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Author | Topic: EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed - Science Under Attack | |||||||||||||||||||||||
randman  Suspended Member (Idle past 4920 days) Posts: 6367 Joined: |
It's a statement of fact. Eugenics and so Darwinism played heavily in their reasoning. Is it a natural outgrowth of Darwinism?
I think it is a logical progression from Darwinistic thinking, but that still doesn't mean I have suggested that Darwinists are anti-semitic. In fact, I don't even think of Darwinists as all that logical so it would not surprise me for Darwinists to think in all sorts of ways about the consequences of Darwinism.
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molbiogirl Member (Idle past 2663 days) Posts: 1909 From: MO Joined: |
It's a statement of fact. Eugenics and so Darwinism played heavily in their reasoning. Mein Kampf makes no mention of Darwin, nor of the ToE.
There is no mention of Darwin in Mein Kampf. Not one single, solitary mention, not one mention in any of the 27 chapters of this long and tedious book. Don't you think that, if Hitler was truly influenced by Darwin, he would have given him at least one teeny weeny mention in his book? Hitler justified his behavior as righteous xian thinking.
Hitler used religion to justify his anti-Semitism. For example, here is a typical quotation, from the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf. "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." Anti-semitism predates the Holocaust by hundreds of years.
Anti-Semitism (had) been rife in Europe for many many centuries, positively encouraged by most Christian churches, including especially the two that (dominated) Germany. The Roman Catholic Church (had) notoriously persecuted Jews as "Christ-killers". As for the Lutherans, Martin Luther himself wrote a book called On the Jews and their Lies from which Hitler quoted. Page not found | Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
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molbiogirl Member (Idle past 2663 days) Posts: 1909 From: MO Joined: |
Yoko sued today.
Reuters | Breaking International News & Views I suppose they'll just have to strip the soundtrack out ... but it's in theaters now. Maybe they'll have to pull it from the theaters? *fingers crossed*
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bluegenes Member (Idle past 2498 days) Posts: 3119 From: U.K. Joined: |
randman writes: It's a statement of fact. Eugenics and so Darwinism played heavily in their reasoning. Is it a natural outgrowth of Darwinism? Eugenics, under different names, is ancient. European aristocrats and royalty used to give it names like "breeding". When humans first noticed that characteristics could be hereditary, we'll never know, but I'd guess it was long before they invented things like the wheel and written language, and before they even started breeding animals. Now there's a thought for you, Randman. Eugenics is artificial selection, not "natural selection", isn't it? I don't think you're so ignorant as to think that artificial selection, both of animals and humans, dates from the nineteenth century. Here, in England, people who regarded themselves as having "blue blood" would go to great lengths to stop their children marrying people of "lowly stock". Stock, as in animal stock. The connection between animal breeding and attempts at directed human breeding is ancient, and shows in the language used. Artificial selection is an ancient idea. Darwin's observation that nature also selects was partially inspired by observation of artificial selection, not the other way around.
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randman  Suspended Member (Idle past 4920 days) Posts: 6367 Joined: |
Are people part of the natural world or not?
Artificial seems somewhat out of place as you use it, at least from an evolutionary perspective. Man-made selection is still natural selection as man is part of the environment.
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bluegenes Member (Idle past 2498 days) Posts: 3119 From: U.K. Joined: |
molbiogirl writes: Mein Kampf makes no mention of Darwin, nor of the ToE. True. I once searched the text for both "Darwin" and "God". Darwin, zero. God, so many, I got bored looking at the contexts. Here's something (not from Mein Kamf) that you might find interesting.
quote: Fundies say the darndest things.
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randman  Suspended Member (Idle past 4920 days) Posts: 6367 Joined: |
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.”
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Mjg1NDg2ZDM5YTMwMGFi... Please note especially:
“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.”
Sounds pretty Hitlerish to me except Darwin probably didn't mean Jews but under-developed nations (ethnic groups in those nations). More from the same article.....Mein Kempf apparently does mention evolution.
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.”
It's a slam dunk case. Now, the real debate should be whether Hitler was following the logic of Darwin or not.
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Minnemooseus Member Posts: 3945 From: Duluth, Minnesota, U.S. (West end of Lake Superior) Joined: Member Rating: 10.0 |
Deftil writes: randman writes: Eugenics was definitely influenced by Darwinism and played a significant role in Hitler and NAZI thinking. To deny this is silly. but that seems to say that some of the blame for the NAZI movement falls on Darwin and the theory of natural selection. It's good to give a message number link when you pull a quote from somewhere other than the replied to message. The Randman quote was from here. He also says more at that message. As far as your Randman quote went, I could argue that that statement is true. It comes down to debating the "significant". I could do a variation on that quote:
Moose might have said, writes: Creationism was definitely influenced by Darwinism and played a significant role in Randman's thinking. To deny this is silly. In preparing this message, I've come to realize that Randman's sentence is poorly written. I presume he was intending to say:
Darwinism played a significant role in Hitler and NAZI thinking. As I see it, what he's actually saying is:
(Darwinism influenced eugenics and) Eugenics played a significant role in Hitler and NAZI thinking. But so what about that last stuff. The bottom line is that Darwinism seems to have played a role in Randman's thinking, and therefor evolution might just be evil. Or something like that. Moose
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randman  Suspended Member (Idle past 4920 days) Posts: 6367 Joined: |
“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.”
Sounds pretty Hitlerish to me, though as a man Darwin would likely recoil at Hitler's actions. Not saying evos are NAZIs or anything, but to act like evolutionist thinking didn't play a role in Hitler's ideas when he extensively used the concept is just misunderstanding history. Edited by randman, : No reason given. Edited by randman, : No reason given.
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bluegenes Member (Idle past 2498 days) Posts: 3119 From: U.K. Joined: |
randman writes: Are people part of the natural world or not? Certainly, in the broad sense, but natural, like many words, has more than one use. So, it's used to describe things that aren't man made (natural lake/artificial lake etc) and the natural/artificial selection definitions come from that tradition.
Artificial seems somewhat out of place as you use it, at least from an evolutionary perspective. Man-made selection is still natural selection as man is part of the environment. Again, that illustrates the deficiency of language. I agree that in the broad sense of the word, that it's natural for us to send rockets to the moon, and to do anything that we do. It's worth noting that the English language evolved at a time when it was standard for our ancestors to perceive themselves as, to some extent at least, separate from other life forms, and special in the eyes of God. You've made a good point (about language, at least) and it's an interesting one, coming from an I.D. supporter. For example, when I.D. people point to human designs as examples of intelligent design, they are pointing to things that are made by biological creatures. Making the comparison of a bacterial flagellum to an outboard motor is making an interesting note of the similarity of two things produced by nature (in the broad sense) but not in the narrow sense of the word nature. I.D. could perhaps be summed up by describing it as an attempt to prove that man is not part of nature by assuming that he's not.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17825 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: It's an observation, not a call to action. Would you call a historian who wrote about what European settlers and adventurers did to the inhabitants of the Americas - without approving of it - "Hitlerish" ? Wouldn't that adjective be better applied to those who were actually responsible ? Or those who encouraged it or glorified it ? Now if you called the Biblical book of Joshua "Hitlerish" I would have to agree. THAT is a glorfication of racial genocide, no question about it.
quote: It doesn't seem to have played that great a role. In fact it seems entirely dispensible. It seems likely that Christianity and the long history of Christian anti-semitism (dating back to the time of the Gospels, at least) played a greater role in the persection of the Jews. There is a certain irony when a known anti-semite appears in the movie - speaking FOR ID. I wonder if Ben Stein knows or cares.
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molbiogirl Member (Idle past 2663 days) Posts: 1909 From: MO Joined: |
In the absence of evidence or solid logical arguments, Creationists have long resorted to the strategy of quote-mining, the purposeful misrepresentation of scientists’ opinions by selective or distorted quotation of their words, to buttress their claims. With the Creationists behind the movie Expelled hard at work to demonstrate that “Darwinism” was a necessary pre-condition for the Holocaust and Hitler’s primary inspiration, it was only a matter of time before historians suffered the same fate. Enter David Klinghoffer, the Discovery Institute’s hired hit-pen and journalistic hatchet job expert. From Look, ma! I can quote-mine historians too! Look, ma! I can quote-mine historians too!
Klinghoffer writes: Joachim C. Fest, in Hitler, describes how the Nazi tyrant “extract[ed] the elements of his world view” from various influences including “popular treatments of Darwinism.” Now, if you have been involved in the Creationism-evolution skirmishes for a while, you get a sixth sense for quote mines, something just doesn’t look right to you: very short quotes, ellipses, words altered or inserted. Fortunately, I had access to Fest’s excellent Hitler biography, so I looked. On page 201, Fest is describing Hitler’s voracious but unsophisticated reading habits, and then writes:
Fest writes: Yet he [Hitler] went on extracting the elements of his world view from pseudoscientific secondary works: tracts on race theory, anti-Semitic pamphlets, treatises on the Teutons, on racial mysticism and eugenics, as well as popular treatments of Darwinism and the philosophy of history. JJoachim Fest, Hitler, Harcourt 2002, p. 201 This is what Klinghoffer wants to pass as this historian’s equivalent of “contributed mightily”: on par with “treatises on the Teutons”! The rest are quote-mines too.
In her classic 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote ... ... about "social Darwinism", not Darwinism. (FYI, rand. The source of social Darwinism was not Darwin but Herbert Spencer and the tradition of Protestant nonconformism going back to Hobbes via Malthus. Spencer's ideas of evolution were Lamarckian. The only real connection between Darwinism and social Darwinism is the name.)
In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock ... ... mentions "Darwinism" once. On page 225. (btw. The book is 489 pages long. You'd think that, were Hitler's policies based on Darwinism, it might merit more than one mention.)
John Toland’s Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography says ... ... mentions Darwin once. On page 23. Once in 1120 pages.
In his biography, Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris, Ian Kershaw ... ... talks about "social Darwinism", not Darwinism. Klinghoffer desperately wants to find something in Mein Kampf. After all, it was Hitler's road map. So Klinghoffer quote-mines Hitler! You gotta love a guy who resorts to quote-mining Hitler. Here's Klinghoffer's version:
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.” Here are the actual quotes:
Thus men without exception wander about in the garden of Nature; they imagine that they know practically everything and yet with few exceptions pass blindly by one of the most patent principles of Nature's rule: the inner segregation of the species of all living beings on this earth. No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower race, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, might be ruined with one blow. Therefore, here, too, the struggle among themselves arises less from inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, Nature looks on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development. http://web.csustan.edu/History/Faculty/Weikart/hitlermk.htm From the first section of Vol. 1, Chapter 11: Nation and Race. Do I even need to point out that the tiny snippets Klinghoffer chose were pulled at random from all over the place? So. Was Hitler a Darwin fan? Unfortunately for Klinghoffer, the Nazis were persnickety record keepers.
To answer this question, a bit of digging into the Nazi archives is needed. Die Bcherei, the official Nazi journal, in 1935 produced a list of things not to be taught: Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (279). CA006.1: Hitler's views No Darwin, hm?
One of the key roots of Hitler’s extreme anti-Semitism and subsequent programs of action are, instead, to be found in Vienna’s Catholic anti-Semitic publications. The anti-Semitic side of his theories were easily come by in Vienna. The Social Catholic journal, Deutsches Volksblatt, edited by Ernst Vergani, offered a constant crop of anti-Semitic stories, mixing the crudest kind of sex and anti-Semitic with popularization of the racial theories of the nineteenth-century French writer, Count Gobineau. The Catholic paper Das Vaterland under its highly successful editor, Vogelsang, who died in 1890, was peddling the argument that Jewish advances came only because of Christian spinelessness even before Hitler’s birth . Hitler was a self-taught man and his system was his own, concocted piecemeal from the leavings of others, filtered at third- and fourth-hand through the cheap pamphlet and leaflet literature of Viennese politics and elaborated in the endless arguments on the Meldeannstrasse, arguments which nearly brought about his permanent exclusion from the hostel on the complaints of the other inmates. Moreover, the section of Mein Kampf which sets out Hitler’s ideas on racial issues are couched in historical rather than biological-mystical terms and they represent only a section of his total ideological structure. His ideas on the primacy of race came much more from Houston Stewart Chamberlain and the German nationalists, such publicists as F. Lange and Klaus Wagner, for example. http://bcseweb.org.uk/...hp/Main/CharlesDarwinAndAdolfHitler Sorry, rand. Sorry, Klinghoffer. Can't quote-mine your way to a connection between Hitler and Darwin.
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Taz Member (Idle past 3313 days) Posts: 5069 From: Zerus Joined: |
Thanks for the info, mol! I never thought anyone would ever want or need to quote-mine hitler.
I'm trying to see things your way, but I can't put my head that far up my ass.
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Modulous Member Posts: 7801 From: Manchester, UK Joined: |
I was composing a similar post, but decided that it didn't have enough weight so I discarded it. Here are some concepts from that now dead post:
quote: This was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, famous intellectual father of Nazi race theory. His opinion of Darwin was expressed in the following way, reminiscent of the Film, Expelled:
quote: You also noted Gobineau who once wrote:
quote: But then again he also wrote:
quote: But then: why does anybody expect Hitler to honestly represent his sources? Does Ben Stein trust Hitler? So Hitler makes some veiled references to something that might be traced back to something Darwin says, are we to take Hitler's word for it? After the hatchet job Hitler does on every single other source, twisting it, turning it, censoring it, burning it, lying about it, manipulating others into believing his version of things...we are supposed to conclude that Darwin's ideas are somehow causally responsible for Hitler's actions? As you can see, there is no real meat to the post, nothing to really get one's teeth into, but I thought it complemented your post rather well so there it is.
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bluegenes Member (Idle past 2498 days) Posts: 3119 From: U.K. Joined: |
Here's William Dembski commenting on "Expelled", which he seems to see as exposing the scientific establishment's attempts to keep God out of science academia, rather than some kind of unknown intelligent designer or designers whose existence can only be inferred from his or their designs.
So, he has obviously deserted the I.D. camp and become a creationist. http://www.bpnews.net/BPFirstPerson.asp?ID=27872
quote: Widespread? Livelihoods? Should we be sending food parcels? Reputations? I can't think of any creationist scientists I'd ever heard of for their work before they came out as creationists. Seems like a quick road to fame and fortune, if anything.
quote: Ah, God. A useful new three letter abbreviation for "Intelligent Designer", I suppose.
quote: Certainly, Bill. And how many scientific theories in the entire history of science can you think of that have been subject to more scrutiny than the Theory of Evolution? None, if you're honest.
quote: But Bill was talking about God, above. He needs to learn the difference between "scientific scrutiny", and religious attack.
quote: "Unwashed" is an interesting way of saying "ignorant". But the bit I like is about young people being encouraged to take up careers in science. Bill should beware. There are countries in which young people know more about science than in America, and in each and every one of them, there is a higher acceptance of evolutionary theory, and lower levels of religiosity than in the U.S.
quote: And people who think that evidence is important in science will be burned at the stake. Edited by bluegenes, : title added. Edited by bluegenes, : typo Edited by bluegenes, : typos
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