Welcome to Atheist Discussion, a new community created by former members of The Thinking Atheist forum.

Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
Nazis, Darwin And Evolution
#1

Nazis, Darwin And Evolution
It has become  a common claim among creationists that Darwin's evolution inspired Hitler and the Nazis.  Richard Weikert, Dinesh D'Souza, et al.  What did the Nazis really think about evolution?

Evolution Under Attack By Nazis in Germany
Source:The Science News-letter Volume 39 Number 4
Jan 25 1941, Page 54
Published by: Society for Science & the Public
JSTOR URL http://www.jstor.org/stable/3918195

Evolution Under Attack By Nazis In Germany

"Evolution is under violent attack in Germany, primatily
because Darwinian teachings deviate from the Nazi "party line"
states states Dr. Otto Haas of the American Museum of Natural
History. (Science,  Jan. 10) Dr. Haas cites a German
"semi-scientific" publication entitle Natur und Kultur, in
which ten different authors make violent attacks on evolution,
especially with regard to the origin of man from apelike
ancestors.
Dr. Haas calls particular attention "to a fact most striking to
a scientific reader: nowhere are the conclusions derived from
the results of research; on the contrary, the former are tested
as to whether or not they agree with the nationalist socialist
racial theory ('Rassenlerhe').  If they do not they have to be
rejected...Its no less striking to see that the adversaries of
evolution reproach its advocates, alleging that the latter made
them politically suspect".
One author, H. Weinert, rejects all these arguments as
"pseudoscientfic objections against the descent of the human
descent", but even he apparently tries to bolster up his
scientific argument with an appeal the party line, "asserting
that, should the origin of man be questioned, the adversaries
of national socialist 'racial hygiene' tendencies should
cite the uncertainty of science.
 
Science News Letter, January 25, 1941

-----

I had saved this on a hard disk some years ago, and just now rediscovered it.  I tried to hunt down any online resources that had  old issues of Natur Und Kultur online, but never discovered anything.  If any such exists, it is on microfiche in the dusty stacks of some German University library far out of my reach.
I am a sovereign citizen of the Multiverse, and I vote!


The following 2 users Like Cheerful Charlie's post:
  • GenesisNemesis, Bucky Ball
Reply
#2

Nazis, Darwin And Evolution
Even if they were inspired by Darwin, it would have been a misapplication of evolutionary theory/appeal to nature fallacy.
“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” -Carl Sagan.
The following 3 users Like GenesisNemesis's post:
  • Deesse23, mordant, Glossophile
Reply
#3

Nazis, Darwin And Evolution
Natur Und Kultur seems to have been a magazine designed to inform German citizens of National Socialism's views on nature, culture and ideas like evolution. They were here, firmly rejecting evolution. Himmler was head of an organization the Ahnenerbe, a nazi organization.

Wikipedia
The Ahnenerbe (German: [ˈʔaːnənˌʔɛʁbə], ancestral heritage) operated as a think tank in Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1945. Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), established it as an SS appendage devoted to the task of promoting the racial doctrines espoused by Adolf Hitler and his governing Nazi Party, specifically by supporting the idea that the modern Germans descended from an ancient Aryan race seen as biologically superior to other racial groups. The group comprised scholars and scientists from a broad range of academic disciplines.

Himmler was a creationist and forbade acceptance of evolution, especially man evolving from lower animals.

Amazon books
The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust Paperback – February 13, 2007
by Heather Pringle (Author)

The entire story can be found in Heather Pringle's book. Himmler's racial theories were creationist, not evolutionist or Darwinian.
I am a sovereign citizen of the Multiverse, and I vote!


The following 1 user Likes Cheerful Charlie's post:
  • GenesisNemesis
Reply
#4

Nazis, Darwin And Evolution
Social Darwinism is NOT evolutionary science.
[Image: M-Spr20-Weapons-FEATURED-1-1200x350-c-default.jpg]
The following 4 users Like Gawdzilla Sama's post:
  • GenesisNemesis, Dancefortwo, Inkubus, Thumpalumpacus
Reply
#5

Nazis, Darwin And Evolution
(03-14-2021, 07:19 PM)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: Social Darwinism is NOT evolutionary science.

Also that. Herbert Spencer was the main guy who came up with Social Darwinism, right? Also Francis Galton.
“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” -Carl Sagan.
Reply
#6

Nazis, Darwin And Evolution
(03-14-2021, 07:19 PM)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: Social Darwinism is NOT evolutionary science.

I am not talking about social Darwinism.  I am discussing the science of evolution, Darwin and Nazis.  stupid creationist are trying to propagandize people into believing Darwin's theories of evolution created the Nazi holocaust.  This is false and a Big Lie. Anti-Semitism, pogroms, genocides and oppression of the Jews was an old European habit that pre-dated Nazis by many centuries.

Most certainly in Germany.  All of that predated evolution and Darwin.  And Hitler for that matter.  Social Darwinism?  Serfdom, which was about as Social Darwinist as you could get predated Darwin by centuries, and was well supported by the RCC.
I am a sovereign citizen of the Multiverse, and I vote!


Reply
#7

Nazis, Darwin And Evolution
I've been doing more research into my ancestory and I happened on an article in The Atlantic about racist genetics being discussed by a white nationalist group called Stormfront.   Since the Human Genome Project of the 1990's they've taken the DNA information twisted and distorted it to suit their views.  It's really rather disgusting. 

Quote:Jedidiah Carlson was googling a genetics research paper when he stumbled upon the white nationalist forum Stormfront. Carlson is a graduate student at the University of Michigan, and he is—to be clear—absolutely not a white nationalist. But one link led to another and he ended up reading page after page of Stormfront discussions on the reliability of 23andMe ancestry results and whether Neanderthal interbreeding is the reason for the genetic superiority of whites. Obsession with racial purity is easily channeled, apparently, into an obsession with genetics.


Quote:Of course, that is hardly a novel danger. In the early 20th century, Americans used eugenics to justify restrictions on immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Then the world changed. The Nazis lost World War II and the racial policies they promulgated became abhorrent. Eugenics turned into a cautionary tale.  

Modern geneticists now take pains to distance their work from the racist assumptions of eugenics. Yet since the dawn of the genomic revolution, sociologists and historians have warned that even seemingly benign genetics research can reinforce a belief that different races are essentially different—an argument made most famously by Troy Duster in his book Backdoor to Eugenics. If a genetic test can identify you as 78 percent Norwegian, 12 percent Scottish, and 10 percent Italian, then it’s easy to assume there is such thing as white DNA. If scientists find that a new drug works works better in African Americans because of a certain mutation common among them, then it’s easy to believe that races are genetically meaningful categories.

Quote:The problem is not with the science per se, but with the set of underlying assumptions about race that we always imprint on the latest science. True, genetics has led to real breakthroughs in medicine, but it is also the latest in a centuries-long effort to understand biological differences. “In a sense, genetics is a modern version of what early scientists were doing in terms of their studies of skulls or blood type,” says Ann Morning, a sociologist at New York University. “We have a long history of turning to whatever we think is the most authoritative sense of knowledge and expecting to find race proved or demonstrated there.” And like its predecessors, genetics is vulnerable to misuse by those with racist agendas.

Quote:In the genomic age, it is now easy to compare the DNA of people from around the world. And it has indeed revealed that our racial categories are fuzzy proxies for genetic difference—an African man may be more closely related to an Asian than to another African. And to put it in perspective, all of the genetic diversity in humans comprises just 0.1 percent of the human genome.

This has inspired the line that race isn’t real—it’s a pure social construction and biologically meaningless. “Yet the lay person will ridicule that position as nonsense,” write geneticists Sarah Tishkoff and Kenneth Kidd in the journal Nature Genetics, “because people from different parts of the world look different, whereas people from the same part of the world tend to look similar.”

Quote:The trouble with the way we talk about race is that our biological differences are by degree rather by category. The borders of a country or continent are not magical lines that demarcate one genetically distinct population from another. “There are no firm and clear boundaries if you sample every grid on Earth,” Tishkoff told me. But because we lack a common vocabulary to talk about these differences between people by degree, we draw boundaries with our words and categorize them: Korean, Mongol, Asian.

Here's the rest of the article.  It's very interesting.   

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ts/510962/
                                                         T4618
Reply
#8

Nazis, Darwin And Evolution
Google for Madison Grant. At the turn of the century he wrote the book "The Passing Of The Great White Race". The title says it all. When it was translated into German in 1916, it soon became a favorite book of Adolf Hitler. Grant was an early supporter of Eugenics, and was responsible for the US passing restrictive immigration laws, limiting immigration of "inferior" races. We can still hear rancid echoes of Madison Grant on Faux News with Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, et al. The rise of anti-Semiticism in today's America. Google also for Lathrop Stoddard, he gave the world the lovely phrase, "Undermen", Untermensch" in German. Nazi pseudo-scientific racism was not a total German invention.
I am a sovereign citizen of the Multiverse, and I vote!


The following 1 user Likes Cheerful Charlie's post:
  • Dancefortwo
Reply
#9

Nazis, Darwin And Evolution
In the early 20th Century there were a number of Darwinists, and some were Americans, and would never admit to being Nazis.
This is nothing but fundies trying to rewrite history.

"We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races." -- Charles Lindberg
Lindbergh said certain races have "demonstrated superior ability in the design, manufacture, and operation of machines". He further said, "The growth of our western civilization has been closely related to this superiority." Lindbergh admired "the German genius for science and organization, the English genius for government and commerce, the French genius for living and the understanding of life". He believed, "in America they can be blended to form the greatest genius of all".

"In his book The American Axis, Holocaust researcher and investigative journalist Max Wallace agreed with Franklin Roosevelt's assessment that Lindbergh was "pro-Nazi". However, he found that the Roosevelt Administration's accusations of dual loyalty or treason were unsubstantiated. Wallace considered Lindbergh to be a well-intentioned but bigoted and misguided Nazi sympathizer whose career as the leader of the isolationist movement had a destructive impact on Jewish people." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Li...oward_race
Test
The following 1 user Likes Bucky Ball's post:
  • GenesisNemesis
Reply
#10

Nazis, Darwin And Evolution
Grant and Stoddart, who I mentioned, did not in their works base any of their theories on Darwin. Neither did German Racial theorists such as Han F.K. Gunther, the official racial theorist of the National Socialists. The Nordicists that influenced so much of this had almost nothing at all to say about evolution. Count Gobineaus who became influential was notably and anti-evolutionist. German racial theories owed nothing to Darwin,but much to crackpot pseudo-sciences about European races.

Hanah Arendt in her essay, "Race Before Racism" tracked down the start of German racism to a French aristocrat arguing that the nobility of their time, all having German ancestral roots, deserved their noble status because their German ancestors were conquerors of the wretched Gauls. The rights of conquest. It was the right of the strong to oppress the weak nationalities. Predating Darwin by centuries. Hard to find on the internet but a real eye opener.

http://archive.discoverthenetworks.org/A...essor.html

German exceptionalism, volkisch superiority and anti-semitism took a violent turn after the Napoleonic wars, predating Hitler and Darwin by decades. The roots of the Holocaust lie here, not at Darwin's feet as per the creationist slime merchants.
I am a sovereign citizen of the Multiverse, and I vote!


The following 1 user Likes Cheerful Charlie's post:
  • GenesisNemesis
Reply




Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)