In article <1ggi0qw.gau4hhvjhzqwN%john_SPAM@wilkins.id.au>,
john_SPAM@wilkins.id.au (John Wilkins) wrote:

If Goebbels used the notion of contagion, a theory that gained
scientific standing about the same time as evolutionary ideas, in a film
about the Jews, can we say that Pasteur has contributed to the
Holocaust? For Goebbels manifestly did use that metaphor.

It was a metaphor (as you point out), and clearly used as such by Nazis
all the way up to Hitler. So was the metaphor of the Jews as a "cancer."
In contrast, racial hygiene was considered to be a science at the time.
It was advocated by the most prominent Nazi medical authorities and
served as the basis for the Nuremberg Laws.

Is recognition
of the scientific standing of an idea sufficient to account for the use
people make of it?

A tough question. I suspect it depends on how directly the idea leads to
the specific use.

Why do we not say that Pasteur contributed to the
Holocaust in the same way?

Because the description of Jews as a contagion was clearly a metaphor.
The use of racial hygiene was not. The struggle for existence and
reproduction was presented as a "harsh fact" that justified racial
hygienic policies.

If you are consistent, then you must do this. If you won't, because you
think it obviously silly (as I do), why is Darwin so different? I
believe it is because people think that Darwin's ideas have a different
standing to those of Pasteur, and so they do not apply the same filter.
I want to know what that difference in standing is.

Darwin's ideas and Pasteur's ideas are of similar stature in the world
of biology. However,

No doubt you will disagree, but I see a strong reference to Darwinian
concepts of natural selection as a justification for the policies he
later describes, which involve "letting nature take its course" with the
mentally ill and "genetically defective."

Yes, he does that. He assumes that "Darwinism" assumes that might is
right, and what is ought to be.

Yes, but Darwin was often misinterpreted that way. He still is.

My reaction though, is that this was
never Darwin_ian_, and in fact precedes Darwin by centuries. All that is
happening here is that Gross is saying that in the absence of human
intervention thus and so occurred, so we should allow it to. Is *that*
idea a Darwinian one?

It is based on a misapplication of Darwin's ideas. The concept of not
helping those with defects bad enough that they would normally not live
long enough to reproduce without human intervention is simply letting
natural selection occur normally, as it did before modern medicine.

No - in point of fact it rests on Galton's works, in particular his
biometrical studies in what became the. This is the classical eugenics
account, and it traces directly back to Galton (there is a hint of it,
influenced directly by Galton, in the _Descent_. Darwin had read
_Hereditary Genius_ not long before). But the ideal that what is natural
is better can be found long before that - in Rousseau for instance.
There is a massive industry tracing these ideas of Nature.

Yes, but of "selection"?

So the question before us is, had Darwin and Wallace and Weismann and
Haeckel never published a word on natural selection, how would that
passage above be different? I would suggest he might have started off
quoting the Republic of Plato, or the accounts of the Spartans who
practised a negative eugenics 2400 years earlier. The rest of the
passage could be left untouched.

Maybe.

But if Galton had not been around, and his ideas never touted, then the
passage would have had to be very different. And this is a distinct
question from what the underlying motivations are due to. If neither
Galton nro Darwin nor any of their followers had existed; if Mendel had
not been rediscovered, if genetics were in the very same state as during
the epigenesis/preformationist debate of the 17thC; the Nazis would
still have wanted to "purify" their Lebensraum and Volk.

Possibly, but they would have had to find a different justification for
their euthanasia policies (at least) than letting natural selection
again take its course. Certainly, they could have justified their
policies against the Jews and Slavs and for selectively breeding "true
Aryans" on the need to keep the "volk" pure--and indeed they did just
that. However, without the distorted version of Darwin that is racial
hygiene, it would have been more difficult to carry out the policy of
euthanasia of "defectives," because a large part of that policy depended
upon the enthusiastic cooperation of the medical/scientific professions,
indeed the instigation of the policy by high-ranking Nazi doctors and
scientists, who influenced the racial policies of the Party. These
scientists were convinced of the need for removing "defectives" not by
the appeal to Lebensraum and purifying the Volk, but rather by the
appeal to science, specifically the pseudo-Darwinian principles known as
racial hygiene. Certainly Hitler's other arguments had an effect, but
these men considered themselves men of science, and they
enthusiastically embraced racial hygiene, using it as justification for
the euthanasia program.

This is "what-if" history, I know, but if you ask a question what causal
role something had on another thing, you are, in effect, asking what
would have been different had the former not preceded the latter - and I
think it is a reasonable comment to make that Darwin is not a major
component of the eugenics movement, despite his own son being a major
player in that movement in the UK. But the use of his technical terms
and ideas clearly are. Whether that is what *caused*, even in part, the
Holocaust is extremely moot.

Of course, I never claimed that "Darwin caused the Holocaust." My only
claim was that the racial hygienists who were so influential in
formulating Nazi eugenics and racial polices WERE influenced by Darwin,
or at the very least a distorted version of Darwin.

Look, nobody is denying - at least I am not - that there was a movement
called "Darwinism" in the period from around 1880 to 1930 which
contributed to eugenics, nor that among those ranks there were racists
including Haeckel, a noted anti-Semite. And Leonard Darwin wrote a
eugenics tract he explicitly dedicated to his father. But movements have
names for reasons of contingency rather than definition, and so far as I
can tell, given the way the OP phrased the question (what contribution
did Darwin, not Darwinism, make to the Holocaust?), Darwin made not the
slightest bit of difference to the Holocaust.

Darwin himself? Certainly. His ideas? That is debatable. (Realize that I
simply equated "Darwin" with "Darwinism" in the original post. I did not
rise to the obvious bait. Perhaps I was too generous.)

His ideas did not form the
foundation of racial hygiene in any sense other than being the factual
basis on which they built their pseudoscientific edifice, just as
contagion formed the factual basis on which they propagandised against
Jews in Europe.

I beg to differ. The use of the word "contagion" to describe the Jews
was clearly a metaphor used predominantly by politicians like Hitler or
Goebbels, as was the use of the word "cancer." Racial hygiene was not a
metaphor. It was a pseudoscientific movement built on a toxic brew of
Darwinism, eugenics, and genetics.

john_SPAM@wilkins.id.au (John Wilkins) on 30 Jun 2004 posted

If you want my
opinion, the Vienna School of Art probably has more to do with it.

For 'rejcting hitler' or for being part of the anti-rational movement?

david ford wrote:

What is Darwin's contribution, if any, to the coming of the Holocaust?

Nothing.

The Nazi claim of racial superiority was never based
on the theory of evolution - not Darwin's version, anyway.

Rather it was based on a weird blend of Christianity, Norse
mythology, and the Theosophical ravings of Madame Blavatsky.
While the latter did claim a sort of "evolution", it
was in no way scientific and not related at all to
Darwin's theory.

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004 01:56:02 +0000 (UTC), Orac <orac@mac.com> wrote:

However, it was still very cunningly
wrapped in scientific and pseudoscientific justification. I suggest that
it is doubtful that, without the concepts Darwin produced (natural
selection), that the Nazis would have been able to come up with such
seemingly compelling justifications for the concept of "protecting" the
German race from being contaminated with "inferior genes" and the
concept that races, just like individuals, also go through a Darwinian
struggle to out-compete and out-reproduce their competitors.

Except you seldom read of Nazis actually using this sort of rhetoric
to defend their racial policies. I have my doubts whether you've
found Nazis using the term "inferior genes."

More likely than not,
Nazis evoked medical metaphors, comparing Jews and inferior races to
germs and contagion.

The policies for dealing with germ and contagion
are straight forward: quarantine and extermination.

Like everyone else making this sort of argument you have first
discussed people putatively influenced by Darwin

but people active
in the late 19th century and the first ten of the 20th.

From there
the facts stop and a leap is made: whatever influence Darwin was
suppose to have had on certain people active at the
turn-of-the-century is without explanation is transfers to Nazi active
30 or 40 years later. I see no reason to buy this.

On Sat, 3 Jul 2004 13:53:56 +0000 (UTC), Orac <orac@mac.com> wrote:

The pieces may have existed before Darwin, but Darwinism provided a
nice, neat umbrella to allow scientific racists to tie them all together
into a seemingly logical, rational, and "scientific" whole.

Irrelevant to anything meaningful. Science showed astounding success
in the 18th and 19th centuries. It has started to explain so much of
the world so that people in other area of endeavor tried to claim the
mantle of that success. We got scientific socialism and religious
science and scientific racism. There was nothing in the content of
Darwin that provided anything to the Nazis, it was simply the
successful science and they claimed the mantle of science.

In article <cbupjl$qnj$1@info4.fnal.gov>, EjP <nospam@hackers.are.bad>
wrote:

david ford wrote:

What is Darwin's contribution, if any, to the coming of the Holocaust?

Nothing.

Not exactly.

The Nazi claim of racial superiority was never based
on the theory of evolution - not Darwin's version, anyway.

True, but Darwin's name was used widely, and in Nazi Germany a
perversion of his theory was applied to society at large. But it didn't
start with the Nazis by any means. In 1895, Alfred Ploetz based his
concept of "racial hygeine" (in essence social Darwinism and eugenics)
on Darwin, a concept in which the "harshness" of evolution by natural
selection would be replaced by man taking over his own evolution by
deciding which babies should live and die shortly after their birth,
with babies thought not to be fit enough euthanized. The overall concept
is that evolution through natural selection would come to be replaced by
humans "rationally" guiding their own evolution.

Rather it was based on a weird blend of Christianity, Norse
mythology, and the Theosophical ravings of Madame Blavatsky.
While the latter did claim a sort of "evolution", it
was in no way scientific and not related at all to
Darwin's theory.

Agreed, the Nazi concept of evolution was not scientific and it was a
perversion of Darwin's concepts. However, it was still very cunningly
wrapped in scientific and pseudoscientific justification. I suggest that
it is doubtful that, without the concepts Darwin produced (natural
selection), that the Nazis would have been able to come up with such
seemingly compelling justifications for the concept of "protecting" the
German race from being contaminated with "inferior genes" and the
concept that races, just like individuals, also go through a Darwinian
struggle to out-compete and out-reproduce their competitors.

What is Darwin's contribution, if any, to the coming of the Holocaust?

T. H. Huxley's?
Haeckel's?
Nietzsche's?

What is Darwin's contribution, if any, to the coming of the Holocaust?

T. H. Huxley's?
Haeckel's?
Nietzsche's?

What is Darwin's contribution, if any, to the coming of the Holocaust?

T. H. Huxley's?
Haeckel's?
Nietzsche's?