenship it will let come -- white, black, red, or brown; the efficiency will be the test." However, once again there was the problem of those who could not or would not get with the program: "And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency?" He concludes: "They will have to go ... it is their portion to die out and disappear."
Wells made no mention of exactly how their disappearance would come about. One might generously conclude that he meant they would just not make the grade in the Darwinian race for survival and gradually become extinct, but the general tone of Wells' argument suggested that was probably not what he had in mind. Wells is often cited as advocating the murder of the impaired and the extermination of the nonwhite races, but a closer reading shows those assertions to be exaggerations. However, they are only slight exaggerations; and the only argument over the matter in hindsight is whether he should have been horsewhipped or hanged.
* Wells and his kind, however, were not able to prevail in Britain and pass laws for the compulsory sterilization of the "unfit". Eugenics was never a mass movement anywhere, likely for the sensible reason that most of the citizenry might well wonder if they might end up looking down the barrel of eugenics laws sooner or later, and it was only promoted by an enthusiastic elite. Attempts to drive eugenics laws through Parliament in 1912 and 1913 foundered, with Josiah Wedgwood -- another son of the Darwin-Wedgwood clan -- fighting his own party to block it. The co-founder of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, also blasted the exercise, calling it the notions of an "arrogant, scientific priestcraft."
Elsewhere, eugenics foundered in nations where the Catholic Church was a political power, since the Vatican opposed it as a matter of policy. However, eugenicists were able to prevail in America, with 32 US states passing compulsory sterilization laws. In fact, the US was a pioneer in the legal enforcement of eugenics, with Indiana creating a compulsory sterilization law in 1907. From beginning to end, about 60,000 Americans would be forcibly sterilized. Most were inmates of mental institutions, but in some cases the laws covered criminals as well.
* Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. Hitler was obsessed with race and racial supremacy, and he was very impressed with the eugenics laws passed in the United States. A sweeping compulsory sterilization law was passed immediately, with over 300,000 Germans sterilized up to 1939.
In that year, Nazi Germany decided to take a more drastic approach. By the spring, Hitler was on a path towards war, and the attitude was that "useless eaters" in institutions ought to be removed permanently to free up resources to take care of wounded soldiers. A formal program, known as "Action T4", was set up in which invalids -- both adults and children -- were killed, first by lethal injection and then gassing them with carbon monoxide, with one of the prime movers behind the effort being Dr. Karl Brandt (1904:1948), who would later become Hitler's personal physician. Tens of thousands of invalids were murdered into 1941, when public outrage forced the government to formally give up the program -- though that was easy to do because most of the invalids targeted had been liquidated by that time. The exercise still suggested to the leadership that when the time came to kill the defenseless on a larger scale, as it did within months, it would need to be done with extreme discretion.
The Nazis also adopted positive eugenic measures, matching mates to provide good Aryan babies, but even in this measure their efforts were sinister. During the war, the Nazi occupation of Europe was accompanied by the widescale kidnapping of children who seemed to fit Nazi physical ideals from occupied countries. The program was named "Lebensborn (Font of Life)", with the children then adopted by German families -- sometimes families of dedicated Nazis, but also ordinary families who had no idea their adopted child had been kidnapped, having only been told that the child was a "war orphan". In some cases this was entirely true, the child's parents having been executed.
* The irony was that by the time the Nazis were taking to eugenics with a vengeance, enthusiasm for the idea was fading out in the US. During World War I, IQ tests administered to US Army soldiers had demonstrated shockingly low scores, suggesting to eugenicists that something drastic needed to be done. However, many soldiers who had low IQ scores turned out to be heroic and resourceful, suggesting there was less something wrong with the troops than with the IQ tests and their advocates.
In the 1920s, social scientists such as Margaret Mead (1901:1978) began to strongly question the idea of biological determinism. Thomas Hunt Morgan, having been originally attracted to the eugenics movement, was on the board of the Genetics Record Office but resigned in 1928. The rigorous Morgan had finally decided that eugenics was bogus science -- as well he might, since by that time Davenport was working on studies showing the eugenic perils of race-mixing. The Great Depression that began in 1929 also suggested to the population at large that people might be more prisoners of their circumstances than of their genes. The Nazi abuses helped hammer the nail in the coffin of American eugenics; in 1940 the Carnegie Institute quietly shut down the Eugenics Record Office.
The full savagery of the Nazi eugenics program was not revealed until the trials after the war. Karl Brandt and six others went to the gallows in 1948 for their involvement in the Action T4 program and for other crimes, including ghastly medical experiments performed on prisoners. Eugenics laws remained on the books in the US and elsewhere until the 1970s, but the steam had gone out of the movement well before then. Few were willing to promote eugenics in the postwar period, though the idea did crop up along the margins in science-fiction novels and the like.
Well-known sci-fi novelist Robert Heinlein (1907:1988), a great admirer of H.G. Wells, was enthusiastic about the idea, envisioning the selective breeding of geniuses or long-lived humans. Another science-fiction writer, Cyril Kornbluth (1923:1958), published a well-known short story titled "The Marching Morons" in 1951 that featured a future Earth overrun by moronic humans, with a small elite trying to keep things running. With the help of a 20th-century conman revived from suspended animation, the elite finally came up with a grotesque scheme for tricking the masses into neatly killing themselves off and disposing of their bodies in the process. To the arguable extent that Kornbluth was serious about the idea, by the 1950s it was clearly comic-book nonsense, antique notions dressed up as futurism.
The fundamental problems with eugenics remained. There was its ugly and retrograde contempt for the rights of individuals, and its tendency to quickly descend into racism: a postwar enthusiast, Nobelist William Shockley (1910:1989), one of the inventors of the transistor, also published studies to show that black folk seemed to be inferior to whites in some regards. Shockley, incidentally, contributed to a eugenic sperm bank, citing his "breeding qualifications" as a Nobelist.
There was also, once again, the practical difficulty in getting from here to there. While it is true that there are some classes of genetic defects that are blatant and could be argued as being appropriate targets for eugenics, in general it's not so simple to sort out the "good genes" from the "bad genes". A human has about 30,000 genes, with about 6,000 of them being variable -- polymorphic alleles. These thousands of genes can have complicated effects and their action remains far from completely understood. In addition, human development can be, is, affected by external factors, such as diseases that damage the brain in infancy. Impaired individuals may be as "sound" genetically as the people around them.
Such considerations make attempts to create superhumans through selective breeding difficult. What alleles were to be selected and which were to be discarded? On the basis of what information? Once such decisions were made, how would the alleles be promoted in any useful way through selective breeding? To be sure, there is a way to artificially select for specific alleles -- it's called "inbreeding", and it's often used with domestic animals and plants to optimize gross properties such as size or growth weight. However, nobody would suggest it as a good way to breed superhumans, since in practice inbred human populations tend to be unusually prone to otherwise rare genetic disorders. It's hard to concentrate desireable sets of alleles without also concentrating undesireable ones -- when it's even possible to pin down which is which.
Eugenics notions still tend to pop up in various ways -- the concept is too obvious, if it was somehow erased from all the books and memory it would be quickly rediscovered -- but they are handled with the extreme and well-deserved caution generally used in dealing with any potentially dangerous booby-trap. Modern genetic testing does allow couples to determine when having kids together is unarguably a bad idea. The rapidly increasing knowledge of genetics also suggests that in time humans will be able to manipulate their genome. These controversial issues are discussed in more detail later.
* The Nazi regime also did much to put the final nails in the coffin of Social Darwinism. The idea was, in hindsight, fundamentally broken, in that it was founded on a transparently bogus ethical premise. As pointed out by the British philosopher George E. Moore (1873:1958) in his 1903 book PRINCIPIA ETHICA, Social Darwinism suffered from the "naturalistic fallacy", the idea that what is natural is also ethically correct. In reality, this is entirely contrary to common notions of ethics, one of the underlying premises of which is the idea that humans ought to behave better than beasts. Animals do not have morals, not as we define the term; Social Darwinism, in contrast, tried to set up beasts as role models.
Role models? As the modern saying has it: Mother Nature is a bitch. Darwin expressed the same notion more articulately in a letter in 1857: "What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature!" Long before Darwin's time, few had failed to realize that, while nature has its beautiful and benign side -- which, oddly, never factored into the considerations of Social Darwinists -- its other side is frighteningly ruthless and monstrous. Indeed, our Stone Age ancestors knew this only too well as they watched the darkness for lurking predators.
Darwin's use of the word "cruel" was not exact, since it implied deliberate malevolence. He knew perfectly well that nature is not cruel in the strict sense of the word, it is simply merciless, as mindlessly indifferent to the pain it inflicts as is a volcanic eruption that reduces a town to lifeless cinders and ashes. The concept of morality implies the existence of intelligent organisms that can balance considerations of right and wrong; without that intelligence, there is no morality. Predators and parasites do what they are adapted to do to survive, they do not do it to be malign for its own sake.
There was nothing in Darwin's theory of evolution that could possibly suggest that nature wasn't cold and merciless. What realistic scheme of nature could say otherwise? Darwinism or not, that's without reasonable argument the way it works. Even creationism couldn't deny the ugly side of nature; claims that nature was purely benign before the expulsion of humankind from the Garden of Eden do not alter in the slightest the absolute fact that it isn't now. Darwin merely acknowledged that ugliness. He made it clear he didn't endorse it, and he never proposed it as a basis for moral principle. As he wrote in THE DESCENT OF MAN:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Important as the struggle for existence has been, and even still is, yet, as far as the highest part of man's nature is concerned, there are other agencies more important. For the moral qualities are advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the reasoning powers, instruction, religions, etc., than through natural selection; though to this later agency may be safely attributed the social instincts which afforded the basis for the development of the moral sense.
END QUOTE
In some species of mantises and spiders, males are often eaten by females when the males attempt to mate, or after they have done so. Unless human females became vampires, however, it would take a convoluted argument to suggest that this grotesque behavior had any direct relevance to human morals and conduct. Darwinism was never any more a theory of morality than was physics, and Darwin flatly said as much. The naturalistic fallacy of Social Darwinism, taken to a ridiculous extreme, was equivalent to claiming that since the law of gravity causes things to fall, then Isaac Newton was advocating that in obedience to the law we should all go jump off a bridge.
* Critics of Darwin hold eugenics against him, and indeed Darwin discussed some of the underlying ideas of the movement in the second subchapter of chapter 5 of THE DESCENT OF MAN:
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In the last and present chapters I have considered the advancement of man from a former semi-human condition to his present state as a barbarian. But some remarks on the agency of natural selection on civilised nations may be here worth adding. This subject has been ably discussed by Mr. W. R. Greg, and previously by Mr. Wallace and Mr. Galton. Most of my remarks are taken from these three authors. With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
END QUOTE
This is often cited by his critics, but they rarely cite the following paragraph:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.
END QUOTE
Darwin comes back to the theme in the last pages of THE DESCENT OF MAN, again suggesting that a choice of mate might involve a consideration of the healthiness of the match -- a notion that was far from new in the 19th century and not unknown today -- as well as reiterating that potential mates might well "refrain from marriage in they are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind." He was then, cautious as always, quick and in hindsight extremely accurate to add that "such hopes are Utopian, and will never even be partially realized until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known."
Darwin was concerned that his marriage to a first cousin was biologically unsound, since the health of his children was mixed -- one of his sons who died in infancy was clearly an imbecile -- and few would disagree now that such inbreeding isn't a recommended practice. His response to this worry was typical of him: he proposed to Parliament that the 1871 census ask if marriages were between first cousins so that proper data could be obtained to confirm or reject the idea. It was simply not like Darwin to put forward an idea without making sure it would float. The proposal raised a storm of controversy in Parliament, being criticised as excessively intrusive, and it didn't happen.
* Darwin has been accused of being a racist. There is a basis for this, since his views on the various peoples he met during his travels on the BEAGLE are in fact very mixed. He regarded the cannibalistic Fuegians as little better than beasts, though he thought Jemmy Button merry, pleasant, and keen-eyed. He found the Aborigines and Maoris almost as savage. As far as the extermination of the unfortunate Tasmanians went, he described "this most cruel step" in an equivocal fashion as:
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... quite unavoidable, as the only means of stopping a fearful succession of robberies, burnings, and murders, committed by the blacks; and which sooner or later would have ended in their utter destruction. I fear there is no doubt, that this train of evil and its consequences originated in the infamous conduct of some of our countrymen.
END QUOTE
In VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE he commented: "I do not think it possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilized man. It is the difference between wild and tame animals ... " In THE DESCENT OF MAN he wrote, as a condescending and coldly neutral generalization on the suppression of native peoples that he saw in South America and Tasmania:
BEGIN QUOTE:
At some future period ... the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races of the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes ... will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state ... even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of, as now, between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
END QUOTE
As far as women went, he wrote in THE DESCENT OF MAN: "Man is more powerful in body and mind than woman ..."
On the other hand, he was very taken with the health and gentleness of the Tahitians, finding their tattooed figures elegant, observing how pale and unpleasant an Englishman looked next to them, "like a plant bleached by a gardener's art compared with a fine dark green one ..." He rejected criticisms of the work of missionaries in civilizing them, saying that any traveler worried about shipwreck on a foreign shore "will most devoutly pray that the lesson of the missionary may have extended thus far."
Darwin was also very taken with the "noble-looking figures" of the Indians exiled to Mauritius, saying that many had been sent there only because of their adherence to religious beliefs that clashed with English law and that such men were "generally quiet and well-conducted". He was clearly appalled by slavery, the Darwin clan having an antislavery tradition, and condemned it at length in the last chapter of THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE: "I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal ... Those who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter ... It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty ... "
In short, anyone who wants to make a case for or against Darwin on a personal basis has citations to work from. To the extent that some of his statements are unacceptable to modern propriety, it can be said, in mitigation if not in defense, was that his attitudes were ordinary for an upper-class Victorian Englishman, reflecting both the virtues and faults of Victorian society in general. Much the same could be said about other prominent Victorians, for example Charles Dickens -- who has in fact been faulted in modern times for his antisemitism, the critics citing the vile Jewish thief Fagin from OLIVER TWIST as evidence.
The truth remains that Darwin was a Victorian chauvinist. However, he was also a Victorian gentleman, and unlike many who would adopt his ideas to their own ends, he never made the blunder of believing that scientific knowledge trumped moral vision. In fact, he was clearly careful in his work to try to avoid any such implications, for the simple reason that they would have weakened the scientific credibility of his argument. The last thing he ever wanted to do was write another ZOONOMIA or sound as loopy as his grandfather Erasmus. Darwin knew perfectly well he was in for trouble even proposing evolution by natural selection, and he had not the least inclination to make matters more difficult for himself than they needed to be.
* Galton was more blunt and less guarded in his notions and, unlike his cousin Darwin, never suspected just how half-baked his ideas about selective breeding really were. It is impossible to deny that there were people following Galton who took Darwin's ideas off into directions that Darwin himself had repudiated or at least kept at arm's length, and that Nazi eugenics ideas were heavily influenced by this movement.
However, it should be noted that though Hitler's autobiographical tract MEIN KAMPF takes Social Darwinist ideas to a pulp-fiction extreme -- spending a good deal of time discussing the struggle for survival between "superior" and "inferior" races, and outlines concepts of eugenics that could have been taken out of the mouths of its American advocates -- it does not mention the name "Darwin". Hitler did mention "evolution", if mostly to condemn the notion of race mixing:
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If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.
END QUOTE
This has a clearly Darwinian sound to it, but he also described race mixing as a "sin against the will of the Eternal Creator", which doesn't, and he also described Aryans as "the highest image of God among His creatures", which has a vaguely creationist sound to it. The fact is that Hitler was a scientific illiterate who lived on a diet of tabloid ideas and adopted whatever slogans fit his agenda. One critic of Darwinism wrote:
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Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust [the genocide of the Jews], but without Darwinism, especially in its social Darwinist and eugenics permutations, neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the world's greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy.
END QUOTE
It is more than slightly far-fetched to think it ever crossed Hitler's mind that he might need "scientific underpinnings" to justify his crimes, any more than it occurred to Genghis Khan or any other brutal tyrant in history, and in fact Hitler had no real interest in science at all. One of the early acts of the Nazi regime was to dismiss all public employees with Jewish or partly-Jewish backgrounds, which meant the sacking of a substantial body of professors from the universities, most notably many of Germany's best physicists. German physicist and Nobelist Max Planck (1858:1947) protested the firings, saying they would destroy German science, and reportedly the Fuehrer snapped back: "If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!"
Many of the physicists ended up in America and worked for the Allied cause to help defeat the Axis. More generally, the inability of Hitler's regime to remotely match the competence of the Allies in understanding and organizing scientific research was one of the contributing factors to the downfall of the Nazi regime.
Hitler did have the nerve to cite divine authority to support his atrocities, writing in MEIN KAMPF: "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." It should be noted that, though Hitler has also been compared to a fundamentalist Christian, it is difficult to see his religious rhetoric as anything but political salesmanship, part of an effort to obtain support from nationalistic German churches. He had no use for Christianity as such, since it spoke of charity and kindness, concepts which he regarded as corrupt and weak. Ministers were told to toe the line and there were those who did so enthusiastically; those who proved uncooperative were sent off to concentration camps, where they were abused and in a few cases murdered. The ultimate goal of the Nazi regime was to establish Naziism along with pagan-Germanic trappings as a state religion that would replace all others -- with Hitler as its chief prophet, or in effect proxy god, and MEIN KAMPF reverently set up on household shrines as its bible: the swastika was to replace the cross.
* In any case, thanks to his long, tedious, and unbalanced ramblings Hitler can be and is invoked as a smear tactic -- "reductio ad Hitlerum" as it's called -- against almost anyone, and it is the almost inevitable terminal point of "flame wars" on internet forums, with comparisons to Hitler invoked relative to liberals, conservatives, political activists, fundamentalist religions, militant atheists, the media, and so on. In fact, in some of the stricter internet forums any person who invokes "Hitler & the Nazis" in any but the most historically appropriate context is immediately threatened with expulsion by the forum moderator.
Certainly the idea that Hitler was a disciple of Darwin is not the prevailing view among the Jewish community: the ranks of the evolutionary science community includes prominent Israeli researchers, and after an anti-Darwinist video attempted to link the Holocaust to Darwinism, the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith, organized to "stop the defamation of the Jewish people", was conscientious enough to issue a statement that read in part:
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Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people, and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness. Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous, and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.
END QUOTE
The reality is that Nazi notions of race supremacy, ethnic cleansing, nationalism, authoritarianism, militarism, imperialism, repression, and simple thuggery were hardly invented, or even condoned, by Darwin, having been around for a very long time. In fact, they were arguably much less morally questioned before the Enlightenment than they are now.
In the absence of any reference by Hitler indicating a debt to Darwin, it is difficult to provide any persuasive reason to show that Hitler would have been much different had Darwin never existed, though Hitler might have used slightly different rhetoric. One might as well play up the Fuehrer's debt to the Wright brothers, since Hitler's conquests heavily relied on Stuka dive-bombers, speedy Messerschmitt fighters, and an entire range of murderous flying machines whose origins could be easily traced back to the Wrights.
* Incidentally, some of Darwin's critics also link him to Karl Marx. Marx actually was a fan of THE ORIGINS OF SPECIES, it appears for the fact that it undermined traditional religious views and suggested that the class struggle had a biological basis. It is actually hard to see much specific influence Darwin had on Marx's thinking, since Marx and Engels' COMMUNIST MANIFESTO doesn't mention "Darwin" or even "evolution". This is not too surprising, considering that it was published in 1848, over a decade before the publication of THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. Darwin has an airtight alibi for having any involvement in the origins of Communism.
DAS KAPITAL only references Darwin in a few footnotes relevant to specialization in industrial production -- for example:
BEGIN QUOTE:
[XIV.2] In Birmingham alone, 500 varieties of hammer are produced, and not only is each adapted to one particular process, but several varieties often serve exclusively for the different operations in one and the same process The manufacturing period simplifies, improves, and multiplies the implements of labour, by adapting them to the exclusively special functions of each detail labourer.
FOOTNOTE: Darwin, in his epoch-making ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, chapter 5, remarks, with reference to the natural organs of plants and animals: "So long as one and the same organ has different kinds of work to perform, a ground for its changeability may possibly be found in this ... "
END QUOTE
Anyone seeking any shocking or even particularly interesting references to Darwin in DAS KAPITAL will be stretched to find them. Marx was clearly taken with Darwin's ideas, but they were of incidental relevance to the social and economic case Marx was trying to make, and whatever else might be said about Marx, nobody could credibly accuse him of being a Social Darwinist. The USSR would later play up Darwinism on occasion to show the "progressive" nature of the Soviet state, but as discussed later, under Stalin the Soviet regime would demonstrate an extreme prejudice against Darwinism in practice.
It is true that in 1873 Marx sent a copy of DAS KAPITAL to Darwin, this being the first known direct contact between the two men. Darwin replied with a characteristically polite thank-you note -- and never read through the book, its pages being found mostly unseparated after Darwin's death. A story still circulates that Marx had offered to dedicate DAS KAPITAL to Darwin, as demonstrated by a letter from Darwin very politely turning down the request. In reality, the letter was to Marx's son-in-law, Edward Aveling, who had offered to perform such a dedication for his own book. Marx's daughter had her father's letters and the reply from Darwin to Aveling, which in itself did not name the recipient, got mixed in with the lot.
A Soviet scholar started the rumor in the 1930s. The matter would be too trivial to mention except for the interesting comments about Darwin's attitudes toward religion in his reply:
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Moreover though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follow from the advance of science. It has, therefore, always been my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.
END QUOTE
That Darwin was a religious skeptic is undeniable. That he was considerate of the beliefs of the devout is just as undeniable, and as indicated by the last sentence of the quote above he had a strong personal motive for doing so: to attack religion would have been to attack his dear wife Emma. If Darwin's work undermined the doctrines of traditional religions, it was not something he did as part of a conspiratorial agenda. He only came to the conclusion that he did because that was where the evidence led him, and he did not welcome the controversy that publishing that conclusion brought him.
Since Darwin's time, his work has been used to support various ideologies, with the different ideologies sometimes completely at odds with each other. It has been commented that such interpretations resemble the depression on a sofa of the bottom of the last person who sat on it.
* As far as eugenics goes, it was an unpleasant episode in the history of evolutionary biology that shouldn't be and won't be forgotten. There are critics outside the community who see the Social Darwinism and the eugenics movement as fundamental faults of Darwinism, and indeed there were prominent evolutionists who jumped on the bandwagons. Fortunately, Darwin himself explicitly rejected the use of his ideas as a basis for moral principles and also made it clear he had no particular use for Herbert Spencer; and he went no farther with eugenics than to suggest that when people get married, they might include the healthiness of a mate as part of the selection criteria. It would be difficult to find any prominent figures in the evolutionary science community today who are enthusiasts for Social Darwinism or eugenics.
In any case, the failure of eugenics and Social Darwinism say nothing about the technical validity of Darwin's core ideas. After all, those so inclined might make a moral case against physicists for their development of nuclear weapons, that it was a perversion of science as bad or worse than the Nazi Action T4 program, and argue that nuclear weapons ought to be banned -- but no sensible case can be made that the physicists were wrong in any technical sense. Like it or not, the bombs worked as designed, and nobody could convincingly argue that it was by accident, using fundamentally flawed theory.
Darwinism has no technical demonstration of its validity as vivid as that of a mushroom cloud, but the analogy holds: even if, in some alternate universe, Charles Darwin had been actually a brutish thug, a Mr. Hyde instead of a Dr. Jekyll, that says nothing about the truth or falsity of Darwinism as a description of the way the physical Universe works. While Darwinism has implications that definitely need to be discussed, no ideological argument has any relevance to whether Darwinism actually works or not, and credibly claiming that Darwin's theory was technically wrong demands another approach.
