The accusation that I'm just parroting the historian, Richard Weikart has been made, and that is something I share in common with the late Daniel Gasman, against whom Robert Richards mounted the same dishonest tactic of argument by association*, a subset that falls within the classic definition of the ad hominem fallacy - a term so abused that it has lost much of its meaning largely at the hands of the fan boys of such pop-atheists as Carl Sagan in the last forty years.
Well, I've talked about Richard Weikart the last time that happened and noted that I had used exactly one thing from him, a letter that Darwin sent to Heinrich Fick and that was only because the online Darwin Correspondence site, part of the academic wing of the St. Darwin industry, had, for some reason, failed to post the text of it.**
I have read things by Richard Weikart and find that as long as he doesn't express his opinions about evolutionary science, proper, he's what you'd expect from a prominent academic historian writing for reviewed journals, careful to be able to document and back up what he says in the historical record and in the literature he deals with. But I noted that even that doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to accept what he concludes nor that I'd trust what he says without looking at the documentation he relies on to say it. In the places I've done that about history and the historical record, I haven't caught him in any misrepresentations, something which I have, by the way, found in Darwin twice on rather important issues.
Nothing I have written on the topic has been based on secondary scholarship without checking the primary documents, in so far as those are available. Most of my initial conclusions came from reading a. The Decent of Man and On the Origin of Species, especially the last two editions of it that Darwin, himself, prepared and those scientific and other works that Darwin had cited in his scientific writings b. the correspondence of Charles Darwin, c. the testimony of his closest scientific colleagues, Galton, Haeckel, Huxley, etc. and the testimony of those closest to him, especially his sons Leonard, Francis and George Darwin. I have found that even respectable secondary sources, some of them with valuable clues of what to look at in that primary documentation, are seriously limited due to the ideological or academic side the author is trying to promote. That is especially troubling when the lapses and, at times, blatant dishonesty, fall well within the area in which the credibility of the scholar is supposed to reside.
In endorsing Daniel Gasman's arguments about the relationship of Ernst Haeckel to Nazism, last week, I noted that I disagreed with his desire to distance Haeckel from Charles Darwin, which has the considerable problem of the many, repeated and glowing endorsements of Charles Darwin made to Haeckel, himself, that he was one of the few who really got Darwin's theories and the fact that Darwin repeatedly, till the end of his life, endorsed books and articles in which Haeckel made many of the most obvious proto-Nazi statements as reliable science, even fact, directly attributing those to Charles Darwin and his theories. It is impossible for an honest scholar of Haeckel and his all important relationship with the thinking of Charles Darwin to avoid such things as the early attribution by Haeckel to Darwin of the the triumph of Haeckel's monism, one of the things which has earned him the reputation as a direct precursor of Nazism.
This final triumph of the monistic conception of nature constitutes the highest and most general merit of the Theory of Descent, as reformed by Darwin.
He made that statement early in the book Natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte, which Darwin endorsed, in the strongest possible terms, as reliable science in The Descent of Man, an endorsement that Darwin never mitigated nor retracted in anything I've looked for and I looked hard at the evidence. I never found anywhere in which Darwin disavowed that attribution.
In that, the direct and inseparable relationship of Haeckel and Charles Darwin, oddly, it might seem, I agree with Robert Richards who, of the three, I've been the most critical. I am most critical of Richards because his project is the most blatantly dishonest, the rehabilitation of Ernst Haeckel who was a scientific racist, a proponent of the theory that genocide was necessary and would lead to salubrious results for the surviving murderers, a man who advocated the genocide of entire races, American Indians, Australians, other named ethnicities who he had placed as practically having the same status as animals in his infamous ranking of human groups. He also advocated the murder of those deemed unfit due to their disabilities and illnesses. In virtually every way, Ernst Haeckel advocated what the Nazis did, starting about 14 years after Haeckel's death.
No one who read Ernst Haeckel could honestly come to the view of him advocated by Robert Richards because, as with Darwin, he advocated exactly what he did in books presented as having the reliability of science. I think the post-war academic and journalistic effort to turn Charles Darwin into a figure at odds with his scientific writing is one of the most obviously tawdry frauds in modern intellectual life.
So, to sum up, from what I've read and tested, I would trust Richard Weikart's academic presentation of the relationship of Darwinism to Nazism, I would trust Daniel Gasman's presentation relating Haeckel to Nazism and I would trust Robert Richards' on the close relationship of Darwin and Haeckel. I would not trust any of them on other issues, Weikart on the general facts of evolution having happened and common descent (which, notably, is not within his area of academic expertise). I would not trust Gasman on the issue of Darwin's complete endorsement of Haeckel's interpretation of Darwin's theories, and I would not trust Robert Richards' on the nature of Haeckel's proto-Nazi scientific racism, social Darwinism and homicidal eugenics. I think of the three that Gasman's and Richards' lapses in their academic areas are the most serious.
* Richards' article assumes a malevolent, intemperate style and he chooses his words with intentional malice. There are instances where Ricahrds employs scarcely veiled mockery to get his questionable revisionist ideas across. He juxtaposes my writings together with those of Richard Weikart, even though Weikart and I disagree on almost all basic interpretations of Haeckel, Darwin and evolution and Richards must be well aware of the fact that I certainly do not lump Haeckel and Darwin together, as does Weikart. Richards' attempted synthesis of the two works is an apparent desire to introduce elements of confusion and even derision into the general academic discussion about Haeckel.
** It is curious to me that there are a number of such letters from Darwin, presumably all written in English in that I am unaware of him ever writing in any other language, many of them to Ernst Haeckel, held by the Haeckel Haus at the University of Jena and not needing translation before they can be published in that easy to research and read form. Weikart included the text of the letter in a short article he posted on Darwin promoting some pretty extreme positions of social Darwinism. If the Darwin establishment has found fault with his transmission of that one letter, I'd like to see where.
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