There have been great social effects of evolution in regards to its acceptance by various individuals in the course of history. The theory of evolution has been influential in regards to Social Darwinism, Nazism, Communism, and racism.
The staunch evolutionist Stephen Gould admitted the following:
“ Haeckel was the chief apostle of evolution in Germany.... His evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a "just" state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others; the irrational mysticism that had always stood in strange communion with his brave words about objective science - all contributed to the rise of Nazism. - Stephen J. Gould, "Ontogeny and Phylogeny," Belknap Press: Cambridge MA, 1977, pp.77-78). ”
Robert E.D. Clark in his work Darwin: Before and After wrote concerning Hitler's evolutionary racism:
“ The Germans were the higher race, destined for a glorious evolutionary future. For this reason it was essential that the Jews should be segregated, otherwise mixed marriages would take place. Were this to happen, all nature’s efforts 'to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being may thus be rendered futile' (Mein Kampf). ”
Dr. Clark also wrote “Adolf Hitler’s mind was captivated by evolutionary teaching — probably since the time he was a boy. Evolutionary ideas — quite undisguised — lie at the basis of all that is worst in Mein Kampf — and in his public speeches”.
Richard Hickman in his work Biocreation concurs and wrote the following:
“ It is perhaps no coincidence that Adolf Hitler was a firm believer in and preacher of evolutionism. Whatever the deeper, profound, complexities of his psychosis, it is certain that [the concept of struggle was important for]. . . his book, Mein Kampf clearly set forth a number of evolutionary ideas, particularly those emphasizing struggle, survival of the fittest and extermination of the weak to produce a better society. "
Noted evolutionary anthropologists Sir Arthur Keith conceded the following in regards to Hitler: “The German Fuhrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practices of Germany conform to the theory of evolution”.
B. Wilder-Smith wrote the following regarding Nazism and the theory of evolution:
“ One of the central planks in Nazi theory and doctrine was …evolutionary theory [and] … that all biology had evolved … upward, and that … less evolved types … should be actively eradicated [and] … that natural selection could and should be actively aided, and therefore [the Nazis] instituted political measures to eradicate … Jews, and … blacks, whom they considered as “underdeveloped”.’ ”
Pulitzer Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson wrote the following regarding Hitler's racism in the November 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine:
“ While it is true that persecution of the Jews has a very long history in Europe, it is also true that science in the twentieth century revived and absolutized persecution by giving it a fresh rationale — Jewishness was not religious or cultural, but genetic. Therefore no appeal could be made against the brute fact of a Jewish grandparent.
Dawkins deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil "in the name of. . . an insane and unscientific eugenics theory." But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point. Science quite appropriately acknowledges that error should be assumed, and at best it proceeds by a continuous process of criticism meant to isolate and identify error. So bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion. That both of them can do damage on a huge scale is clear. The prestige of both is a great part of the problem, and in the modern period the credibility of anything called science is enormous. As the history of eugenics proves, science at the highest levels is no reliable corrective to the influence of cultural prejudice but is in fact profoundly vulnerable to it.
There is indeed historical precedent in the Spanish Inquisition for the notion of hereditary Judaism. But the fact that the worst religious thought of the sixteenth century can be likened to the worst scientific thought of the twentieth century hardly redounds to the credit of science."
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Joseph Stalin was greatly influenced by the work of Charles Darwin.
Dr. Josef Mengele's evolutionary thinking was in accordance with social Darwinist theories that Adolph Hitler and a number of German academics found appealing. Dr. Joseph Mengele studied under the leading proponents the "unworthy life" branch of evolutionary thought. Dr. Mengele was one of the most notorious individuals associated with Nazi death camps and the Holocaust. Mengele obtained a infamous reputation due to his experiments on twins while at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Prominent evolutionist and atheist Richard Dawkins stated the following regarding Adolf Hitler in an interview: “What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question." The interviewer of Richard Dawkins wrote the following regarding the Richard Dawkins comment about Hitler: "I was stupefied. He had readily conceded that his own philosophical position did not offer a rational basis for moral judgments. His intellectual honesty was refreshing, if somewhat disturbing on this point."
In addition to greatly influencing Hitler's Nazism, evolutionary ideas influenced the thinking of the Communists, including Marx, Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin. Marx wrote, "Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history." Marx offered to dedicate the second German edition of his polemic "Das Kapital" to Charles Darwin, but Darwin declined the "honour."
Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn was asked to account for the great tragedies that occurred under the brutal communist.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn offered the following explanation:
“ Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.
Since then I have spend well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."
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Charles Darwin wrote: "When we descend to details, we cannot prove that a single species has changed; nor can we prove that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the groundwork of the theory.” In addition, Charles Darwin was an evolutionary racist.
As noted earlier, evolutionary ideas contributed to the scourge of racism. Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley contributed greatly to the theory of evolution broadly being accepted in the 1900s. Darwin, Huxley, and the 19th century evolutionists were racist in sentiment and believed the white race was superior. For example, Charles Darwin wrote in his work The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex the following:
“ At some future period not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes...will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest Allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as the baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
John C. Burnham wrote in the journal Science the following:
“ After 1859, the evolutionary schema raised additional questions, particularly whether or not Afro-Americans could survive competition with their white near-relations. The momentous answer was a resounding no.... The African was inferior — he represented the missing link between ape and Teuton." ”
Harvard University's Stephen Jay Gould stated, "Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory."
Australian atheist and philosopher David Stove argues that evolutionary ideas were influential in regards to the sexual revolution. In his work entitled Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution, Stove states that The “new religion of selfish genes” classifies all humans as biological errors. Stove further states that “the great sexual emancipators after 1859” (Ellis, Freud, Lenin, Stopes, Sanger, Mead, Reich) "were all Darwinians" and that genetics supplied "the new religionists" their gods ... the chromosomes of the sex cells.”
Per capita atheists and agnostics in the United States give significantly less to charity than theists even when church giving is not counted for theists.
http://www.conservapedia.com/Social_Effects_of_the_Theory_of_Evolution
Topic: Influence of Evoloution Theory On Hitler, Marx & Stalin (Read 1262 times)