I have tried to stay close to the primary documentary literature as much as possible, I've consulted secondary literature much less and never without checking its claims as I could find what they allegedly were based in. So I have not read much of Daniel Gasman. I can tell you that anyone who could simultaneously claim - correctly - that Nazism was directly fed by the foremost German evolutionary scientist of the late 19th century, Ernst Haeckel, and then claim that the Nazis rejected evolution would have to be entirely unaware of what Ernst Haeckel's scientific fame was based in, HIS ARTICULATION OF EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE.
Anyone who could claim that Ernst Haeckel was not a through Darwinist is entirely ignorant because they could not possibly have read Darwin's second major book on the topic which is not only full of glowing citations of Haeckel's work but in the introduction Charles Darwin said that if he had know Haeckel was writing Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, which Darwin relied on heavily, he would not have finished The Descent of Man because he said Haeckel had pretty much said what he did in that book. He also praised his other work, they were friends and scientific colleagues, Darwin repeatedly, till his death endorsed Haeckel's writings and after his death Darwin's son Francis wrote that he, personally, had witnessed their collegiality when Haeckel visited his father at Down.
Anyone who wanted to distance Haeckel from Darwin would have to have gotten over those facts and no one today ever did what he and Francis Darwin did, spoke with ol Charles. If Haeckel wanted to defend his Darwinism, he had the letters from Darwin, his published endorsement of his version of Darwinism IN THE DESCENT OF MAN and the testimony of at least one and likely of more of Darwin's family members. On that, if your account is accurate, Gasman is full of gas.
The idiocy that abounds on that subject is literally everywhere online. I saw one thing today that claimed that Haeckel couldn't be considered a strict Darwinist because he believed in Lamarckian evolution. The problem is that Charles Darwin did, as well, in fact he published his own theory of the acquisition of acquired characteristics. To hold that Haeckel was not a Darwinist on that count would have to equally hold that Charles Darwin was not a Darwinist. Such is the absurdity of the post-war Darwinist cover-up.
I won't even entertain what Robert Richards has to say on the topic because of what I've read what he claims about Haeckel and because I've also read Haeckel's proto-Nazism. I don't trust a thing he says.
Update: One thing I do know is to cut through the cover-up you have to have read the primary documentation from the first and second generation of Darwinists. The second generation, in Germany WERE THE FOUNDERS OF NAZI EUGENICS-GENOCIDE, Ploetz, Lenz, Fischer, etc. And they were as collegial with their English language colleagues as Darwin was with Haeckel and other German Darwinsts as Haeckel was writing his proto- Nazi interpretation of it which Darwin endorsed. in 1934, as he was helping to start the Nazi planning of their mass murders, one of the worst of them, Ernst Rüdin was elected the president of the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations, the members of which were mostly not Germans. He got funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and other American and British people and institutions. But that's a long story. Rüdin was not rejected by English language scientists and science even as he was sending them copies of some of the worst things he was working on.
And a lot of it doesn't wait till the second generation. I'll point again to the fact that that kind of stuff was being written by Darwin's foremost British follower, famous as Darwin's attack "bull dog" Thomas Huxley in his infamous happy declaration that now that the Black slaves in the United States had no economic utility to the white population that they would be killed off by those who had once enjoyed that economic value they derived by stealing their labor - what the Nazis did with those people they worked to death knowing there were always more where they came from. That Darwinian declaration, made in 1865 BY DARWIN'S FOREMOST BRITISH DISCIPLE, is as proto-Nazi in its content as anything Haeckel or Alfred Ploetz or Eugen Fischer or Fritz Lenz said, it is Nazism in a nutshell in regard to one group that both Haeckel and Hitler held as inferior to white people, 24 years before Hitler was born.
QUASHIE'S plaintive inquiry, "Am I not a man and a brother?" seems at last to have received its final reply–the recent decision of the fierce trial by battle on the other side of the Atlantic fully concurring with that long since delivered here in a more peaceful way.
The question is settled; but even those who are most thoroughly convinced that the doom is just, must see good grounds for repudiating half the arguments which have been employed by the winning side; and for doubting whether its ultimate results will embody the hopes of the victors, though they may more than realise the fears of the vanquished. It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest.
But whatever the position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility for the result will henceforward lie between nature and him. The white man may wash his hands of it, and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore. And this, if we look to the bottom of the matter, is the real justification for the abolition policy.
The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion; emancipation may convert the slave from a well-fed animal into a pauperised man; mankind may even have to do without cotton-shirts; but all these evils must be faced if the moral law, that no human being can arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous damage to his own nature, be, as many think, as readily demonstrable by experiment as any physical truth. If this be true, no slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.
Really think about what he's saying here, especially those things I've put in blue. "The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion." I doubt anyone has ever said something like that if they were decidedly on the side of equal natural rights. Huxley, in his other claims clearly wants his readers to have less confidence in the existence of equal rights than his only seemingly equivocal "may" covers up. It's clear that for him,on the basis of the biological inferiority which is the engine of the natural selection he was most famous for being the "bull dog" champion of, the idea of equal rights was as absurd a delusion that his budget-brand intellectual descendant proclaims God to be. It's obvious from the rest of his piece that for him, as it would be for Francis Galton, or, from any rational reading of The Descent of Man and many of his statements in letters, Charles Darwin in regard to the reality of natural inequality, "the question is settled." Settled through the assertion of natural selection.
Nor is it in the least bit unclear that, as in Haeckel, as in The Descent of Man, that the natural outcome of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation would be the slaughter of assuredly (according to Huxley) biologically inferior Black people by their White competitors in a struggle for life. That is as obvious from what he said which I've found nowhere Darwin disagreeing with* and which is clearly was a majority opinion in the Darwinists I read before the post-WWII era, explicitly so when they wrote even scientifically on this, certainly to be found in milder form in even the high school biology textbooks such as the one which Scopes allegedly taught from (he didn't, as he and his students admitted - read about it in my archive, look for "Scopes").
It's not at all unclear to me that Thomas Huxley loved the idea of White former slave-owners killing their former slaves as much as his master loved the idea of British imperialists wiping out the darker-skinned inhabitants of other lands and replacing them with white people, he said so in his letter to G. A. Gaskel and in The Descent of Man.
Proto-Nazism probably was first scientifically articulated in British English, though Haeckel immediately saw the meaning of natural selection in his reading of On the Origin of Species. I would hold that the most evil parts of it were already present well before Darwin had these ideas. in the economic claims of Thomas Malthus, though you can find the same things attributed to Pharaoh in the first two books of the Bible. In the Bible, in Exodus the slaves, for the first time, get the upper hand. Pharaoh and his successors have been fighting them ever since. There's a reason that the enslaved blacks reached for Exodus and not Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to articulate their right to freedom. Because that's where it's held as a truth which is self-evident.
* He as much as said the same thing about different populations of dark-skinned people as I've documented, over and over again.
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