Tuesday, January 15, 2008

No Darwin, No Hitler?

A candidate for the mayoral race in St. Petersburg Florida has equated Darwin with Hitler. Quotes the story in the St. Petersburg Times:

"Evolution gives our kids an excuse to believe in natural selection and survival of the fittest, which leads to a belief that they are superior over the weak," Bill Foster wrote board members in a letter received this week. "This is a slippery slope."

Later, the story notes:

"To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler," said the group's late founder, D. James Kennedy.


Foster echoed those words in his letter: "Adolf Hitler duped an entire generation using Darwin's evolution," he wrote. "He sought to preserve the 'favored' race in the struggle for survival."

Michael Ruse jumped on this one.

Ruse said Nazi ideologues were motivated by many factors, including "social Darwinism," a movement that tried to apply natural concepts like "survival of the fittest" to human society. But the Nazis later distanced themselves from Darwin because rather than promoting racial superiority, evolution showed "Aryans and Jews and Gypsies and Slavs were all one stem," he said.

I noted this problem a bit back. In both speeches that I reproduce by Hitler, he rejects the evolution of humans from lower forms of life. Another persistent untruth.

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