Friday, May 7, 2010

Was evolution a significant and essential factor in guiding Nazi thought?

The web page at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/a_contest_gets_a_winner_common.php has the argument shown below that Hitler was NOT influenced by Darwin. The author of the argument even counts the words in Mein Kampf to help make their point. The post begins with an answer to the question posed by the subject of this post.

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No. First of all, as has already been established courtesy of searching through Mein Kampf in detail, Hitler's assorted eructations on nature reproduce well-known creationist canards, including the static species fallacy, and Hitler also asserted that fertile, viable hybrids were impossible, which is manifestly refuted by this scientific paper (among many others):

Speciation By Hybridisation In Heliconius Butterflies, by Jesús Mavárez, Camilo A. Salazar, Eldredge Bermingham, Christian Salcedo, Chris D. Jiggins and Mauricio Linares, Nature, 441: 868-871 (15th June 2006)

Also, even an elementary search of Mein Kampf reveals the following statistics. The number of instances of key words are as follows:

"Darwin" : ZERO

"Almighty" : 6

"God" : 37

"Creator" : 8

Hitler was inspired by the anti-Semitic ravings of one Lanz von Liebenfels, who was a defrocked monk, and whose magnum opus bore the Pythonesque title of Theozoology, Or The Account Of The Sodomite Apelings And The Divine Electron. This was in effect a warped Biblical exegesis, which rewrites the Crucifixion story, and also contains a mediaeval bestiary replete with instances of Liebenfels' florid imagination.

Additionally, the Nazis placed textbooks on evolutionary biology on their list of seditious books to be burned, as illustrated nicely here, where we learn that in 1935, Nazi guidelines with respect to seditious books included:

6. Schriften weltanschaulichen und lebenskundlichen Charakters, deren Inhalt die falsche naturwissenschaftliche Aufklärung eines primitiven Darwinismus und Monismus ist (Häckel).

Translated into English, this reads:

Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel)

The evidence is therefore conclusive. Nazism was not inspired by evolution, and indeed, much of Hitler's own writings are creationist in tone. The Nazis destroyed evolutionary textbooks as seditious (much as modern day creationists would love to), and the Nazi view of the biosphere is wholly at variance with genuine evolutionary theory, involving fatuous views of race "purification" by the establishment of monocultures that are the very antithesis of genuine evolutionary thought, which relies upon genetic diversity.

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