Where Chairman Mao and Teenage Nihilists Got Their Motivation

CEH ^ | November 12, 2009

[GodGunsGuts]

Nov 12, 2009 — What propelled Mao Zhedong to become the biggest mass murderer in world history?  Let a professor of Chinese history answer the question.  James Pusey (Bucknell U), writing in Nature this week for a series on “Global Darwin,”¹ was explaining the vacuum left by the collapse of the reform movement in the early 20th century.  A “group of intellectuals” found Marxism attractive.  It was the fittest ideology:

Many tried to fill it: Sun, Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kaishek) and, finally, the small group of intellectuals who, in indignation at the betrayal at Versailles, found in Marxism what seemed to them the fittest faith on Earth to help China to survive.
    This was not, of course, all Darwin’s doing, but Darwin was involved in it all.  To believe in Marxism, one had to believe in inexorable forces pushing mankind, or at least the elect, to inevitable progress, through set stages (which could, however, be skipped).  One had to believe that history was a violent, hereditary class struggle (almost a ‘racial’ struggle); that the individual must be severely subordinated to the group; that an enlightened group must lead the people for their own good; that the people must not be humane to their enemies; that the forces of history assured victory to those who were right and who struggled.
    Who taught Chinese these things?  Marx?  Mao?  No.  Darwin.

The ideology that led Mao to murder 77 million of his own people (11/30/2005) began with a view of nature that values struggle and fitness over the individual.  Though acknowledging that the political currents in China were complex, with reformers like Yan Fu and Sun Yat-sen incorporating Darwinian principles without radical revolution, Pusey placed the worldview that empowered Marxist ideology squarely at the feet of Darwin.  Darwin was Mao’s ideological mentor.
    Darwinian ideas can produce murderous results in individuals, too.  The Sunday Times Online printed an article that described the Darwinian motivations behind some of the serial killers of recent memory.  “The naturalist [Darwin] outraged the church, prompting a bitter debate that still sets creationists against evolutionists,” Dennis Sewell wrote.  “Now a sinister link has emerged between his work and the recent spate of high-school killings by crazed, nihilistic teenagers.”  Despite Darwin’s personal reputation as an “amiable Victorian gent,” Sewell continued, he “has been fingered as a racist, an apologist for genocide, and the inspiration of a string of psychopathic killers.”  The shooters at Columbine High School, for instance, saw themselves as eliminators of the weak.  Harris wore “Natural Selection” on his T-shirt the day of the shooting spree.  Many other artifacts gathered afterwards, described in the article, uncovered the boys’ fascination with “survival of the fittest.”
    In 2007, detectives intercepted a school shooting in Pennsylvania.  They “discovered that their suspect often logged on to a social networking site called Natural Selection’s Army,” the article says.  Sewell discussed a personality cult around Harris and Klebold in certain chatrooms and websites, including a computer game that lets the player act out the massacre.  “Natural Selection” apparel is hot with these aficionados, and “‘Natural Selection’ is the name of a popular computer game in which competing teams attempt to annihilate one another – a sign that Darwin’s term is still associated by many teenagers with sudden and extreme violence.”  Another case is the killing spree in 2007 in Finland by Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who declared in his manifesto before the event that he was a social Darwinist wanting to weed out the unfit.  In his words: “It’s time to put natural selection and survival of the fittest back on track.”
    Sewell acknowledged that Darwin himself would have been horrified by all this.  He knows that other great figures have been used by murderers as their inspiration.  Still, he was not ready to let the bearded old man off the hook.  “One conclusion implicit in evolutionary theory is that human existence has no ultimate purpose or special significance.... Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved,” he continued.  These simple (and simplistic) ideas are certainly accessible to disturbed adolescents who feel nothing stops them from taking natural law into their own hands.  And Darwin himself wrote in 1881, “Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”
    Sewell is author of the book The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics.  His Times article was published on the Science page, not the Opinion page.  On page 2, he continued supporting his premise that Darwin’s views feed into the nihilism behind high school shootings – and political genocides – because it destroys all moral restraint.  One particular example shows this is not an isolated interpretation.  He said, “Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang ‘Randomness is good enough for me, If there’s no design it means I’m free’ – lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel.”  With a gospel like that, no wonder some go beyond the mere abandonment of sexual mores taught by their parents.  “But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.”  Sewell ended by pointing out that we cannot begin to address the issues when presented only with a “bowdlerized account of Darwin’s work” – i.e., a sanitized version portraying Darwin as a scientific saint.  He said, “The more sinister implications of the world-view that has come to be called ‘Darwinism’ — and the interpretation the teenage nihilists put on it – are as much part of the Darwin story as the theory of evolutions [sic].”

---

1.  James Pusey, “Global Darwin: Revolutionary road,” Nature 462, 162-163 (12 November 2009) | doi:10.1038/462162a.

You have just seen what two scholars said who were not intelligent design leaders, creationists, or Bible-thumping preachers.  If you will not listen to the latter, then listen to the former.  You heard them saying what the preachers would have said anyway.  Let’s recap the list of principles that Pusey said you have to believe in to be a Marxist:

1. Inexorable forces push mankind to inevitable progress (are we there yet?)
2. There are set stages of progress (which can be skipped; e.g., by revolution).
3. History is a story of violent struggle (i.e., violence, not peace, is the ultimate reality).
4. The struggle is between classes or races (meaning, genocide is sometimes a moral obligation).
5. The individual must be severely subordinated to the group (so you are just a pawn in a game played by forces of nature).
6. An enlightened group must lead the people for their own good (e.g., the Communist Party leaders, who lived more royally than Czars, while their people suffered in famines and cramped apartments or in prison camps).
7. People must not be humane to their enemies (or to the unfit).
8. The forces of history assure victory to those who struggle (i.e., evolve or perish; eliminate the Mother Theresas and hospitals who unnaturally prolong the life of the unfit).

Again: who taught the Chinese these things?  Marx?  Mao?  No.  Darwin.
    What a world we live in.  On one side you have radical revolutionaries and teenage nihilists killing for Darwin.  On the other you have radical Muslims killing for Allah.  What to do?  Run not to the poorly-named Scientific Gospel, or to any self-proclaimed messiah who’s dead, but to the true gospel of the risen Lord Jesus Christ.  Run to the true Messiah who gave his life for his friends.  Run to Teacher whose two greatest commandments were to love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself.  Notice how un-Darwinian his Sermon on the Mount is.  The truth, not randomness, will set you free.  The truth will lead to a flourishing free society based on individual responsibility and charity.  You will know teachers of lies and teachers of the truth by their fruits.

[count-your-change]

No being of the YEC persuasion I don't have to concern myself with YEC “problems.

And it is correct that Darwin didn't invent his theory of evolution as he modestly says he drew his ideas from Wallace, Galton, and Greg.

The ideas of the first two are probably better known than Greg's so I'll show part of one of Greg's essays in which he laments the failure of natural selection to cull the human race and what the ideal regime would be like:

“...Of course it will be urged that the principle of natural selection fails thus utterly because our civilisation is imperfect and misdirected; because our laws are insufficient; because our social arrangements are unwise; because our moral sense is languid or unenlightened. No doubt, if our legislators and rulers were quite sagacious and quite stern, and our people in all ranks quite wise and good, the beneficent tendencies of nature would continue to operate uncounteracted. No constitutions would be impaired by insufficient nutriment and none by unhealthy excess. No classes would be so undeveloped either in mind or muscle as to be unfitted for procreating sound and vigorous offspring. The sick, the tainted, and the maimed, would be too sensible and too unselfish to dream ‘of marrying and handing down to their children the curse of diseased or feeble frames;—or if they were not self-controlled, the state would exercise a salutary but unrelenting paternal despotism, and supply the deficiency by vigilant and timely prohibition. A republic is conceivable in which paupers should be forbidden to propagate; in which all candidates for the proud and solemn privilege of continuing an untainted and perfecting race should be subjected to a pass or a competitive examination, and those only should be suffered to transmit their names and families to future generations who had a pure, vigorous and well-developed constitution to transmit;—so that paternity should be the right and function exclusively of the élite of the nation, and humanity be thus enabled to march on securely and without drawback to its ultimate possibilities of progress. Every damaged or inferior temperament might be eliminated, and every special and superior one be selected and enthroned,—till the human race, both in its manhood and its womanhood, became one glorious congregation of saints, sages, and athletes:—till we were all Blondins, all Shakespeares, Pericles’, Socrates’, Columbuses and Fénelons. But no nation—in modern times at least—has ever yet approached this ideal; no such wisdom or virtue has ever been found except in isolated individual [362] instances; no government and no statesman has ever yet dared thus to supplement the inadequacy of personal patriotism by laws so sapiently despotic”

Of course neither Greg or Darwin lived long enough to see this eugenic Utopia come to fruition but they certainly would've had no difficulty understanding it and its roots when Mao or others sought to establish it.

[Natural Law]

"Of course neither Greg or Darwin lived long enough to see this eugenic Utopia come to fruition but they certainly would've had no difficulty understanding it and its roots"

Any nation or culture with a history of monarchy, oligarchy and colonization was well versed in "Natural Selection" as it applied to human populations. This dates back thousands of years and is not limited to Britain or Europe. To try to link Mao's cultural purges and the Holocaust to Charles Darwin is simply specious.

[count-your-change]

The evidence is the evidence even if you don't like it and saying “specious” doesn't change it.

But as to these nations “well versed in Natural Selection”, whom might they be?
I understand many people had some notion of evolving over time or something like it but “Natural Selection”?

[Natural Law]

"The evidence is the evidence even if you don't like it"

I do not deny that Socialists, Communists and Tyrants may have credited Darwin, but that does not imply that he in any reciprocated. My point is that Darwin, although iconic for his theory on evolution, invented nothing. Had Darwin not connected the dots someone sooner or later else would have. The criticism of Charles Darwin is undeserved.

"But as to these nations “well versed in Natural Selection”, whom might they be?"

Within most countries were a class of people who declared themselves superior to the commoner by virtue of their superior breeding and lineage. Amongst nations there existed racially based theories of superiority by virtue of their superior genetic stock and the natural selection of the generations of wars and competition between the nations and peoples. Articulating these common practices to the competition between species, in the environment of church-state authority structures took more balls than brains.

[count-your-change]

No, Darwin wasn't original in his ideas and gave credit, as I said, to other. What he did do, with the help of a few friends, was give his biases and the observations that supported them a patina of scientific respectability.

For example when it to intelligence, etc.:

“The belief that there exists in man some close relation between the size of the brain and the development of the intellectual faculties is supported by the comparison of the skulls of savage and civilised races, of ancient and modern people, and by the analogy of the whole vertebrate series. Dr. J. Barnard Davis has proved70 by many careful measurements, that the mean internal capacity of the skull in Europeans is 92·3 cubic inches; in Americans 87·5; in Asiatics 87·1; and in Australians only 81·9 inches. Professor Broca71 found that skulls from graves in Paris of the nineteenth century, were larger than those from vaults of the twelfth century, in the proportion of 1484 to 1426; and Prichard is persuaded that the present inhabitants of Britain have “much more capacious brain-cases” than the ancient inhabitants. Nevertheless it must be admitted that some skulls of very high antiquity, such as the famous one of Neanderthal, are well developed and capacious.”

A well established finding that runs directly contrary to his theory is glossed over like a mere bump in the road to evolution. And naturally his own countrymen are on the high end of intelligence via brain size.

Darwin as a person may have been a kindly old gentleman and a lover of children and rabbits but his writings, if anyone can struggle though them, not only connect the dots but invent them from whole cloth. And men with ideas like Greg helped him as Darwin acknowledged. So if he can be praised for his writings and ideas, he can rightly be criticized for same.

[Stultis]

Has anyone actually read the Nature opinion piece this creationist cites? You can't trust a creationist to accurately represent something like this. I'm curious where this article was actually going.

In any case, despite diligent searching, I'm finding ABSOLUTELY NOTHING substantively connecting Darwin and Mao. If, as the Creation Evolution Headlines author writes, "Darwin was Mao’s ideological mentor," then surely Mao would have said or written something about Darwin or Darwinism.

I've looked at several online archives Mao's works. The most complete I've found is at marxists.org. Here is the google search on that archive for "Darwin." Out of God knows how many thousands upon thousands of pages from speeches, books (including of course all of the "Little Red Book"), articles, poetry, etc, there are ONLY FIVE references to Darwin. All of them are passing references. None of them are substantive.

All of these five Darwin references by Mao make the same trivial point -- new ideas that may later turn out to be worthwhile are often initially rejected, especially by elites and the older generation. In all cases Darwin is only one of several examples cited, and in no case is he even the primary focus. It wouldn't take you much time to look at all five examples, but here's one for the non-clickers:

Ever since ancient times the people who founded new schools of thought were all young people without too much learning. They had the ability to recognize new things at a glance and, having grasped them, they opened fire on the old fogeys. The old fogeys with learning always opposed them. When Martin Luther founded the Reformation, and Darwin’s theories appeared, many people opposed them. The inventor of sleeping-pills was not even a doctor, let alone a famous doctor; he was only a pharmacist. At first the Germans did not take him seriously, but the French welcomed him. That was how sleeping-pills started. I am told that penicillin was invented by a man who worked as a laundryman in a dyers and cleaners. Franklin of America, who discovered electricity, began as a newspaper boy. Later he became biographer, politician and scientist. Gorky only had two years of elementary schooling. Of course some things can be learnt at school; I don’t propose to close all the schools. What I mean is that it is not absolutely necessary to attend school. The main thing is whether your direction is correct or not and whether you come to grips with your studies. Learning has to be grasped. As soon as they had grasped the truth the young founders of new schools embarked on discoveries, scorning the old fogeys. Then those with learning oppressed them. Isn’t that what history is like? When we started to make revolution, we were mere twenty-year-old boys, while the rulers of that time, like Yüan Shih-k’ai and Tuan Ch’i-jui were old and experienced. They had more learning, but we had more truth.

Notice who Darwin is immediately paired with in that quotation. So, by the weak standards of this creationist author, I suppose we can also assert that, "Martin Luther was Mao’s ideological mentor."

BTW, in this essay Mao describes Jesus (along with Confucius, The Buddha and Mohammed) as "among the greatest thinkers." More than he ever said for Darwin.

[Stultis]

The evidence is the evidence even if you don't like it and saying “specious” doesn't change it.

So what IS that evidence, count-your-change? Let's focus specifically on the title claim that Mao was influenced particularly by Darwin. The article doesn't offer a shred of specific evidence. I've just searched through all of Mao's works available online and in English (see my preceding message) and among thousands and thousands of pages found next to nothing about Darwin.

So what IS "the evidence"?

[Stultis]

Then I wonder if you know who proclaimed:

“Chinese socialism is founded upon Darwin and the theory of evolution.”

Sorry. I'm not ready to buy that as a genuine Mao quote. It only appears on Creationist websites, and never with an original reference cited. Either no reference is cited, some other creationist is cited, or we get the secondary reference, "K. Mehnert, Kampf um Mao's Erbe, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1977".

So, what, we're just supposed to trust what the unknown creationist who mined this quote said about what "K. Mehnert" said about what Mao said? (And who knows? The chain might be longer than that. Maybe "K. Mehnert" used a secondary source!) I don't think so. I want to know when and where Mao said or wrote it.

[AndyJackson]

My conspiracy theory is that marxist radicals taught these self-proclaimed conservatives how to argue like marxist radicals in order to discredit the conservative movement by showing that it is a transparent fraud. It is a brilliant tactic and they trained their useful idiots amazingly well.

If conservatives argue like liberals we are dead. The principal onservative principal is that we start from fact, and use logical argumentation, to reach a reasonable conclusion, a worldview that began with the French enlightenment and worked its way through such as Locke and Jefferson and Paine and Franklin and Adams and other worthies among our founding fathers.

Being a physicist, and not a biologist, I don't give a professional fig about the technical details in this argument. I just care that so-called conservatives would attempt to defraud their audience with transparent intellectual frippery.

[count-your-change]

It's a quote form Klaus Mehnert’s book whose title from German is The Struggle Over Mao's Heritage.
Mehnert was an author of several books and a journalist.

I don't have his book at hand, perhaps my library will, but I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the quote and good reason to believe it.

A scholar by the name of James Pusey, “China and Charles Darwin”, after commenting on how both Darwinism and Marxism aided Mao's “reform” offered a reason for this acceptance of Darwin in China and particularly by Mao:

“Darwin offered a substitute for the traditional idea of “The Mandate of Heaven”, having himself “disproved” that theory by “disproving” Heaven's existence”.

As the author says, ‘Darwin helped make Marxists the fittest’ in the struggle for survival of the fittest.

So Mao's statement would be perfectly in line with the history of China and his own debt to Darwin.

Of course I wouldn't expect evolutionist web sites to publicize Darwin's influence on Marxist China.

[count-your-change]

The evidence is Darwin’s theory and how it was put to use and that is what was documented in Pusey’s book, IF you care to take a look at it since I can’t repeat the entire book here but only some of his conclusions.

[Stultis]

but I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the [Mao] quote

How do you know it's even a quote? Maybe it was an editorial evaluation by Mehnert that got transformed into a "quotation" when it was lifted.

Do you even know which creationist originally extracted this alleged quote from Mehnert’s book? It appears to have been extracted by one person and copied from creationist to creationist since. Why has no one cited an original reference for this alleged quote? Having not seen the book, how do you know that Mehnert is even a secondary source? Maybe Mehnert gets it elsewhere, so that he's a tertiary source!

Lacking all this info there is every reason to doubt, particularly given the irresponsible manner in which creationists have and do use quotes, and the number of psuedo-quotes freely circulating in the creationist literature.

A scholar by the name of James Pusey, “China and Charles Darwin”, after commenting on how both Darwinism and Marxism aided Mao's “reform” offered a reason for this acceptance of Darwin in China and particularly by Mao:

“Darwin offered a substitute for the traditional idea of “The Mandate of Heaven”, having himself “disproved” that theory by “disproving” Heaven's existence”.

I've been looking at that passage, and a number of others, indeed looking through all of what is available of Pusey's (out of publication) book through Google Book's preview function.

Pusey does not say, either in the text or pages immediately preceding your quote, or anywhere else that I can find, that Darwin was accepted "particularly by Mao". In fact -- in line with my search of the marxists.org Mao archive -- I can't find any indication in Pusey that Mao himself commented on Darwin.

Furthermore, you seem to fundamentally misunderstand Pusey when you write, "after commenting on how both Darwinism and Marxism aided Mao's 'reform'." Pusey doesn't connect this reference to "reform" to Mao, or even to the communists. He's talking about actual reformists -- those who wanted to substantially challenge and reform the Qing (Manchu) dynasty's corrupt, weak and ineffective rule -- as opposed to violent revolutionaries (first Republicans, later Communists) who wanted to replace it.

Indeed Pusey makes the major and groundbreaking figure in introducing Darwin to China the reformist (not communist) scholar and journalist Liang Qichao. (Pusey spells the name, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao.)

Indeed, Pusey doesn't connect Darwin in China particularly with communists at all. Most of his book discusses reformists/modernizers, like Liang, and Republicans/nationalists/ANTI-communists, like Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek. Communists also used Darwin was a rationale for rebellion (traditionally a severe sin in the Chinese mind) but this was "old hat" by the time they came along.

The discussion of communists is relatively brief, since, as Pusey asserts, it was the communists who killed Darwin in China!!!

[pg 448] First the Nationalists won and then the Communists won, and when the Communists won, Darwin's second day was over. For the Communists had the power to decree that Marx had superseded Darwin -- and they did [...]

[pg 449] Darwin helped inspire a true renaissance of Chinese thought by specifically challenging (or seeming to challenge) certain favorite traditional ideas and by discrediting all ancient authority. For twenty years, all the great questions of philosophy were rethought. Individual philosophies were changed. Individual lives were changed. And, if was a renaissance that produced nothing newly profound, it as least held great promise as the freest period of thought since the classical age. But it was cut short -- by the early imposition of neo-orthodoxy, the Thought of Mao Tse-tung.

BTW, that last paragraph, IMMEDIATELY PRECEDES the paragraph you partially quote:

...But it was cut short -- by the early imposition of neo-orthodoxy, the Thought of Mao Tse-tung.

That "imposition," of course, also owed much to Darwin. For Darwin had legitimized violent change and revolution. Surely that was one of the most momentous things Darwin did to China, even if it was the furthest thing from his own mind. Darwin offered a substitute for the traditional idea of the Mandate of Heaven...

So, to support your claim that "both Darwinism and Marxism aided Mao's 'reform'," you quote from a paragraph immediately following that author's clear assertion that Mao ENDED the period of Darwin inspired reform! How very, very creationist of you. And, btw, we know you did actually read the immediately preceding material, because you chose to characterize (or, rather, mischaracterize) it for us!

Granted, Pusey does claim that Darwin was an inspiration for pre-Communist (and pre-Nationalist) "reform;" and for first Republican and then Communist revolution. But he does say NOT say that Darwin inspired Communist "reform," i.e. nation building and governance. He says rather that the appeals to Darwin ceased with triumph of the Communists.

So Mao's statement would be perfectly in line with the history of China and his own debt to Darwin.

Nope. As we now see, the reference you chose makes this alleged "quote" even more dubious. First because Pusey says nothing about Mao commenting on Darwin in this, or any other substantive, manner. Second, because he says, to the contrary, that Maoism "cut short" the "renaissance of Chinese thought" that "Darwin helped inspire."

Of course I wouldn't expect evolutionist web sites to publicize Darwin's influence on Marxist China.

Why not? Marxist.org certainly doesn't worry about conveying information that will be popular. They're Marxists. Their interest is in conveying Marxist doctrine.

In fact look at the index page to their archive. Scroll down to the bottom section on "Natural Science". They write:

Marxists have always taken a keen interest in the development of the natural and social sciences and the philosophical problems arising out of science. Even scientists who have had conservative political views have contributed to revolutionary ideas.

What science authors do they include? Einstein, Freud, some anthropologist, and Darwin (although they only archive the Origin). So they're certainly not censoring Darwin references from their library. A google search on the whole archive turns up 372 "Darwin" references across the whole archive, and 1,330 across the whole site.

I any case I didn't search through stuff written by anyone running the site. I searched through a HUGE archive that apparently includes just about everything Mao wrote which has been translated into English. The archive covers his entire career, from 1917 until his death. Again, "Darwin" is only even mentioned, per google search, 5 times, and only trivially and in passing.

[Stultis]

The evidence is Darwin’s theory and how it was put to use and that is what was documented in Pusey’s book, IF you care to take a look at it since I can’t repeat the entire book here but only some of his conclusions.

As you can see from my preceding message, I did "care to take a look."

You don't have to "repeat the entire book". Just give me the citation[s] where it documents Mao being directly motivated or inspired by Darwin. Because I can't find that.

I do find, in Pusey, anti-Manchu reformers being inspired, in part, by Darwin. I do find specific documentation of ANTI-communists like Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek appealing to Darwin. But Mao himself appealing to Darwin? Nope.

Unless you can come up with something good, it appears that the lead article's claim -- that the historian Pusey documents that Darwin, "propelled Mao Zhedong to become the biggest mass murderer in world history" -- is likely just another creationist lie. I'd have to read Pusey's Nature opinion piece to be certain. But, having found nothing in Pusey's book, I'm not about to pay the 40 bucks Nature wants for me to access the article.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[count-your-change]

“Do you even know which creationist originally extracted this alleged quote from Mehnert’s book?”

I don't know (nor do you)that any “creationist” extraced the quote from Mehhnert’s book but I will see if I can find more on it.

You would do well to read a bit more of the book.

Darwin offered a way for the country to become fit for survival seeing that it had a few years previously lost a war to small Japan. And gaining that fitness through struggle was how Darwin would pave the way for Marx.
Hence Pusey writes:

“That synthesis [revolution and evolution, earlier called the ‘marrow of Marxism], real or imagined, gave Marx tremendous power, for it seemed to mean Marx had gone beyond Darwin, that he had become a “Super Darwinist”.....Marx was THE “Social Darwinist”.

And had you looked to these words about Mao's “imposition”,

“That “imposition”, of course, also owed much to Darwin. For Darwin had legitimatized violent change and revolution.
Surely that was one of the most momentous things Darwin did to China, even if it was the furthest thing from his mind.
Darwin offered a substitute for the traditional idea of “The Mandate of Heaven”, having himself “disproved” that theory by “disproving” Heaven's existence”.

That is what Pusey's book is all about, how Darwin paved the way for Marx. Hence Mao's comment even IF he didn't or did write and comment on Darwin to any extent.

Darwin WAS the reform. Marx was just an extension of Darwin, the house on it's foundation.

You've misunderstood the premise of the book. If you read the previews, I suggest you read them to the end.

[Stultis]

You've misunderstood the premise of the book.

I perfectly understand Pusey's thesis: China was a highly traditional society, resistant to change and specifically demonizing rebellion. In this context Darwin (more specifically social darwinism) was, along with other Western ideas, utilized to legitimate and justify, initially reform, and later rebellion, by many of those who wanted to change China; first reformers, later Republicans, and finally Communists.

You've been trying to imply the whole book was about Communist appropriation of Darwin, when in fact that was the least of Pusey's findings. I'm getting the whole picture. The Communists were the last to adopt Darwin, and then dropped Darwin once they gained power.

Problem is you're trying to justify this creationist screed which claims that Darwin "propelled Mao Zhedong to become the biggest mass murderer in world history." However, at least in his book, Pusey at most claimed that appeals to Darwin helped Communists come to power; but those appeals weren't even original to the communists, who were merely copying the arguments of reformers and Republicans. Pusey doesn't claim that Communists appealed to Darwin in governing China (indeed he says they dropped Darwin when they gained power) much less that Darwin had anything to do Mao's mass murders.

Finally, both you, and the lead article, are claiming that Mao personally was influenced by or appealed to Darwin. But Pusey doesn't even make this claim about Mao specifically. Thus you're reduced to tap-dancing, arm-waving and generalities.

Hence Mao's comment even IF he didn't or did write and comment on Darwin to any extent.

Darwin WAS the reform. Marx was just an extension of Darwin, the house on it's foundation.

We still don't know if this alleged quote, which appears only on creationist websites, and doesn't appear in any of his collected works in English --

“Chinese socialism is founded upon Darwin and the theory of evolution.”

-- even is "Mao's comment".

But that aside, your problem with your chosen source is that it equally, if not more so, supports the contention that "Darwin WAS the reform" which opened China to modern, Western ideas; that "Darwin WAS the reform" which led to the abandonment of backward traditions like foot binding; that "Darwin WAS the reform" which overthrew the weak and corrupt Manchu dynasty; that "Darwin WAS the reform" which established the nationalist Republic; that "Darwin WAS the reform" which organized resistance to the fascist Japanese during World War II; that "Darwin WAS the reform" which organized nationalist resistance to the Communist insurgency, etc, etc, etc. This is all in the same book.

The connection made to Communism and to Mao is indirect. Darwin (as the Chinese interpreted him) justified rebellion, consequently destabilized China, and encouraged a search for more "fit" political ideologies, of which the Communists were only one group contending for their "fitness," and just happening to be the one that won out in the end. So the connection of Darwinism and Communism, per Pusey, is only in this indirect sense of appeals to Darwin supposedly helping to lay the groundwork for revolution, but NOT directing the shape of that revolution, nor how it would govern having attained power.

[count-your-change]

You fail to understand what I said and rephrase it to suit yourself.
And as I said YOU may not like the evidence but it is what it is. And the authors conclusions are quite clear as I quoted them. Anyone can go there and read for themselves and you’re calling something a “screed” simply shows you really don’t understand what was said.

Anything else you wish to add?

[Stultis]

Anything else you wish to add?

Nope. For the present I'm completely satisfied with the case I've made.