From the facts established by modern biology it follows by logical necessity that natural selection also plays a decisive role in species arising. The leading geneticists of our time, Morgan, Baur and many others have been unequivocal in this matter. If there are nevertheless certain scholars who believe that they must reject "Darwinism", this only shows how the consideration of certain "foresight" leads to confusion. The socialist social-hygienist Grotjahn accused me and other racial hygienists of deducing our theories from the teachings of "Darwinism.
Now we hold that Darwin's natural selection theory is completely assured by the biological facts; but even if Darwin had never lived, the immediate experience gained from humans is still the most important way in which the meaning of natural selection is revealed. Compared to that objection raised by Grotjahn I am compelled to emphasize that the explanations in this book are directly found in the experience of human populations. Only those who ignore tangible facts or the most elementary laws of logic can fail to recognize that natural selection has an unmittigated influence on the character of the species.
I would note, in light of what I wrote about the discovery of epigenetic inheritance and genetic drift and chance and contingency any claims of the kind made by Darwinists from the start are logically incoherent. All of those factors and others which I'd bet you anything must be there, some of which Richard Lewontin has noted are the product of indeterminacy "on the level of quantum indetermincy" (if my memory is accurate) undermines the entire claim.
As an aside, I would like to know how indeterminacy can be a "force" of the kind these other mechanisms of evolutionary change are, how can something of indeterminate character and strength or frequency constitute a "force" though I am more than ready to believe it has a decisive role in leading to the forms of individuals and to the matter of the evolution of species. I don't think there is any way to do science around such indeterminate factors. Maybe as a theoretical problem of statistics. But who knows, they being indeterminate, if they've determined enough about them to assign numbers to them?
However, that's not my foremost purpose here, which is to demonstrate that the book which we know, beyond any dispute, Hitler and his Nazi colleagues were informed by* as they developed their racist, antisemtic eugenics and, then, genocide, was, by the declaration of the three eminent biologists who wrote it, a thoroughly Darwinist text.
That passage is from a part of the book authored by Fritz Lenz (as noted earlier today, someone Karl Pearson worked with and cited). You don't have to take my word for who he was, here's what it says at the Holocaust Museum about him.
Dr. Fritz Lenz
A medically trained geneticist, after 1933 Lenz headed the Department of Racial Hygiene at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and sat on the “Committee of Experts for Population and Racial Policy,” which endorsed Nazi eugenic laws. As early as 1917, Lenz had envisioned Germany’s future in expanded eastern territories. Viewing Slavs as an undesirable, racial element that threatened to “overrun the superior [German] Volk,” Lenz advised the SS in 1940: “The resettlement of the eastern zone is… the most consequential task of racial policy. It will determine the racial character of the population living there for centuries to come.”
[POSTWAR CAREER] From 1946 to1957, Lenz was Director of the Institute for Human Genetics, University of Göttingen. He continued to publish into the 1970s. Lenz died in 1976.
Ingred L. Anderson, Ethics and Suffereing since the Holocaust: Making Ethics "First Philsopy" in Levinas, Wiesel and Rubenstein
Here's what the Holocaust Museum site says about Fischer:
Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics from 1927 to 1942, Fischer authored a 1913 study of the Mischlinge (racially mixed) children of Dutch men and Hottentot women in German southwest Africa. Fischer opposed “racial mixing,” arguing that “Negro blood” was of “lesser value” and that mixing it with “white blood” would bring about the demise of European culture. After 1933, Fischer adapted his institute’s activities to serve Nazi antisemitic policies. He taught courses for SS doctors, served as a judge on Berlin’s Hereditary Health Court, and provided hundreds of opinions on the paternity and “racial purity” of individuals, including the Mischlinge offspring of Jewish and non-Jewish German couples.
[POSTWAR CAREER] Fischer retired in 1942 as Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. After the war he worked to secure university teaching positions for many of his former students (including Otmar von Verschuer). As professor emeritus at the university of Freiburg, Fischer continued to lecture and publish articles in anthropological journals. He died in 1967.
I haven't found anything to indicate that science ever imposed any sanction on him for his part in the Nazi genocides.
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