The claim that what is called in some legal systems first degree murder, the intentional killing of human beings by other human beings for specific motives isn't presented by Darwin and by most if not virtually all of conventionally accepted scientists in the pre-Nazi era as an aspect of natural selection, producing benefits for the killers, is absolutely false. That can be seen all through The Descent of Man, for example, if you look at all of the times he included the intentional murder of infants as having an effect he considered beneficial for the survivors, especially as a group. Here's just one of the early examples in the book, in the manner that Darwin typically makes such claims, tucked into what seems number of less depraved claims.
Some savage races, such as the Australians, are not exposed to more diversified conditions than are many species which have a wide range. In another and much more important respect, man differs widely from any strictly domesticated animal; for his breeding has never long been controlled, either by methodical or unconscious selection. No race or body of men has been so completely subjugated by other men, as that certain individuals should be preserved, and thus unconsciously selected, from somehow excelling in utility to their masters. Nor have certain male and female individuals been intentionally picked out and matched, except in the well-known case of the Prussian grenadiers; and in this case man obeyed, as might have been expected, the law of methodical selection; for it is asserted that many tall men were reared in the villages inhabited by the grenadiers and their tall wives. In Sparta, also, a form of selection was followed, for it was enacted that all children should be examined shortly after birth; the well-formed and vigorous being preserved, the others left to perish. .
The Descent of Man:
That certainly fits exactly in with what he presented as much of his primary evidence of natural selection taken from the commercial husbandry of farm animals and other domesticated animals. The distinction he makes between the two is fraught with double-speak and logical disconnects. For a city person who is unfamiliar with how that always, inevitably works, the agricultural breeding of animals is intrinsically the selection for animals to be killed, early, before they produce offspring and choosing which ones you will keep for breeding. Choosing animals to be killed is an inevitable part of the animal husbandry which Darwin made the model of natural selection when it suited him and claimed differences when those suited him.
And Charles Darwin, having grown up in the country, being a sharp observer of animal husbandry, as is seen in On the Origin of Species, would have known that even those animals chosen to breed only rarely got to live to die of natural causes, they would be chosen to be slaughtered when their economic utility was considered to be over.
He introduced that into the biological science in ideas which very rapidly came to dominate science and almost immediately, within the very weeks and months after Origin of Species was first published, excited the imagination of scientists but also politicians, lawyers, sociologists, etc. in trying to figure out ways of improving the "human stock" through an application of Darwinian principles. Those ideas they came up with, as I proved even in the socialist mind of Karl Pearson, are indistinguishable from the same ideas that the Nazis came up with to do things such as drowning the new born infants born in Auschwitz while keeping their mothers alive to be used as slave labor.
If you want to read about that, you should read the primary material available about Stanisława Leszczyńska the Polish midwife who refused orders to drown them, risking her life in what she knew was a futile act of conscience that wouldn't keep them alive. Though I will warn you that a lot of what is online, including the Wikipedia page on her, seems to be the subject of embroidering and what I think is likely ideological tampering. I never trust an online source which has been demonstrated to have been tampered with by ideological groups, including neo-Nazis.
How the Nazis thought of their murdering of newborn infants - drowning them where their mothers could hear their burbling cries - differed from the infanticide Darwin endorsed as producing alleged Spartan superiority or a breeder in a commercial operation is nugatory. I will point out that in support of his claims about the benefits of murdering babies, Darwin cited the father of German Darwinism, probably his follower who Darwin praised most highly, Ernst Haeckel who, in the very book Darwin gave his highest praise, advocated the murder of babies, using the exact same claim about its crucial relationship to Spartan superiority. We also know that Hitler believed a lot of the same thing about the Spartans as he marveled at how a small class of Spartans lorded it over their slaves, the Helots. No doubt he was aware of the annual slaughter of Helots by the Spartans as part of their means of controlling them.
Charles Darwin repeatedly, specifically and in no uncertain terms included human beings killing other human beings, who he denominated as inferior as a part of natural selection and that that killing produced and proved "superiority". I think it is likely that he only considered it artificial selection if it was humans breeding other animals. Why he didn't consider that as the same thing as animals killing other animals, I don't know. Darwinism is full of double-speak and logical incoherence. Probably that some of them were kept alive and that all of it it was with the intended purpose of economic efficiency and utility or maybe it was because it was an activity engaged in by his fellow aristocrats and what he, no doubt, saw as the superior class of English yeomen lucky enough to have a bit of land under the abysmal and totally artificial English legal system, the real force in producing the inequality that Darwin attributed to biology.
Darwinian selection differs not in the slightest from the selections that were made when the cattle cars were opened at Auschwitz. Look at that paragraph quoted above to see how he fits intentional murder into his scheme of natural selection and what he terms artificial selection in animal breeding. I think I might go so far as to say that Nazi eugenics was first written in Victorian English by an elegant English aristocratic scientist.
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