Hitler as a Darwinist?: prof accused of academic dishonesty

Recently, several people have generously devoted considerable time to padding the comments section of the Post-Darwinist on the question of whether Hitler was a creationist or a Darwinist. Now, one recent commenter, Mitchell Coffey, went over the top, accusing Cal State prof Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler, of being dishonest. Critiquing my post, he scolds, in part:

This is to be expected if you rely on the immorality of dishonest academics like Richard Weikart. Most of his assertions about Darwin's beliefs are contradicted by the historical sources -- often by the historical sources he himself cites for support! In one case, he out-and-out lies about what he calls Darwin's "system."

But if you want to see a straight-out lie by Prof. Weikart, locate his one quote from H.G. Wells. Weikart makes extravagant claims about the significance of the quote, which Weikart wants you to believe meant that Wells believed in killing off "inferior" races.

Weikart, who is fluent in German, replies,

Mitchell Coffey’s claim that I engaged in academic dishonesty is patently ridiculous.

I should note that my overall argument in no way depends on the Wells’ quotation, since the vast majority of my book is about German thinkers, and most of my quotations are from primary sources, unlike the Wells quote, which I provided to show that Germans weren’t the only ones advocating racial extermination. If anyone can show that my primary source quotations are wrenched out of context, this would be troubling indeed. To date, no one has raised such a criticism, despite many reviews by historians in historical journals.

To me, the really interesting aspect of this whole exchange is why it should matter so much to some people whether Hitler was a Darwinist, a creationist, or something else. After all, what if Pol Pot was a Darwinist and Idi Amin a creationist? Do we think the better or the worse of mass murderers on such an account? So I asked Weikart for some thoughts, as he deals frequently with such attacks.

His reply was interesting:

The reason why people care about Hitler being a Darwinist was because his version of Darwinism influenced his murderous ideology. It wasn't incidental to his mass murder, as it might be in the other cases you mentioned. Darwinists have to distance themselves from his social Darwinist views, so they campaign against it as against heresy. Also, it's remarkable how many websites run by atheists and anti-religious people prominently feature articles about Hitler being a Christian, and they blame Christianity for Hitler and the Holocaust.

It's also remarkable that many Darwinists idolize Darwin so much that they cannot come to admit that he was a social Darwinist (though many scholars, to their credit, have conceded this).

Hmmm. I have often suggested that Darwinism would repay study by social scientists. It does come with a worldview, including a number of positions on hotly contested but apparently unrelated topics. For example, I would like to hear from a single serious Darwinist who disapproves of stem cell research on discarded human embryos on ethical grounds. It is easy to find non-Darwinists who disapprove such things.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

O'Leary's review of Weikart's seminal work From Darwin to Hitler

I first determined to make a point of reading historian Richard Weikart's meticulously researched book, From Darwin to Hitler because Darwinists were very clearly upset by the implications of his work.

Some seemed obsessed with proving Weikart, who teaches at California State University (Stanislaus) not only wrong but dishonest and irresponsible - which he certainly isn't.

I am glad I read this magisterial work, because I now understand much better the relationship between 19th century Darwinism and the rise of Hitler. Weikart unearths so many old, almost buried 19th and early 20th century German sources. Indeed, one can only wonder at his patience, systematically reading through the many, many articles and books of long-dead eugenicists, imperialists, pacifists, socialists, and such.

Weikart unearths several lines of evidence that are critical for understanding what happened. (Clicking on the link gets you the rest of the review.)

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 4: Hitler's Ethic and the Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress in Nazi Policy

On this episode of ID the Future, Logan Gage interviews historian Richard Weikart on his new book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, and how Darwinism influenced and inspired much of Nazi ideology.

Weikart’s provocative book, out tomorrow, argues that Hitler's immorality was not the result of ignoring or rejecting ethics, but rather came from embracing a coherent -- albeit pernicious -- ethic of improving the human race through "evolutionary progress." Directly inspired by Darwin's theory of evolution, this ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improved human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination. By embracing this particular brand of ethics, Hitler perpetrated much greater evil than he would have had he been merely opportunistic or amoral.

Go here to listen.

[From Denyse: Personally, I have never understood why Darwin's fans freak out when anyone tries to talk about the relationship between Darwinism and eugenics, Darwinism and racism, and Darwinism and the Nazis.

It is a hands down, no contest fact that Darwin made eugenics and racism seem "scientific." There was a time when racism depended on obscure arguments from the Bible and such, but Darwin changed all that with The Descent of Man. There is no question, either, that the Nazis were inspired in part by German translations of Darwin's Descent. Dr. Weikart has been subjected to predicable attempts to muddy the waters by claiming that someone other than Darwin is always to blame for making mayhem respectable.

To one such effort, Weikart replies,

Hoppe claims in this blog that Bronn inserted progressivism into Darwin’s theory in his translation of _Origin of Species_. However, anyone reading _Origin_ carefully can find many passages where Darwin embraced progressivism, for example:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.

This is laced with progressivism, and many other passages reinforce this point.

The part I find intriguing is that the Darwin fans would do themselves such a big favour if they just admitted it and got past it. No one holds them responsible individually or collectively for what happened in centuries past. It is their continued defensiveness and misrepresentation, creating a continued need to set the record straight, that keeps the issue alive. And they have only themselves to blame for that.

See also:

Expelled: Did Darwin really lead to Hitler? Better question: Did the suggestion lead tofree publicity?

Finnish school shooter: Social Darwinism's role in mass murder

O'Leary's review of Weikart's seminal work From Darwin to Hitler.
]
Next: Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 5: Seeking God in Science: An Atheist
Defends Intelligent Design

Finnish school shooter: Social Darwinism's role in mass murder

Note: If you were linked to this story, be sure to see Update 1, Update 2, and Update 3 below.

I just got done rejecting a large number of comments from people who claim to enjoy this blog but nonetheless consider the report last evening of the Darwinist sympathies of the Finnish school shooter to be in poor taste.

(I suppose the Finns didn’t know they were supposed to suppress that part of the story, so that it would only be discovered thirty years from now by a gutsy researcher ... )

First, it’s rubbish that anyone who enjoys this blog was upset. This blog has published many more pungent stories and I urge anyone who doubts that to investigate the archives. While you’re there, have a look at the way in which scholar Richard Weikart found himself the target of similar attacks for his careful study of social Darwinism in From Darwin to Hitler.

Second, if people honestly think that the boy’s social Darwinism played no role in his shooting spree, I assume that they also think that toxic religious beliefs play no role in Middle Eastern-directed suicide bombings.

I disagree in both cases. Beliefs have consequences.

While we are here, I think that - while individual atheists can be highly moral - materialist atheist creeds in the twentieth century were demonstrably more likely to exterminate vast numbers of people than any traditional orientations.

There are several good reasons for that, but the most obvious is this one: The materialist atheist does not believe that there is any underlying mind, meaning or purpose in the universe. In principle, then, it is not true that humans are of more significance than tent caterpillars. And if they are a problem, the materialist atheist who is in power need not have any compunction in dealing with them in the same way as a gardener deals with tent caterpillars. He faces no judgment if he is wrong. He will someday be a corpse just like the ones he surrounds himself with.

Yes, of course, an atheist may choose to behave differently from that, as most do - except that materialist atheists do not in fact believe in free will. So they aren't choosing to behave differently - they are merely happening not to behave that way. Not much on which to build a society.

And I'm supposed to take their "offended" posture seriously?

Someone mentioned Ann Coulter to me recently, and I happen to have her book Godless out of the library. Those of you who get off on being offended will really appreciate this:

The path between Darwinism and Nazism may not be ineluctable, but it is more ineluctable than the evolutionary path from monkey to man. Darwin's theory overturned every aspect of Biblical morality. Instead of honor thy mother and father, the Darwinian ethic was honor thy children. Instead of enshrining moral values, the Darwinian ethic enshrined biological instincts. Instead of transcendent moral values, the Darwinian ethic said all morals are relative. Instead of sanctifying life, the Darwinian ethic sanctified death.

So it should not be surprising that eugenicists, racists, and assorted psychopaths always gravitate to Darwinism. From the most evil dictators to today's antismoking crusaders, sexual profligates, and animal rights nuts, Darwinism has infected the whole culture. And yet small schoolchildren who know that George Washington had slaves are never told of the centrality of Darwin's theory to Nazism, eugenics, abortion, infanticide, "racial hygiene" societies, genocide, and the Soviet gulags. (p. 269)

Apparently, they don't need to be told about it, actually. Young Pekka Eric Auvinen only needed to embrace the ideology.

(I wonder if news authorities will be pressured to remove any references to Auvinen's views from the story, to avoid "confusing" people about Darwinism. That happens a lot here in Canada with fanatical Islamists, who allegedly represent a broad spectrum of society. That is about as true as Darwinism is, as you will see from reading the linked story.)

Coulter goes on to say,

In his magnificent book From Darwin to Hitler, Richard Weikart documents the proliferation of eugenics organizations in Germany around 1900, all of which asserted their "scientific imprimatur by claiming harmony wit the laws of evolution." Darwin's theory was quickly and widely accepted among German biologists, a fact Darwin noted with approval, telling a friend, "The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail." Darwinism provided the lingo for "scientific" racism at the onset of the twentieth century. Not only were all eugenicists Darwinists, but nearly all Darwinists were scientific racists.

I never thought social Darwinism made sense, being more in Stephen Jay Gould's anti-social Darwininst Mismeasure of Man camp myself. But most Darwinists thought it did make sense, and that is very well documented. And, come to think of it,for much of his life Gould was an indifferently loyal Darwinist.

Update 1:

Barry Arrington, the lawyer for the families of six of the students killed at Columbine responds to the combox below:

As the attorney for the families of six of the students killed at Columbine, I read through every single page of Eric Harris’ jounals; I listened to all of the audio tapes and watched the videotapes, including the infamous “basement tapes.” There cannot be the slightest doubt that Harris was a worshiper of Darwin and saw himself as acting on Darwinian principles. For example, he wrote: “YOU KNOW WHAT I LOVE??? Natural SELECTION! It’s the best thing that ever happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms . . . but it’s all natural! YES!”

Elsewhere he wrote: “NATURAL SELECTION. Kill the retards.” I could multiply examples, but you get the picture.

Here, Arrington reflections on the ethical agonies of questioning the parents of Eric Harris.

Sorry, fanatical Darwinists. You must eat this one or back off. And don't bother bugging the University of Toronto either. They know I am teaching an adult night school course and they DON'T care.

Update 2. The Finnish school shooter's video has been removed from the Internet. A source tells me

The Finland school shooter's video has been removed from the internet. It is understandable that few media now want to cite his ideology at length. Here website here still has a long citation of the boy's statement. His strong ideological roots in Darwinism are more obvious than you will learn from the mass media.

Here is a still-working link for what are said to be Auvinen's views.

Go here for story updates.

Here is a still-working link for what are said to be his views.
Go here, here, here or here (German) for other copies/believed authentic items so far not purged.

Update 3

A friend sends a video clip of Dawkins making the point that a fanatical faith can cause people to become violent.

Dawkins said [01:14 - 02:17]:

“If you teach children or teach people, that there is a virtue in faith. If you teach people that it's OK to believe something in the absence of evidence. Maybe even it's more virtuous to believe something if there's no evidence than if there is and that's certainly part of the message that gets across.

And that's what is told by the moderate, decent, middle of the road, religious teachers. If you believe that, then if you have any tendency toward extremism at all, there is really nothing to stop you pushing your extreme views to the logical conclusion which is to kill people. Why would you not if you've been persuaded that this is what Allah wants you to do or Jehovah wants you to do? And you really really really truly believe it and you've been talked to really really truly believe it by those moderate teachers, then why wouldn't you blow people up, blow yourself up, etc.”

So, here we have a case of someone killing in name of Natural Selection!

(My friend hat tips Telic Thoughts.)

Final reflections on this topic:

This tragedy has provoked an enormous outburst of protest from Darwinists on account of my noting that the shooter's motive was social Darwinism. On the rare occasions when a shooter's motive has been anti-abortion advocacy ( Rudolph) or fundamentalist madness ( Yates), I have NEVER been excoriated by an anti-abortionist or fundamentalist for openly discussing that fact. Indeed, these types of cases were openly discussed among Christian journalists at a number of gatherings in which I participated over the last decade, with conspicuously little defensiveness. We had long accepted that some forms of anti-abortion advocacy and fundamentalism are toxic.

So this storm of comments has been a real eye-opener for me (and I probably rejected more than I accepted, so readers never saw all the somniferous posturing I did). The storm suggests that - despite claims - Darwinists have never dealt with the legacy of social Darwinism in an emotionally healthy enough way to just put it all behind them. Now that may be because the actual worldview of Darwinism necessitates social Darwinism. Or it may be because no one has said, "let's just do it." Or someone has said that, but the troops didn't get it. It's not really my problem though.

I have now shut off comments to this post. That is principally for reasons of time management. I wanted to provide a resource on this subject, and have done so. Conspiracy theorists are welcome to invent additional reasons for my actions if preferring to spend my time on more productive areas seems unbelievable.

What did Hitler believe about evolution?: From the Comments box

I'm not sure how many people read the - often very interesting - comments in the comments boxes, so I want to draw your attention to a pair of them:

In response to the post on the Coral Ridge TV special on social Darwinism, blogger Steven Carr commented that Hitler was a creationist:

Hitler, of course, believed that mankind was specially created.

Hitler explicitly rejected Darwinism and the evolution of man.

From Hitler's Tischgespraeche for the night of the 25th to 26th 1942 '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.'

I shall translate Hitler's words, as recorded by the stenographer.

'From where do we get the right to believe that man was not from the very beginning what he is today.
A glance in Nature shows us , that changes and developments happen in the realm of plants and animals. But nowhere do we see inside a kind, a development of the size of the leap that Man must have made, if he supposedly has advanced from an ape-like condition to what he is' (now)

And in the entry for 27 February 1942 , Hitler says '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.'

However, Cal State prof Richard Weikart, who specializes in Hitler and the Nazis' view of Darwinism, responded to Carr, saying:

Stephen Carr has perceptively located a passage from Hitler's table talks (which were off-the-cuff conversations he held with his colleagues), which seems to deny that humans evolved from apes. If this were all we knew about Hitler's views on the subject, Mr. Carr would have a strong case; we could conclude that Hitler did not even believe in human evolution (though this same passage implies that he does believe in the evolution of animals and plants).
However, Mr. Carr ignores a multitude of passages in Hitler's writings (which should carry more weight than off-the-cuff comments) and speeches. In _Mein Kampf_, especially in the chapter, "Nation and Race," Hitler expostulates on his evolutionary views and their application to humanity. Hitler's _Second Book_, especially the first two chapters, spend even more time discussing human evolution and the human struggle for existence. And, Mr. Carr also overlooked some passages in the table talks (see Oct. 24, 1941, for example), where Hitler explicitly rejected creationism in favor of evolution.

I should also note that I don't know of any reputable historians who claim that Hitler was a creationist, but almost all historians admit he was a social Darwinist.

My own view is that the reason for the controversy around films like the Coral Ridge special is precisely the fact that Darwinists have never really dealt with the implications of social Darwinism, so it keeps coming back to them like a bad penny.

While we are on this subject, here are some other recent posts on Hitler/ Hitler fans and Darwinism, to add to the mix:

Prof Richard Weikart, again, as horrified by student views on the moral neutrality of Hitler:

A number of years ago two intelligent students surprised me in a class discussion by defending the proposition that Hitler was neither good nor evil. Though I kept my composure, I was horrified. One of the worst mass murderers in history wasn't evil? How could they believe this? How could they justify such a view?

They did it by appealing to Darwinism.

H.L. Mencken as Hitler fan:

H.L. Mencken, who popularized the view that only the booboisie would oppose Darwinism, supported eugenics. While I am here, I have noticed a tendency in American literati to refuse to face up to the fact the Mencken was a Hitler fan and an anti-democrat, as Terry Teachout shows. I am always hearing excuses, excuses, excuses for Mencken from the lar-di-dah quarters. Why?

Steve Gould on Darwinism as promoting racism by orders of magnitude:

"Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1850 but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory."

Philosopher Fr. Edwin Oakes on Darwinism as unmitigated disaster:

But leaving aside whether natural selection actually does any explanatory work, the importation of that concept into human relations has been nothing but an unmitigated disaster for the 20th century: Karl Marx, John D. Rockefeller and Adolf Hitler were all enthusiastic Darwinians.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being denied tenure at Baylor.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

Blog policy note:Comments are permitted on this blog, but they are moderated. Fully anonymous posts and URLs posted without comment are rarely accepted. To Mr. Anonymous: I'm not psychic, so if you won't tell me who you are, I can't guess and don't care. To Mr. Nude World (URL): If you can't be bothered telling site visitors why they should go on to your fave site next, why should I post your comment? They're all busy people, like you. To Mr. Rudeby International and Mr. Pottymouth: I also have a tendency to delete comments that are merely offensive. Go be offensive to someone who can smack you a good one upside the head. That may provide you with a needed incentive to stop and think about what you are trying to accomplish. To Mr. Righteous but Wrong: I don't publish comments that contain known or probable factual errors. There's already enough widely repeated misinformation out there, and if you don't have the time to do your homework, I don't either. To those who write to announce that at death I will either 1) disintegrate into nothingness or 2) go to Hell by a fast post, please pester someone else. I am a Catholic in communion with the Church and haven't the time for either village atheism or aimless Jesus-hollering.

New Film Special: Darwin's Deadly Legacy?

Apparently, Coral Ridge Hour, hosted by Dr. D. James Kennedy, is hosting a special called Darwin's Deadly Legacy, on the legacy of social Darwinism (= sterilizing or murdering people who are thought to be unfit, sometimes called eugenics). There is a whole history there, ably recounted in a sober way by Richard Weikart's From Darwin to Hitler.

I think it quite worthwhile that Coral Ridge wants to explore the legacy of social Darwinism, on the "never again" principle.

However, some cautions might also be well advised.

Strictly speaking, the social Darwinists were completely off the wall in their understanding of Darwinism, as agnostic Australian philosopher David Stove points out.

For example, Darwin himself disapproved, apparently, of vaccination because it preserved weak people. He wrote in 1874:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poorlaws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. 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 himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. (p. 9, quoting Darwin, c. (1874) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd edition) John Murray, London, Vol. I, pp. 205-6.)

Now, in writing as he did in this specific instance, Darwin was being a true Darwinist (though according to Stove's Darwinian Fairytales, he often wasn't).

That is, if you believe that natural selection is the main force that creates diversity and adaptation in the world, you should not interfere via eugenics. After all, the prison sociopath's selfish genes are probably much better adapted to sheer survival and continuance than are those of the musical genius. The prison socio may well produce eight children on his "trailer weekends," whom he compels taxpayers to support. The musical genius, by contrast, may produce one or two at best, but very often none.

Yet most human beings who have ever lived would prefer to forego the evolutionary benefits of the sociopath's selfish genes. Whenever they can, they execute him or keep him locked up, and offer awards, prizes, and fan clubs to the musical genius instead. That approach to human survival seems quite sound to me - but it is hardly Darwinism.

Here's where the social Darwinists went wrong: They took from Darwinism the lack of respect for the human being as anything other than a brainy ape. But they still wanted to smuggle into Darwinian philosophy at least some respect for human culture and decency, because they were not willing to give all that up. So they developed the worst possible solution: Instead of helping the halt, the lame, and the blind, as well as bumpkins and dullards, because God loves them (the traditional view) OR letting nature take its course (the only reasonable Darwinian view), the social Darwinist came up with a new view that was far worse than either: A system for mass riddance of people who fail a cultural or medical standard.

If they were true Darwinists, they would have just done nothing instead of done murder, for the same reason that Darwin saw a problem with vaccinations.

So we need to be clear here: Social Darwinism is very bad. But, strictly speaking, it is not Darwinism. No human being can live with what Darwinism entails, which is why it so quickly morphed into a bastard social Darwinism.

Neither Darwin nor most of his loyal followers clearly saw the problem because they could not live with the consequences of their own theory. The confusion continues: After the Nazi eugenic horror was fully revealed, people decided to get rid of social Darwinism, but assumed that it was Darwinism in some sense. They couldn't have lived with Darwinism either, but they did not realize that.

Then we reacted by vilifying the Nazis - which is 100 percent fine with me, as far as it goes - but, as Richard Weikart points out, we must see clearly the origin of the problem or we have no assurance that we won't repeat it: Darwinism cannot provide a reasonable account of the human being.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Hitler as social Darwinist: Another salvo in the barely civilized controversy

The story regarding flunking students sympathetic to intelligent design theory got plenty of attention. But there are a few other things going on that might also justify a bit of attention.

Over the past few months, this blog has been host to quite the little controversy over whether Hitler was a social Darwinist or a creationist. If you want to pursue that in detail, try
"Does Darwinism devalue human life?" (July 2, 2006)
What did Hitler believe abut evolution? (September 2006)
"Hitler as a Darwinist: Prof accused of academic dishonesty" (September 15, 2006)
Recent posts (October 9, 2006) (Scroll down to Coral Ridge for the Anti-Defamation League flap.)

Now, I was brought up to believe that Hitler was one sick puppy. Indeed, I have Jewish friends who will not use his name, calling him only "that man." So I don't know how much it matters in principle what he thought about origins. But having listened to both sides, I think that he was, for all practical purposes, a social Darwinist who doubted the creative power of natural selection alone.

Anyway, Professor Richard Weikart , an expert on Nazi ideology, has often been the target of Darwinists who need to believe that Hitler was exclusively a creationist, which Weikart can hardly confirm for them. Prof. Weikart writes me to say:

Nick Matzke at Panda's Thumb has been critiquing my book, and his latest salvo from early Oct. deserves a response, I think (but it's too late to respond to the discussion board on that blogsite, since the discussion on it ceased long ago). I e-mailed Nick to ask him to post the following response to Panda's Thumb, but thus far I haven't heard a peep from him. Maybe I don't have his correct e-mail address. In any case, I'm wondering if you would mind posting this response on your ID blogsite.

Here is the text:

Recently Nick Matzke unearthed a neat piece of evidence that he (and others at Panda's Thumb) thinks delivers a knock-out blow to my arguments in From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany. Unfortunately, his evidence is to the history of Nazism what the Nebraska Man is to evolutionary theory an extrapolation of fragmentary evidence that wildly misses the mark. To be fair, Matzke makes a few comments showing that he recognizes some of the problems with his evidence, but nonetheless he persists with nonsequitur comments, such as: "The above lists do not prove that books by Darwin or Haeckel were actually physically burned, only banned [by the Nazis];" Do they really?

Before I get to this, though, I'd like to clear up one big misunderstanding about my book that Matzke promotes. He has claimed more than once that my thesis is hopelessly confused because: a) I criticize Daniel Gasman's Haeckel to Hitler thesis, b) I argue for a Darwin to Hitler thesis, but c) Haeckel was obviously a bigger and closer influence on Hitler than Darwin was. Matzke's objection fails, however, because while I concede point c), points a) and b) are misleading, at least to those who haven't read both Gasman's book and mine. Gasman claimed that Haeckel was THE progenitor of Nazi ideology (and in his second book, he argues the same for European fascism in general). My approach is quite different, because I overtly state in my book that Darwinism does not lead logically to Nazism nor the Holocaust (Gasman thinks Haeckel's ideas do lead inevitably to Nazism), and that Darwinism is not the sole influence on Nazi ideology (Gasman thinks Haeckel's ideas are the only significant influences). My book confirms the point that Haeckel was a bigger influence on Hitler than Darwin was (you only need to look in the index to see that I spend a lot more time discussing Haeckel than I do discussing Darwin). In fact, you might be interested to learn that I seriously considered entitling my book, _From Haeckel to Hitler_. I finally decided against it, because a) few people know who Haeckel is; and b) I didn't want my position to be confused with Gasman's.

So just how do Matzke's objections destroy my thesis, which properly stated is this: Darwinism [note: not just Darwin I discuss many Darwinian-inspired scientists and scholars] produced new thinking about morality and ethics, especially medical ethics, helping bring about [note: I didn't say "inevitably producing"] the rise of ideologies such as eugenics, infanticide, euthanasia, and racial extermination. I never claimed Darwinism was the only influence on these ideologies (I stated the exact opposite in my book). However, even if Darwin had believed in the equality of races (he didn't), even if he denied that races were annihilating each other in the struggle for existence (he argued the contrary), even if he completely rejected eugenics (he only rejected compulsory eugenics measures), and even if he viewed infanticide and euthanasia as immoral (lo and behold, he did!), and even if he was anti-militarist (he was, and I say so in my book); this would not undermine my point that leading Darwinian biologists, anthropologists, medical professors, physicians, and other social thinkers in Germany overtly used Darwinian principles to promote eugenics, infanticide, euthanasia, and racial extermination. I'm sorry if you don't like this, but it happened. Instead of criticizing me for pointing it out, you should argue with these nineteenth and early twentieth-century Darwinists.

Having cleared this up, what is this new evidence that Matzke produced in his October 1, 2006, blog, that allegedly demolishes my thesis? He perceptively discovered that in guidelines for banned books issued by the Nazis in 1935, one of the categories of banned books were those about "primitive Darwinism and Monism (Haeckel)." Matzke then claims that Darwin was banned under the Nazis (once he concedes that it might just have been something called "primitive Darwinism," so he apparently recognizes one of the huge problems with his claim but he persists nonetheless).

There are many reasons why Matzke's discovery, interesting though it is, does not present a serious challenge to my own scholarship.

First of all, Matzke himself apparently realized that by modifying Darwinism with the word primitive, this list did not really mean Darwinism per se. Good observation, but then why does he persist in maintaining that Darwin's works were banned? Darwinian biologists (and Darwinian theory) under the Nazi regime were promoted, not silenced. There are many good scholarly books that clarify this issue, such as Ute Deichmann's Biologists under Hitler (Harvard UP, 1996)and Paul Weindling's Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge UP, 1989). These works and many others show that Darwinian biologists thrived under Nazism. Hans F. K. Guenther, who was appointed to a professorship in social anthropology by the Nazi minister Frick after the Nazis came to power in the state of Thuringia (against the objections of the faculty there), was committed to Darwinian theory. Eugen Fischer, a Darwinian anthropologist and eugenicist, was named rector of the University of Berlin in July 1933, and he headed up the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, a leading research institute. In 1944 (that's still under Nazi rule) the institute was even named after Fischer! Many other Darwinian biologists landed in important positions under Nazism: Fritz Lenz, Emil Abderhalden, Konrad Lorenz, and the list could go on and on.

Another problem for Matzke's critique of my position is that just about all historians discussing Nazi eugenics, euthanasia, and racism have mentioned the importance of Darwinism as a precursor to Nazi ideology and policies. Also, most historians writing about Hitler's ideology have discussed the role of Darwinism in his thinking. Many other Nazi leaders were enthusiastic about Darwinism, too. Sure, some of these historians may call it "vulgar Darwinism" or "social Darwinism," or some other such appellation, but these still all had Darwinian elements of some sort. You cannot be a "social Darwinist" without first embracing Darwinism. This should be an obvious point, but apparently it eludes some people.

Finally, you might be interested to learn that historians (including myself) already know that Haeckel's ideas were not universally well-received in Nazi circles. An essay I published in 2002 about the Monist League showed that Haeckel and the Monist League supported pacifism and feminism, which did not sit well with the Nazis. Also, the Monist League had many socialist members, making it suspect. No wonder the Nazis dissolved the Monist League when they came to power. But it had nothing to do with any supposed antipathy toward Darwinism. (My article is: " Evolutionare Aufklarung'? Zur Geschichte des Monistenbundes" in Wissenschaft, Politik, und ™ffentlichkeit: Von der Wiener Moderne bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Mitchell G. Ash and Christian H. Stifter, Vienna: WUV Universitatsverlag, 2002. pp. 131-48).

The infighting about Haeckel (but not about Darwinism!!) merely shows what many historians have been saying for years: Nazism was not a monolith (Matzke points this out, to his credit, but he doesn't point out that it undermines his critique of me, since I only discussed Hitler in my final chapter, not Nazism in general). There were considerable disagreements within Nazism. Weindling and others have shown that Haeckel's views were contested: some Nazis liked his views and others didn't. According to Deichmann, Walter Gross, the head of the Nazi Office of Racial Policy, was an avid Darwinist, but opposed Haeckel's monistic philosophy. However, Karl Astel, rector at the University of Jena, along with SS member and biologist Gerhard Heberer and biologist Viktor Franz, were all enthusiastic about Haeckel, as was Heinz Bruecher, who in 1935 published a tribute to Haeckel in the Nationalsozialistische Monatschrifte. This article, by the way, was published in a major Nazi journal the same year that the banned book list included Haeckel on the list!

So, Matzke's piece of evidence only proved what I already knew not all Nazis liked Haeckel. So what?

Note: If anyone with access to Panda's Thumb sees this, please post this or a link to this to Panda's Thumb. I e-mailed Nick Matzke asking him to post this, but I received no response, so maybe I don't have the right e-mail address for him.

Okay, Prof, I posted it. If anyone needs the link to this blog post, this is it.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

My U of Toronto talk on why there is an intelligent design controversy, or my talk on media coverage of the controversy att he University of Minnesota.

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being granted tenure at Baylor after a long struggle - even after helping in a small way to destroy the Baylor Bears' ancient glory - in the opinion of a hyper sportswriter.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

Blog policy note:Comments are permitted on this blog, but they are moderated. Fully anonymous posts and URLs posted without comment are rarely accepted. To Mr. Anonymous: I'm not psychic, so if you won't tell me who you are, I can't guess and don't care. To Mr. Nude World (URL): If you can't be bothered telling site visitors why they should go on to your fave site next, why should I post your comment? They're all busy people, like you. To Mr. Rudeby International and Mr. Pottymouth: I also have a tendency to delete comments that are merely offensive. Go be offensive to someone who can smack you a good one upside the head. That may provide you with a needed incentive to stop and think about what you are trying to accomplish. To Mr. Righteous but Wrong: I don't publish comments that contain known or probable factual errors. There's already enough widely repeated misinformation out there, and if you don't have the time to do your homework, I don't either. To those who write to announce that at death I will either 1) disintegrate into nothingness or 2) go to Hell by a fast post, please pester someone else. I am a Catholic in communion with the Church and haven't the time for either village atheism or aimless Jesus-hollering.

Uncommon Descent Contest Question 17: Why do evolutionary psychologists need to debunk compassion? Winner announced

Here, we asked, as per the title, why do evolutionary psychologists need to debunk compassion?

That's always been a puzzle for me because ... why indeed? Only if one is a slave to basically stupid ideas like "the selfish gene," would debunking compassion, which is widely noted in my local society - and most working societies - seem a worthwhile project. Yet that project generates many useless research papers and other goofy projects.

You'd think more people would be interested in sponsoring compassion than debunking it. But hey.

Anyway, the winner here is Aidan at 6 for this entry (and Aidan needs to get in touch with me at oleary@sympatico.ca with an address to which I can mail the prize):

Proponents of neo-Darwinian orthodoxy are instinctively aware of certain awkward anomalies they need to undermine and contradictions they must cover up if their Big Picture View is to appear to trump all others. In the case of compassion, they are required to show that, whatever else it may be, it isn’t *really* compassion. Compassion as it is – in its raw, undebunked state – is particularly threatening to the materialist worldview because it is a universally accessible and entirely tangible demonstration of the reality of higher orders of being.

True selflessness lies not in the exclusion of oneself but in seeing another person *as* oneself. This is essentially ennobling not only because it rises above self-interest but because, in spirit (and in action), it lifts the other to the precisely same degree as ourselves, to the point where their interests and ours are seen as united within a much greater context. The existentially elevated ground upon which both are then able to stand – ground upon which neither could have stood alone – transcends both the material arrangements of the situation and the confines of each one’s personal mentality. Compassion has the power to free us from ourselves and thereby set us upon a very different road.

It is not sympathy, where you suffer along with the person in the hope that this will make them feel better; neither is it pity, where you look down on the person and feel sorry for them from the position of your own safety. As a form of understanding – of oneself, other people and life generally – true compassion is astonishingly rich in content. It is intellectual and spiritual rather than emotional in nature, possessing a power to transform the character beyond recognition. On such a foundation, there is a sense of resonance and alignment with far higher orders, the contours of which we can hardly begin to discern, along with intimations of universal laws profoundly unlike those proposed by materialist observers yet plainly in harmonious accord with laws long since codified by spiritual tradition.

For ideological reasons, materialists and Darwinians cannot allow anything to be in this world that is not of it. If they can show that every instance of compassion fits the grim calculations of one survival strategy or another, they can dismiss every spiritual teaching without further examination. Then they win!

What I liked best about Aidan's entry is that Aidan helpfully distinguishes compassion from mere sentiment - you know what I mean: Blubbing all over someone's sofa about the awful time they are having.

Chances are, the afflicted person secretly wishes that "Blubber" would just go away. Almost any problem is easier to deal with than useless blubbing. Compassion transforms people; blubbing means that the upholsterer must be called in, for advice re the sofa.

Readers in general, in my view, "evolutionary" psychologists are generally poseurs. I respect the paleontologist who toils in the Badlands or Death Valley. But "evolutionary" psychologists are tax-funded intellectual parasites on a once Big Idea.

Other comments:

Barb, as always, had an excellent comment at 1: This point particularly struck me:

If materials are solely responsible for morality, as E. O. Wilson asserts, then Hitler simply had bad molecules. He holds no moral accountability for what he did. People not versed in the art of logic and debate as well as those who are Ph.D. candidates in philosophy know this is sheer nonsense.

The observation particularly struck me, because that was one of the motivations for Richard Weikart's involvement in investigating the role of Darwinism in Nazism. The irrational attacks on Weikart for simply documenting the facts were one of my reasons for continuing to follow the story.

qwertyuiop at 4, I hope you are not running for office anywhere near where I live. Your comments in general, about how materialist mechanist explanations are useful, tell me much. You write,

Would you claim that someone who studies how the brain processes music or the physics of music does not still appreciate music? If not, then why is their seeking of a physical explanation different from “Darwinists and materialists”?

I doubt very much that such a person appreciates music, because they are looking for a debunking explanation. People who get past that can appreciate music - as opposed to being thought well of by fellow members of their herd because they supposedly appreciate music, when all they really offer is a clever putdown.

Here are the contest rules. I gather that Contest 19 is still open.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Expelled: Did Darwin really lead to Hitler? Better question: Did the suggestion lead to free publicity?

Bioethicist Arthur Caplan is convinced that Expelled isn't only bad, it's "immoral." and that principal character Ben Stein is guilty of "Holocaust denial." Forthat matter, Dave Springer over at Uncommon Descent has been pretty upset about it too.

Actually, it is a historical fact that the Nazis were very much influenced by Darwin. That doesn't mean Darwin or anyone else agreed with the Nazis. But people who go ballistic when his profound influence on the Nazis is discussed are just not facing reality - just as they were unable to face reality about the Finnish school shooter who was motivated by Darwinism.

Historian of Germany Richard Weikart's April 8, 2008 article in American Spectator offers:

As I show in meticulous detail in my book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, the Nazis' devaluing of human life derived from Darwinian ideology (this does not mean that all Nazi ideology came from Darwinism). There were six features of Darwinian theory that have contributed to the devaluing of human life (then and now):

1. Darwin argued that humans were not qualitatively different from animals. The leading Darwinist in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, attacked the "anthropocentric" view that humans are unique and special.

2. Darwin denied that humans had an immaterial soul. He and other Darwinists believed that all aspects of the human psyche, including reason, morality, aesthetics, and even religion, originated through completely natural processes. ...

Weikart recently defended his view against Darwinist philosopher Michael Ruse as well, in a debate at Stanford.

Here is my own view for what it is worth: I think the Holocaust link was a marketing ploy on the part of the producers. A film like Expelled risks being a flop d'estime, as Malcolm Muggeridge liked to say. Another worthy documentary. Yawn.

Okay, so how to avoid the death sentence of mere worthiness? Well, first, didn't some of the same marketers work on The Passion of the Christ? Some Anti-Defamation League people, among others, saw early rough cuts and spread the word that the film was anti-Semitic.

Well, after that, the lib-left commentariat guaranteed that EVERYONE knew about The Passion. Tsk. Tsk. How awful that those Christians would do this! And isn't that just like them too? You could hear the pundits gloat miles off.

And, every bit as helpful for the Passion film, lots of yer-grannies and Christianettes, male and female, obsessed in print about the film's alleged anti-Semitism.

Instant critics, many of whom had never been invited to see a cut, trotted out all kinds of alleged problems, like "We are told that Jesus speaks Latin with Pontius Pilate? Shouldn't the two speak Aramaic or Koine?" (Many are critics, few are screenwriters.)

The buzz continued until the opening, and of course the Passion was a huge success. IMDB says it had more pre-ticket sales than any other film in history. The anti-Semitism accusation, having got people's attention, faded into the ka-CHING of the box office. (Viewers saw that the Jewish leaders don't come off well in the film, but the Romans are the real creeps.)

Curiously, it later came out (2006) that Mel Gibson did have anti-Semitic tendencies (at least when tested over the limit for alcohol). Obviously, his film's critics didn't know that in 2003. Had they known, their revelations would have had a devastating impact. But years later, that all just sank out of sight. Timing isn't everything, but it's 50% of marketing.

So now, back to Arthur Caplan: I recall Caplan defending the firing of people who doubt Darwinian evolution years ago. So if he thought the film was good, he would keep quiet about it, wouldn't he? And silence from the commentariat has killed more non-materialist projects than any attacks have ever done.

So wouldn't the Expelled marketers use a surefire ploy like "Darwin leads to Hitler" to get Caplan talking about Expelled? Sure Caplan thinks it's all lies, but what else is new? No one thought he'd like it. The goal wasn't to get him to like it, but to get him to talk about it.

If he keeps it up long enough, he will earn what they didn't have to pay him.

Why humans are, and need to be, special

Historian of the Nazi era Richard Weikart explains:

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who endured the horrors of Auschwitz, astutely commented on the way that modern European thought had helped prepare the way for Nazi atrocities (and his own misery). He stated, "If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. I became acquainted," Frankl continued, "with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment--or, as the Nazi liked to say, of 'Blood and Soil.' I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers."

[ ... ]

A few modern thinkers specifically criticized the "anthropocentric" view that humans are special, made in the image of God. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the famous German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel, for example, blasted Christianity for advancing an "anthropocentric" and dualistic view of humanity. Today the famous bioethicist Peter Singer, along with the atheistic Darwinian biologist Richard Dawkins, argue that based on the Darwinian understanding of human origins, we need to desanctify human life, divesting ourselves of any notion that humans are created in the image of God and thus uniquely valuable. An evolutionary ecologist at the University of Texas, Eric Pianka, fights overtly against anthropocentrism, even expressing the wish that 90% of the human population will be extinguished, perhaps by a pandemic.

But remember, the Texas Academy of Science distanced itself from Pianka's ravings (oops, views). So then it's all right, apparently.

Oops, no, wait. The "we're just animals" view is obviously raving wrong. For one thing, once we believe that, mass murder ensues. Otherwise not. So there must be something wrong with the story.

Recent events in the intelligent design controversy - 4

(Note: I am trying a new method of updating this through the day as I get a chance.)

■ A friend has advised me that I could respond to this challenge from Larry Moran if I am interested in swimming through a swamp. I seem to remember evo bio Larry Moran from the Toronto ID conference ... Yeah really. Nada da swamp, thanx.

Basically, Moran wants to know what I make of most Canadians' and Europeans' support for Darwinism. Briefly: I have no idea what the aging traditional Europeans are thinking and even less what the Islamic population that is quite quickly replacing them thinks (though I suspect the latter is NOT what Larry Moran thinks).

But I do know this: Here in Canada I have often lowered my head and shut my eyes in embarrassment as people I otherwise respect have yap-yapped politically correct speech that they know is not true, on a variety of subjects. That's just what you do here. It's been that way for a long time. Ever since Pierre Trudeau, I suspect. So I have no idea what Canadians really think about Darwinism. They may never have given themselves the right to think much about it at all. Now and then people sidle up to me to confide how they came to doubt. As if it were illicit or something ... Well, stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage ...

■ Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler , has shown that a point of view I was raised to believe is incorrect. Back home, we had always assumed that eugenics and Social Darwinism were strictly right-wing phenomena. Not so, he says:

My earlier book, Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein (1999) explained the reception of Darwinism by German socialists, including Marx and Engels, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The political left immediately jumped on the Darwinian bandwagon, because, as Engels crowed to Marx in a letter, Darwinism demolished teleology. Many socialists used Darwinism as an anti-religious weapon from the start. Contra some popular thinking, it was conservatives who were least likely to embrace Darwinism in the 19th century. Most social Darwinists in the late nineteenth century were laissez-faire *liberals*, not conservatives (most of whom did not even embrace Darwinism, much less social Darwinism). Social Darwinism only became the province of conservatives once the definition of conservatism changed, i.e., once laissez-faire was no longer considered liberal, but conservative (this change occurred roughly in the 1890s).
Marx claimed that Darwinism was the natural-historical foundation for his own philosophy. However, Marx later privately criticized the Malthusian element in Darwinism, and Engels launched a frontal attack on social Darwinism (while embracing Darwinism nonetheless).
Incidentally, eugenics was also favored more on the left than on the right politically at first. In Europe it was mostly non-Marxian socialists (Karl Pearson, Alfred Ploetz, Ludwig Woltmann, Wilhelm Schallmayer, etc.) who were the early leaders of the eugenics movement. Eugenics was not a right-wing phenomenon in the early 20th century, nor is it a right-wing phenomenon today.

I suspect he is right. remember the shock I felt when leftoid feminists dismissed the problem of late-term aborted babies left to die slowly in agony in the dirty linen closet, on the grounds that they were poor quality specimens of humanity anyway. How foolish I feel now for blurting out, "But I thought you were a socialist ...." Yes, of course, ... exactly. A socialist. Not a "human"ist.

■ Arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins and top ID math guy Bill Dembski have started making their letters public. This had to happen. Another stage in the mainstreaming of ID. Look, be grateful they are both straight guys who don't like each other. Hey, today things could be worse.

■ It's b-a-a-ck!: The claim that somehow Darwin believed in an intelligent or God-guided or theistic design of life. Or some such thing. A friend asked me to help sort it out. And as it happens, I was indeed able to help, but only by turning to a trusted source: Darwin didn't believe anything of the kind, as Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones shows, neatly disposing of the widespread but silly claim. If you are not already regularly checking Steve's incomparable CreatinEvolutionDesign blogspot, well, you should be. I'm only a hack and I only front news, but Steve ca really teach you something.*

What really intrigues me are the "religionists" - I don't know how else to term them - who need to believe and propagate the idea that classical Darwinists are, deep down, believers in traditional spiritual religions. We sometimes hear, from the same sort of people, that Darwinist Theodosius Dobzhansky was a good Christian. I don't blame the Darwinists for trying this stuff on with the wilfully gullible soccer moms (what else can they do?), but I have little patience with the overstuffed schoolmarms who front for the Darwinists, who should know better.

Look, get it straight, will you? If you are a serious Darwinist, you cannot really be a serious Christian. Make up your mind which side you awant to fall on.

*Funny thing, the two sites I have praised most recently are a Brit site and Steve's Aussie one, above. My Canuck Post-Darwinist isn't so bad either, when I actually have time to do it, but most of the time I have to mind the fish lines, ya know. See, the Yank ID guys always wanted the rest of us Anglophones to get involved, but it never occurred to them that, once we did, we would do it way better than them. Shhhhh. Forget them. Get the French involved, will you? I am SO sick of bran muffins and butter tarts. The French know how to live.

■ Here’s a story about a lab that does ID work, which Darwinists have not yet shut down (presumably because it relies on private funds). New Scientist reporter Celeste Biever dishes:

This science-first message suggests that the developing anti-evolution movement in the US has moved on to a new stage - one in which opponents of evolutionary biology, trained as research scientists, take to the lab in search of the creator's handiwork. In light of recent events, it also makes sense as a public relations strategy.

Her whole article is worth reading for the way in which she needs to keep reassuring New Scientist readers that there is something not quite right about this. I understand. It's a tough business, catering to readers’ expectations, but one need not - of course- absolutely descend to them. And, yes, yes, sci jo Celeste Biever is the very one who pretended to be somebody else while investigating the student IDEA clubs.

I wish she had asked me first before she had felt that was necessary. I could have told her that the IDEA types really are non-materialists (strange as that may seem to the typical New Scientist reader), but they should not be presumed to be Neanderthals with a taste for snake-handling on that account. They are mostly quite smart. There are good reasons for disbelieving in materialism. Darwinism, in its present state, is certainly one.

■ PhysicsWeb has a neat item on James Clerk Maxwell, a “force for physics”:

Unless one is a poet, a war hero or a rock star, it is a mistake to die young. James Clerk Maxwell – unlike Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, the two giants of physics with whom he stands – made that mistake, dying in 1879 at the age of just 48. Physicists may be familiar with Maxwell, but most non-scientists, when they switch on their colour TVs or use their mobile phones, are unlikely to realize that he made such technology possible. After all, in 1864 he gave us "Maxwell's equations" – voted by Physics World readers as their favourite equations of all time – from which radio waves were predicted.

I overheard a scientist mutter recently that we could certainly never do without Maxwell’s science contributions today but that we could do without Darwin’s very easily.

Oh, ... heresy! Fire UP the barbecue!! Be sure to select the Rick Sternberg heat on the dial. We like 'em well scorched!


■ Easily one of the most interesting articles of the year is by science journalist John Horgan, who, despite much criticism, continues to maintain in Discover ten years later, that the end of all things is at hand, at least for science.

Much criticism? How about this:

One of my most memorable moments as a journalist occurred in December 1996, when I attended the Nobel Prize festivities in Stockholm. During a 1,300-person white-tie banquet presided over by Sweden's king and queen, David Lee of Cornell University, who shared that year's physics prize, decried the "doomsayers" claiming that science is ending. Reports of science's death "are greatly exaggerated," he said.Lee was alluding to my book, The End of Science, released earlier that year. In it, I made the case that science—especially pure science, the grand quest to understand the universe and our place in it—might be reaching a cul-de-sac, yielding "no more great revelations or revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns." More than a dozen Nobel laureates denounced this proposition, mostly in the media but some to my face, as did the White House science advisor, the British science minister, the head
of the Human Genome Project, and the editors in chief of the journals Science and Nature.

Career limiting move? Well, a smart editor favors original thinkers for thinkmags, so it’s nice to see Horgan holding forth again in Discover.

But here's the part I find most interesting: Horgan maintains his point about the "end of science" pretty effectively, but please note: He clearly sees science as "applied materialism". For example, in support of his view he writes that one of the limits to knowledge is, "Evolutionary biology reminds us that we are animals, shaped by natural selection not for discovering deep truths of nature but for breeding."

Oh? Well, so much the worse for evolutionary biology then. Does anyone really believe that Euclid or Einstein were just trying to spread their genes? You see, this is where Darwinism ends and discoveries begin. But I am indebted to Horgan for making this clear.

■ Dennis Wagner of Access Research Network has posted his picks for top ten ID-related stories of the year, also podcasted by Discovery Institute. They include

- 60% of U.S. Medical Doctors Doubt Macroevolutionary Theory
- Fly Eye Important Blueprint for Creating Better Video Systems
- Europeans Question the Value of Teaching Macroevolution
- Over 600 Scientists Express Skepticism of Darwinian Evolution
- Scientists Conduct New Research Using Intelligent Design Theory.

If I get a chance, I will try putting together my own list. The founding of Truth in Science in Britain would certainly be on it.

My other blog is the Mindful Hack, which keeps tabs on neuroscience and the mind.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

My review of Francis Collins’ book The Language of God , my backgrounder about peer review issues, or the evolutionary biologist’s opinion that all students friendly to intelligent design should be flunked.

Lists of theoretical and applied scientists who doubt Darwin and of academic ID publications.

My U of Toronto talk on why there is an intelligent design controversy, or my talk on media coverage of the controversy at the University of Minnesota.

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

Blog policy note:Comments are permitted on this blog, but they are moderated. Fully anonymous posts and URLs posted without comment are rarely accepted. To Mr. Anonymous: I'm not psychic, so if you won't tell me who you are, I can't guess and don't care. To Mr. Nude World (URL): If you can't be bothered telling site visitors why they should go on to your fave site next, why should I post your comment? They're all busy people, like you. To Mr. Rudesby International and Mr. Pottymouth: I also have a tendency to delete comments that are merely offensive. Go be offensive to someone who can smack you a good one upside the head. That may provide you with a needed incentive to stop and think about what you are trying to accomplish. To Mr. Righteous but Wrong: I don't publish comments that contain known or probable factual errors. There's already enough widely repeated misinformation out there, and if you don't have the time to do your homework, I don't either. To those who write to announce that at death I will either 1) disintegrate into nothingness or 2) go to Hell by a fast post, please pester someone else. I am a Catholic in communion with the Church and haven't the time for either village atheism or aimless Jesus-hollering.

Why do people recant Darwinism just before they die?

I am really going to miss Richard John Neuhaus, who slipped away January 8 (1936-2008), quite unexpectedly. I got my February First Things earlier this week, knowing it was the last installment I would ever read of his "The Public Square," and especially of my favourite portion, "While We're At It," of which I am transcribing a bit for you below, a bit that is relevant to the intelligent design debate. And he is NOT an example of the problem I am commenting on here.

I first became aware of Neuhaus when he was a Lutheran pastor (he subsequently became a Catholic priest), because he was one of the first people ever to write against the "population bomb" hoax, in 1971 - when that very hoax was hot stuff in what we today call the legacy media.

Essentially, as Pamela Winnick has also pointed out, there was no population bomb. The rise of national government - which meant, among other things, the prohibition of local warfare, together with the worldwide spread of modern agriculture and medical techniques - simply meant that more people than ever before in history happen to be alive at the same time. This is an inevitable consequence of reducing child and young adult mortality. But inevitably then, birth rates begin to taper off. As Neuhaus recognized, there was unmistakable evidence that birth rates were already tapering off, even while editorialists were freaking out about the supposed "bomb."

Anyway, without more ado, here are some of Neuhaus's comments on Ernst Haeckel, Darwin's devoted German disciple:

Give a boy a hammer and he discovers the whole world needs hammering. Give an intellectual enthusiast a really big idea and he discovers it explains just about everything. Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was such an enthusiast and, along with many others, his really big idea was Darwinism. He had no problem with being accused of worshiping Darwin and was an influential popularizer of his thought. A new biography of Haeckel, The Tragic Sense of Life, by Robert Richards, notes his prodigious productivity, including what he considered a central pillar of Darwin's theory - the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. This means that in the first two months of development a human embryo can scarcely be distinguished the tailed embryo of a dog or other mammals. In other words, the embryo of a contemporary species goes through the same morphological changes in its development as its ancestors went through in their evolutionary descent. I have met people who still hold to Haeckel's theory and contend that an abortion only interrupts an evolutionary process, and we do not know what the embryo would have turned out to be at the end of its evolutionary development. Haeckel published a book with an illustration, juxtaposing three embryos (dog, chicken, and turtle) and pointing out, as evidence in support of Darwin's theory, that the three images were indistinguishable. A sharp-eye reviewer noted that they were indeed indistinguishable. The same woodcut had been printed three times. Haeckel's reputation never recovered. T.H. Huxley, "Darwin's Bulldog," wrote him a letter of consolation": "May your shadow never be less, and may all your enemies, unbelieving dogs who resist the Prophet of Evolution, be defiled by the sitting of jackasses upon their grandmother's graves!"

Okay, so anyone who doubts Huxley, and presumably, current Darwin perpetrators, should have their grandmother's grave defaced? Okay. At least they are making it clear. If this is a fight they want, they will get it.

Sadly, at one point, what Fr. Neuhaus writes is not strictly true. Haeckel's reputation totally recovered! He's part of the Darwin religion now. His beliefs about human embryos pioneered abortion legislation worldwide. (After a while, people began to acknowledge, of course, that abortion kills a human being, but - they now say- society is better off without the humans who merely punish their relatives by existing. That was after the abortion mob had confused the public by claiming that the human embryos were not human - as if anything could be more impossible in real science.)

And while we are here, why do so many people recant Darwinism just before they die?

In this world, today, isn't there some point at which guys with balls just push their way forward to say, "We know this is major crap and we will sign here to say so, and will fight for it?

Well, all power to those guys, and I will do anything I can to help them.

Hey, guys, do it. Do it for your kids. Don't your kids deserve a world in which we can know what is real and what isn't? Should your kids be listening to this or to something worthwhile? Think for a kid who wants to make it in science?

For what it is worth, Richard Weikart had intended to call his magisterial book on the contribution of Darwinism to Nazism "From Haeckel to Hitler" but the publisher insisted on titling it, From Darwin to Hitler. The book is sobering, and much recommended, however titled.


4

Recent events in the intelligent design controversy - 5

■ "Where science and ethics meet," Gregory Lamb's review of Freeman Dyson's The Scientist as Rebel notes,

For Dyson, scientists are neither secular saints who have an answer for every human need nor irresponsible devils without regard for human values. Science, for example, doesn't have solutions to the great issues of war and peace. But scientists can be advocates for international understanding and cooperation by serving as models of those values themselves, he says.

Science needs both its revolutionaries and conservatives, Dyson explains - those eager to abandon past views and those who defend them. It also needs both hedgehogs and foxes, scientists who dig deeply at a few fundamental problems (hedgehogs include Albert Einstein) and those who have wide interests and move quickly from problem to problem (foxes include Dyson's mentor, Richard Feynman).

I wonder how Dyson would feel about materialist scientists just leaving the ID guys alone to just get on with their work: One of them wrote me recently, saying poignantly, "If only they would just leave us alone, but they can't and won't." Of course not. If ID is right in any particular, materialism is dead.

■ In Commentary magazine, Eric Cohen's "The Human Difference" offers to explain why most North Americans do not accept the current science pundits' vision of the world:

On the evidence provided by nature, Darwin’s claim of common descent seems undeniably compelling; man’s emergence via genetic mutation and natural selection seems likely; and the possibility of man’s never emerging seems all too possible. Yet for all its insights into the development of complex life, the theory of evolution ends before the most interesting questions begin. Where did matter come from in the first place, and with it the latent possibility of man? What is the source of nature’s fixed laws, by which the chance process of evolution plays itself out? Why do animals seek to survive and reproduce at all, hungering for life even with its manifold sufferings?

To these questions, modern Darwinian theory has no compelling answer, and its methods are poorly equipped even to initiate the right sort of inquiry. Evolution may explain the mechanisms of man’s descent, but not the mystery of his ascent, including the wonder he exhibits about the origins and destiny of the cosmos—a wonder that serves no useful animal function. A theory of man’s origins is not yet a theory of man, let alone a theory about why there is something rather than nothing.

Well, exactly.

■ Do "molecular clocks" really predict history of evolution? Someone sent me this item from Trends Ecol Evol. (2006 Dec 6;: 17157408) by Mário J.F. Pulquério, and Richard A. Nichols School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London, London, E1 4NS, UK:

Opinion: Dates from the molecular clock: how wrong can we be?

Large discrepancies have been found in dates of evolutionary events obtained using the molecular clock. Twofold differences have been reported between the dates estimated from molecular data and those from the fossil record; furthermore, different molecular methods can give dates that differ 20-fold. New software attempts to incorporate appropriate allowances for this uncertainty into the calculation of the accuracy of date estimates. Here, we propose that these innovations represent welcome progress towards obtaining reliable dates from the molecular clock, but warn that they are currently unproven, given that the causes and pattern of the discrepancies are the subject of ongoing research. This research implies that many previous studies, even some of those using recently developed methods, might have placed too much confidence in their date estimates, and their conclusions might need to be revised.

Well, no one should be surprised that the history of life, like all other histories, can be very complex to untangle.

■ It is apparently not in principle the case that US judges are allowed to simply adopt the arguments of one side in a court case for their judgement, as some argue that Judge Jones did at Dover. I think the case is more complicate than that and in any event, I doubt Dover matters very much. Here is what I wrote to a group of (mostly) Yanks about it:

1. Think for the long term. The people who understand what you are saying about information [as a fundamental feature of the universe, not produced either by law or by chance] were born after 1990, and have never known a world that was not driven by information. I have pinned "1991" to my bulletin board, to remind me that the audience I am writing* for on my current wage job is about 16 years old. Not 60 years old. Just sweet sixteen.

2. Distinguish between (1) smoke, noise, and screaming and (2) direct hits on key targets. Possibly because I am a Canadian, but also because I am a journalist, I have trouble staying awake when people carry on about Dover and other accidents of the American judicial system.

See, Dover is mostly just smoke and noise. Judges and politicians cannot change reality by their rulings.

Case in point from one of my current jobs: In 1299, the city council of Florence (Firenze) in Italy banned the Arabic numbers and zero. This new system that could calculate numbers up to any size and do all kinds of other weird math. That frightened people who were used to clunky Roman numerals that had no zero and conked out after 1000. And how can you have a number like zero? T'ain't right.

So ... well, like I said, my key readers are sweet XVI, not LX ... and so ... oh, where was I? Ah yes, on to Point III ...

III. Dawkins ... can probably see at least what I can see - that is all isn't working any more. People know they have a spiritual nature. It's just a fact - and the life and times of West African apes or computers don't in fact shed much light on that. (Bonzo, quit stomping on that keyboard or I am whacking you back into your cage and nada bananas for you ... )

IV/4. I can't speak for other professions, but I can tell you how most media will behave at this point, and you will see my predictions come true time after time in the new year. Most media people respond to their anxiety about a paradigm change by seeking confirmation that the paradigm they actually believe in is correct. They often seek/manufacture stories that demonstrate that and they always frame stories to reflect it. I could almost write a book about that, but why bother?

Did I really write "why bother"? Come to think of it, I am the co-author on a book that addresses that precise situation - among other things (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, The Spiritual Brain, Harper 2007).

■ Some clowns are happy, some sad, and a few are ... well, nasty. Someone alerted me to this item from the Thumbsmen's blog (the self-constituted anti-ID group):

Posted by Steve B on December 9, 2006 5:08 PM (e)
REVIEWING BRAD
Brad is clearly an inferior and unfit individual who should not survive in a forum such as this. In fact agnostics, IDists and creationists should be exterminated or at the very least put in camps somewhere - obviously since their presence does nothing but hinder evolutionary progress.

With these thoughts in view I commend Glen Davidson, Poppers Ghost et.al. for having the courage to eviscerate Brad for even suggesting that evolution might not be correct. The others here also deserve high commendation for helping present a unified front in this regard.

My correspondent suggests that this might be intended as a joke, to see if anyone takes the bait by taking the correspondent seriously. If so, it is el floppo grande , but I reasonably believe that some threats against ID types, etc., are not. My usual practice in these matters is to reproduce such writings. Better to reproduce a failed joke than fail to produce a police lead.

■ For anyone who assumed otherwise, Edwin T. Oakes' review of Richard Weikart's From Darwin to Hitler makes clear that Darwin was indeed a social Darwinist.

One of the most pernicious and widespread fictions ever foisted on an unsuspecting public claims that Charles Darwin was not a social Darwinist. Not so. For example, in a letter to one William Graham dated July 3, 1881, Darwin wrote:

I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago, of being overwhelmed by the Turk, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.

The part I find fascinating is why anyone would doubt that a Victorian Brit toff like Darwin would have that view on such matters, or bother to deny it. Why bother, if he is not the messiah of a new religion? But then, he is, isn't he?

(Note: Re, being overwhelmed by the Turk: This could happen in Toronto if you are looking for a great computer guy who charges reasonable prices and won't sell you stuff you don't need.. In fairness, however, my most recent great computer guy happened to be from Iran.)

My other blog is the Mindful Hack, which keeps tabs on neuroscience and the mind.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

My review of Francis Collins’ book The Language of God , my backgrounder about peer review issues, or the evolutionary biologist’s opinion that all students friendly to intelligent design should be flunked.

Lists of theoretical and applied scientists who doubt Darwin and of academic ID publications.

My U of Toronto talk on why there is an intelligent design controversy, or my talk on media coverage of the controversy at the University of Minnesota.

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

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