* The eugenics ideas of Francis Galton and the Social Darwinist concepts associated with Herbert Spencer would have an evil history in the first half of the 20th century. They would provide an influence to Nazi ideology and atrocities; in modern times, they are totally discredited.
* One of the unfortunate fallouts of the discovery of Mendelian genetics and hard heredity was its influence on eugenic thinking. Richard Dugdale's Lamarckian ideas had allowed him to believe that the likes of the Jukes could be improved by improving their environment, but to a later generation armed with much more solid ideas about genetics, that seemed like nonsense. If the degeneracy of the Jukes was born and bred, they would stay degenerate, generation after generation, and there was no changing it. The notion would be expressed later by the phrase "biological determinism".
The brute-force solution was to make sure the Jukes and their kind didn't breed. The Eugenics Education Society of Britain was set up in 1907, with a focus on negative eugenics; an elderly Galton was made honorary president. Galton also provided funding for the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics at University College, London, which performed research for the Eugenics Education Society. Charles Darwin's middle son Leonard was its president from 1911 to 1925.
The primary advocate of eugenics in the USA was the Eugenics Record Office at the Carnegie Institution's Cold Spring Harbor genetics laboratory, set up in 1910 by Charles Davenport (1866:1944). Davenport had a strong liking for the sort of hereditary statistics pioneered by Galton. He took it to a notable extreme, writing that the Twinings family was inclined to have characteristics including "broad shouldered, dark hair, prominent nose, nervous temperament, temper usually quick, not revengeful. Heavy eyebrows, humorous vein, and sense of ludicrous; lovers of music and horses."
Later generations of researchers would laugh at his notions, particularly at an analysis of the Herreshoff family of boat-builders, in which it almost seemed Davenport was suggesting there was a gene for boat-building. In any case, in 1915, the office published an updated edition of Dugdale's study of the Jukes. Psychologist Henry H. Goddard (1866:1957) of the prominent Training School for Feeble-Minded Boys & Girls in Vineland, New Jersey, summed up the mindset of the updated report by pointing out that if the Jukes were feeble-minded "then no amount of good environment could have made them anything else but feeble-minded." The conclusion of the report was that the likes of the Jukes should be sexually segregated to prevent them from reproducing, or simply sterilized.
Goddard relied on the new "intelligence quotient (IQ)" tests to figure out who the feeble-minded really were. Goddard suggested that a minimum threshold be set at an IQ level comparable to that of a 13-year-old; in his view, those below this level, who he dubbed "morons" (from a Greek word for "foolish"), should not be allowed to reproduce. Goddard was thinking small: other eugenicists believed that persistent criminals and others with antisocial tendencies, as well as those with deformities and other conditions believed to be hereditary, ought not reproduce either.
* Eugenics became something of a popular fashion among the intelligentsia. The British novelist H.G. Wells (1866:1946) was a prominent true believer. In his novel THE TIME MACHINE, a time traveler visiting the far future encountered two post-human races, the pretty and useless Eloi -- a race of dumb blondes, so to speak -- and the brutish troglodyte Morlocks, evolved (or maybe devolved) from the aristocratic elite and the working class of our times respectively.
Wells had more specific ideas about eugenics, writing in his 1902 speculative book ANTICIPATIONS about the enlightened leaders of his hoped-for utopian "New Republic" in a way that makes odd reading to a later generation: "They will naturally regard the modest suicide of incurably melancholy, or diseased or helpless persons as a high and courageous act of duty rather than a crime." As for any lawless sort who just refused to get with the program, the New Republicans would "consider him carefully, and condemn him, and remove him from being. All such killing will be done with an opiate, for death is too grave a thing to be made painful or dreadful, and used as a deterrent from crime."
After considering the horrors of unregulated reproduction and suggesting greater supervision of the matter, Wells goes on to ask: "And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races?" Despite their inferiority, he certainly thought there was a place for them in his New Republic: "Whatever men may come into its efficient citizenship it will let come -- white, black, red, or brown; the efficiency will be the test." However, once again there was the problem of those who could not or would not get with the program: "And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency?" He concludes: "They will have to go ... it is their portion to die out and disappear."
Wells did not describe exactly how their disappearance would come about. One might generously conclude that he meant they would just not make the grade in the struggle for survival and gradually become extinct -- but the tone of Wells' argument suggests that might not have been what he had in mind. Wells is often cited as advocating the murder of the impaired and the extermination of the nonwhite races, but a closer reading shows those assertions to be exaggerations. Unfortunately, they are not big exaggerations; and the only argument over the matter in hindsight is whether he should have been horsewhipped or hanged.
* Wells and his kind, however, were not able to prevail in Britain and pass laws for the compulsory sterilization of the "unfit". Eugenics was never a mass movement anywhere, likely for the sensible reason that most of the citizenry might well wonder if they might end up looking down the barrel of eugenics laws sooner or later; it was a doctrine that could only be favored by a self-superior elite. Attempts to drive eugenics laws through Parliament in 1912 and 1913 foundered, with Josiah Wedgwood -- another son of the Darwin-Wedgwood clan -- fighting his own party to block it. The co-founder of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, also blasted the exercise, calling it the notions of an "arrogant, scientific priestcraft."
Elsewhere, eugenics foundered in nations where the Catholic Church was a political power, since the Vatican opposed it as a matter of policy. However, eugenicists were able to prevail in America, with 32 US states passing compulsory sterilization laws. In fact, the US was a pioneer in the legal enforcement of eugenics, with Indiana creating a compulsory sterilization law in 1907. From beginning to end, about 60,000 Americans would be forcibly sterilized. Most were inmates of mental institutions, but in some cases the laws covered criminals as well.
BACK_TO_TOP* Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. Hitler was obsessed with race and racial supremacy, and he was very impressed with the eugenics laws passed in the United States. A sweeping compulsory sterilization law was passed immediately, with over 300,000 Germans sterilized up to 1939.
In that year, Nazi Germany decided to take a more drastic approach. By the spring, Hitler was on a path towards war, and the attitude was that "useless eaters" in institutions ought to be removed permanently to free up resources to take care of wounded soldiers. A formal program, known as "Action T4", was set up in which invalids -- both adults and children -- were killed, first by lethal injection and then gassing them with carbon monoxide, with one of the prime movers behind the effort being Dr. Karl Brandt (1904:1948), who would later become Hitler's personal physician. Tens of thousands of invalids were murdered into 1941, when public outrage forced the government to formally give up the program -- though that was easy to do because most of the invalids targeted had been liquidated by that time. The exercise still suggested to the leadership that when the time came to kill the defenseless on a larger scale, as it did within months, it would need to be done with greater discretion.
The Nazis also adopted positive eugenic measures, matching mates to provide good Aryan babies, but even in this measure their efforts were sinister. During the war, the Nazi occupation of Europe was accompanied by the widescale kidnapping of children who seemed to fit Nazi physical ideals from occupied countries. The program was named "Lebensborn (Font of Life)", with the children then adopted by German families -- sometimes families of dedicated Nazis, but also ordinary families who had no idea their adopted child had been kidnapped, having only been told that the child was a "war orphan". In some cases that was perfectly true, the child's parents having been murdered.
* The irony was that by the time the Nazis were taking to eugenics with a vengeance, enthusiasm for the idea was fading out in the US. During World War I, IQ tests administered to US Army soldiers had demonstrated shockingly low scores, suggesting to eugenicists that something drastic needed to be done. However, many soldiers who had low IQ scores turned out to be heroic and resourceful, suggesting there was less something wrong with the troops than with the IQ tests and their advocates.
In the 1920s, social scientists such as Margaret Mead (1901:1978) began to strongly question the idea of biological determinism. Thomas Hunt Morgan, having been originally attracted to the eugenics movement, was on the board of the Genetics Record Office but resigned in 1928. The rigorous Morgan had finally decided that eugenics was bogus science -- as well he might, since by that time Davenport was working on studies showing the eugenic perils of race-mixing. The Great Depression that began in 1929 also suggested to the population at large that people might be more prisoners of their circumstances than of their genes. The Nazi abuses helped hammer the nail in the coffin of American eugenics; in 1940, the Carnegie Institute quietly shut down the Eugenics Record Office.
The full savagery of the Nazi eugenics program was not revealed until the trials after the war. Karl Brandt and six others went to the gallows in 1948 for their involvement in the Action T4 program and for other crimes, including ghastly medical experiments performed on prisoners. Eugenics laws remained on the books in the US and elsewhere until the 1970s, but the steam had gone out of the movement well before then. Few were willing to promote eugenics in the postwar period, though the idea did crop up along the margins in science-fiction novels and the like.
Popular sci-fi novelist Robert Heinlein (1907:1988), a great admirer of H.G. Wells, was enthusiastic about the idea, envisioning the selective breeding of geniuses or long-lived humans. Another science-fiction writer, Cyril Kornbluth (1923:1958), published a well-known short story titled "The Marching Morons" in 1951 that featured a future Earth overrun by moronic humans, with a small elite trying to keep things running. With the help of a 20th-century conman revived from suspended animation, the elite finally came up with a grotesque scheme for tricking the masses into neatly killing themselves off, and disposing of their own bodies in the process. If Kornbluth was honestly serious about the idea, by the 1950s it was clearly pulp-fiction trash, an antiquated and disreputable notion dressed up as futurism.
The fundamental problems with eugenics remained. There was its ugly and backwards contempt for the rights of individuals, and its unbreakable linkage to racism: a postwar enthusiast, Nobelist William Shockley (1910:1989), one of the inventors of the transistor, also published studies to show that black folk seemed to be inferior to whites in some regards. Shockley, incidentally, contributed to a eugenic sperm bank, citing his "breeding qualifications" as a Nobelist.
There was also, once again, the fact that eugenics was oversold, not as straightforward as its advocates presented it to be. While it is true that there are some classes of genetic defects that are blatant and could be argued as being appropriate targets for eugenics, in general it's not so simple to sort out the "good genes" from the "bad genes". A human has about 30,000 genes, with about 6,000 of them being variable -- polymorphic alleles. These thousands of genes can have complicated effects and their action remains far from completely understood. In addition, human development can be, is, affected by external factors, such as diseases that damage the brain in infancy. Impaired individuals may be as "sound" genetically as the people around them.
Such considerations make attempts to create a race of "superhumans" through selective breeding troublesome. What would the objectives be, based on what system of values? Would we want to breed a race of hulking athletes? Would people with poor eyesight be thrown on the trash heap even though they would be perfectly functional, even possibly highly valued, members of society, with no defect that corrective lenses couldn't easily fix?
Would we want to select for geniuses? If so, how would we identify them? To be sure, there are people who are distinctly quick-witted, but it is also true that people of substantial intellectual accomplishment may be skilled in their field of expertise, but act like damn fools outside of it. How would we grade accomplishments? Most people have their special skills; would we grade a famous scientist higher than a famous piano player? Such issues have always plagued IQ tests, which have been described as merely testing the ability to pass IQ tests. Yes, there are people who are recognizably stupid, but it is hard to think that any citizen who can drive, keep a budget, schedule a trip, play a musical instrument, or perform any other fairly ordinary and achievable task that demands a brain could be regarded as deficient in intelligence. After all, no animals are honestly capable of such things.
We are not only hard-pressed to neatly characterize intelligence, we would find it very difficult to identify the elaborate set of alleles involved, and the more elaborate the set of alleles, the more difficult it would be to select the ones we want. To be sure, there is a way to artificially select for specific alleles -- it's called "inbreeding", and it's often used in selective breeding of domestic animals and plants to optimize gross properties such as size or growth weight. It's not all that good a way to produce "superhumans", since in practice inbred human populations tend to be unusually prone to otherwise rare genetic disorders. It's hard to concentrate desireable sets of alleles without also concentrating undesireable ones, when it's even possible to pin down which is which.
Selective breeding of domesticated organisms is a blunt instrument; it never has been a neatly engineered process by any means, being notorious for accumulating unpleasant side effects along with desired properties. For example, modern giant tom turkeys, far larger than their wild ancestors, are so big they can barely have sex with any success on their own, and the only reason it is practical to raise them is thanks to convenient techniques for artificial insemination.
There's little doubt we could similarly selectively breed for, say, very big and strong humans with fair success, but might well end up with people who are big and stupid, more reminiscent of domestic livestock than "superhumans". Trying to breed for an across-the-board range of enhanced features would be very difficult, maybe not impossible but certainly demanding an effort over centuries using a large genetic pool that would be very hard to administer, with any lesser effort amounting to an ineffectual joke.
Of course, it would be more technically practical to focus on getting rid of "subhumans", instead of promoting superhumans -- again, some people are obviously dimwitted or otherwise impaired -- but again, who with any sense would want to have a government that was empowered to target "inferiors", with no citizen guaranteed to be protected from such persecution? A government can certainly take action against a terrorist movement in the name of protecting the common good; who could argue that ambiguously-defined "inferiors" represented a threat to the collective that justified a similar and effectively arbitrary violation of civil rights?
In short, eugenics was crippled by a lack of reasonable goals, practical methods, and simple ethics. Eugenics notions still tend to pop up in various ways -- the concept is too obvious, if it was somehow erased from all memory, it would be quickly rediscovered -- but they are regarded by the prudent with the extreme and entirely deserved caution generally used in dealing with any potentially dangerous booby-trap. Modern genetic testing does allow couples to determine when having kids together is unarguably a bad idea. The rapidly increasing knowledge of genetics also suggests that in time, humans will be able to manipulate their genome. These controversial issues are discussed in more detail later.
* The Nazi regime also did much to put the final nails in the coffin of Social Darwinism. The idea was, in hindsight, fundamentally broken. Even accepting an "evolutionary ethic", how did that translate to a ruthless notion of society? From an evolutionary point of view, any society that successfully promotes the health and prosperity of its citizens can be regarded as "superior" to one that doesn't, and so simply declaring a society based on heartless competition as "superior" was simply ignoring the real question of what the most beneficial form of society might be.
The idea of an "evolutionary ethic" was nonsense anyway. It was a spectacular example of the "IS:OUGHT" problem, a notion most closely identified with the Scots scholar David Hume (1711:1776), who pointed out that arguments of morality tend to start with a set of statements about what IS and then simply jump to a statement of what OUGHT to be -- without explicitly making a value judgement to connect the IS to the OUGHT.
For example, if we are driving and come to a crossroads, we get information from roadsigns on the names of roads, what cities lie on those roads, and how far they are, but that information doesn't tell us what road to take in itself; we take a particular road based on the value judgement of where we want to go. This is a very simple example and in practice the value judgement is obvious from context, but still -- there's a value judgement there, the roadsigns in themselves don't establish where we want to go.
In more general terms, Hume pointed out that no set of observable facts about the world determine the value judgements we make from them; they just allow us to evaluate the options. The facts do not tell us what we want; we often want things that are entirely unrealistic, and end up settling for what we can realistically get. In attempting to establish an "evolutionary ethic", Social Darwinists made observations of the behavior of animals, an IS, and then said we OUGHT to imitate them, without establishing why we should do so.
More specifically, following up Hume's insight, the British philosopher George E. Moore (1873:1958) observed out that value judgement assumed by Social Darwinism was absurd, even monstrous. In his 1903 book PRINCIPIA ETHICA, Moore pointed out that Social Darwinism suffered from the "naturalistic fallacy", the idea that what is natural is also ethically correct. In reality, this is entirely contrary to common notions of ethics, one of the underlying premises of which is the idea that humans ought to behave better than beasts.
In fact Social Darwinism, taken to its extreme, was not a concept of morality at all, it was instead an arbitrary declaration that morality was irrelevant. Where was there any moral principle in it?
What possible concept of morality worthy of the name would proclaim there was nothing wrong with the strong oppressing the defenseless? In the name of a self-serving "progress", in which the "clever ones" would direct the "lower orders", the eugenicists wanted to throw away millennia of social evolution, morally retrogressing back to the era of the stone axe.
Darwin knew better than to suggest that nature was a good place to find moral instruction. As the modern saying has it: Mother Nature is a BITCH. Darwin understood this perfectly well, expressing the same notion more articulately in a letter in 1857: "What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature!"
Long before Darwin's time, few had failed to realize that, while nature has its benign and cooperative side -- which, oddly, never factored into the considerations of Social Darwinists -- its other side is frighteningly ruthless and monstrous. Indeed, our Stone Age ancestors knew this only too well as they watched the darkness for lurking predators.
Darwin's use of the word "cruel" was not exact, since it implied deliberate malevolence. He knew perfectly well that nature is not cruel in the strict sense of the word, it is simply merciless, as mindlessly indifferent to the pain it inflicts as is a volcanic eruption that reduces a town to lifeless cinders and ash. Predators and parasites don't have any concept of mercy either. There was nothing in Darwin's theory of evolution that could possibly suggest that nature wasn't cold and merciless. What realistic scheme of nature could say otherwise? That's the way it works -- it's not even a matter of opinion, any book on parasitology demonstrates it as an easily-observed fact. Darwin merely acknowledged that ugliness, and he made it clear he didn't endorse it as a basis for moral principle. As he wrote in THE DESCENT OF MAN:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Important as the struggle for existence has been, and even still is, yet, as far as the highest part of man's nature is concerned, there are other agencies more important. For the moral qualities are advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the reasoning powers, instruction, religions, etc., than through natural selection; though to this later agency may be safely attributed the social instincts which afforded the basis for the development of the moral sense.
END QUOTE
In some species of mantises and spiders, it is an established fact that males are often eaten by females when the males attempt to mate, or after they have done so. Unless human females became vampires, however, it would take a bizarre argument to suggest that this unkindly behavior had any direct relevance to human morals and conduct. Darwin's theory of evolution was never any more a theory of morality than was physics, and he flatly said as much. The naturalistic fallacy of Social Darwinism -- or "Antisocial Spencerism" as it might be more accurately, if clumsily, named -- taken to a ridiculous extreme, was equivalent to claiming that since the law of gravity causes things to fall, then Isaac Newton was advocating that in obedience to the law we ought to all go jump off a bridge.
BACK_TO_TOP* Creationists are fond of personal attacks on Darwin who -- despite a lifestyle polite and moderate to the point of dull, an obsessive focus on scholarship as demonstrated by years of investigation of barnacles, and a clear distaste for political controversy -- ends up being pilloried as one of the great monsters of history. Eugenics is one of the stones thrown at him, and indeed Darwin discussed some of the underlying ideas of the movement in the second subchapter of chapter 5 of THE DESCENT OF MAN:
BEGIN QUOTE:
In the last and present chapters I have considered the advancement of man from a former semi-human condition to his present state as a barbarian. But some remarks on the agency of natural selection on civilised nations may be here worth adding. This subject has been ably discussed by Mr. W. R. Greg, and previously by Mr. Wallace and Mr. Galton. Most of my remarks are taken from these three authors. With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
END QUOTE
This is often cited by creationists, but they never cite the following paragraph:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.
END QUOTE
Darwin comes back to the theme in the last pages of THE DESCENT OF MAN, again suggesting that a choice of mate might involve a consideration of the healthiness of the match -- a notion that was far from new in the 19th century and not unknown today, few regarding poor health or other blatant defects as desireable qualities in a potential mate -- as well as reiterating that potential mates might well "refrain from marriage in they are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind." He was then, cautious as always, quick and in hindsight extremely accurate to add that "such hopes are Utopian, and will never even be partially realized until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known."
Darwin was concerned that his marriage to a first cousin was biologically unsound, since the health of his children was mixed -- one of his sons who died in infancy was clearly an imbecile -- and few would disagree now that such inbreeding isn't a recommended practice. His response to this worry was typical of him: he proposed to Parliament that the 1871 census ask if marriages were between first cousins so that proper data could be obtained to confirm or reject the idea. It was simply not like Darwin to put forward an idea without making sure he had backed it up. The proposal raised a storm of controversy in Parliament, being criticized as excessively intrusive, and it didn't happen.
* Creationists also accuse Darwin of being a racist. There is a basis for this, since his views on the various peoples he met during his travels on the BEAGLE are in fact very mixed. He regarded the Fuegians as little better than beasts, though he thought Jemmy Button merry, pleasant, and keen-eyed. He found the Aborigines and Maoris almost as savage. As far as the extermination of the unfortunate Tasmanians went, he described "this most cruel step" in an equivocal fashion as:
BEGIN QUOTE:
... quite unavoidable, as the only means of stopping a fearful succession of robberies, burnings, and murders, committed by the blacks; and which sooner or later would have ended in their utter destruction. I fear there is no doubt, that this train of evil and its consequences originated in the infamous conduct of some of our countrymen.
END QUOTE
In VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE he commented: "I do not think it possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilized man. It is the difference between wild and tame animals ... " In THE DESCENT OF MAN he wrote, as a condescending and coldly neutral generalization on the suppression of native peoples that he saw in South America and Tasmania:
BEGIN QUOTE:
At some future period ... the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races of 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 civilized state ... even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of, as now, between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
END QUOTE
As far as women went, he wrote in THE DESCENT OF MAN: "Man is more powerful in body and mind than woman ..."
On the other hand, he was very taken with the health and gentleness of the Tahitians, finding their tattooed figures elegant, observing how pale and unpleasant an Englishman looked next to them, "like a plant bleached by a gardener's art compared with a fine dark green one ..." He rejected criticisms of the work of missionaries in educating the Tahitians, saying that any traveler worried about shipwreck on a foreign shore "will most devoutly pray that the lesson of the missionary may have extended thus far."
Darwin was also very taken with the "noble-looking figures" of the Indians exiled to Mauritius, saying that many had been sent there only because of their adherence to religious beliefs that clashed with English law and that such men were "generally quiet and well-conducted". Darwin did not even believe that his own ancestry was any more noble than those he regarded as the lowest savages, writing in THE DESCENT OF MAN:
BEGIN QUOTE:
... there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians. The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed into my mind ? such were our ancestors.
END QUOTE
It should be noted that the Darwin clan had a strong antislavery tradition, with Charles condemning it at length in the last chapter of THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE:
BEGIN QUOTE:
I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal ... Those who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter ... It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty ...
END QUOTE
In some cases the accusations against Darwin are silly, with creationists even pouncing on the subtitle of THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES: "Or The Preservation Of Favoured Races In The Struggle For Life" -- as evidence that he was promoting a racist philosophy. Actually, the book says effectively nothing about human evolution and race, with the term "races" being used interchangeably with "breeds" and "varieties", and Darwin writing about "races of cabbages". Indeed, in THE DESCENT OF MAN Darwin claimed that all humans were branches of the same family tree, that they shared common ancestry; a notion that bluntly contradicted the common notions of the time that human races were distinct, and if they had evolved, it had been from different animal forebears.
In short, anyone who wants to make a case against or for Darwin on a personal basis has citations to work from. To the extent that some of his statements are unacceptable to modern propriety, it can be said, in mitigation if not in defense, was that his attitudes were ordinary for an upper-class Victorian Englishman, reflecting both the virtues and faults of Victorian society in general. The standards of societies of the past do not always match the standards of our own -- after all, many of America's founding fathers, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and even Benjamin Franklin were slaveowners.
The truth remains that Darwin was a Victorian gentleman, and a Victorian chauvinist. However, he was also a Victorian gentleman, and unlike many who would adopt his ideas to their own ends, he never claimed that scientific knowledge trumped moral vision. In fact, he was clearly careful in his work to try to avoid any such implications, for the simple reason that they would have weakened the scientific credibility of his argument. The last thing he ever wanted to do was write another ZOONOMIA, or sound as loopy as his grandfather Erasmus. Darwin knew perfectly well he was in for trouble even proposing his ideas of evolution, and he had not the least inclination to make matters more difficult for himself than they needed to be.
* Galton was more blunt and less guarded in his notions and, unlike his cousin Darwin, never suspected just how half-baked his ideas about selective breeding really were. It is impossible to deny that there were people following Galton who took Darwin's ideas off into directions that Darwin himself had repudiated or at least kept at arm's length, and that Nazi eugenics ideas were heavily influenced by this movement.
However, it should be noted that though Hitler's lengthy autobiographical tract MEIN KAMPF takes Social Darwinist ideas to a pulp-fiction extreme -- spending a good deal of time discussing the struggle for survival between "superior" and "inferior" races, and outlines concepts of eugenics that could have been taken out of the mouths of its American advocates -- it does not ever mention the name "Darwin". Hitler did mention "evolution" once, if mostly to condemn the notion of race mixing:
BEGIN QUOTE:
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.
END QUOTE
It's hard to read much into this remark, since Hitler's notions of "evolution" were obviously muddy and imprecise. He described Aryans as "the highest image of God among His creatures"; the Nazis might have conceded that the "inferior" races were related to apes, but Aryans? They were God's chosen elite! The fact is that Hitler was a scientific illiterate who lived on a diet of tabloid ideas, and adopted whatever slogans fit his agenda.
One of the early acts of the Nazi regime was to dismiss all public employees with Jewish or partly-Jewish backgrounds, which meant the sacking of a substantial body of professors from the universities, most notably many of Germany's best physicists. German physicist and Nobelist Max Planck (1858:1947) protested the firings, saying they would destroy German science, and reportedly the Fuehrer snapped back: "If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!"
Such was Hitler's interest in science. Many of the physicists ended up in exile in the USA and worked for the Allied cause to help defeat the Axis. More generally, the inability of Hitler's regime to remotely match the competence of the Allies in understanding and organizing scientific research was one of the contributing factors to the downfall of the Nazi regime.
* In any case, thanks to his windy and unbalanced ramblings Hitler can be and is invoked as a smear tactic -- generally referred to as "reductio ad Hitlerum" or sometimes "pin the tail on the Nazi" -- against almost anyone, and it is the almost inevitable terminal point of "flame wars" on internet forums, with comparisons to Hitler invoked relative to liberals, conservatives, political activists, environmentalists, creationists, sorehead atheists, the media, and so on. Few fail to recognize it as cranks playing games, and in some of the stricter internet forums any person who invokes "Hitler & the Nazis", in any but the most historically appropriate context, is immediately threatened with expulsion by the forum moderator.
The reality is that Nazi notions of race supremacy, racial purity, ethnic cleansing, nationalism, authoritarianism, militarism, imperialism, repression, and simple thuggery were hardly invented, or even condoned, by Darwin, having been around for a very long time. They were arguably less morally questioned before the Enlightenment than they are now.
Can a connection between Hitler and Darwin be established? Absolutely. However, in the absence of a single reference by Hitler indicating a debt to Darwin, there is no way to prove that Hitler would have been much different had Darwin never existed -- though Hitler might have used slightly different rhetoric. The connection between Hitler and Darwin amounts to no more than the even more demonstrable connection between Hitler and the Wright brothers. After all, Hitler's conquests heavily relied on Stuka dive-bombers, speedy Messerschmitt fighters, and an entire range of murderous flying machines whose origins could be easily traced back to the Wrights. Obviously, if we should make a fuss about Hitler and Darwin, we need to make at least as much of a fuss about Hitler and the Wrights.
* Incidentally, some creationists also link Darwin to Karl Marx. Marx actually was a fan of THE ORIGINS OF SPECIES, it appears for the fact that it undermined traditional religious views and suggested that the class struggle had a biological basis. It is still hard to see much specific influence Darwin had on Marx's thinking, since Marx and Engels' COMMUNIST MANIFESTO doesn't mention "Darwin" or even "evolution". This is not too surprising, considering that it was published in 1848, over a decade before the publication of THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. Darwin has an airtight alibi for having any involvement in the origins of Communism.
DAS KAPITAL only references Darwin in a few footnotes relevant to specialization in industrial production -- for example:
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[XIV.2] In Birmingham alone, 500 varieties of hammer are produced, and not only is each adapted to one particular process, but several varieties often serve exclusively for the different operations in one and the same process The manufacturing period simplifies, improves, and multiplies the implements of labour, by adapting them to the exclusively special functions of each detail labourer.
FOOTNOTE: Darwin, in his epoch-making ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, chapter 5, remarks, with reference to the natural organs of plants and animals: "So long as one and the same organ has different kinds of work to perform, a ground for its changeability may possibly be found in this ... "
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Anyone seeking any shocking or even particularly interesting references to Darwin in DAS KAPITAL will be stretched to find them. Marx was clearly taken with Darwin's ideas, but they were of incidental relevance to the social and economic case Marx was trying to make, and whatever else might be said about Marx, nobody could credibly accuse him of being a Social Darwinist. The USSR would later play up evolutionary theory on occasion to show the "progressive" nature of the Soviet state, but as discussed later, under Stalin the Soviet regime would demonstrate an extreme prejudice against evolutionary science in practice.
It is true that in 1873 Marx sent a copy of DAS KAPITAL to Darwin, this being the first known direct contact between the two men. Darwin replied with a characteristically polite thank-you note -- and never read through the book, its pages being found mostly unseparated after Darwin's death. A story still circulates that Marx had offered to dedicate DAS KAPITAL to Darwin, as demonstrated by a letter from Darwin very politely turning down the request. In reality, the letter was to Marx's son-in-law, Edward Aveling, who had offered to perform such a dedication for his own book. Marx's daughter had her father's letters and the reply from Darwin to Aveling, which in itself did not name the recipient, got mixed in with the lot.
A Soviet scholar started the rumor in the 1930s. The matter would be too trivial to mention, except for the interesting comments about Darwin's attitudes toward religion in his reply:
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Moreover though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follow from the advance of science. It has, therefore, always been my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.
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Darwin did not conceal the fact that he was a religious skeptic, but his work was not based on any anti-religious agenda. He was simply interested in how the material world works, and whether anyone likes how it works or not is irrelevant -- it works that way nonetheless. He only came to the conclusions that he did because that was where the evidence led him, he would have accepted any different conclusion had the evidence demonstrated it, and he did not welcome the controversy that publishing his conclusions brought him.
Since Darwin's time, evolutionary science has been used to support various ideologies. All such efforts have foundered on the IS:OUGHT problem, on thinking that the IS of evolutionary science implies an ideological OUGHT, though the different ideologies have been sometimes completely at odds with each other. It has been commented that such interpretations resemble the depression on a sofa of the bottom of the last person who sat on it.
* As far as eugenics goes, it was an unpleasant episode in the history of evolutionary biology, and a nasty lesson in the danger of blindly accepting fashionable intellectual fads without considering their ethical implications. Creationists continue to proclaim Social Darwinism and the eugenics movement as fundamental faults of evolutionary science, and indeed there were prominent evolutionary biologists who jumped on the bandwagons. Fortunately, Darwin himself explicitly rejected the use of his ideas as a basis for moral principles, and also made it clear he had no particular use for Herbert Spencer; he went no farther with eugenics than to suggest that when people get married, they might include the healthiness of a mate as part of the selection criteria.
There is no eugenics movement of significance today, and Social Darwinism is a dead issue. To the extent that people continue to advocate visions of a reactionary brute-force social order -- and somebody always will -- they no longer make much pretense that science has anything to do with it. Indeed, modern reactionaries tend to regard science as part of their problem and not part of their solution. Politicians running for election might accuse an adversary of being a "Socialist", but a "Social Darwinist"? Most of the general public wouldn't know what it meant.
In any case, the failure of Social Darwinism and eugenics says nothing about the technical validity of Darwin's ideas and the modern evolutionary science that came from them. The sciences are, like it or not, amoral, in exactly the same way that engineering is amoral, both being concerned with technical realities -- certainly subject in practice to moral considerations, but providing few insights into moral considerations in return.
After all, those so inclined could make a credible moral case against physicists and engineers for their development of nuclear weapons, that it was a crime against humanity, a perversion of science as bad as or worse than the Nazi Action T4 program, and argue that nuclear weapons ought to be banned -- but no credible case can be made that the designers were wrong in any technical sense. Like it or not, the bombs worked as designed, and nobody could convincingly argue that it was by accident, using fundamentally flawed theory. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had never actually been test-fired; its designers simply knew it would work, and it did.
Modern evolutionary theory, thankfully, has no technical demonstration of its validity as vivid as that of a mushroom cloud, but the analogy holds: even if, in some alternate universe, Charles Darwin had been actually a brutish thug, not a Dr. Jekyll but a Mr. Hyde, that says nothing about the truth or falsity of modern evolutionary theory as a description of the way the material Universe works. Credibly claiming that it is technically wrong demands another approach.
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