Nazi racial ideology was religious, creationist and opposed to Darwinism

[웃 910]

Only posting the introduction (part 1 of 9) because it is quite a long read...Full article here: http://coelsblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/nazi-racial-ideology-was-religious-creationist-and-opposed-to-darwinism/

Nazi racial ideology was religious, creationist and opposed to Darwinism

1:Introduction

Among those who dislike Darwin's explanation of human beings as the product of evolution a common accusation is that Darwinian thinking has led to horrors such as the Nazi holocaust. For example the American religious commentator Ann Coulter writes: "From Marx to Hitler, the men responsible for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century were avid Darwinists" (which is wrong on all the others, not just Hitler). So widespread is the claim that even many who accept that Darwinian evolution has been established as true, well beyond any reasonable doubt, also believe that Darwinian ideas were misused to justify Nazi atrocities. For example the British political commentator Andrew Marr writes that Darwinism was "used to justify … the Nazi holocaust".

Are these claims correct? Remarkably, for a claim so widely accepted, no they aren't. Indeed, the Nazi ideology underpinning the extermination of the Jews was opposed to and incompatible with Darwinism, instead being a religious and creationist doctrine.

Even such a staunch Darwinian as Richard Dawkins fails to appreciate how anti-Darwin the Nazis were, hugely underplaying the differences. These differences are best illustrated by the schematics in Figure 1. On the left is the Darwinian evolutionary tree showing the origin of man out of monkey-like ancestors. In the middle is a schematic of the "family tree" of today's dogs. The domestic dog, as with other domesticated and farmed species, is partially the product of Darwinian natural selection and partially the product of human artificial selection to produce desired outcomes. Dawkins is correct to make a distinction between artificial selection — something we've known about since the invention of farming — and natural selection, Darwin's idea explaining the evolution of species over geological timescales.

Fig. 1: The `branching' pattern of descent produced by Darwinian natural selection and by artificial selection contrasts with Nazi racial ideology of separate creation of distinct races, and the sinfulness of "contaminating" the "God's handiwork" Aryan race by allowing inter-breeding with "lesser" races.

Dawkins writes, in response to Ben Stein's propaganda film Expelled

"Hitler didn't apply NATURAL selection to humans. [...] Hitler tried to apply ARTIFICIAL selection to humans, and there is nothing specifically Darwinian about artificial selection. It has been familiar to farmers, gardeners, horse trainers, dog breeders, pigeon fanciers and many others for centuries, even millennia".

The suggestion here is that Hitler wanted to use farming techniques to artificially select desired traits and so produce a "master race". This would indeed be an ideology that had some similarities to Darwinism. However, while Professor Dawkins can be excused for never having looked into Nazi ideology, abhorrent and unscientific as it is, this misunderstands Nazi racial doctrine and what they were trying to achieve. In fact, Nazi racial ideology was radically different, being based on a creationist vision that was totally incompatible with and opposed to Darwinian evolution.

The panel on the right of Fig. 1 illustrates Nazi racial doctrine. They believed that the different human races were distinct and separate, created as God wanted them, and they regarded these permanent racial characteristics as all important to human culture and destiny. Further, they believed that allowing racial inter-mixing had led to the downfall of civilizations, and was a sin against God's creation. Thus they considered it of overwhelming importance to preserve their own Nordic/Aryan race, which they regarded as superior and created in "God's own image", by preventing inter-breeding with "inferior" races which they regarded as literally "sub-human", being separate creations.

So, yes, the Nazis wanted to use selective breeding, but not to create a "master race", but topreserve an Aryan master race, preserving the primordial Aryan characteristics which they believed were the "highest image of God".

This ideology shares one thing with Darwinism, namely the possibility of using selective breeding to achieve a desired end, a possibility mankind had known about since the invention of farming, about 12,000 yrs ago. But in all other respects it is profoundly anti-Darwinian. Whereas in Darwinian evolution all mankind evolved out of a common monkey-like ancestor, with all human races sharing a common origin in the recent past, in Nazi ideology the different human races were distinct and separate creations.

While the mutability of species, with new species evolving out of distant ancestors, is the central theme of Darwinism, the Nazis found that idea anathema, and placed a heavy emphasis on racial purity and the distinctiveness and separateness of different species. Further, the Nazis found abhorrent the materialist notion that man might be just like other animals, and, from their religious and moralistic perspective, they insisted that man had a spiritual soul.

That is why leading Nazi ideologues wrote books explicitly rejecting Darwinism, and why they banned Darwinian works from public libraries. The truth is that nothing in Nazi ideology derives from Darwin — the slight overlap is only in areas known about long pre-Darwin. Nor are there any quotes of leading Nazis looking to Darwin or pointing to Darwin as justification — if there were the creationists would likely have found them by now. In short, the association of Nazi doctrine with Darwinism is an outright fabrication by those who wish to discredit Darwinism and the scientific account of the origin of man.

2: Nazi Racial Theory (de Gobineau)

For remaining 8 chapters click here!

Edited November 17, 2011 by Lord Infamous