HAVING GOTTEN FAR INTO THE HISTORY OF DARWINISM through its primary documentation, from its inception to its use today as a result of my online brawls, several things that are the common received wisdom of the college-credentialed class are blatant post-WWII, post the revelation of what eugenics led to under the Nazis fabrications that literally no one I have found in more than a decade of searching from before WWII ever claimed, that Darwin and Darwinism, natural selection had nothing to do with eugenics,
- "active eugenics", involuntary and coerced sterilization of people to murder
- or the "passive" form of letting the poor, the ill, the weak, the merely "unfavored" by those with power and money (assumed to be the product of and acting out some atavistic force of "nature") die for want of the resources to live a decent life for themselves AND THEIR CHILDREN. Darwin especially hated the thought that such children would live to adulthood.
That was such an obvious lie that the definitive proof against that ubiquitous lie among the educated post-WWII population was to be found in the words of the inventors of eugenics, Francis Galton, W.R. Gregg, Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Schallmeyer who all founded their assertions of some pretty extreme eugenics on Darwin's theory of natural selection, (Haeckel early calling for the active murder of those he classified as "lesser" beings) and on Charles Darwin's endorsement of the very texts and allegations made by all of the above except Schallmeyer who came up in the generation after Darwin died. Darwin explicitly endorsed the claim that the deaths of those he deemed "less favored" people and entire races would lead to the "improvement" of the human species in the survivors who, he hinted, were to do the killing if "passive eugenics" didn't get the job done.
He, himself, removed any doubt, proved the lie that the putative inventor of "Social Darwinism" the putrid Brit philosopher Herbert Spencer was the foul polluter of Darwinism in the 5th edition Charlies Darwin made of his magnum opus, On The Origin of Species By explicitly saying that when he used the term "Natural Selection" he meant exactly the same thing that Herbert Spencer meant when he said "Survival of the Fittest." He said at that time he was urged to make that clear by his co-inventor of natural selection, who would eventually turn anti-eugenics, A. R. Wallace. I have given that proof here a number of times, linking to the pro-Darwin website that posts the image of the pages of the 5th edition that proves he said that along with a somewhat more easily resolved text transcription of it. There is no honest argument to be made that "Social Darwinism" is not exactly what Darwin meant when he said "Natural Selection" because Darwin removed any doubt whatsoever on that point, himself.
His most notable followers among scientists in his and the next several generations, not a few of them his direct descendants, were pretty much all eugenicists, some of them actually collaborating with Nazi eugenicists, some such as the English elite style "socialist" Karl Pearson handing Nazi eugenicists arguments that Polish and Russian Jews who lived in Western Europe were a danger to the nations and societies they were in in the decade before the Nazis started murdering exactly those same people, his scientific assertions entirely founded on Darwinism, natural selection. I have documented that here, exhaustively. In doing that I have found that even many of the creationist critics of Darwin have, if anything, underestimated the connection between English language Darwinism and Nazi eugenics and genocide.
And that characteristic of Darwinism was noted from the start of it by at least one person, someone who knew Darwin and his wife quite well, the sadly little remembered early feminist, Lesbian radical Frances Cobbe who correctly and accurately predicted that natural selection would lead to moral catastrophe and atrocity, a history which was fully realized in not only the Nazi eugenics but in the preceding American eugenics and the same in places such as Canada, someone who Darwin brushed off with sexist condescension in his scientific publications, even as he endorsed the depravity of exactly that kind of moral depravity in Ernst Haeckel and the assertions of Francis Galton and W. R. Greg as scientific truth.
I know that this will not be the last time I find it necessary to repeat this because we live in an age of lies, conventional lies and the absence of any truly believed in consequential sin of lying. Quite often the political and ideological character that a person takes is not based so much in their deviation from or devotion to the truth but to which conventional lies are preferred by the person who holds and asserts them. I have come to the conclusion that that is directly related to the secularism that has pushed such notions as morality out of lives of so many people in the way that, formerly, vulgar materialism pushed out notions of doing for the least among us being what we did for God from consideration when it came to slaves or those who could be killed and robbed of their lands and resources. The problem with Christians has always been, not that they believed too much in the Gospel of Jesus, the Epistles of Paul and James but that they didn't believe enough in them and acted accordingly.
This is an answer to the typical whining that happens when I diss Darwin. Part of a never-ending series.
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