----- Original Message ----- On Sun, 4 May 2008 22:52:38 -0400, "Louis Schmier" wrote: > Mike, Darwin was not the cause of the Holocaust.
Let us be clear about this: by making this statement you are implying that Ben Stein is wrong, right? It would be appreciated if you simply state this outright. >What I am saying, in the history of science, is that the science >of Darwin, particularly Natural Selection, was there and later >used by others as justification, as Nature's laws, for their existing >prejudices and predispositions. If I may, I would suggest reading Daniel Kevles' "In the Name of Eugenics" to get clear on the history of (a) the development of what is now referred to as "Darwinian Theory", (b) how these ideas were appropriated into social programs of racial hygiene, and (c) how geneticists, after Fisher's synthesis of evolutionary theory and genetics, started to dismiss eugnenics proposals as being unscientific and was simply used as a weapon against "social undesirables" by societal elites. Specifically, I suggest you look at Kevles' Chapter VIII. A Coalition of Critics (which identifies the scientists who argued against the eugencis, e.g. |...Raymond Pearl, professor of biometry and vital statistics at |Johns Hopkins ... lambasted the 'biology of superiority' in the |November 1927 issue of The American Mercury, asserting that |eugenics had "largely become a mingled mess of ill-grounded |and uncritical sociology, economics, anthropology, and politics, |full of emotional appeals to class and race prejudices, solemnly |put forth as science, and unfortunately accepted as such by the |general public" (Kevles,1986, p122) and Chapter IX. False Biology. A more convincing case can be made, I believe, that the Holocaust has closer ties to Madison Grant and his The Passing of The Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History than to Darwin. For those unfamiliar with Grant, a American lawyer, eugenicist, and influential New York socialite, there are summaries about his life and his book on Wikipedia, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passing_of_the_Great_Race http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Grant Kevles also reviews Grant and how scientists viewed his writings (e.g., |In 1935 Julian Huxley and the former Cambridge University |anthropologist A. C. Haddon published We Europeans: A Survey |of 'Racial' Problems, which castigated works like Madison Grants's |The Passing of the Great Race ("When...we read [Grant's book] |that the greatest and most masterful personalities have had blond |hair and blue eyes, we can make a shrewd guess at its author's |complexion. A flaw in his line of thought is that the same claims |are made by brunets!)" Kevles, 1986, p133 ) >From the Wikipedia entry on Grant, we have the following: |At the postwar Nuremberg Trials, Grant's Passing of the |Great Race was introduced into evidence by the defense of |Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician and head of the Nazi |euthanasia program, in order to justify the population policies |of the Third Reich or at least indicate that they were not ideologically |unique to Nazi Germany (it seemed to have had little effect, as |Brandt was sentenced to death). | |Grant's works of scientific racism are often cited by scholars to |demonstrate that many of the genocidal and eugenic ideas associated |with the Third Reich did not arise specifically in Germany, and in |fact that many of them had origins in the United States. As such, |because of Grant's well-connectedness and influential friends, he is |often used to contradict the idea that the U.S. did not have its own |history of racism, eugenics, and the popularity of quasi-Fascist ideals. |Because of the strong associations his eugenics work had with |the policies of Nazi Germany, his work as a conservationist has |been somewhat ignored and obscured, as many organizations with |which he was once associated do not generally want to overstress |their connections with him. If one is allowed to raise the proximal-distal cause distinction, I think that Grant and his work in support of eugenics is a much closer cause to the Holocaust (a proximal cause) than any set of links to Darwin (a distal cause at best). And given that Grant was a lawyer, should anyone now claim that the study of law leads to genocide or that lawyers are murderers? Oh, outside of being a commedian, what is Ben Stein? Oh, the irony! (Yale Law, 1970; see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Stein ) -Mike Palij New York University [EMAIL PROTECTED] P.S. I think that Ben Stein is as "correct" about the Darwin-Holocaust link as he was on the identity of "Deep Throat", the governement source for Woodward and Bernstein. --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
