Someone is pissed off that I stated the obvious, that Darwin's basic claim of what is natural selection in the human population, of "savages" manifesting natural selection in the human population, that that claim is identical to the most basic and central pillar on which Nazism stood,
"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health,"
That statement, presented as reliable science, of having the reliability that officially declared science is supposed to have, is obviously and literally the basic idea behind the entirety of Nazi ideology, published in Britain in 1871, almost immediately translated and published in German* and which took the German intellectual community by storm as it did British and American intellectuals and those who wanted to be mistaken as intellectuals in more popular venues of publication and bloviation, and from there into politics and the law.
That is the basic foundation of all of Nazism, the killing of the "weak in body or mind" by other people whose murdering not only proves their superiority but, and this is totally out of nowhere but the mind of Darwin, "those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health." How he comes up with the idea that murder makes the murderers better, well, I have said the British class system despite all those BBC-PBS shows and soaps about royalty and stately homes is essentially depraved.
In the third quote I gave, you can see how Darwin also provided the basis of the concern of the Nazis for the general welfare of the German Volk, one result of which is why a "Volkswagen" is called that.
"It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."
"Or care wrongly directed" is the operative part of that scientific claim. In this case the care was directed by the Nazi government to the welfare and, in line with the entire sentence, management, of the "Aryans" the "German Volk" who were to benefit from the murder of Jews, Poles, others who were on the list of those to be murdered by the Nazis, by the acquisition by murder of their land and property and through the direction of "care" in the "right direction" from those they considered inferior to those they considered superior. That extermination was explicitly the reason for the trial-run of Nazi genocide, the murder of the disabled, something which was explicitly endorsed by not only Ernst Haeckel in his entire line of Darwinian elucidation but in The Descent of Man, by Darwin himself, as can be seen in the second of those quotes concerning the alleged enhancement of Spartan superiority through infanticide.
In the years I've been engaged in this I don't think there has been any time when answering an objection has done anything but strengthen the obvious ties between Darwinism and Nazism. I don't think last year at this time I would have been prepared to say that the link is as direct as it so obviously is when you look deep into the primary documentation.
You want me to go on, I can guarantee you the result will only make you unhappier. Darwinism is a blight on everything and will continue as long as people buy into the idea that natural selection governs everything. It is irredeemably and unalterably a guarantee of depravity which has little intellectual validity when subjected to the most rigorous of scrutiny.
Note: I should point out that looking again at The Voyage of the Beagle, especially at the blatantly racist claims Darwin made against the People he called Fuegians and the paltry evidence of things like his claim that they ate the old women among them, I think all of that is a product of Darwin's aristocratic racism and disdain for people who he called "savages" even as, in his scientific work, his claims about natural selection's unimpeded operation among them should have ensured their superiority. There is nothing so telling as the two-faced presentation of Darwin when you contrast his claims about natural selection among "savages" and his bewailing the effect of "civilisation" in impeding the violence and neglect that would lead to the deaths of members of the British (and those of other "civilised" nations) underclass. I've pointed out how he constantly discounts the predicted effects of natural selection in improving those populations of people most subjected to it even during his lifetime, such as the Irish who endured the second major potato famine in two centuries in the years before Darwin proclaimed their inferiority to even the Scots, their close, almost identical, biological cousins who had not been so culled by such a brutal "selection".
Everything about his theory is of the same quality, all of it is a product of his ideological and class preference, the preferences of his colleagues in biology and their various and shared bigotry. That's another thing I wouldn't have said was obvious when I started in this study. As I point out below, the extent to which the academic and scientific establishment has to tell bald-faced lies to maintain their myth is both astounding and its most obvious weakness. You can only sustain that lie as long as people don't do with Darwin's books what he intended done with them, that they be read, his citations read, as well. As soon as you start reading those, the lie is doomed, unless you have a goal of extending the life of that lie.
* Lest it be forgotten in a book intended to be his elucidation of natural selection hin the human species, , The Descent of Man, whose introduction gives the highest praise to Ernst Haeckel's books, Generelle Morphologie, and especially his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, in which Haeckel spouted even more explicit Darwinian racism and claims of the salubrity of killing people, a book which Darwin said, in that introduction.
This last naturalist, besides his great work, 'Generelle Morphologie' (1866), has recently (1868, with a second edition in 1870), published his 'Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte,' in which he fully discusses the genealogy of man. If this work had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine. Wherever I have added any fact or view from Prof. Haeckel's writings, I give his authority in the text; other statements I leave as they originally stood in my manuscript, occasionally giving in the foot-notes references to his works, as a confirmation of the more doubtful or interesting points.
That was as total an endorsement of another scientist's work that I believe Darwin ever gave in his lifetime. As can be seen in statements by Darwin for the rest of his life, of Thomas Huxley, his chief defender and "bull dog", his son Francis Darwin, and others, Charles Darwin's endorsement of the orthodox Darwinism of Ernst Haeckel is unquestionable by any but either disqualifying ignorance or an outright and bald lie.
However, that lie is the common received wisdom of official academia and science, such as can be found at this website from The University of California at Berkeley.
Haeckel was influenced both by the German idealistic tradition and by the works of Darwin. After reading Origin of Species, Haeckel became one of the more prolific and vociferous supporters of evolution, but was less supportive of natural selection as the mechanism by which evolution occured. Hacekel was certainly an evolutionist but less so a Darwinian.
Well, that would obviously be news to Charles Darwin by testimony of not only his introduction to The Descent of Man but also throughout the text in which he continually lavished praise on Haeckel and his scientific declarations, not to mention in letters he wrote directly to Ernst Haeckel in which he thanks him for his energetic promotion and defense of Darwin's work.
The extent to which lying about Darwin in regard to Haeckel is commonplace is seen in the continuation of the text at the website.
An extremely common misperception is that natural selection and evolution are the same thing. In fact, Haeckel is one of many thinkers who believed that all species were historical entities (lineages) but did not share Darwin's enthusiasm for natural selection as the main mechanism for generating the diversity of the biological world. Haeckel instead believed that the environment acted directly on organisms, producing new races (a version of Lamarckism). The survival of the races did depend on their interaction with the environment, a weak form of natural selection. Haeckel's mechanism of change required that formation of new characters diagnostic of new species occured through progressive addition to the developmental trajectory. For example, most metazoans go through a developmental stage called a gastrula -- a ball of cells with an infolding that later forms the gut. Haeckel thought that at one time an organism called a "gastraea" existed that looked much like the gastrula stage of ontogeny. This hypothesized ancestral metazoan gave rise to the rest of the multi-celled animals.
While I don't want to list the evidence, which you can easily find, yourselves, Charles Darwin explicitly believed in the heritability of acquired characteristics, something which he stated explicitly as science as did Galton and virtually all of the early Darwinists with the exception of August Weismann up and until the "rediscovery" of Gregor Mendel's paper about twenty years after Darwin's death. Lots of present day Darwinists are touting that fact after the long reigning orthodoxy of the 1930s neo-Darwinian synthesis had buried the idea only to have it reemerge as epigenetic inheritance has been demonstrated. Apparently the neo-Darwinist who said that hasn't kept pace with both the latest in science and the Darwin PR campaign.
As I wrote in the post on the topic of Haeckel's justified claim to the endorsement of his Darwinism, the people I quote establishing that, Francis Darwin, Darwin's son, Thomas Huxley, a man who Darwin himself said was his foremost champion and Ernst Haeckel, himself, knew Darwin, met him, corresponded with him and, in the case of Haeckel, had the confirmation of Darwin's approval of his Darwinism by letter and in person during Haeckel's several visits to Darwin at Down, something whoever told that lie at that website can't claim to have even by fourth hand.
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