On The Origin of Charles Darwin's Eugenics and Haeckel's Monism Redux

You have asked me a number of times to repost the series I did about the relationship of Charles Darwin with eugenics and with his foremost German disciple, Ernst Haeckel.  That topic is about the most controversial one I've written about because it violates a widely held but totally false line of propaganda that arose after World War Two exonerating Charles Darwin from involvement with eugenics and Haeckel.  There is no more enduring and potent lie in modern life and in the culture of what is considered to be the educated class of the English Speaking Peoples.  It is a lie which, being untrue, deserves to be exposed on that basis alone.  No one should ever be faulted for telling the truth or of refuting a lie.  That the ideas of eugenics and of Haeckel have had the most horrible consequences, destroying many people, blighting the lives of many makes exposing the lie all the more important.  As I hope to show later this year, it is a legacy that didn't die in 1945 and is most unfortunately resurgent today.  If there is a better reason to write anything, I'd like someone to tell me what it is.

That the absolutely required belief in and recitation of the myth that Darwin was entirely innocent in regard to those hot topics is best refuted by a full reading of the record that Darwin left in his own words, in his books, especially The Descent of Man, later editions of On the Origin of Species, his numerous letters to Haeckel and others.   The record of what Darwin, himself, said endorsing Francis Galton's eugenics and Ernst Haeckel's even more extreme developments of Darwin's theory of natural selection has to be covered up or lied about to pretend he was innocent of saying what he did.  He endorsed both of those men and their books in which they presented the ideas that have made them infamous, repeatedly, beginning in the 1860s and continuously until Darwin died in 1882.

Most seriously of all, Darwin promoted both the eugenics of Galton and the far more extreme ideas of Haeckel as representing scientific knowledge.  For one of the most famous scientists in all of history to have endorsed those as being reliable scientific knowledge must bind him, his professional reputation and moral character to what he said.   The enormous confidence that is demanded as the rightful property of what is published as science, with the enormous confidence in the word of scientists, individually and as a whole, with the enormous potential for harm as well as good coming from what scientists say, binding them to their own words and the results of those words is the lowest price that scientists must be charged in exchange for that privilege. 

I have searched long and in vain for any kind of retraction or change of mind on the part of Darwin on these topics and have found that he never changed his mind in those endorsements.  That record, in the absence of any clear retraction by Darwin in as public and formal a manner as he made those endorsements, must stand as what he really intended to say.  

Almost as important in judging these questions is the testimony of those closest to Charles Darwin, his children, several of whom had their own careers in science.   As I have had to point out, repeatedly,  they knew Charles Darwin more intimately than anyone alive today or, indeed, anyone I have encountered who has tried to distance Darwin from eugenics and Haeckel.  I have never read an assertion by a single person who knew Charles Darwin, in person, which has done anything but repeat what a reading of Darwin's record shows, that he supported both those and others in eugenics.
Indeed, four of Darwin's sons were active in the eugenics movement, especially Leonard Darwin who was a major figure in its promotion up to and even during the Second World War.  As I discovered while researching my series, his brother, George Darwin, was one of the earliest enthusiasts for their cousin Galton's ideas.  Charles Darwin names him as recommending Galton's first book developing eugenics before his father read it*.  George Darwin's early articles denoted as "eugenics" by none less than his brother Francis Darwin, the author of the earliest collection of their father's letters and, perhaps, his earliest biographer.   Francis Darwin notes their father's full support for those articles.  

My series dealt with all of those issues, making what I believe is an irrefutable case proving that Darwin was not the eugenic-free figure of modern mythology and that, even more troubling, Ernst Haeckel was not a rogue Darwin distorter but a man whose work had Darwin's full praise, endorsement and promotion.   You can look at the citations included and judge for yourself.   I don't know if I will go back to finish the pieces I began as part of that series, making the case into the generations up to the war and up to today.  Even the most recent advocates for eugenics, Francis Crick,  James Watson,  W. D. Hamilton, and well known Darwinists still living, all base their eugenics on Charles Darwin in the form of his natural selection.   If Darwin had never given any of his myriad endorsements of Galton's, Greg's, Haeckel's, Fick's, and others' eugenics  ideas, any of them who cited him as their inspiration would cement that part of the case that he inspired eugenics, and all of them did.  

I will repost the pieces from last summer over the next few weeks, revising them and adding to them as seems fit. 

* Or rather had it read to him by Emma Darwin, his wife.  Charles Darwin said she also liked Galton's book, though I haven't read anything by Emma Darwin on the subject.