The social Darwinist genie is out of the bottle again.

 Whether Fascists  misunderstood Darwin or not,they were inspired by him. 

And Darwin himself was a racist.

The method of natural selection as proposed by Darwin, is a logical and common sense one and easy for a layperson to understand,  though he or she may not understand the ramifications and implications of Darwin's theory. 

However, the effect of the social philosophy derived from Darwinism has been catastrophic. It has destroyed all viable notions of the good, as such, and has turned morality into the plaything of evolutionary psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists - the phrenologists and Lysenkoists of our day. 

Unfortunately for the Darwinian purists, who protest so much, Darwin himself speculated in racial futures. He himself was a social Darwinist.

Read Charles Darwin, in his own words:

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, 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 civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla."

This paragraph, written by Darwin, reveals he believed in what would become the essence of Nazi ideology.

Now, read what James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, said in an interview:

"He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.

It wasn’t that Watson suddenly went doolaly and said this. He didn’t say this because he was senile. It reads as if he was stating a belief he had always held. The comments sound  like the thoughts of someone who has mulled over the genetic difference between races for many years.

Modern proselytizers of Darwinism should come clean! Nazism found some of it's theoretical justification in Darwin. Fascism was inspired by Darwinism, and Darwin himself together with his modern followers are directly responsible for the eugenicist ideas that plague us to this day. But what I personally don't understand is how on Earth Darwinists dare to claim that they are humanists.

Madison Grant, the US eugenicist, and a Darwinist was one of the major influences on Nazi ideology. Like James Watson and Darwin himself he was an outright racist and just like Darwin he fanned the flames of genocide. Here is an example of Madison Grant's vile philosophy, the philosophy of a Darwinist:

"A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit — in other words social failures — would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types"

Darwinism can be blamed directly for providing the basis of the ideology that justified the slaughter of millions of people during the second world war through the influence of eugenicists like Madison Grant. Darwinism was used to justify colonialism. Darwin himself was undeniably a racist and Darwin himself was a social Darwinist.

Currently the modern Darwinists promote the spread of evolutionary theory by analogy into every corner of the social sciences when it is clear that human behaviour cannot be accounted for in mere behaviouristic evolutionary terms. Half baked notions from dodgy social scientists using evolutionary theory spread like cancer, just as they did before, in the heyday of the eugenicists, right before the holocaust.

Darwinian theory should stay in its box. They are not experts in cognition and human behavior. Their accounts of adaptation rely on having an account of cognition and they do not have one. The simpler the organism the better the Darwinism fits. The more complex the organ the more poorly it fits.

Let these people not pretend, with their simple, Procrustean biological logic of self-interest that they have an account for the way the human mind-brain works. They cannot explain human  behavior. It doesn’t fit into their ridiculous binary building blocks account of the human imagination and thought.

At this point, often, the smarmiest philosophers point to Gilbert Ryle in support of the Darwinists and say that when we think of ourselves in terms that do not come from the brain sciences then we commit "category errors." And isn't "pity" itself a mere "category error" to these modern heirs of the eugenicists.

More is the pity, I say!

The New Darwinists are the furthest thing from real humanists one could ever imagine. They have let the monster of social Darwinism out of the box again. And it is monster that denies the essence of our humanity as we experience it. Pity is reinterpreted by the Darwinists as self interest. Any kind or altruistic act is accompanied by a sly wink.

Peter Singer is the latest in an infamous line of Dawinists. Humans, according to Singer, are animals and there is nothing that raises them above animals. This cuts both ways. While  the implications are that animals, like humans, have rights- and this is all to the good - the implication Singer also draws  in that people should be treated more like animals.  Breeding animals with rights.

He  has "interesting" ideas on eugenics. He supports euthanasia, even for handicapped children, screening "imperfect" embryos, allowing late abortions, encouraging the sterilisation of those with genetic "defects". These ideas were also held by the Nazis. While a Darwinist like Peter Singer would stand alongside some the fascists in some of their beliefs relating to eugenicism. Of course he would be 'moral' enough to disagree with Mengele.

To quote Michael Burleigh, author of "Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany 1900-1945, as others have:

"What Singer fails to engage with is the fact that the Nazis and their Weimar intellectual progenitors were equally aggressively bent upon a secular, post-Christian alternative to the doctrine of the sanctity of human life … When he writes, ‘A self-conscious being is aware of itself as a distinct entity, with a past and a future … Killing a snail or a day-old infant does not thwart any desires of this kind, because snails and newborn infants are incapable of having such desires’ … Singer is, no doubt unwittingly, for history is not his strong suit, using arguments and analogies employed again and again by the Nazis."

 
These are all the ideas of the new "humanists" the new Darwinians. And they are in tune with Nazi ideas: Every single one of them is a variant on an idea the Nazis actually put into practice. The social Darwinist genie is out of the bottle again. Let's see what kind of monstrosity of an ideology it will propitiate this time round.