Glen Davidson
Posts: 1100
Joined: May 2006
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Quite so, k.e. and N. Wells. Since the Hitler-Darwin smear has been brought up again, I'll take this opportunity to copy what I wrote on Ed Brayton's blog (one edit in brackets). For what it's worth:
[QUOTE]One may detect a very tenuous link between Darwin and Hitler, of course, in the sense that 'all things are connected'.
Beyond that it's pretty much BS. English science was all about mechanism, causality, what Hitler might have called "shopkeeper science"--keeping track of all of the transactions. German science, while it became good solid science by the 20th century in most areas, tended toward the Romantic in the biological realm. Haeckel's musings about a true recapitulation of phylogeny in each ontogeny, that sort of thing.
I think Nietzsche was great, but his later anti-anti-Semitism and opposition to German nationalism as it existed in his day did not prevent Hitler from being influenced by, and misusing, Nietzsche's writings (I will say that Nietzsche wrote some few things that make one's skin crawl, but his writings in their entirety are much as Heidegger characterized them, as involving primarily an artistic conception of life). And Nietzsche was pointedly opposed to "Darwinism", preferring, yes, a kind of Romantic striving of life toward power. It may not be possible to show [conclusively] that Hitler did prefer the Nietzschean/Romantic conception of evolution (found also in Schelling, Hegel, and I dare say Marx in altered form), but all evidences, from the use of the term "Superman" to the idea of controlled human evolution, points away from a belief in Darinian theory, and toward pre-Darwinian and competing conceptions of progressive evolution.
Hitler was caused by Darwin in about the same way that Lysenko was caused by Darwinian conceptions of evolution--as a reaction against the real science. As such, Kennedy et al are sloshing through analogous reactions against science and substituting pseudoscience for the real science, much as Nazis, commies, and also less dangerous folk, have done in the past. Let us hope that their reactions against truth will be less violent than were Hitler's and Stalin's were (to be fair, I think that indications thus far is that they are less aggressive in their use of power).
That said, have you noticed how ID/creo "arguments" are drifting away from the so-called "science", and toward moralistic screeds and denunciations of their opponents as being the source of various evils? We seem to have accomplished something in opposing their pseudoscience after all, although they're not about to quit, and will happily smear morally those who they can't answer scientifically. After all, it never was about science, and all about moral dictation, anyhow.
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http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p....p
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of coincidence---ID philosophy
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It was pointed out that almost nothing would be posted in that case so it was kept open (the students were kept busy with the required reading, class discussion, and the paper due at the end of the course).