Posted by I won’t comment on the execrable link made by that execrable TV show. Some things aren’t worth the effort. But those whose minds aren’t made up may still have a sneaking suspicion that somehow evolutionary theory was responsible for some part of the Holocaust. After all, that sneaking suspicion is what the unDiscovery Institute wants to implant.
So, what’s the real story?
There are several ways in which evolution might have made it possible for the sort of racial eugenics that rationalised (not motivated – the German tradition of anti-Semitism goes back as far as Luther, and to the middle ages) the Nazis’ actions.
One is that it might have underpinned the idea that Jews and Slavs and Gypsies were subhuman or less evolved subspecies. Let’s not forget that the Nazis hated the Russians and Slavs as much as the Jews, and saw the Gypsies as, ironically, non-Aryan (ironically, because they came from India originally and have a much better claim to being Aryan than the Germans). Call this the subhuman thesis.
Another is that evolution might have provided the genetic breeding ideas that the Nazis relied upon. Call this the eugenics thesis.
A third is that evolution, with its survival of the fittest doctrine, might have underpinned the idea that some nations were fitter than others, and therefore should be allowed to do what they want. Call this the national selection thesis.
A fourth is that ideas that were tied in with evolution might have contributed to the nationalism of Germany, and to a lesser extent, Japan. Call this the cotraveller thesis.
Let’s look at these ideas and see what we can find. This post will address the first claim and move into the second.
The subhuman thesis relies on there being a scale from 0 to 1 according to which different “races” can be assessed as being fully human. According to Darwinian theory, there is no such scale. Instead that idea comes from the pre-Darwinian biology that developed out of the medieval notion of the Great Chain of Being. The Great Chain had steps from simple being to fully rational being that relied on Aristotle’s notion that living things exhibit one or more of several “souls”. In the late Renassiance version, there were the souls of “simply existing”, to “living”, to “sensible” (able to respond to stimuli in modern terms) to “rational”, as in the following figure from the 16th century. This was a moral chain, too: on the right hand side are the moral states equivalent to the organic states on the left:
In the 18th century, this was transformed to a scale of organic beings, as here in the figure redrawn from Charles Bonnet in the 1760s:
Bonnet was not an evolutionist – indeed, the idea wasn’t even widely discussed (only Pierre Maupertuis had proposed anything like it before this). This was the way God had made the world. The Great Chain was reflected in the racial classification of Johann Blumenbach, which became the widely accepted basis for racial classification thereafter, although Buffon showed considerably more discrimination in his description of the races, denying the existence of a single “negro” race, as did the Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper.
Blumenbach’s five races, based on skull morphology, with the Caucasian “race” in the centre.
Immediately, people began to identify these races with more advanced and noble levels in the human race, and by the early 19th century, these sorts of figures were common. This one is by Charles White, from 1799:
See the other images at that site. It is clear that the tradition of racial ranking predates evolutionary theory by a considerable margin. Towards the end of the 19th century a school of anthropology formalised this racial classification, drawing in part on evolutionary ideas, but they were the ideas of pre-Darwinian evolution, not that based on natural selection.
Did natural selection get used to justify these racial classifications? Yes, it did. There were some execrable writings that used NS to try to justify the claim that this or that “race” (which was often as not a national ethnic group rather than a biological race) was better adapted or more highly “evolved” (a term that means nothing biologically). I have in my shelves two books that illustrate this.
One book is Social Evolution by Benjamin Kidd (1895), in which he talks about “savage races”, as Darwin had in the Descent of Man (1872). Here it is not clear that Kidd thinks these races are biological realities, though – he talks about selection being not between races as such but between “peoples” or “socities”. Prior to a clear distinction between social and political entities on the one hand, and biological entities on the other, which did not appear until some time later, people often shifted between asserting the superiority of a society and the superiority of the underlying biological differences, without realising they had equivocated. Kidd talks about “the Anglo-Saxon” exterminating the “less developed peoples” more efficiently than any before. He (repugnantly, to us) thinks this is progress, but it isn’t clear that he means by this that the biological differences are the cause of this “progress”, but rather the cultural differences. Of course, this is also put down to the “temperament” of these “races” or societies, a tradition that goes back many centuries. In the period of imperialism, it was common to think that a “race” was “childlike” because of the lack of sophistication of their culture. Some thought that this was inevitable, and they would be exterminated by competition, while others thought this was merely a matter of education and assimilation into the (superior) European society.
The same year, though, Darwinism and Race Progress was published by a physiologist, John B. Haycraft. This is a truly awful book – he thought, it seems, that races were like individual organisms, with a period of growth, maturity and decay, and that they had “muscle, blood and brain”. He does make a distinction between “the innate and organic” and the “political power and influence”, which is almost like a biology/culture division. But he thinks there are naturally superior “types”, particularly the Scandanavian, and oddly, the Jew. He thinks that the Spanish are undergoing “racial degeneration” via interbreeding with “lower races”. His solution is for “the clever man and woman to earn a better livelihood, marry early and have large families, while the stupid ones should produce fewer children, a condition which at present is far from being the rule” (p22).
Why should he say this, if natural selection is the guarantee of progress he thinks it is? It is not natural selection to breed the clever and inhibit breeding of the stupid this way. In fact, it is very clearly artificial selection, or, as it was known for the thousand years before him, animal husbandry.
And this is where the crucial point is – this sort of eugenics never was based on variation and inadvertent selection of advantageous variants, but on the deliberate breeding of the varieties one wants to encourage in the breeding stock, whether it be a kind of bull or a kind of warrior. It is the very antithesis of natural selection. And it is the very same argument put by the Spartans, whose breeding programs were indeed aimed at better warriors, and by Plato in his Republic. So far from being an outcome of Darwinian ideas, or even evolutionary ones, this is the default view of how to improve the tribe, the city state, the class, the culture or the nation.
It is true that the modern form of eugenics was begun by the work of Darwin’s cousin, which is no slur on Darwin (I’m very sure my own cousins would be aghast at me), but Galton’s work is at best partly related to Darwin’s. He says in the section on the “Comparative Worth of Different Races” in hisHereditary Genius,
Every long-established race has necessarily its peculiar fitness for the conditions under which it has lived, owing to the sure operation of Darwin’s law of natural selection. However, I am not much concerned, for the present, with the greater part of those aptitudes, but only with such as are available in some form or another of high civilisation. [Emphasis mine]
Note: he is not saying that races are ill adapted or less evolved, but he is concerned only about those things that relate to culture. In short, he is decidely not basing this on evolution or natural selection. The rest of that chapter is the usual Eurocentric mishmash of “travellers’ tales” and cultural question begging, and of course, Europeans, specifically the Anglo-Saxon, come out best. He concludes:
The explanation I offer… is neither more nor less than that the development of our nature, whether under Darwin’s law of natural selection, or through the effects of changed ancestral habits has not kept pace with the development of our moral civilisation.” [Emphasis mine]
Pretty clearly Galton depends not at all for his argument on natural selection, but on anything that could cause what he is really interested in – “types of intelligence”.
That eugenics always appealed, after Darwin, to evolutionary considerations is no more surprising than that it appealed before Darwin to the principles of animal breeding, or the theories of inheritance in the “blood” (“blood will tell”, “of good stock”, and the usual cliches of the aristocratic form of eugenics practised from the middle ages until today). In fact, eugenics, if it is connected to any science at all, is the precursor to genetics, not evolution. The work of R. A. Fisher, Karl Pearson, and the other geneticists who promoted eugenics of the “positive” kind (as in positively encourage the fit, rather than negatively cull the weak), relied very litte if at all on evolution, and typically, like Galton, insisted that evolution could not be trusted to purify the race or maintain the standing of the “superior races”, and needed to be controlled by artifical selection.
These posts take a long while to write and research so I’ll probably return to the eugenics thesis next time, in about a week.
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