Notice how it is the atheistic, Darwinian view of human life - humanity as a biological species only, without any reference to God - that makes the above cold-blooded discussion of human natural selection possible.Nope. You don't get it. People have been coming up with excuses for genocide for ages(i.e. papists, hindus etc... don't deserve to live). Hitler's main invention was not apologia for genocide it was *the industrialization of genocide*. Do we blame Henry Ford for the holocaust? He was even one of Hitler's first backers.
We need to clarify first that neither Ben Stein nor anyone else in “Expelled” ever claimed that Darwinism was the sole culprit for the Nazi program for killing the disabled or exterminating the Jews. The argument was more circumspect: Darwinism was an important—but by no means exclusive—ingredient in the Nazi worldview that motivated them to pursue death for the “inferior” as a means to foster evolutionary progress. This is irrefutable, if anyone will simply examine the evidence (just read the chapter “Nation and Race” in Mein Kampf).
If we focus on the Nazi program to kill the disabled, we find that just about all historians who have examined the evidence have concluded that Darwinism did have something to do with it. The museum in Hadamar (which Stein visited in the film) and the accompanying book for sale there both explain the influence of Darwinism on the Nazi euthanasia program.
For the Nazis killing the disabled was a radical form of eugenics, i.e., the program to improve humans hereditarily. The father of the modern eugenics movement, Francis Galton, conceived the idea while reading Darwin’s _Origin of Species_. The organizer of the German eugenics movement, Alfred Ploetz, claimed that his main ideas about eugenics were drawn from Darwinism. Ploetz also recruited the two leading Darwinists in Germany—Ernst Haeckel and August Weismann—to became honorary members of the Society for Race Hygiene when he founded it in 1905. Ploetz was on the Nazi government’s committee that framed eugenics legislation, and Hitler personally honored him in 1936 for his contributions to the German eugenics movement.
And from Mein Kampf:
Originally posted by Adolph Hitler
Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable.
http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/
The article makes clear the undeniable link between Darwinian thought and eugenics -- and how the Nazis put these ideas into practice.
The Gentle Darwinians
What Darwin’s Champions Won’t Mention...
The enthusiasm Nietzsche expresses in this passage is for eugenics, a theory of biological determinism invented by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s first cousin. However extreme Nietzsche’s recommendation might sound today, by the first part of the twentieth century eugenics came to be widely practiced. In 1933, little more than thirty years after Nietzsche’s death, the Hereditary Health Courts set up in Nazi Germany were enforcing a rigorous policy of enforced sterilization; to a lesser degree, similar policies were carried out in societies from the United States to Scandinavia.
In 1912, in his presidential address to the First International Congress of Eugenics, a landmark gathering in London of racial biologists from Germany, the United States, and other parts of the world, Major Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son, trumpeted the spread of eugenics and evolution. As described by Nicholas Wright Gillham in his A Life of Francis Galton, Major Darwin foresaw the day when “eugenics would become not only a grail, a substitute for religion, as Galton had hoped, but a ‘paramount duty’ whose tenets would presumably become enforceable.” The major repeated his father’s admonition that, though the crudest workings of natural selection must be mitigated by “the spirit of civilization,” society must encourage breeding among the best stock and prevent it among the worst “without further delay.”
Leonard Darwin’s recognition of his father’s role in the formation and promotion of eugenics was more than filial piety. ...