The fact is that life is shorter than is required to verify everything we must treat as fact in order to operate as functioning, decision making beings in society. There is no choice but to believe things we either haven't or can't verify, often on no better basis than the alleged reputability of the source. We take a chance of being wrong and doing things that are bad on that basis but we can't avoid the necessity of doing that. In most casual and every day affairs of life, the possibility of large scale and immediate disaster is rarely encountered. When we are acting as a society or with the enhanced power that organization and modern science and technology supply, the potential for disaster and the scale of that have a marked tendency to rise, rapidly as do the potential victims. The mass killings of the 20th century were more effective and rapid due to those. We have to choose what to trust but we are at risk for, at the very least, being complicit in allowing evil when we aren't very, very careful in what we choose to trust.
I really didn't want to rehash the entire Darwin Wars just now but when it just happens to be a hard fact of history that the mass murdering movements and governments of fascism and Nazism were based on biological theories of individual and group superiority and inferiority AND that the dominant scientific theory within biology at the same time was based in the benefits of the deaths of biologically "inferior" people, their deaths enhancing the quality of the superior survivors it seems, you know, kind of important to admit that. And with crimes that massive, there is a lot to deny and people with different motives to deny different things about the same crime.
The two denials merely concentrate on denying different aspects of the same historical fact. That there is such an obvious match that to deny the Holocaust and the theory of Natural Selection are related is the equivalent of Holocaust denial, one denying the result, the other denying the motives of those who did what they did for those reasons which are completely in line with what the inventor and proponents of Natural Selection presented as hard science. I don't think the academic denial of their motives is ultimately any better than the form of denial that is generally considered the more vulgar of the two. I would say that the denial of the relationship of the Holocaust to Natural Selection is the more potentially insidious of the two, it denies the cause produced the effects that it did. It is a more generalized denial of reality, risking a less obvious but no less real repetition of that chain of causation, even by those who may have despised the Nazis for other reasons. In recent years, with the increased emphisis on biological determinism based in Natural Selection, the ability to deny the relationship became a bit harder to ignore. What was unusual in history was the brief period of reaction to the Holocaust, which suppressed that kind of use of Natural Selection to explain human culture and governments during the 1950s up to about the mid-70s. I date the end of that brief pause with the publication of Sociobiology The New Synthesis, by E.O. Wilson.
There is a very specific example of what I'm getting at. When the infamous Holocaust denier and falsifier of history of the Nazi period, David Irving, presented his case in his lawsuit against the eminent historian of the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt, he called only one witness, the fully credentialed professor at a fully accredited and respected university, the evolutionary psychologist, Kevin MacDonald. Irving didn't make an historical case of his historical claims, but made what passes as a scientific one, ultimately based on Natural Selection, the absolute foundation of evolutionary psychology and the sociobiology that are derived from it. It was with his participation in the lawsuit that MacDonald's long history of publishing anti-Semitic assertions as science became more commonly known.
You can look over his publications history* to see the nature of it and how apparent the nature of it is. Yet that history, on which his academic life and work were based and sustained, the relationship it had to one of the most massive murders in human history, somehow which seemed to completely go past the heads of the many, many scientists who had passed on or supported his work, even making him a reviewer and an editor of scientific journals within his branch of evolutionary science**. I will include his publishers and reviewer in the list of those who, on the identification of what he wrote as science, approved and gave it a pass, to allow it into the realm of formal academic writing, within science, itself.
Yet on such a denial of one of our hardest of very recent historical facts, within living memory, is the basis of the mandatory and required belief of modern academic culture founded. Just as the writings of David Irving, now discredited by a more rigorous and sober review of it, was fully accepted within the academic culture of the study of history by even known anti-Nazi historians, it was first allowed in it as were its authors. The intellectual elite presented both Irving and MacDonald the imprimatur of enhanced reliability that comes with the trappings of and institutions of the educated elite. That modern academic culture can so easily host that kind of a lie, making its belief a requirement to be respected as a member of the club only proves that there is an even more basic problem with the entire thing. Academic culture that values the truth, facts, honesty so little is academic culture that has lost any legitimate claim to respect and belief.
History, unrespected and unlearned from, is in the process of repeating itself, it never stopped repeating itself and the academic elite does at least as much to enable it as to resist it. Frankly, I think they got by on the laziness of the academic community who were more interested in their ease and university community Fahrvergnügen than anything else.
* You can see his CV here, from his website.
** I am rethinking my habit of putting the word "science" in quotations when dealing with this kind of garbage because the wider scientific community has done nothing to expel such "science" from the formal literature of science, its promotion and purveyors having the full protection and enhanced repute that science provides. Despite his exposure as a neo-Nazi sympathizer and pseudo-scientific anti-Semite, using his credentials to promote anti-Semitism, Kevin MacDonald is still a tenured faculty member who allegedly is a figure of science. In that he merely continues the history of people working within the biology who maintain the intellectual scientific racism based in natural selection, without anyone batting an eyelash.
If science doesn't reject such stuff then it deserves to be treated with enhanced skepticism, not with rote, automatic acceptance. And that kind of thing has happened so often in the history of Natural Selection that a scholar could base an entire academic career or found a field to study and document it.
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