posted April 16, 2008 04:42 PM            

Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and some other Darwinists are horrified that the forthcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, will promote Intelligent Design to a large audience when it opens at over a thousand theaters nationwide on April 18. Ironically, their campaign to discredit Ben Stein and the film confirms its main point, which is to expose the persecution meted out by Darwinists to those daring to criticize Darwinian theory.

One aspect of Expelled that troubles Dawkins and some of his colleagues is its treatment of the ethical implications of Darwinism, especially its discussion of the historical connections between Darwinism and Nazism. Isn't this a bit over-the-top, suggesting that Darwinism has something to do with Nazism? After all, Darwinists today are not Nazis, and Darwinism has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

However, what is most objectionable about the Nazis' worldview? Isn't it that they had no respect for human life? Their rejection of the sanctity of human life led the Nazi regime to murder millions of Jews, hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, and about 200,000 disabled Germans. Where did the Nazis get the idea that some human beings were "lives unworthy of life"?

As I show in meticulous detail in my book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, the Nazis' devaluing of human life derived from Darwinian ideology (this does not mean that all Nazi ideology came from Darwinism). There were six features of Darwinian theory that have contributed to the devaluing of human life (then and now):

1. Darwin argued that humans were not qualitatively different from animals. The leading Darwinist in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, attacked the "anthropocentric" view that humans are unique and special.

2. Darwin denied that humans had an immaterial soul. He and other Darwinists believed that all aspects of the human psyche, including reason, morality, aesthetics, and even religion, originated through completely natural processes.

3. Darwin and other Darwinists recognized that if morality was the product of mindless evolution, then there is no objective, fixed morality and thus no objective human rights. Darwin stated in his Autobiography that one "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."

4. Since evolution requires variation, Darwin and other early Darwinists believed in human inequality. Haeckel emphasized inequality to such as extent that he even classified human races as twelve distinct species and claimed that the lowest humans were closer to primates than to the highest humans.

5. Darwin and most Darwinists believe that humans are locked in an ineluctable struggle for existence. Darwin claimed in The Descent of Man that because of this struggle, "[a]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races."

6. Darwinism overturned the Judeo-Christian view of death as an enemy, construing it instead as a beneficial engine of progress. Darwin remarked in The Origin of Species, "Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows."

These six ideas were promoted by many prominent Darwinian biologists and Darwinian-inspired social thinkers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. All six were enthusiastically embraced by Hitler and many other leading Nazis. Hitler thought that killing "inferior" humans would bring about evolutionary progress. Most historians who specialize in the Nazi era recognize the Darwinian underpinnings of many aspects of Hitler's ideology.

BUT WHAT DOES THIS have to do with the present? Darwinists today are not Nazis.

If you look back at the six points outlined above, however, you will find that many Darwinists today are advancing the same or similar ideas. Many leading Darwinists today teach that morality is nothing but a natural product of evolution, thus undermining human rights. E. O. Wilson, one of the most prominent Darwinian biologists in the world, and Michael Ruse, a leading philosopher of science (the latter is in Expelled) famously stated that ethics is "an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes."

Many leading Darwinists today also claim that Darwinism undermines the Judeo-Christian conception of the sanctity of human life. Dawkins wrote in 2001 that we should try to genetically engineer an evolutionary ancestor to the human species to demolish the "speciesist" illusion that humans are special or sacred. In the same article he expressed support for involuntary euthanasia. Another critic of "speciesism," Peter Singer, one of the leading bioethicists in the world, argues that Darwinism destroyed the Judeo-Christian sanctity-of-life ethic, so infanticide and euthanasia are permissible. James Watson, one of the world's most famous geneticists and a staunch Darwinist, has railed at the idea that humans are sacred and special.

Today's Darwinists are not Nazis and not all Darwinists agree with Dawkins, Wilson, Ruse, Singer, or Watson. However, some of the ideas being promoted today by prominent Darwinists in the name of Darwinism have an eerily similar ring to the ideologies that eroded respect for human life in the pre-Nazi era.

Richard Weikart is professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, and author of From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (Palgrave Macmillan).

posted April 16, 2008 06:17 PM            

>>>>I'm still going to invite you to be at the very top of the list for euthanasia

posted April 16, 2008 06:25 PM            

That movie is promoted by conservatives, I gather. It has some truth. Are you now glad that you got my approval to watch the movie? BTW I am waiting to see that movie too.

So what do you think my views of scientists who do not believe in darwinism?
After they hear from me some of them will want to go back to the 60s. Go back to California and smoke Pot
So I better not tell as it obviously conflicts with your conservative principles - LOL

posted April 17, 2008 01:24 AM            

No right or wrong
No moral standards
No ethical standards
No respect for human live
Moral equivalence
Voluntary and Involuntary euthanasia

The odd thing is that some of those people are the very people who claim to be oh so compassionate and they're always there to start a pity party...except for those killed by those of whom they approve.

It's interesting to note one of the main backers of euthanasia is right here in the United States. When I say backers, I mean he funds groups who are attempting to get the laws changed to permit euthanasia. His name is George Soros and he funds the most radical leftist causes in the United States. He's totally insane of course and he...in his own words...sometimes thinks he's God.

When a dictator in power and in total control subscribes to the arguments put forth by Darwin, genocide, murder and every other form of debased, immoral behavior are almost certain to follow...and they have.

posted April 17, 2008 10:34 AM            

I love Darwin, the first one to really make an observation of how life evolves in the cosmos. Very detailed

posted April 20, 2008 10:54 AM            

What isn't widely known is that these theories also under-gird the thinking and policies of other socialists as well.

The utterly mistaken notion that only they...being intellectually endowed as they claim to be should be making decisions for everyone.

The Socialists resort to murder, genocide, oppression and repression as a tool to crush and keep the "lesser individuals in line"

Socialists belief that the individual is nothing and the state is everything...unless that individual is them self and then, they screech, scream, whine, shriek and demand their individual rights.

These are murderous concepts when put into motion as they were by all the socialist dictators of the 20th Century.
Hitler
Lenin
Stalin
Mao
Ho
Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Sung Il.
Castro

Now, that same Darwinist thinking in found in the George Soros movements which he funds. George Soros is behind the Euthanasia movement. They haven't really gotten cranked up yet but they're active behind the scenes...in secret. Having government sanction to off the terminally ill is just the beginning. Next will be the mentally disabled. Then the physically disabled. Then the elderly. Modern Darwinists are already on record as seeing nothing wrong with involuntary euthanasia.

April 18, 2008 12:00 PM
Don’t Doubt It
An important historic sidebar.
By David Klinghoffer

Get ready for the great Darwin-Hitler debate. There’s already been a volley of advance attacks on a new film’s suggestion of a link between Darwinism and Nazi ideology. The movie is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opening this weekend, a cheeky documentary that is not primarily about evolutionism in prewar Germany. Reviewers in Time, Scientific American, Variety, Fox News, and elsewhere have denounced the filmmakers for suggesting that Hitlerism without the contribution of Darwinism would be hard to imagine.

This movie is, in fact, about the professional ostracism visited today on American scientists who doubt that undirected natural selection can fully explain life’s development. They are academics at places like the Smithsonian Institution, Iowa State University, and Baylor University. Droll comic-actor Ben Stein stars, interviewing the researchers.

But for about ten minutes, Expelled touches on Darwinism’s historical social costs, notably the unintended contribution to Nazi racial theories. That part packs an emotional wallop. It also happens to be based on impeccable scholarship.

The Darwin-Hitler connection is no recent discovery. In her classic 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.”

The standard biographies of Hitler almost all point to the influence of Darwinism on their subject. In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock writes: “The basis of Hitler’s political beliefs was a crude Darwinism.” What Hitler found objectionable about Christianity was its rejection of Darwin’s theory: “Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.”

John Toland’s Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography says this of Hitler’s Second Book published in 1928: “An essential of Hitler’s conclusions in this book was the conviction drawn from Darwin that might makes right.”

In his biography, Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris, Ian Kershaw explains that “crude social-Darwinism” gave Hitler “his entire political ‘world-view.’ ” Hitler, like lots of other Europeans and Americans of his day, saw Darwinism as offering a total picture of social reality. This view called “social Darwinism” is a logical extension of Darwinian evolutionary theory and was articulated by Darwin himself.

The key elements in the ideology that produced Auschwitz are moral relativism aligned with a rejection of the sacredness of human life, a belief that violent competition in nature creates greater and lesser races, that the greater will inevitably exterminate the lesser, and finally that the lesser race most in need of extermination is the Jews. All but the last of these ideas may be found in Darwin’s writing.

Like Hitler, Charles Darwin saw natural processes as setting moral standards. It’s all in The Descent of Man, where he explains that, had we evolved differently, we would have different moral ideas. On a particularly delicate moral topic, for example, he wrote: “We may, therefore, reject the belief, lately insisted on by some writers, that the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience.”

In the same book, he compared the evolution of people to the breeding of animals and drew a chilling conclusion regarding what he saw as the undesirable consequences of allowing the unfit to breed:

“Thus the weak members of civilized 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.” In this desacralized picture of existence, to speak of life as possessing any kind of holiness is to introduce an alien note.

Most disturbing of all, in The Descent of Man, Darwin prophesied: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”

While it must be very clearly emphasized that the gentle-souled Darwin himself never supported ill treatment of any race or group, his words inspired a movement to “scientific” racism.

“Eugenics,” breeding humans for excellence, is a word coined by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton in 1865, six years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species. In America itself, between 1907 and 1958, in states including Indiana, California, and Washington, some 60,000 genetically “unfit” persons were legally sterilized against their will. Germany took eugenics to the point of murder, euthanizing 70,000 of the unfit.

You only have to read Mein Kampf to see the indebtedness. A shrewd manipulator of his fellow Germans’ sympathy for scientifically flavored racial theorizing, Hitler gives a Darwinian-style analysis of how the struggle for existence mandates a defense of the Aryan race.

He invokes the “principles of Nature’s rule,” “her whole work of higher breeding,” in which “struggle is always a means for improving a species’ health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development.” He warns against racial decline from the mixing of blood — his own spin on Darwinism — arguing that the preservation of a “creative race” is “bound up with the rigid law of necessity and the right of victory of the best and stronger in this world.” He calls for “a more noble evolution.”

Other Nazi propaganda followed his lead. In a 1937 German propaganda film, Victims of the Past, the audience is shown a retarded person as the narrator intones, “In the last few decades, mankind has sinned terribly against the law of natural selection. We haven’t just maintained life unworthy of life, we have even allowed it to multiply.”

None of which, of course, is an argument against Darwin’s theory, narrowly defined, which could still be true as most but not all biologists believe, despite having deadly implications.

Yet it is surely of interest that, at the very heart of his message, Hitler appealed to Germans primarily as devotees of modern biological science. He could have framed his pitch in any terms he liked. He chose evolutionary terms. No one knows what he believed in his heart, if he had one. But we know what he judged would stir up fellow Nazis and ordinary citizens to commit themselves to his movement. In that, he judged correctly.

— David Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the author of Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History.

posted April 28, 2008 12:32 AM            

>>>If not, most defenders of evolution would be able to discuss the theory in a coherant manner instead of calling those in opposition "idiots".

There are enough books available on that subject. Most Military men have iq greater than that of the smartest animal so I can understand why they don't like to read. But their spouses are free to read any thing they want to read. I am not saying these spouses are better intellectually than their husbands LOL. But they can develop their innate intelligence. The opportunity is there. Anyhow, When was the last time you took your lazy "behind" to a library (public or private), Pidaua? When you are bored with your dildos and phalluses (err guns) and bible , please spend few hours in the library to get answers to your question. You can't go on an expedition like Darwin did , hence suggesting that you go to the library where you can see with you own eyes what he achieved.

posted April 28, 2008 12:52 AM            

I don't mind casting it before you though You are better than other non objective trolls here LOL

Will chose to be super capitalist in this matter for some more time until the next synchronistic moment . .... clicking mute button

posted April 28, 2008 01:02 PM            

You come across as more of a "Socialist Anarchist"..which is "unprincipled confusion".

No one would expect you to understand "Expelled" Mannu. You don't even understand the ramifications of Darwinist Theory. Note Mannu, I said Theory.

Oh wait, I forgot. You've clicked your mute button.

Does that mean you're no longer listening/seeing?

posted April 28, 2008 01:16 PM            

Would such a scientist be controlled or influenced by a socialist or capitalist or a communist form of government or will he be controlled by his institution?

posted April 28, 2008 01:36 PM            

Jwhop you continue to amaze me.

So I take it you believe the earth is 6,000 years old Jwhop?

You guys realize gravity is "just" a theory too right?

As is Einstein's theory of relativity.

As is the "cell theory" of biology.

Unlike religious whacknuts, scientists actually take everything with a grain of salt. A scientific theory is based on a lot more fact than the typical religious whackjob garbage that a lot of people believe.

Because everyone knows god put ancient fossils in the earth for us to discover!

Evolution can be demonstrated in a petri dish. The building blocks of life can be created in a bubbling flask.

I guess we should just turn our backs on science and go back to living in the dark ages.

Hey here's a good science, lets start another crusade!

Religion and religious beliefs are less than a theory, they're fantasy.

posted April 28, 2008 01:39 PM            

Let me revise my statement Mannu.

"You come across as more of an Insane "Socialist Anarchist"..which is "unprincipled confusion" and insanity personified."

Now Mannu, show me the proof American genetic scientists are working on producing human/chimp hybrids...right here in America...where by the way and just for your education which is sorely lacking..such experiments are illegal.

posted April 28, 2008 01:47 PM            

I used the word "possible".

And so many times I have told you - I have a rebel within me and I do not believe in a revolution like Ron Paul does. He will fail.

I will try to find various articles that may suggest what the FBI/American government may have been doing in the last 50 years. The theory of American manufactured aids virus to eliminate blacks did not creep just like that in Rev. Wrights speech

Why don't you dig for it yourself. I have a full time Job and really lack time.

I am curious, are you an X-files fan?

>>>>How about India Mannu? Are such experiments "Illegal" there?

Of course they are illegal there and here too. You missed my point on how scientists may misuse absence of finding God in their labs. This is what even Dawkins speaks of at length.