Orac is the nom de blog of a humble pseudonymous surgeon/scientist with an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his miscellaneous verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few will. (Continued 
I knew there was a reason why I like bioethicist Art Caplan.
Leave it to him not to be afraid not only to wander a bit afield of medicine than usual but also to call it as he sees it, mainly his argument for why Expelled! and its claim that "Darwinism" led directly to the Holocaust is not only historically incorrect but a form of Holocaust denial. I don't quite agree with him, but he makes a compelling argument:
The movie seeks to explain why, as a matter of freedom of speech, intelligent design should be taught in America's science classrooms and presented in America's publicly funded science museums. But what is really on display in this film is a toxic mishmash of persecution fantasies, disconnected and inappropriate references to fallen communist regimes and their leaders and a very repugnant form of Holocaust denial from the monotone big mouth Ben Stein.
Caplan explains:
The core of the movie consists of a sequence in which Stein visits the former German psychiatric hospital at Hadamar where the mass sterilization and murder techniques were first perfected that were later to be used in the concentration camps. Then Ben heads to Dachau, the first concentration camp, where 35,000 people died. These excursions are followed by a visit to Down House, Charles Darwin's country home outside of London where Ben looks warily at the memorabilia of Darwin's scientific work that led him to posit the theory of evolution. Stein finishes this sequence by bravely visiting a statue of Darwin where he stares the long deceased now marbleized evil-doer down while making it clear who is directly to blame for Hitler, the sterilization of tens of thousands of German children, the death of 6 million Jews and the deaths of countless other millions of victims of Nazism and those who died fighting the Nazi regime.This frighteningly immoral narrative is capped off with a lot of shots of the Berlin Wall, old stock footage of East German police kicking around those trying to escape through the wall to the West and some solemn blather by Ben, who calls upon each one of us to rise up in defense of freedom and knock down a few walls in order to get creationism back into the curriculum at Iowa State, Baylor, and other dens of American secular iniquity.
This is the core of what is ethically rotten about this movie. Darwinism did not lead to Nazism in Germany. Nor does Darwinism inherently contain the seeds of Nazism.
There were many nations, such as Brazil, where Darwinism led to no political ideology. There were some such as Britain which embraced Darwinism but saw a considerable number of their population killed trying to eliminate Nazism. There were other nations, such as the Soviet Union, where Darwinism was seen as so dangerous and subversive to state sponsored dreams of social engineering that those who espoused it were killed or exiled and a complete biological fairy tale, Lysenkoism, put into classrooms and agricultural policy ultimately leading to the deaths of millions from starvation.
And there were some nations where Darwinism was greeted with glee because it seemed so compatible with the prevailing ideology of the day. In particular the United States at the turn of the 20th century where robber-baron capitalists like the Carnegies, Mellons, Sumners, Stanfords and yes, even Jack London, could not stop rattling on about how the "survival of the fittest" justified crushing unions, exploiting immigrant labor or being left unregulated to amass huge fortunes while administering monopolies.
Ben Stein apparently understands none of this. He flags Darwin but does not bother to go and stare at the busts of Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Malthus so much beloved by American proponents of survival of the fittest.
[...]
To lay blame for the Holocaust upon Charles Darwin is to engage in a form of Holocaust denial that should forever make Ben Stein the subject of scorn not because of his nudnik concern that evolution somehow undermines morality but because in this contemptible movie he is willing to subvert the key reason why the Holocaust took place -- racism -- to serve his own ideological end. Expelled indeed.
Sadly, Ben Stein's not alone. David Klinghoffer, fellow at the Discovery Institute, recently dropped this drippy, stinking turd about the supposed connection between "Darwinism" and the Holocaust that is so despicable, so outrageous, that it's hard for me even to write about it as he begins with a single sentence:
Hitler understood something about Judaism that even many Jews today don't grasp.I mention this because you're soon going to be hearing a lot about a new movie, Expelled, which understands something about Hitler that, in turn, many Jews and non-Jews don't or don't want to understand.
I want you to stop and think about that for a moment. I have seen this very sentiment expressed on many a white supremacist website: That Hitler understood something about the Jews and Judaism that no one else, not even the Jews, did. Does Klinghoffer even know or care what Hitler "understood" about Judaism and the Jews? Here's a sampling of what Hitler "understood" about the Jews. To Hitler, the Jews were a "cancer" or an "infection" that had to be extirpated from the German nation. He "understood" them to be greedy bankers who controlled the money supply, strangling Germany economically; to be "depraved" and responsible for what he saw as the "degeneration" of German culture during the Weimar Republic; and as completely alien to German culture. In short, Hitler "understood" Jews and Judaism as nothing more than an implacable enemy of Germany that must be removed by any means necessary and/or destroyed utterly. What he "understood" about Judaism was in essence The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as justification for what he saw as pre-emptive genocide to purify the German volk of what he viewed as a malign influence that would destroy it.
That's what Hitler "understood" about the Jews and Judaism.
Come to think of it, Ben Stein and the makers of Expelled!, not to mention Klinghoffer, understand evolution about as well as Hitler understood Judaism. The rest of his vile article is argument enough for this point.
So what was it that Hitler supposedly "understood" about the Judaism that even the Jews don't understand, according to Klinghoffer? I almost can't read this without wanting to vomit, but this is what Klinghoffer argues:
A gentle soul, Darwin himself never advocated genocide. But in The Descent of Man, he predicted that the logic of natural selection made inevitable something like what Hitler attempted against the Jews:"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races."
What you would not readily foresee from reading Darwin's writings is that the race requiring extermination would turn out to be us Jews. But Hitler perceived an inner logic in Darwinism that even Charles Darwin didn't.
In the same chapter of Mein Kampf where the Darwinist flavor is most pronounced - Chapter XI, "Nation and Race" - Hitler comments that while his philosophical outlook is based on respecting Nature's laws, the Jews with their "effrontery" say the opposite: that "Man's role is to overcome Nature!"
Hitler notes with disgust that, "Millions thoughtlessly parrot this Jewish nonsense and end up by really imagining that they themselves represent a kind of conqueror of Nature."
There is, in other words, a Darwinian case for seeing the Jews as the ultimate Enemy. Darwin's portrait of reality in his books is one where Nature determines all. In The Descent of Man, he explains that even our morality is a product of natural selection just like everything else about us.
The Jews, Hitler wrote, defy nature and call others to do so. This is the characteristic "Jewish nonsense."
This doesn't even make sense on a most superficial level. Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews because they had the effrontery to believe that "Man's role is to overcome nature"? That's a belief that is not just based in Judaism; Christian doctrine is based on Judaism, and the line about "giving Man dominion" over nature is far more likely to be cited by a Christian than Jews. There's also more than ample evidence to link the anti-Semitism that drove Hitler to mass murder on an industrial scale to Christian beliefs. (Read some of Martin Luther's thoughts on the Jews sometime. They aren't pretty.) Just because Hitler used the supposedly Jewish desire to "dominate nature" as one of his justifications for exterminating the Jews does not mean that he had any insight into biology or "nature's laws." In fact, Hitler's understanding of how "nature" works is most definitely as flawed as that of any creationist, as a wider quoting of the chapter of Mein Kampf to which Klinghoffer refers readily demonstrates:
Thus men without exception wander about in the garden of Nature; they imagine that they know practically everything and yet with few exceptions pass blindly by one of the most patent principles of Nature's rule: the inner segregation of the species of all living beings on this earth.Even the most superficial observation shows that Nature's restricted form of propagation and increase is an almost rigid basic law of all the innumerable forms of expression of her vital urge. Every animal mates only with a member of the same species. The titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the finch, the stork the stork, the field mouse the field mouse, the dormouse the dormouse, the wolf the she-wolf, etc.
Only unusual circumstances can change this, primarily the compulsion of captivity or any other cause that makes it impossible to mate within the same species. But then Nature begins to resist this with all possible means, and her most visible protest consists either in refusing further capacity for propagation to bastards or in limiting the fertility of later offspring; in most cases, however, she takes away the power of resistance to disease or hostile attacks.
No wonder creationists like to quote Hitler so much to try to smear their hated "Darwinism" with the association. Hitler's understanding of biology was as bad as theirs. I trust that anyone with a knowledge of biology and evolution can spot the ignorance of biology, evolution, and, yes, even "Darwinism" in the above passage. Nothing in "Darwinism" claims that members of different species must mate with each other, and Hitler seems hopelessly confused about the definition of "species," confusing it with race. Indeed, Hitler seems to conflate the two, as the next passage clearly shows:
Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable.The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance, etc., of the individual specimens. But you will never find a fox who in his inner attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice.
Later in that same chapter, Hitler writes at great, pontificating length (as was his habit) about how the "Aryan" race is the "founder of culture" and superior, another conclusion that nothing in "Darwinism" leads to. In any event, nothing in evolutionary theory makes a value judgment of what is "superior" or "inferior." There are only traits that make an organism more adapted or less adapted to survive in its environment. These do not have to be strength, intelligence, dexterity, or endurance. None of these traits are inherently "superior" or "inferior" either. A trait that makes an organism less likely to survive in one environment could just as well be advantageous in a different environment. In other words, Hitler had no clue about how evolution works, and, as I've been saying all along, there is nothing inherent in Darwin's theory that demands genocide or eugenics. Rather, it is the twisted interpretations of individuals like Hitler that inferred genocide and eugenics from Darwin's theory when neither are inevitable consequences of it. Indeed, even if they were, it would not invalidate the scientific validity of evolutionary theory any more than the atom bomb invalidates quantum theory or Einstein's theory of relativity that made its development possible or that Hitler liked to invoke Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur as a justification for his Jew-hatred invalidates the germ theory of disease.
Reading over Klinghoffer's mind-bogglingly stupid and offensive attempt to link Darwinism and the Holocaust, I can't help but wonder if it's in reality an incredibly clever satire of the creationist love of argumentum ad Nazium with respect to evolution, but then I remember that it's a Discovery Institute fellow I'm talking about. His writings are so brain-dead that they can't be parodied without being mistaken for the real thing, according to Poe's Law. Between Ben Stein and David Klinghoffer, the stupid burns so brightly that it threatens to go supernova, obliterating the entire solar system. Truly, no Stupid-O-Meter can be set high enough to match what this not-so-dynamic duo of intellectual dishonesty can achieve without breaking a sweat.
Coming back to Art Caplan's arguments, although I agree with him that this dishonest constant attempt by creationists to paint Hitler as an inevitable consequence of Darwinism is a lie and inherently immoral in its intent and content, I'm not sure I'd go so far as to characterize it as "Holocaust denial." It is true that by blaming Darwin Klinghoffer, Stein, and their ilk are in essence denying the true causes of the Holocaust, but they do not deny that the Holocaust happened or attempt to minimize the death toll, as real Holocaust deniers do. There's a substantive difference between the two, and equating them actually weakens Caplan's argument. Indeed, Stein and Klinghoffer would probably have preferred it if even more people had died at Hitler's hands during the Holocaust. A higher death toll would have provided them with just that many more murdered victims that they could dishonestly place at Charles Darwin's doorstep.
Comments
If I'm reading this right, Klinghoffer is suggesting that the Jews are one of the "savage races" (or why else would this be the "inner logic in Darwinism"?). Either he doesn't understand his own argument, or the DI has an anti-semitic Jew on their books. This would be funny if it wasn't so awful, particularly in the context of discussing Hitler.
Posted by: Bob O'H | April 23, 2008 10:10 AM
Ooooh, that's a huge leap that isn't logically justified. He kind of tacks on the holocaust denialism at the end, almost as if he wants to pound a final nail in a point that was already well stated and argued. But the tacking on of it does more to harm his correct assessments of the movie and thinking behind it than anything else. Denying that a thing happened and denying that it happened for other reasons are two very, very different things. It's unfortunate because the article was quite interesting and another excellent call to reason in the wasteland that is intelligent design.
Posted by: Liesl | April 23, 2008 11:08 AM
"In any event, nothing in evolutionary theory makes a value judgment of what is "superior" or "inferior." "
And Darwin himself scribbled in one of his his notebooks, that he should be careful never to use the words "superior" and "inferior".
Posted by: Christophe Thill | April 23, 2008 11:44 AM
Again, the simple truth that many leading Darwinists in the early 20th Century promoted infanticide and involuntary euthanasia, as well as racial extermination seems to be lost on those who want to deny any link between Darwin's conclusions on how natural selection applies to human populations and the justifications used by the Nazi's for their actions.
Richard Weikart mentions several ethicists who liked to use Darwinism as an ethical framework. Great thinkers like Bartholomäus von Carneri, Friedrich Hellwald, Wilhelm Schallmayer, Alfred Ploetz, August Forel, Eugen Fischer, Fritz Lenz, and Theodor Fritsch.
In the last thread I was bombarded with "coincidence" to explain how science has advanced in the last 200 years and the decline of the belief in God by scientists. Now I see coincidence has no place in the argument.
You know, a great new idea came out prior to the development of people leading millions in the first half od the 20th Century. That idea discussed the extermination of groups (species) based on pressures dealing with resources, populations and competition. Interest in that theory and how it applied to mankind and an increase in academic activity on eugenics just did not have an influence in Nazi Germany.
My goodness, the ideologues are up in arms. The application of Darwinian theory on a population seems to disturb the true believers. The cynic's application of the cynicism seems selective based on where the argument is heading. Like I mentioned in another post, the road to nihilism starts somewhere and many see Darwinism and atheism as one such logical place.
I await the FLAMES!
Posted by: cee | April 23, 2008 11:55 AM
Nothing in "Darwinism" claims that members of different species must mate with each other
Shouldn't that be "must not"? (the above is true as well, but doesn't match the Hitler quote)
Posted by: windy | April 23, 2008 12:14 PM
I hope, seeing that Caplan uses it, just like Darwinists have since the 1860s, that no one is going to bring up the phony gambit that "only creationists use the word 'Darwinism' again. Though, since even citing Darwinists use of it from T. Huxley to Richard Dawkins has made an impace to this piece of Sci-blog erudition, that's hoping for a lot.
Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | April 23, 2008 12:23 PM
Just changed glasses, make that
Though, since even citing Darwinists' use of it from T. Huxley to Richard Dawkins hasn't made an impact to this piece of Sci-blog erudition, that's hoping for a lot.
Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | April 23, 2008 12:38 PM
Straw man.
It's not that "only" creationists use the term "Darwinism." It's just that very few evolutionary biologists use the term anymore, Dawkins being an exception and that creationists do fetishize the term because it allows them to paint evolutionary theory as an ideology (like "Marxism," for example) rather than science. I would also point out that Caplan is not an evolutionary biologist.
Posted by: Orac | April 23, 2008 12:41 PM
Orac, it's not a straw man, it's the way every
English dictionary I looked defines the word. The charge of covert-creationism made when I used this perfectly standard English word in a pro-evolution post was the straw man. It's a gambit to avoid joining in an argument, just like the word "straw man" and "quote mining" generally is.
So, Richard Dawins' use of "Darwinism", as in the note I sent you the other day, doesn't count? I sent you other contemporary use of the word by another Darwinist. I seem to recall it used by Daniel Dennett and many others.
It doesn't help the effort to promote evolutionary science to distort everything from the historical record down to the dictionary in polemics over the mythic reputation of Charles Darwin.
Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | April 23, 2008 12:52 PM
Dictionaries define "theory" as not much more than a hunch; that does not mean that's what the word means in science. Citing dictionary meanings of words in arguments about science is generally the last refuge of someone defending a weak argument.
Posted by: Orac | April 23, 2008 12:55 PM
No, Expelled's "Darwin caused the Holocaust" thesis is not Holocaust denial. Only Holocaust denial is Holocaust denial.
There are many ideas about why Nazis perpetrated a genocide of the Jews. These range from obvious to plausible to dismissable to risible. Many of these are mutually compatible, part of a larger explanation.
I have given a lot of thought to why the Holocaust happened. That does not make me an expert to whom anyone should defer. But I have taken this seriously, and read a number of historical treatments and (translated) primary sources.
I am troubled by how the Holocaust has become a political weapon for contemporary debates. Intelligent Design. Global warming (Goodman's global warming denial is morally equivalent to Holocaust denial). Liberal fascism. American fascism (Hedges et al.). These politicized treatments often have a simplistic, sometimes monocausal theory of what the Nazis were about and why the Holocaust happened.
The Holocaust had a great deal to do with centuries-old Christian antisemitism. But it was not entirely about Christian antisemitism, as some SciBlogs commenters have implied on various threads. Is asserting that the Holocaust was simply about Christian antisemitism and nothing more yet another form of Holocaust denial? Of course not. The fact is that all sides have been oversimplifying the complex historical reality.
It is true that the Holocaust was not caused by Darwinism. It is also wrong to say that the Holocaust had absolutely NOTHING to do with Darwinism. I hate to give aid and comfort to the insufferable cee and other creationists, but the truth is the truth.
One thing that made the Holocaust different from previous mass murders of European Jews was that antisemitism had been biologicized. The Jews were not simply deniers of Christ but an enemy race that was a threat to Aryan stock. But even this is not entirely to crude applications of Darwinism to social affairs (Social Darwinism). For one thing, most American eugenicists were not antisemites, or at least not close to the degree that Nazis were.
There is a lot of discussion about how Hitler referred to germ theory, but little on how this relates to social organicism, which had been developed by Spencer and Haeckel as elaborations of evolutionary theory.
Michael Shermer acknowledges the role of Ernst Haeckel in the formation of Nazi biopolitics. By the way, it is overly simplistic to state that the Nazis banned Haeckel and leave the matter at that. In fact, while the Monist League was banned, an Ernst Haeckel Society was formed under SS auspices. While works of Darwin were banned, some believing Nazi scientists made contributions to the then-new Modern Synthesis. But like everything about Nazism, the story of Nazi biopolitics has been immensely simplified in the service of one agenda or another.
And it should be emphasized that Hitler was not the sole figure behind the Holocaust; many medical doctors and biologists were architects of the Final Solution. Their views, not just Hitler's, matter. And not an insignificant number of them were trained in the tradition of Darwin, Galton, and Haeckel, and they believed that their eugenics sounded rested on evolutionary science.
I also note that part of Hitler's discussion about breeding between species and races in Mein Kampf is this:
"If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile."
Surely there is disagreement over the implications of that statement.
We know for a fact that Hitler read and was inspired by Madison Grant's Passing of the Great Race (he called it his "Bible") and Baur, Fischer, and Lenz's Human Heredity. These books are steeped in Galtonian eugenic reasoning. (If you want to say that Galton had nothing to do with Darwin, that's yet another argument. Grant cites Descent of Man several times.) I have studied an American edition of BFL.
The creationists have dumbed down and grievously distorted historical truth in order to serve their ideological agenda. But we ought not fight error with error. Nor should the charge of Holocaust denial be used against what is not Holocaust denial, however egregious or offensive it is.
Something has happened to the discourse on the pro-science, pro-evolution side. It used to be "Eugenicists and Social Darwinists perverted evolutionary biology, and the Nazis were eugenicists and Social Darwinists as well as being in the tradition of Christian antisemitism." Now the dominant narrative seems to be "The Nazis had nothing to do with Darwinism. Period."
Posted by: Colugo | April 23, 2008 1:02 PM
I am wondering where this magic vacuum "space" is that seperates science from all other disciplines. I really want to find it so that I may enter the fairytale world Art Caplan lives and be content to know that humanity need not worry about technological advancement leading to immoral actions.
Posted by: cee | April 23, 2008 1:03 PM
As a Jew, I find it interesting that those who want to only deny the Nazi's application of Darwinian theory to my family overlook the more striking connection to "unfit" individuals like the old, mentally ill, severely disabled, etc..
Oh my, how convenient that the usual anti-Semitism I see from elite academia is put aside for the rational discussion (I sense some politcal correctness) but physically inferior beings selected for extermination (Darwin's word) by the Nazis are overlooked in the analysis.
Should I be comforted?
Posted by: cee | April 23, 2008 1:13 PM
OK, cee, as an atheistic half-Jew (me) to a Jew, what is your view of the role of centuries of European Christian antisemitism, including mass immolation, in the Holocaust? Or are you just going to rail against "Darwinism"?
Posted by: Colugo | April 23, 2008 1:17 PM
I stand by my claim that attributing the Holocaust to Darwinism is a gross and disgusting form of Holocaust denial. If you say that 6 million Jews died, not from racism and bigotry, but because of a plan to implement Darwinism, then you blur the ethical offense of the Holocaust and, in Stein's case, deliberately so.
Holocaust denial is not just about did an event happen or not. It is crucial to know why the Holocaust happened. And we do know--racism. To imply, suggest or pronounce other causes is to deny what happened just as surely as to say no one was killed in the concentration camps. History encompasses both events and their causes.
Denial is to ignore both.
Expelled is a vicious form of Holocaust denial.
Posted by: Arthur Caplan | April 23, 2008 1:22 PM
There is only one true Holocaust, as there is only one true God.
Ben Stein is a trained lawyer who connects Darwin to the only true Holocaust, but possibly connects incorrectly.
Ben Stein has never connected Jesus-of-Nazareth to the Holocaust, or claimed that Jesus or the Holy Ghost caused the Holocaust.
Claims that Ben Stein attacked Jesus are false.
Art Caplan re-frames Ben Stein as a Holocaust Denier for incorrectly connecting Darwinism to the Holocaust.
Hitler incorrectly connected Darwinism to his visions of a coming Holocaust, and Ben Stein is correct in making the Hitler connection but not the Darwinian connection.
It is true that Joseph Goebbels earned a doctorate in history, but turned to framing science before he died.
Whether or not Darwinism caused the only true Holocaust has not been settled in a court of law.
Whether-or-not Darwinisn caused the Armenian genocide is problematic.
But it remains logically true that the Armenian genocide can't be called a Holocaust because there is only one true Holocaust, as there is only one true God.
There is no Holocaust occurring to the Palestinain people in Gaza because there is only true Holocaust.
One million people murdered in Iraq cannot be called a Holocaust because there is only one true Holocaust.
Norman Finkelstein is the worst Holocaust denier of all.
Jimmy Carter denies the Holocaust when he talks with Hamas.
The procession of the Holy Ghost remains problematic.
Posted by: gerald spezio | April 23, 2008 1:35 PM
Shut up, Spezio.
Arthur Caplan: "And we do know--racism. To imply, suggest or pronounce other causes is to deny what happened just as surely as to say no one was killed in the concentration camps."
What about additional or complementary causes?
Is it Holocaust denial to cite a longstanding pattern of economic scapegoating of Jews - some of which done by those who did not view Jews as a separate race - as a cause of the Holocaust?
Some foundational German racial hygienists were not antisemitic at all, yet their research and policy prescriptions became part of Nazi biopolicy. Did these eugenicists have nothing to do with the Holocaust?
And let's unpack "racism." There are genetic, vitalistic, and spiritual notions of race and hence manifestations of racist ideology. There was a variety of approaches to race in German fascism before Nazism became the dominant strain. A spiritual racist/antisemite might argue that it is possible for a Jew or half-Jew to have an Aryan "soul," an impossibility under a mainly genetically-based racism.
And simply invoking racism cannot provide the sole explanation, because Nazis also viewed Slavs as an inferior race, but one that should be subjugated rather than wiped off the earth. Why were Jews deemed so threatening? For the answer, we need to look at notions of social organicism and even more specifically at the idea of social parasitism - which combined economic and biological antisemitism.
Why did so many Germans, including non-Nazis, comply with and aid in the Holocaust? It wasn't just hatred of the Jews, but profiting from their plunder, as Gotz Aly and other historians have recently discussed.
Are you going to call me a Holocaust denier?
Posted by: Colugo | April 23, 2008 1:40 PM
Citing dictionary meanings of words in arguments about science is generally the last refuge of someone defending a weak argument./i
Orac, denying the use of the dictionary doesn't do anything to strengthen your argument, especially since I also gave you the etymology and contemporary use of the word by today's most famous Darwinist of them all and another authority.
Huxley's fourth review of Darwin's book, The Origin of Species appeared in the April 1860 issue of the Westminster Review. Coining the word "Darwinism" as it is still used today in this review (it had been used before with regard to the work of Erasmus Darwin),
Huxley's fourth review of Darwin's book, The Origin of Species appeared in the April 1860 issue of the Westminster Review. Coining the word "Darwinism" as it is still used today in this review (it had been used before with regard to the work of Erasmus Darwin)
http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/guide4.html
- This book is not a dispassionate scientific treatise. Other books on Darwinism are, and many of them are excellent and informative and should be read in conjunction with this one.
- More, I want to persuade the reader, not just that the Darwinian world-view happens to be true, but that it is the only known theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery of our existence. This makes it a doubly satisfying theory. A good case can be made that Darwinism is true, not just on this planet but all over the universe, wherever life may be found.
- What the 'punctuationists' did, when they first proposed their theory, was to ask themselves: Given that, like most neo-Darwinians, we accept the orthodox theory that speciation starts with geographical isolation, what should we expect to see in the fossil record?
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Books/blind.shtml
Mainline eugenics can be understood as the product of the first meeting of Darwinism and medicine: the realization that evolution is ongoing, and the emerging concern that the human evolutionary process be rationalized and guided by the ideal of progress, and the human stock protected from harm.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucbtdag/bioethics/writings/eugenics.html
Darwin deserves the truth be told about him, he doesn't deserve distortion of history or the meaning of the English language.
Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | April 23, 2008 1:48 PM
Ben Stein knows how to market a brand.
Posted by: gerald spezio | April 23, 2008 2:27 PM
Through most of this debacle, I've thought that treating the Holocaust as nothing more than ammo for a cheap attack on science is at best one step up from Holocaust denial. It's defiling the graves of millions of victims for political gain. Truly despicable, and any human being should be ashamed of it. But Stein, who is Jewish, should be even MORE ashamed. He should know better. Can you get any lower than a JEWISH Holocaust denier?
Posted by: phantomreader42 | April 23, 2008 2:31 PM
Israel demands that Jimmy Carter "shut up" and get out of Palestine.
Condi Rice says: "We told Carter not to talk to Hamas."
Israel is committed to get the Palestinians' land by using genocidal "ethics."
Ethics is ethics.
Posted by: gerald spezio | April 23, 2008 2:36 PM
Colugo, some thoughts:
Thank you for mentioning the economic motivators for the rise of Naziism, as they're important and have largely been lost in this ongoing discussion. The wake of WWI left Germany economically crippled, and with injured national pride. The population was primed for a belligerant nationalist to rail against a scapegoat group. Luckily, the world learned lessons from this, and economic reconstruction of defeated nations was emphasized more after WWII than WWI.
Your earlier post suggests that since some Nazis used language appropriated from Darwin, that understanding of natural selection had some causal role. The first problem with this statement is that it confuses natural selection with artificial selection. Artificial selection is a millennia-old concept, and it's what Nazis and other eugenicists proposed.
The second problem is that the language used as a post-hoc justification for something is not necessarily a reliable indicator of actual cause. E.g.: Phrenology was a pseudoscience used to rationalize prejudice based on race and ethnicity, but one could hardly claim that it was the origin of such prejudice. Likewise, when people spout off half-baked mishmashes of Darwinian buzzwords to back up their antisemitism, their persecution fantasies, their religious dogma, their utopian dreams, or whatever; then it's not a result of science, it's a fallacious, post-hoc appeal to authority.
Of course, there were scientists and doctors and politicians in the USA and across Europe who supported eugenics, which should be a cautionary note.
Posted by: Spaulding | April 23, 2008 2:36 PM
Spaulding, the Israelis have been practicing artificial selection against the Palestinians for sixty years.
But I never see the term anti-Palestinianism.
Posted by: gerald spezio | April 23, 2008 2:46 PM
Shorter version:
People can play dress-up in mommy's labcoat while they say all kinds of ignorant, hateful crap - but that doesn't mean it's science's fault.
Posted by: Spaulding | April 23, 2008 2:47 PM
When marketing a brand, there is publicity and more publicity.
Johnnie Cochran invoked the Hitler frame with great success.
Ben Stein knows his courtroom framing.
Ben was valedictorian of his Yale Law School class.
Ben is successfully marketing the Holocaust by careful design - with science and Darwin as his vehicle.
Israel is giving the Palestinians a terrific dose of Holocaust studies too, but hardly anybody appears to know it.
Where is the UN or the US when Israel commits genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza?
As bad as it is, Ben Stein's propaganda can't hold a candle to the outright murder of Palestinians held in an Israeli Concentration Camp in Gaza.
Posted by: gerald spezio | April 23, 2008 3:19 PM
cee, do you refuse to accept the germ theory of disease because Hitler lifted phrases and terms from it to justify his hatred?
Posted by: Robster, FCD | April 23, 2008 3:22 PM
Ben Stein was just a tyke without a law degree when Holden Caulfield warned us;
"The movies will kill ya - they really will."
Posted by: gerald spezio | April 23, 2008 3:36 PM
Christ, Spezio, do you know what a paragraph is?
Posted by: Mike P | April 23, 2008 3:39 PM
I haven't seen Expelled, nor am I in a place to defend it because I'm skeptical of the benefit to the whole debate/culture war, but I think this claim is patently absurd unless "Holocaust denial" means something other than "denying the Holocaust actually occurred." If it doesn't, then the claim is just plain wrong since I have yet to see genuine evidence that Stein really believes that the Holocaust did not occur (and plenty of evidence that he does, such as the scene where he goes to Dachau). If it does, then the phrase needs to be unpacked, and it's still very misleading to use without explicitly stating what one means by it. In my opinion, it's a sneaky rhetorical tool to try and call Stein something that verges on defamation (I say "verges" only because of the verbiage "a form of...") just to take a jab at him.
And this:
This statement sets up a false dilemma: certainly one can't assume that since racism was obviously a reason for the Nazi atrocities, notions derived (correctly or incorrectly) on evolutionary theory can't have contributed. I would even think that, if someone felt that they had an ethical duty to exterminate a race that was supposedly consuming resources needed by others based on Darwin's theory, racism is exactly what you would call it, even though there was another underlying reason.
I'm usually somewhat sympathetic with the content I read here, but this post misses by a mile. One bad turn does not deserve another.
Posted by: The Christian Cynic | April 23, 2008 3:55 PM
Here is a map and text about Zionist designs for Palestine & the Middle East.
Why Supernation is not going to stop murdering Muslims and leave the Middle East.
Israel's chosen-ness and right to the Palestinian's land trumps all, including Professor Caplan's ethics.
http://www.theunjustmedia.com/the%20zionist_plan_for_the_middle_east.htm
Posted by: gerald spezio | April 23, 2008 3:57 PM
I've noticed it's often the same people who embrace the idea Hitler tried to extirpate the Jews because of Darwin who are the voices railing against Jewish "over-representation" in financial institutions, legal profession, and so-called liberal media. It doesn't seem to bother them that if Jews truly dominate successful professions (and I have yet to see any proof), Hitler was trying to eliminate the fittest. Of course that's usually how it is - nothing attracts bitterness and hatred like success.
Posted by: t-guy | April 23, 2008 3:57 PM
"To Hitler, the Jews were a "cancer" or an "infection" that had to be extirpated from the German nation."
So what you're saying is that its not Evolution, or "Darwinism" that led to the Holocaust, but instead germ theory, or "Pasteurism".
Posted by: Scotty B | April 23, 2008 3:59 PM
In not subjugating the self to Jehovah, whether Christian or Jew, the created places himself/herself as god and breaks the greatest commandment, as articulated in The Shema. From this singular error comes all immorality including anti-semitism. The ultimate conclusion of this continued self-idolatry is nihilism.
I hold no grudge against those who have chosen their lot. This is why I am not an ideologue. People may freely choose to only say The Shema or actually obey it.
So to the atheist who has simply removed the possibility of Jehovah, my point of view is nonsense. My construct explains the error in thinking in both the anti-Semite European Christian "religionist" who aided Hitler and the intellectual secularist who stood by and rationally excused the immorality, aided Hitler or simply emigrated. Both groups had the basic fundamental flaw that simply took them down two different roads that eventually meet up again.
Some are now rationalizing the whole experience for themselves or their relatives who chose incorrectly. That is a normal human reaction and I have been guilty of that as well.
I pity those who have proclaimed themselves god. It leaves them very vulnurable to the errors I see on this board, including the most immature one: hubris.
The problems you site, Colugo, have the same father. Darwinism simply gave the immoral actions against Jew and Gentile wider acceptance to academics and a certain legitmacy that the uneducated church going anti-Semite European used for comfort.
And again, I marvel at Mr. Caplan's ignoring the medical aspect of the Holocaust that had nothing to do with racism or bigotry. The thousands who were killed (the mentally and physically disabled, etc) in the name of protecting the limited resources of the group was a reasoning that had the same source as the racial reasons. Even in the Jews processing through the concentration camps, the "weak" were immediately lead to the showers while the strong were used for slave labor. In a word, Darwinism.
So dispense with the semantics. Words like "exterminate," have meaning and Darwin was not kept in a vacuum. Those making the decisions clearly understood the implications of Darwinian ethics and the IDEOLOGY is the common thread.
Science is NEVER in a vacuum without soical influence.
Posted by: cee | April 23, 2008 4:15 PM
Uh, which post? You're disagreeing with Art Caplan's comment, not my post. I didn't write the line that you castigated.
As for Dr. Caplan, I respectfully disagreed with him in that assessment, as I have long admired his work. I'm thinking of doing a followup post on this tomorrow to explain further why. Actually, I'm a bit mortified at the possibility that he might come back here, given how the comment thread has been hijacked by trolling.
Back to work and protocol writing...
Posted by: Orac | April 23, 2008 4:19 PM
Alan Greenspan has never said that all the murdering & destruction in Iraq is about cryptic Israeli designs to capture all of the promised land of Zion.
Anybody who made such a claim would be guilty of possible anti-Semitism.
Alan Greenspan said that the murdering, the lying, the distortions, the financial costs, & complete destruction of Iraq was "all about the oil."
Whatever the causes, including terrible ethics on the part of all manner of brilliant strategists, Iraq is one giant rubble heap filled with dead bodies.
Posted by: gerald spezio | April 23, 2008 4:21 PM
Of course, there were scientists and doctors and politicians in the USA and across Europe who supported eugenics, which should be a cautionary note. Spaulding
Yes, and one of those would be Leonard Darwin, Son of Charles, member of the who succeeded Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin and confidant as the head of the British Eugenics Society. Both of whom said that Charles Darwin was their great inspiration in their promotion of eugenics. If you can find as good authorities as these two among the close associates of Charles Darwin, and I mean people who actually knew him, to rebut them on that link in the chain, you'd better present them because I'm looking and not finding them.
The entire point of eugenics was to "mitigate" the alleged interruption of natural selection which was attributed to things like medical care, food aid, vaccination, etc. The entire point is that most of modern eugenics is a response to crises that went from Malthus - Spenser - Charles Darwin - Francis Galton - Leonard Darwin - Chas. Davenport, others and beyond. The political dependence on a distinction between artificial and natural selection is going to fail due to some of Charles Darwin's own statements such as in The Descent of Man. Political success doesn't depend on proof beyond a reasonable doubt, it's usually not even on the basis of a preponderance of the evidence. But denying that the evidence presented by the opponents of evolution exists has been a political failure for the past several decades.
While Charles Darwin couldn't justly be accused of predicting a form of fascism that rose a half-century after he died - no one else in the 1880s did as far as I know - but you can't make a claim that his son Leonard wasn't around as it was beginning. As late as the 1920s he was in collegeal contact with Charles Davenport. As an example, here's a letter Davenport sent L. Darwin:
November 11, 1922, Major Leonard Darwin, Cripp's Corner, Forest Row, Sussex, England. Dear Major Darwin;- Thank you for your kind letter of November first. I am arranging to have two copies of the sterilization book sent to you. I gathered from contact with geneticists and eugenicists in Austria and Germany that so far from eugenics not being recognized by scientific societies that the German Government is about the only one that has asked and secured the cooperation of leading scientific men (certainly members of leading scientific societies) to cooperate with the Government by constituting a committee to which should be referred all legislation of eugenical import. Apart from the international society 2 of Dr. Alfred Ploctz[sp.?] in Munich, the liveliest society dealing with eugenical matters is the Deutsche Geselschaft fur Vererbungswissenschaft of which Dr. H. Hachtsheim, Landwitach, Hochschule zu Berlin, Invalidenstrasse 42, Berlin, H.4, is secretary. With kind regards to Mrs. Darwin, as well as yourself, Sincerely yours, Chas. B. Davenport, Director. D/G
http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/static/images/440.html
While I haven't gotten around to reading much of his stuff, Davenport was in contact with Nazi eugenicists, at least up to the war.
I don't think the charge of Charles Darwin being responsible for the Holocaust is accurate or even just but you can't deny the record of links that exist to his followers and their followers in turn.
If you don't think the anti-evolution side knows all of this already, you just haven't been paying attention. They know it, they use it and trying to deny it exists plays into their hands.
Posted by: Anthony McCarthy | April 23, 2008 4:51 PM
"Holocaust denial is not just about did an event happen or not. It is crucial to know why the Holocaust happened. And we do know--racism."
Of course it's important to know why an event happened; that's not even an issue in contention. But knowing why a thing happened and denying that it happened are mutually exclusive, don't you think?
"To imply, suggest or pronounce other causes is to deny what happened just as surely as to say no one was killed in the concentration camps. History encompasses both events and their causes."
There were other issues and causes; they may not have been THE cause, but they played a role. To boil it all down to one factor is to simply it to an extent that removes meaning. People aren't that simple or monofaceted and neither are the events people create. There were people who took part in the culture of the holocaust who did so out of expediency; racism for them was a product of a "greater" goal. Nothing related to the holocaust is minimized if we admit that there were other causes, albeit lesser causes. The horror remains. I just don't think we can lump the people who pin false causes on the holocaust in the same category as the denialists. One group denies reality as we know it; the other group denies reality as we think it to be.
Thank you for the frank dialogue, Dr. Caplan. We need all of it we can get.
Posted by: Liesl | April 23, 2008 5:01 PM
When Israel Firster and self styled public intellectual, Norman Podhoretz, demands that the US military rain bombs on Iran because "there is no other way to stop them:" I could conclude that Podhoretz is a bigoted murdering rascist monster, but I surely couldn't conclude that Darwin was responsible for Podhoretz's unquestionably murderous and rascist statements.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bLq6pzOc5w&feature=related
Posted by: gerald spezio | April 23, 2008 5:09 PM
I can see Caplan not liking the Expelled argument, but to equate it with Holocaust denial seems a specious argument of itself. People argue A, B, or C as a derivative of some historical event X all the time. To say B follows X equals D just does not seem right. I really don't think Stein and the Expelled makers deny the Holocaust and I don't think Art does either. So what then does his argument achieve other than to try and denigrate the Stein and the makers of Expelled?? Smells like a pissing match to me. Caplan writes, No wonder creationists like to quote Hitler so much to try to smear their hated "Darwinism" with the association". So it's just fine if Caplin paints Stein and the Expelled makers with the Holocaust denial brush?
It appears clear that Expelled makes a very tenuous argument with only marginal associations being presented as somehow an inevitable path from Darwin to the death camps. That's the issue. The religion trying to masquerade as science is also the issue. Many people who advocated eugenics felt that Darwin somehow provided them with justification for their beliefs. They were wrong, and clearly drew the wrong conclusions from evolutionary theory as it was early in the 20th Century. That does not mean that those who made improper arguments for eugenics from evolutionary theory were Nazi's in the same manner Stein's wrong headed logic makes him a Holocaust denier. IMO
Posted by: JF | April 23, 2008 5:54 PM
spezio, it appears that you could conclude just about anything and have no need for going through even the motions of prior logical analysis. Whatever you are, it is clearly self-styled in the genre of the fanatical.
Posted by: shortie | April 23, 2008 6:05 PM
Again, the simple truth that many leading Darwinists in the early 20th Century promoted infanticide and involuntary euthanasia...
Citations? Weblinks don't count.
...as well as racial extermination seems to be lost on those who want to deny any link between Darwin's conclusions on how natural selection applies to human populations and the justifications used by the Nazi's for their actions.
Following your logic (Discoverer of natural selection is blamed for heinous crimes that claim to be enacted as a form of 'natural selection') then you obviously would blame the scientists who discovered the element arsenic for all murders carried out by arsenic poisoning and you also would blame the scientists who discovered warfarin for all murders carried out with rat poison, right? After all the conclusions of these scientists are clearly being used in acts of murder.
Posted by: Jesse | April 23, 2008 6:44 PM
I think Caplan's point about Holocaust denial can be be illustrated by a kind of argumentum ad absurdum.
1. I accept 6 million jews died in Nazi Germany. But they were killed by an asteroid strike. Holocaust denial, right? Even though the deaths are accepted.
2. I accept 6 million jews died in Nazi Germany. In concentration camps. But it was an outbreak of plague that killed them. Well, that started off better - but it's still Holocaust denial. Right?
3. I accept 6 miiliion jews died in Nazi Germany. In concentration camps. Killed by camp guards. Deliberately. But they were infected by aliens from Planet Xenu. Pod people, you know. And that's still Holocaust denial.
And so on. Anything that deliberately lies about the truth of what happened and why it happened is a form of Holocaust denial.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch ... one point needs to be hammered home again and again. Hammered deep into the thick skulls of these Liars for Jesus. Darwin didn't discover Evolution. He discovered* Natural Selection. The concept of Evolution - that organisms change over time - goes way back. Almost as far as the concept of Artificial Selection. That goes back at least ten thousand years to the beginning of systematic agriculture and animal breeding. And Eugenics (and its offspring, the Holocaust) is BY ITS VERY DEFINITION ARTIFICIAL SELECTION, NOT NATURAL SELECTION.
There, did I scream that loudly enough?
*okay, that's way too simplistic. I'm quite sure the concept of Natural Selection had occurred many, many times to many, many forgotten people in the course of their anonymous and forgotten lives, it's just that Darwin was the first to realise - and spend the rest of his life investigating - the power of that idea when harnessed to the glaringly obvious fact of Evolution.
Two quick points. Dawkins happily uses (used, he's changed his mind lately) 'Darwinism' because he's a Brit. The UK is blessedly free of idiot creationists and their 19th century mindset; in the US it's necessary to point out in every way that MET is 150 years on from Darwin's original formulation.
And ... Gerald, you're a twit. (That's Janine's line, but as she's not here I'm just filling in... )
Posted by: pedlar | April 23, 2008 6:51 PM
Orac, my apologies: I missed the sentence where you expressly noted your disagreement with that statement, instead taking my initial impression from the initial sentence where you said you liked him (assuming from such that you liked him for his notion of Stein's "form of Holocaust denial"). I don't think it was a grand assumption on my part, but my apologies nonetheless for not reading as fully as I should.
Of course, the rest of my comment - directed at Caplan - stands.
Posted by: The Christian Cynic | April 23, 2008 8:52 PM
pedlar:
For someone who just threw about the insult 'twit,' you sure don't have a very good grasp on the plain meaning of "Holocaust denial." The options you gave materially change the events that occurred, which is not at all what Expelled! does (to my knowledge - if someone wants to tell me about that scene where Ben Stein alludes to a meeting of the Darwinist minds where Hitler and some heathen evolutionary biologists decided to exterminate the Jews). Expelled!, however wrong it may be on the motivations of Hitler and the Nazis more generally, does not appear to disagree at all with the historical consensus on the events that occurred which we collectively term "the Holocaust." If I said, "The Holocaust was a horrible atrocity that my grandfather fortunately survived," I would be deliberately lying - he wasn't anywhere near Europe at that time in his life - but it still wouldn't make me a Holocaust denier. Similarly, I could say, "Hitler decided to exterminate the Jews because a frisky Jewish guy spurned him in his youth," even though I'm pretty sure that's false (although not totally impossible), and I still wouldn't be denying that the Holocaust actually happened (I'd just be inventing a story to serve as a backdrop). Your whole statement just doesn't hold water.
Posted by: The Christian Cynic | April 23, 2008 9:34 PM
Theorists of German supremacism cited Rembrandt even more prominently than Darwin, but somehow nobody sets up these days as an anti-Rembrandtist.
Posted by: Harry Eagar | April 23, 2008 9:44 PM
An Intelligent Design advocate (at least I assume Joy is, since the post is at Telic Thoughts) writes that denial of the idea that Darwinism led to the Holocaust is a form of Holocaust denial.
http://telicthoughts.com/rewriting-history-holocaust-denial/
(I'm a little puzzled why Joy defends Expelled since apparently this individual is not as zealous as Ben Stein on the topic.)
I think that most of us agree that disagreements - even over grossly inaccurate and exploitative "explanations" - over the causes of the Holocaust do not constitute Holocaust denial, the "pod people" example notwithstanding. In fact, the notions that the German populace were held captive by a trance or were in a numb state passively following out orders - both incorrect - are not too far away from the pod people hypothesis. And these were not generally called Holocaust denial. Holocaust abuse (suggested by Mark H) or Holocaust exploitation are better terms.
An additional observation: Thanks to Expelled and similar products, the whole topic has been tainted with agenda-driven propaganda and now discussion about the history of ideas and the shaping of ideologies will, if it veers too close to particular approaches, be labeled as akin to the Expelled thesis - even if it is not. Similarly, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism has stunk up several lines of inquiry about a number of topics, including the origins of fascism. Hopefully in both cases the air will eventually clear and it will be possible to have a responsible discussion about certain topics without some controversial but responsible viewpoints being associated with these profoundly flawed pieces of agitprop.
Posted by: Colugo | April 24, 2008 12:56 AM
Which would be odd if he were so enamored of evolution, since evolution was what put an end to polygenist nonsense.
Quite true. It's also interesting to note that the "Aryans create culture/civilization" idea predates "Darwinism" by a good couple of years, being advanced by Joseph Gobineau in An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races.
Posted by: Skemono | April 24, 2008 2:01 AM
I think now I understand how the side with all the facts, evolution, can so consistently lose politically. I mean other than the typical arrogance of so many of the evolutionists who push their way to the microphone, shoving aside more reasonable evolutionists.
You guys have no idea how politics work. You think that all you have to do is hold the hypothesis of Charles Darwin being linked to eugenics to a standard of absolute proof and you've won. You think that the general public will be won over by the lack of a smoking gun, despite compelling evidence that he was linked to it and that, by implication of a rather strong kind, through his son, his cousin, his friends and followers and through their associates in the eugenics movement, to the Holocaust.