Springtime For Darwin

Like the Beijing propagandists who studied the1936 Berlin games and turned to Albert Speer Jr. for helpful Olympic design hints, some people  seem oblivious to Godwin's Law.

It never seems to have dawned on the producers of Expelled that invoking  Hitler can  lose more than internet  arguments. Blaming science for the holocaust , Ben Stein's  neo-creationist 'documentary', styles Darwinism its 'necessary' cause, and commending the film,  Intelligent Design advocate David Klinghoffer insists

"many...don't want to understand ...Darwinism inspired Mein Kampf ...The major Hitler biographers...all agree on Hitler's debt to Darwinism. "

Yet Mein Kampf never mentions 'Darwin' or 'Darwinism', or indeed The Origin Of Species.  Why was the mild mannered Victorian  biologist expelled from Hitler's infamous autobiography? The answer is antithetic to Expelled's equation of 'Godless materialism' 'with moral decay-- Hitler was a staunch advocate of " intelligent design."

Expelled repeats a common cultural mistake. Darwin never wrote such incendiary phrases as "Survival of the fittest" or "Nature red in tooth and claw."yet instead of crediting  Herbert Spencer and Alfred Lord Tennyson with inventing and  immortalizing ' Social Darwinism', Expelled instead ignores the genealogy of eugenics' moral descent  from Nietsche's metaphysics and lays everything from the Gulag to the holocaust at science's door.  Klinghoffer, invokes Hitler's "appeal to biology, which, as he argued, revealed certain iron laws of Nature – principally the struggle for supremacy pitting the superior races against the inferior."

But what kind of biology  results from expelling evolution from the curriculum ? Though fictitious as Frankenstein, Stein's torch and pitchfork parade is less monstrous than fatuous. Deliberately confusing biology and astrophysics, it carps on evolution's failure to explain the origin of the universe.  The reality is that Darwin wrote little about First Things. He had no desire wrangle  with The Reverend William Paley's  metaphysical views --what would become the 'intelligent design' movement  was around before the science of biology was born.

Our world is always at risk of ideology  driving the lethal apotheosis of politicized science, but there's nothing Darwinian about the way in which Karl Marx's scorn for Romantic beliefs like ' elan vital ' evolved into the Leninist dogma of 'Scientific Socialism'.  To say it aimed at conquering nature and transforming man is rather like  insisting Werner von Braun  kepthis eyes on the stars over London.  Put into practice from Russia to Cambodia, it gave National Socialism's program of un-natural selection some  deadly serious competition.

But Klinghoffer's take on  Expelled turns history on its head. It imputes to the Nazis a "philosophical outlook is based on respecting Nature's laws " in contrast to Hitler's bizarre belief that the core of Judaism is "that "Man's role is to overcome Nature!" "  The reality is that the two  Socialisms  competed in  creating an equal opportunity holocaust that rounded up , and killed , scientists they could not suborn.

Did fascination with the origin of life inspire Stalin to send  geneticists to the Gulag, or lend intellectual frisson to Der Fuhrer's torchlight parades?  Hitler's deservedly obscure Tischgespraeche holds the answer:

 "Woher nehmen wir das Recht zu glauben, der Mensch sei nicht von Uranfaengen das gewesen , was er heute ist? Der Blick in die Natur zeigt uns, dass im Bereich der Pflanzen und Tiere Veraenderungen und Weiterbildungen vorkommen. Aber nirgends zeigt sich innherhalb einer Gattung eine Entwicklung von der Weite des Sprungs, den der Mensch gemacht haben muesste, sollte er sich aus einem affenartigen Zustand zu dem, was er ist, fortgebildet haben."

"From where do we get the right to believe that man was not from his very origin what he is today? Glancing at nature we see that in the plant and animal kingdoms changes and developments happen. But nowhere in that do we see a leap, a development of the magnitude man must have made, if he has as surmised, advanced from an ape-like state to what he is."

"Das, was der Mensch von dem Tier voraushat, der veilleicht wunderbarste Beweis fuer die Ueberlegenheit des Menschen ist, dass er begriffen hat, dass es eine Schoepferkraft geben muss."

"An advantage humans enjoy over animals, and what may be the best proof of their superiority is that they have grasped there must be the power of a creator."

This is no paean to  'godless materialism', but an endorsement of creationism from a man who set an army goose-stepping off to war with 'Gott Mit Uns' blazoned on its belt buckles.

If Expelled has a prequel,it's not the Auschwitz episode of the late  great Jacob Bronowski's  Ascent of Man, which  Expelled  shamelessly apes. Islamic creationists will find more to applaud  in Triumph Of The Will  than Hitler's rejection of Darwin's big idea. Poor Ben has joined the ranks of populists from William Jennings Bryan onward who have set out to bolster biblical literalism by blustering against science,  only to inherit the wind.

                 GREETINGS NATIONAL REVIEW REFUGEES
I see John Derbyshire has warped you over by offering newly excavated  wonders , but he gives me too much credit- the Hitler quote first appeared in a letter from an Intelligent Design enthusiast published by The American Spectator, but for some strange reason he did not offer a translation.

    As to my digging things up, John, you have no idea >>

Comments

[nitpicker]

Extremely well-researched and cogently argued. It's doomed to be ignored by those who are so adamantly opposed to science.

[R.C.]

All that may be true.

But has it ever occurred to you folks that, when you argue with someone, you must either argue within their assumptions? You can't communicate logic to someone until you get past the assumptions you DON'T have in common, and work your way back to the ones you DO. Otherwise, arguments are necessarily invalid ones, and you might just as well skip the logic and either deceive them with emotional rhetoric or just shoot them.

In the case of the creation literalists: They trust God and think of themselves as orthodox Christians.

So why not just bring up that *prior* to the canonization of the New Testament, the then-greatest living Christian theologian (St. Augustine of Hippo) had already been teaching that the creation story is not intended *by the author* to be taken literally, especially the time-frames!

Augustine had already written that down by 400 A.D. (or thereabouts). And his argument makes it clear that even Jewish rabbis in Jesus' time and earlier were probably treating the creation story as somewhat figurative.

The problem with these literalists is not that they're too orthodox. It's that they're unorthodox, adding new meaning to pages about which orthodoxy had settled on a less-literal meaning 1,600+ years ago.

Taking it the way these young-earth yahoos take it is as disrespectful to the text as, say, taking Paul's letter to the Ephesians to be an allegorical folk-tale.

[TOF]

Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. 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 itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
-- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd ed., 1882) p. 134.

The advancement of the welfare of mankind is a most intricate problem: all ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty for their children; for poverty is not only a great evil, but tends to its own increase by leading to recklessness in marriage. On the other hand, as Mr. Galton has remarked, if the prudent avoid marriage, whilst the reckless marry, the inferior members tend to supplant the better members of society.
-- ibid. p. 618

Eugenics did not begin with the 1930s/40s. It (more or less) ended then. For most of the early part of that century, it was the primo progressive cause, backed by all the big-name scientists, by Wells, Shaw, Sanger, and others. (Dawkins cites a quote from Wells that is truly horrifying.) In a private letter, Darwin included the Irish among the inferior races that ought to be discouraged from breeding. And Galton, the father of eugenics, was his cousin.

Hitler has no interest whatever in science, per se; but his interest in racial hygiene was purely in-line with mainstream thinking of the day. The genocide against the Jews was not part of this, however.

[runescape money]

The failures and reverses which await men - and one after another sadden the brow of youth - add a dignity to the prospect of human life, which no Arcadian success would do.

[generic viagra]

hello, I love reading about things that speak of marriage as it is a subject of much controversy, I thank them for sharing information is very good, thanks!

[buy eve]

wonderful !!!!!!!!!

[DoreHeensenar]

Top Internet sites
Sitemap of cross frame soma double buy
Sitemap of buy aura soma bottles
Sitemap of tramadol mg slow release 200
Of soma harmony despair cruz

See you later