Wow, You Really Dug To The Bottom of The Barrel Unfortunately It's Tripe

I am sent this decade old post from P.Z. Myers in refutation of what I said.

John Wilkins is fighting the philosophical and historical fight against the Darwin’s Deadly Legacy nonsense with an excellent summary of the course of the eugenics movement. I especially liked this quote from Dobzhansky:

The eugenical Jeremiahs keep constantly before our eyes the nightmare of human populations accumulating recessive genes that produce pathological effects when homozygous. These prophets of doom seem to be unaware of the fact that wild species in the state of nature fare in this respect no better than man does with all the artificiality of his surroundings, and yet life has not come to an end on this planet. The eschatological cries proclaiming the failure of natural selection to operate in human populations have more to do with political beliefs than with scientific findings.

If you don’t know who Theodosius Dobzhansky was, he was one of the founders of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and was far, far more influential on evolutionary thinking than either Haeckel or Hitler. Scientific leaders were calling this stuff nonsense before Hitler tried to invoke his Final Solution.

Well, to start with,  I didn't rely on any secondary, tertiary souces to make my arguments, I didn't use anything but the primary documentation except in one post because the necessary material wasn't available in English.   I used the words of Darwin, Haeckel, Galton, Leonard Darwin, etc. to make my arguments.  So bringing up some fundamentalist propaganda is irrelevant to what I've said here.   Though I will note that some, more scholarly fundamentalists have done what no one in the St. Darwin industry would seem to have done, read what he said and read what those whose writings on the relevant topics said in the works Darwin cited.  They might be wrong about the fact of evolution, many of them are right about the role of Darwin in the history of eugenics which includes the Nazi genocides.  I have yet to meet one of Darwin's defenders who seems to have read The Descent of Man - his work most relevant to the issue, and whose knowledge of On The Origin of Species is anything but quite incomplete and opportunistic.

Of course I know who Theodosius Dobzhansky was, he was a great geneticist in his day, the teacher of one of my heroes, Richard Lewontin, who, in turn was the teacher of Jerry Coyne.  I wouldn't blame either of them for Jerry, just to make sure no one thinks I would.

I will continue by pointing out that as Dobzhansky was Ukranian, a member of one of those racial groups who, under Nazi eugenics, was slated for either extermination as certainly as Jews were or, if they were kept alive, were to be trained to be slaves to their German masters, his counter-eugenic thinking would never have been considered.  Instead of being a distinguished university graduate and professor, such slaves were to be taught no more than how to write their name and count to 500.   I am quite certain that his scientific influence in Nazi Germany exists entirely in the imagination of such ahistorical dolts as Myers.   So such scientific thinking had already been swamped by the interpretation of Natural Selection which informed Nazi science and the eugenics program in place and which would soon fulfill the dream of so many eugenicists before then of murdering the disabled and going on from that starter program to full fledged industrialized mass murder.

Dobzhansky, eminent as he was, as right in his condemnation of eugenics as he was, didn't have nearly the impact even among his scientific colleagues as Myers claims.  I think it's safe to say that more of the prominent geneticists at the time he said that, 1937, were eugenicists as so many of them would remain in the post-war period and continuing til today.  The roll call of eminent geneticist-eugenicists even during and even after the war would include R. A. Fisher, Julian Huxley, Francis Crick, James Watson, if you want to consider him a geneticist, Myers' friend, Richard Dawkins has flirted with overt promotion of eugenics.  You can add all kinds of others from related and unrelated fields of science, even such people as Linus Pauling.  There's even a quote floating around from Dobzhansky that, if accurate, is far more positive about the "core" of eugenics than that quote above, though I haven't read it in his book and I won't accept the characterization of it until I do.

But all of that is, actually, beside the point, there is no doubt that the mainstream of German biology and the central authorities it relied on to construct its racial theories, its rankings of human beings in terms of "fitness" or value, both among various ethnic and national groups and within the German population (the basis of their murder of the disabled) was solidly Darwinian.  Darwin repeatedly talked about the benefits of murdering the disabled, especially when they were children.  He spoke blithly of the great day he anticipated, when the superior would have eradicated inferior ethnic groups, some of which he named, some which he implied with a mild, would-be wise, wink and a nod.  Read The Descent of Man and read it for yourself, look up his glowing, positive citations of Haeckel, Galton, Greg and others promoting those and other ideas that were useful to the Nazis.

There is absolutely no question that thinking was promoted by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man and in his full and fully informed endorsement of Ernst Haeckel's and others' eugenics, including Haeckel's articulation of the idea that the deaths of those deemed inferior, including deaths at the hands of their "superiors" was a benefit to the entire human species.  There is no changing that, it is there in Darwin's books, in the things he endorsed and promoted.  The very generation of Nazi scientists who constructed the biological theories that were the basis of the genocides were thoroughly steeped in Darwin and Haeckel and Galton (whose eugenics Darwin also and for all time endorsed).   Alfred Ploetz, Eugen Fischer, etc. were explicit in stating where they got those ideas from.   Anyone who believes that Theodosius Dobzhansky, a young American geneticist of Ukranian ethnicity and Soviet education would have more of an influence on the Nazi scientific establishment than Ernst Haeckel, widely read even by non-scientists in Germany,  from whom their generation learned so much of their relevant thinking is either lying or they are a total idiot.

Now, I really would rather be trying to fight fascism than going over this again.  My archive is not indexed but it's not hard to do a word search of it.