David Klinghoffer Practices Reductio ad Hitlerum Over at HuffPo

David Klinghoffer has written another article over at the Huffington Post (cross-posted at the Discovery Institute's Evolution News and Views) on the connexion between Hitler and Darwin. This ought to be some sort of corollary to Godwin's Law. He writes:

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."

The reason that "honest accounts" omit Darwin is that Hitler did not think evolution applied to humans. I have commented on this here, here and, most importantly, here. In 1942, Hitler said, in a speech:

“Where do we get the right to believe that humans have not been, from the very beginning, what they are today? A look into nature shows us that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments occur. But nowhere in a species does a development occur that is further from the origin which people must have made if they evolved (developed) from their ape-like condition to that which they are now.”

That Darwin was responsible for Hitler and Stalin is a persistent meme at the Discovery Institute and creationist movements. It is ironic that the man, himself, did not accept evolution as it applied to humans. Hitler, in this speech, clearly argues that the animal kingdom and humans are separate creations. Further, Hitler went out of his way to systematically eradicate groups of people that he thought were inferior. This is counter to how evolution would proceed. Had Hitler actually proceeded along biologically evolutionary themes, he would have assumed that nature would eventually cull out the inferior "races." In proper evolutionary theory, there is no such thing as "helping it along."

Equally ironically, if Stalin had applied Darwinian evolutionary principles to his agricultural program, the Soviet Union would not have suffered from such bad famines during his reign of terror. He specifically adopted Lamarckian evolutionary principles and the regime purged those that accepted Darwinian ideas. The results were a total disaster.

But the principle problem with this piece (and this is a problem with all of Klinghoffer's pieces on this subject) is that it is also Reductio ad Hitlerum. It is clear that the early 20th century saw a rise in biological determinism and eugenics. It is also clear that some people took some of what Darwin (and others) wrote and warped it beyond what it was intended ever to mean. As Jeffrey Schloss writes:

The historical record amply and indisputably confirms the fact that references to Darwin and to ideological principles attributed to the evolutionary process were frequently employed by the intellectual architects of the Reich, at the very least in this way. That Darwin was used (or abused) in Holocaust thinking seems uncontestable. But it is also not necessarily very interesting. Darwin has been used in this way for many other social movements very different from fascist eugenics: e.g., racial egalitarianism, feminism, anti-feminism, Marxism, and free enterprise capitalism. Big ideas can be used, or misused, for all manner of big causes, and Darwinism – like the Bible – has been claimed to justify or inspire many.

When we follow this line of thought, it continues to go very wrong for Klinghoffer's argument. Schloss continues:

In fact, the Bible and the Christian tradition themselves were used to justify the anti-Semitism of the Holocaust. Martin Luther’s fierce denunciation of Jews (“everyone would gladly be rid of them,” “we are at fault in not slaying them”)51 was frequently referred to by Hitler and other influential anti-Semites. Luther was lauded as the “greatest anti-Semite of his time,” and the infamous Kristallnacht on the night of November 9/10, when my own grandfather was taken to a concentration camp, was celebrated with the applauding observation that “on Luther’s birthday,the synagogues are burning in Germany."

It seems that if we are to lay the fault of the genocide in Germany at the feet of Charles Darwin, we would be well to lay it at the feet of Martin Luther as well. The problem is that the simplistic idea of blaming Charles Darwin for the genocide of the 20th century perpetrated by the Nazis reflects a rather one-dimensional view of history and a complete misunderstanding of the complex events that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Is it true that ideas have consequences? Yes, but should we hold a man responsible for his ideas if those ideas are badly misinterpreted? Early 19th century Christians justified the subjugation of Blacks based on the story of the three sons of Noah and the misguided idea that one of the sons, who was less favored, gave rise to the Blacks. Shall we blame the Bible for racism?

You cannot hold a man responsible for his ideas if the abuse of those ideas lead to events or movements that he would have condemned. Darwin did not endorse the killing of the "weak members" of the human race. He simply knew that humans were capable of emotions that would lead to the preservation of those who would not ordinarily survive. Darwin, himself, was perfectly aware of the differences between humans and lower animals and how humans were to behave to each other. He wrote in his autobiography:

If he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives; and this latter gain undoubtedly is the highest pleasure on this earth. By degrees it will become intolerable to him to obey his sensuous passions rather than his higher impulses, which when rendered habitual may be almost called instincts. His reason may occasionally tell him to act in opposition to the opinion of others, whose approbation he will then not receive; but he will still have the solid satisfaction of knowing that he has followed his innermost guide or conscience.

Darwin would have condemned the modern eugenics movement and the rise of Nazi Germany. This is something that never occurs to Klinghoffer.

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Charles Darwin, Social Darwinism and Columbine

Dennis Sewell has an article for Times Online about the link between Darwin and the recent spate of high school massacres. He writes:

In America, where Darwin’s writings on morality and race have come under particularly intense critical scrutiny because of the enduring creationist debate, he has been accused of fostering moral nihilism and scientific racism, and even of promoting an ethic that found its ultimate expression in the Holocaust. Most startling of all, a connection has now been drawn between Darwin’s theories and a rash of school shootings.

Morality? Race? Darwin not only failed to express some of the views against racism that were prevalent in his culture but was an outspoken opponent of slavery. The rest of the article painstakingly recounts all of the events that led up to each high school shooting and the fact that each of the shooters wanted to rid the world of people they thought were inferior and in the way. While interesting in its own right, it is not clear how much it actually has to do with Darwin's concept of natural selection, in which the environment plays a role in how species change over time.

It has been shown time and again that Darwin's views were not shared by either Hitler or Stalin and had nothing to do with the Holocaust. This meme is getting so old, it has whiskers, but creationists and ID supporters keep using it. Sewell also writes:

Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved — a set of sentiments or intuitions that developed from adaptive responses to environmental pressures tens of thousands of years ago. This does not merely explain the origin of morals, it totally explains them away. Whether an individual opts to obey a particular ethical precept, or to regard it as a redundant evolutionary carry-over, thus becomes a matter of personal choice. Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang “Randomness is good enough for me, If there’s no design it means I’m free” — lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel. Clearly they see evolution as something that emancipates them from the strict sexual morality insisted upon by their parents. But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.

This is a complete misread of Darwin's understanding of morality. While it is certain that, by the end of his life, Darwin was not a Christian, he did believe in a God and did have a high opinion of morality. In his autobiography, he wrote:

A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, 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. A dog acts in this manner, but he does so blindly. A man, on the other hand, looks forwards and backwards, and compares his various feelings, desires and recollections. He then finds, in accordance with the verdict of all the wisest men that the highest satisfaction is derived from following certain impulses, namely the social instincts. If he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives; and this latter gain undoubtedly is the highest pleasure on this earth. By degrees it will become intolerable to him to obey his sensuous passions rather than his higher impulses, which when rendered habitual may be almost called instincts. His reason may occasionally tell him to act in opposition to the opinion of others, whose approbation he will then not receive; but he will still have the solid satisfaction of knowing that he has followed his innermost guide or conscience.

Darwin clearly understood the good of being kind to his fellow humans. In fact, without this understanding of morality, his kindness to his wife or love for his children and his opposition to slavery would have made little to no sense. "Let them die!" would have been a more appropriate response if, in fact, he thought that everyone should have his own morality.

Klebold and Harris were clearly not acting in anybody's best interest, even their own. Darwin never used the term "survival of the fittest." It was attributed to him much later when the misguided notion of "Social Darwinism" arose. Darwin's contribution to the scientific world was the theory that organisms in any given population expressed a variety of traits and that the environment acted on those traits in a way that some variations were positively selected, some were negatively selected and some were not selected either way. Over the course of many generations there was "descent with modification." That's it.

Sewell ends thus:

The more sinister implications of the world-view that has come to be called “Darwinism” — and the interpretation the teenage nihilists put on it — are as much part of the Darwin story as the theory of evolutions [sic]

This misses the central point about evolution, though. When nuclear power was harnessed in the 1930s and used in the 1940s to devastating effect, it ushered in the nuclear age and the raging debates about whether nuclear energy should be used, even for beneficial purposes.

I remember seeing Peter, Paul and Mary perform in 1985, here in Knoxville. Ever the protest singers, they sang one song called "Power." One of the lyrics was "Take all of your atomic poison power away." Above the protests, sat nuclear power, oblivious to all of it. It simply was. It existed. As Shel Silverstein put it: "Its all the same to the clam."

The same is true of evolution. It exists. It is observable and its effects can be quantified. Not only do we see evidence of speciation in modern-day organisms, we see evidence of it in the fossil record (fishapod, frogamander). How Darwin's theory, and the extrapolations from it, have been misused is irrespective of the actual processes, themselves. The implications may be part of the story of "Darwinism" but they are not a part of evolution.

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The Nonsense of Pat Buchanan

Former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has written a column that, sadly is all too common from conservatives these days. He has rolled into one column nearly every myth and misrepresentation about evolution out there. Let's start at the top:

"You have no notion of the intrigue that goes on in this blessed world of science," wrote Thomas Huxley. "Science is, I fear, no purer than any other region of human activity; though it should be."

As "Darwin's bulldog," Huxley would himself engage in intrigue, deceit and intellectual property theft to make his master's theory gospel truth in Great Britain.

And the support for this allegation is where? Not in this column, that's for sure. No matter. He moves on. Talking about Eugene Windchy's book The End of Darwinism: And How a Flawed and Disastrous Theory Was Stolen and Sold, Buchanan says:

That Darwinism has proven "disastrous theory" is indisputable.

"Karl Marx loved Darwinism," writes Windchy. "To him, survival of the fittest as the source of progress justified violence in bringing about social and political change, in other words, the revolution."

"Darwin suits my purpose," Marx wrote.

Darwin suited Adolf Hitler's purposes, too.

"Although born to a Catholic family, Hitler become a hard-eyed Darwinist who saw life as a constant struggle between the strong and the weak. His Darwinism was so extreme that he thought it would have been better for the world if the Muslims had won the eighth century battle of Tours, which stopped the Arabs' advance into France. Had the Christians lost, (Hitler) reasoned, Germanic people would have acquired a more warlike creed and, because of their natural superiority, would have become the leaders of an Islamic empire."

Charles Darwin also suited the purpose of the eugenicists and Herbert Spencer, who preached a survival-of-the-fittest social Darwinism to robber baron industrialists exploiting 19th-century immigrants.

Some of these are so old, they are getting whiskers. Hitler, once again, did not use natural selection as the underpinnings of his hatred of the Jews. He simply didn't. And to continue to peddle this nonsense only makes Buchanan look foolish. Herbert Spencer's adaptations of Darwin's theory was misapplied, since Darwin never meant his theory to be extrapolated outside of the biological realm. As Derek Freeman wrote for Current Anthropology in 1974:

The disparity between Spencer's "general doctrine of evolution" and Darwin's theory of the origin of species was thus immense. Spencer's doctrine, not having resulted from any kind of sustained empirical enquiry, was explicitly deductive in its structure, and rested on the metaphysical supposition that all evolutionary change was due to the persistence of an immanent "Power" that was (Spencer 1904 [1882], vol 1: 554) both "unknown and unknowable." In marked contrast, Darwin's theory, as he published it in 1859, was authentically scientific, for, without recourse, for all practical purposes, to metaphysics or "final causes," it postulated, on the basis of massive factual evidence, a non-teleological mode of evolutionary change and incorporated a precise definition of the mechanism of natural selection which (as has been conclusively demonstrated) does indeed result in the genetic evolution of populations of living organisms.¹

The problem is that Buchanan has no idea what evolution actually is and has confused what Spencer believed with what Darwin empirically showed. Buchanan continues:

Darwin also lied in "The Origin of Species" about believing in a Creator. By 1859, he was a confirmed agnostic and so admitted in his posthumous autobiography, which was censored by his family.

Darwin did not lie about believing in a creator. When his beloved daughter Anne died, it shattered Darwin's belief in a personal, loving God. It is also nonsense that Darwin's family suppressed it. Darwin wrote:

Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.

This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker. But then arises the doubt—can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? May not these be the result of the connection between cause and effect which strikes us as a necessary one, but probably depends merely on inherited experience? Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.

I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.

He didn't "lie" about his belief in a creator. That is a simplistic read of Darwin's thoughts on God. Darwin freely admitted he was an agnostic but that is a far cry from lying about it. The real clue that Buchanan has no idea what he was talking about comes toward the end, though, with this:

Darwin's examples of natural selection – such as the giraffe acquiring its long neck to reach ever higher into the trees for the leaves upon which it fed to survive – have been debunked. Giraffes eat grass and bushes. And if, as Darwin claimed, inches meant life or death, how did female giraffes, two or three feet shorter, survive?

What Buchanan is actually recounting here is Lamarckian evolution. Darwin used Lamarck's example of the giraffe to show that Lamarck was wrong. The problem is that Buchanan doesn't know the difference. Darwin showed that the giraffe didn't stretch its neck and pass on the characteristic to its offspring. He showed that the giraffes with longer necks outcompeted those with shorter necks and this trait was passed on to their offspring. Not the same thing. As far as the females not getting any food, he makes it seem as if there was no food at the lower branches. This is nonsense. The giraffes evolved long necks over time because the ones with longer necks could exploit a feeding niche that no other animal could, which ensured their survival. As Buchanan, himself, says, giraffes also eat grass. Plenty of that around. He also trots out this lie:

For 150 years, the fossil record has failed to validate Darwin.

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontologists," admitted Stephen J. Gould in 1977. But that fossil record now contains even more species that appear fully developed, with no traceable ancestors.

If Buchanan actually knew anything about the fossil record, he would know that this isn't true. It is also absolutely telling that he uses a quote that is 32 years out-of-date. And it was even a controversial statement when Gould said it then. Furthermore, if Buchanan had done his homework, he would have discovered this quote of Gould's:

"Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists--whether through design or stupidity, I do not know--as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups."²

But that doesn't fit the narrative, so it has to be ignored. Buchanan simply swiped that quote from a stock of misquotes that creationists have been collecting for years. That Buchanan has been marginalized in the GOP is little consolation because this kind of thought keeps showing up in conservative sources. That so little thought, preparation or accuracy is put into such work is a very disturbing.

¹Freeman, D. (1974) The evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Current Anthropology 15(3): 211

²Gould, Stephen J. (1983) Evolution as Fact and Theory. Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes.Norton, New York.


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