Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #338030 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 328 pages

Synopsis
In this work, Richard Weikart explains the revolutionary impact Darwinism had on ethics and morality. He demonstrates that many leading Darwinian biologists and social thinkers in Germany believed that Darwinism overturned traditional Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment ethics, especially the view that human life is sacred. Many of these thinkers supported moral relativism, yet simultaneously exalted evolutionary 'fitness' (especially intelligence and health) to the highest arbiter of morality. Darwinism played a key role in the rise not only of eugenics, but also euthanasia, infanticide, abortion and racial extermination. This was especially important in Germany, since Hitler built his view of ethics on Darwinian principles, not on nihilism.

Customer Reviews

Meticulous Research
I had known for a long time that the Nazis used Darwinism to promote their racial theories to their own people etc., but until I read Weikart's book I had more or less assumed that this was just a Hitler thing - a hijack of Darwin's theory for his own ends. However, it turns out that Hitler was a product of a country whose medical, scientific, academic and philosophical disciplines has swallowed and been taken over by Darwinism while Hitler was still in short trousers. Weikart proves beyond any shadow of a doubt to any impartial reader that Darwin's own racial views, which were intertwined with his theory of evolution, were a direct cause of the German way of thinking that produced Hitler, the Holocaust, Mengele's experiments and the eugenics movement. This is a much more in-depth book than Gasman's "The Scientific Origins of National Socialism".

Creationist "Argument ad Nazium"
This book, funded largely and sold by the creationist "think tank" The Discovery Institute, is little more than a grand smear on Charles Darwin as it attempts to blame his ideas directly for the genocide carried out by Nazi Germany. In doing so it misquotes and misrepresents Darwin's actual writing and falsely attributes Social Darwinism, a political and eugenic distortion of simple biological concepts, to Darwin himself. It is a misuse of Darwin's theory, not the theory itself. This new creationist tactic of "Argument ad Nazium" was recently used in the US "documentary" Expelled which was largely based on this book.

As others have said about this evolving creationist anti-Darwin tactic, it's as valid to blame Newton for Hitler's Luftwaffe as without the concept of gravity, they wouldn't have thought of dropping bombs.

Weikart ignores vast tracts of German history that informed Hitler and the Nazis. Organised anti-semitism, in the form of pogroms, is as old as the Roman Empire under Caligula and Martin Luther in 1543 advocated these ideas in Germany in his sadly influential tract "Of Jews And Their Lies". To point out, 1543 is around 200 years before Darwin's birth.

Genuine historians have rightly rubbished this book, for example Sander Gliboff professor of History and Philosophy of Science said :"It is dismaying to see such opinions being passed off as results of scholarly research." Exactly.

shockingly obvious
This is a scholarly book, exhaustively documented and effectively unanswerable.
It also sets out what is blindingly obvious, however shocking, ie the direct line in Western thought between Evolutionism and Nazi ideology.
The book's hostile critics are driven back on some very specious reasoning indeed, for example attacking the author's credentials and scholarship, or insisting that because Darwin was actually a liberal and decent man, it is preposterous to link him with Hitler. The assessment of Darwin the man is probably correct though the assessment of Weikart the scholar is not. More importantly, neither assertion has any bearing on the book's central thesis.
THAT is proved beyond all doubt.