Tag Archives: Charles Darwin

Was Darwinism Connected to National Socialism and Marxism? Part 1

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

National Socialism (Nazism) and Marxism are, for the most part, dead and buried as movements. However, it is incumbent on us, the caretakers of the cemetery, to remind everyone of the past so that it won’t be repeated.

Perhaps you believe that we are just beating a dead horse by mentioning the profound effects that Darwin’s ideas had on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I disagree. Darwin’s ideas, although certainly blunted and modified over time, are still an important foundation for our culture.

The theme of “survival of the fittest” can be found everywhere in the entertainment industry. Just take a look at the recent TV series Revolution. This post-apocalyptic narrative of life on earth after electrical power ceases repeatedly trades on the idea that civilized men revert back to savages when food and shelter become more scarce. As a culture, we continue to be fascinated by Darwin’s ideas.

So what movements found allies in Darwin in the beginning of the 20th century? Philosopher David Stove, in his book Darwinian Fairytales, first briefly recounts the connection between Darwin’s ideas and National Socialism.

It is less well known, but still is fairly well known, that Adolf Hitler found or thought he found an authorization for his policies in the Darwinian theory of evolution. He said, for example, that “if we did not respect the law of nature, imposing our will by the right of the stronger, a day would come when the wild animals would again devour us-then the insects would eat the wild animals, and finally nothing would exist except the microbes. By means of the struggle the elites are continually renewed. The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle by allowing the survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature.”

Hitler justified his policies because he was merely acting on the “law of selection” that demands that only the fit survive. Stove continues with a description of the link between Darwinism and Marxism.

What deserves to be well known, but has in fact been virtually forgotten, is this: that if Darwinism once furnished a justification, retrospective or prospective, for the crimes of . . . National Socialists, it performed the same office to an even greater extent, between about 1880 and 192o, for the crimes, already committed or still to be committed, of Marxists.

It is in fact scarcely possible to exaggerate the extent to which Marxist thought in this period incorporated Darwinism as an essential component. Marxists do not believe, of course, that there will be any struggle for life among human beings in the future classless society. But it was that Darwinian conception which Marxists at this time adopted as their description of human life under capitalism.

In part 2, we will look at some examples of period Marxist literature which lean on Darwin’s ideas for their justification.

Were Cave Men (Our Ancestors) All Trying to Kill Each Other? Part 3

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

In parts 1 and 2, we looked at agnostic philosopher David Stove’s explanation of “Darwinism’s Dilemma” in his book Darwinian Fairytales:

If Darwin’s theory of evolution were true, there would be in every species a constant and ruthless competition to survive: a competition in which only a few in any generation can be winners. But it is perfectly obvious that human life is not like that, however it may be with other species.

Stove introduced the Cave Man way out of the dilemma whereby Darwinists claim that even though humans are not in a constant and ruthless competition for survival today, they were in the past. Stove, however, thinks this way out is absurd. He writes:

Even if such a tribe could somehow continue in existence, it is extremely difficult to imagine how our species, as we now know it to he, could ever have graduated from so very hard a school. We need to remember how severe the rule of natural selection is, and what it means to say that a species is subject to it. It means, among other things, that of all the rabbits, flies, cod, pines, etc., that are born, the enormous majority must suffer early death; and it means no less of our species. How could we have escaped from this set up, supposing we once were in it?

After 150 years of being inundated with Darwinian theory, we forget how absurd aspects of it are. Stove’s point is staring us in the face. Darwin said that all species are in a brutal struggle for survival: kill or be killed. Yet, that clearly is not the case, today, with human beings. Therefore, Darwin’s theory flies directly in the face of what we know.

At this point, T. H. Huxley enters the scene to help out his friend, Charles Darwin. Stove picks up the story:

Darwinism in its early decades had an urgent need for an able and energetic PR man. Darwin himself had little talent for that kind of work, and even less taste for it. But he found in T. H. Huxley someone who had both the talent and the taste in plenty. Huxley came to be known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” and by thirty years of invaluable service as a defender of Darwinism against all comers, he deserved it. And he provides an unusually explicit example of a high scientific authority who takes the Cave Man way out.

Huxley knew perfectly well, of course, since he was not a madman, that human life in England in his own time did not bear any resemblance to a constant and ruthless struggle to survive. Why, life was not like that even among the savages of New Guinea-nay, even in Sydney-as he found when he was in these parts in the late 184os, as a surgeon on board H.M.S. Rattlesnake. Did these facts make him doubt, when he became a Darwinian about ten years later, the reality of Darwin’s “struggle for life,” at least in the case of humans? Of course not. They only made him think that, while of course there must have been a stage of Darwinian competition in human history, it must also have ended long ago.

So what was Huxley’s proposal?

But in those distant times, Huxley informs us, human beings lived in “nature,” or “in the state of nature,” or in “the savage state.” Each man “appropriated whatever took his fancy and killed whomsoever opposed him, if he could.” “Life was a continual free fight, and beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence.”‘

It is hard to believe one’s eyes when reading these words. Thomas Hobbes, forsooth! He was a philosopher who had published, two hundred years earlier, some sufficiently silly a priori anthropology. But Huxley is a great Darwinian scientist, and is writing in about 1890. Yet what he says is even sillier than anything that Hobbes dreamed up about the pre-history of our species.

More to come in part 4, as Stove continues to look at how Huxley propounded the Cave Man theory.

How Is Evolution Defined? Part 2

Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1, we looked at 6 definitions of evolution and explained how different Christian creationist positions deal with them.  If you recall, definition 6 was the most controversial:

6. “Blind watchmaker” thesis: the idea that all organisms have descended from common ancestors solely through unguided, unintelligent, purposeless, material processes such as natural selection acting on random variations or mutations; that the mechanisms of natural selection, random variation and mutation, and perhaps other similarly naturalistic mechanisms, are completely sufficient to account for the appearance of design in living organisms.

Jay Richards has several interesting things to say about definition 6 that are worth repeating:

Of all the senses of evolution, this one seems to fit with theism like oil with water. According to the blind watchmaker thesis, all the apparent design in life is just that—apparent. It’s really the result of natural selection working on random genetic mutations. (Darwin proposed “variation.” Neo-Darwinism attributes new variations to genetic mutations.)

The word “random” in the blind watchmaker thesis carries a lot of metaphysical baggage. In Neo-Darwinian theory, random doesn’t mean uncaused; it means that the changes aren’t directed—they don’t happen for any purpose. Moreover, they aren’t predictable, like gravity, and don’t occur for the benefit of individual organisms, species, or eco-systems, even if, under the guidance of natural  selection, an occasional mutation might enhance a species odds of survival.

The blind watchmaker thesis is more or less the same as Neo-Darwinism as its leading advocates understand it. It is usually wedded to some materialistic origin of life scenario, which isn’t about biological evolution per se. This so-called chemical evolution is often combined with biological evolution as two parts of a single narrative.

Unfortunately, the blind watchmaker thesis isn’t an eccentric definition of the word evolution. It’s textbook orthodoxy. For instance, Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson explained evolution by saying, “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.” Darwin himself understood his theory this way: “There seems to be no more design,” he wrote, “in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the winds blow.”

And here’s how the late Darwinist Ernst Mayr put it: “The real core of Darwinism, however, is the theory of natural selection. This theory is so important for the Darwinian because it permits the explanation of adaptation, the ‘design’ of the natural theologian, by natural means, instead of by divine intervention.” Notice that Mayr says, “instead of.”

These are representative quotes from the literature. From the time of Darwin to the present, Darwinists have always contrasted their idea with the claim that biological forms are designed or created. That’s the whole point of the theory.

Theists claim that the world, including the biological world, exists for a purpose; that it is, in some sense, designed. The blind watchmaker thesis denies this. So anyone wanting to reconcile strict Darwinian evolution with theism has a Grade A dilemma on his hands.

Does Evolution Give Us True Beliefs?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

If our minds developed solely due to the process of Darwinian evolution, then how can we trust that our minds give us true beliefs about the world?  This is a nasty problem for atheistic naturalists, because if they cannot argue convincingly that evolution gave us minds that generate true beliefs, then they cannot argue that atheistic naturalism is true.

Evolution is only concerned with survival, so the evolutionist must somehow convince us that most of our beliefs about the world are true because they help us survive.  But there are many examples we can give where that connection breaks down.

Philosopher Louis Pojman, in his book What Can We Know? ,  relates the research of John Garcia and his rats.  Garcia and his co-workers “performed experiments on rats in which the rats were fed distinctively flavored water or food and then given high doses of radiation, inducing sickness.  After a single exposure to radiation, the rats developed a strong aversion to their aforementioned distinctively flavored water or food.  Even if the radiation is given as long as twelve hours after eating the food or water, the aversion pattern follows.”

In this example, the rats believe the food and water make them sick, but they are wrong.  It seems that this aversion pattern is the result of natural selection to aid in survival.  Evolution has caused the rat to have untrue beliefs in order to survive.  Pojman notes that humans follow this same pattern when we become sick after eating a particular food, and then are often repulsed by that food for the rest of our lives, even though the food had nothing to do with us getting sick.

Pojman also explains that:

False beliefs may positively procure survival.  Inducing beliefs that great spirits are protecting members of the tribe may enable these members to surmount dangerous obstacles that would otherwise destroy them.  Consider two tribes, the Optimists and the Accuratists, who go to war.  They are relevantly similar in every way except that the Optimists believe that if they die in battle (especially sacrificing themselves for their mates), they will be rewarded with an afterlife of unparalleled sensuous bliss, whereas the Accuratists, tailoring the strength of their beliefs to the strength of the available evidence, believe that in all likelihood this life is all they have, that death is the final cessation of consciousness.  The Optimists are more likely to win; the Accuratists more likely to flee or submit to an inferior settlement.

As long as our beliefs enable us to reproduce more successfully, they may have nothing to do with truth.  Pojman quotes Pat Churchland, “Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F’s: feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing.  The principle chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. . . . Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”

Darwin himself had fears about evolution giving us true beliefs:

With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.  Would any one trust in the conviction of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

Perhaps the belief that atheistic naturalism is true is nothing more than a genetic mutation which survives in a small number of advanced primates.  If you’re an atheistic naturalist, you may never know.

What Kind of Morality Could Evolution Have Given Us?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Most atheists appeal to the process of Darwinian evolution as the source of our moral instincts, but this idea poses some intriguing questions.  What if humankind had evolved in different circumstances, in different environments?  One could imagine a different set of moral instincts having developed in humans.  What about other animals?  We see different behaviors in them based on their evolutionary history.  Let’s look at some examples.

Philosopher William Lane Craig draws our attention to John Hick.  He “invites us to imagine an ant suddenly endowed with the insights of socio-biology and the freedom to make personal decisions.”  Hick writes:

Suppose him to be called upon to immolate himself for the sake of the ant-hill. He feels the powerful pressure of instinct pushing him towards this self-destruction. But he asks himself why he should voluntarily . . . carry out the suicidal programme to which instinct prompts him? Why should he regard the future existence of a million million other ants as more important to him than his own continued existence? . . . Since all that he is and has or ever can have is his own present existence, surely in so far as he is free from the domination of the blind force of instinct he will opt for life–his own life.

Why should the ant go against his evolutionary instincts?  His instinct for suicide is for the good of the ant-hill and has been placed into him by evolutionary processes.  If humans had likewise evolved with an intense instinct to immolate ourselves, would atheists tell us we ought to immolate ourselves or would they say we ought not?  If we ought not, then why not, given our evolutionary instincts?

Darwin himself recognized this problem.  He said, “If men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering.”

If morality is derived from evolution, and evolution gave our females moral instincts to kill their brothers, would the atheist say that this is behavior is right?

Philosopher Mark Linville notes that “wolves in a pack know their place in the social hierarchy.  A lower ranked male feels compelled to give way to the alpha male.”  If we imagine that there were wolf moral philosophers, would they not draw the inference that justice is inequality, that wolves ought to give way to those higher in the social hierarchy?  After all, this is what evolution gave them.  Would atheists agree with the wolf philosophers?

In the rest of the animal world, we see animals eating their young, we see males aggressively forcing themselves on females sexually, and we see animals violently taking things from each other.  If evolution has caused all of these behaviors, then how would the atheist call any of these behaviors wrong if humans had evolved these same instincts?

Here is the problem in a nutshell.  Atheists must say that evolution has given us moral instincts as they cannot invoke any kind of moral standard that comes from outside the natural world.  But evolution has given the animal kingdom all sorts of instincts that atheists would want to say are wrong.  In order for them to say these instincts are wrong, however, they must invoke a moral standard that transcends evolution, but they don’t believe that a transcendent standard exists.

Either atheists must admit that a moral standard exists outside and above evolution, or they must accept the fact that they cannot rationally call any behavior wrong that evolution has produced.  Which way to go?

Science as a Religion?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

I just finished reading a book called Evolution by Donald Prothero, a paleontologist.  The book’s main purpose is to chronicle the fossil evidence for the evolution of animal life.  Prothero, as an expert in this field, seems to do a reasonable job of this throughout the book, although every tenth sentence seems to be a dress down of creationist, religious fundamentalism (back to that point at the end).  Still, he is extremely knowledgeable about fossil evidence, no doubt.

One thing that bothered me about the end of the book, however, is Prothero’s wholehearted and devoted worship of science.  I can almost imagine him bowing at an altar, it’s so overdone.  Read on to see why.

At the very beginning of his volume, he gave me hope that he understood the limits of science when he explained, “Science helps us understand the natural world and the way it works, but it does not deal with the supernatural, and it does not make statements of what ought to be, as do morals and ethics. . . . When science tries to proscribe morals or ethics, it falters.”  Sounds good.

But then we fast-forward to the conclusion, literally the last 2 pages, where he quotes three of his favorite science prophets.  First we hear from the Prophet Michael Shermer, who testifies, “Darwin matters because evolution matters.  Evolution matters because science matters.  Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.”  Science, it seems, is an epic saga.

Next Prothero quotes from the Gospel of the Prophet Carl Sagan: “The universe is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.  Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us.  There’s a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a great height.  We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.”  Tingling in the spine?

And finally, a reading from the Book of Darwin, speaking on his theory of evolution.  “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one.”  Evolution is full of grandeur.

After having heard from the Holy Trinity, I almost expected Prothero to burst into a hymn of science thanksgiving.  What place does all of this have in a book about fossils?  When all is said and done, Prothero is not just trying to teach about fossils; no, he is all about recruiting us to his religion, the religion of science.  After all, religions tell us who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.  This, according to Prophet Shermer, is what science does for us.

For Prothero, it seems that science is the answer to every question worth asking.  After 358 pages of berating religious fundamentalists, it turns out he is one, too.

What Didn't Darwin Know?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Quite a bit, it turns out.  The leaps in knowledge of cellular biology and genetics over the last 150 years would boggle Charles Darwin’s mind.  Some argue that if he were alive today, he would abandon the very theory named after him because of all the contrary evidence that now stands against it.

In any case, please follow this hyperlink to a video which features two scientists and a medical doctor who explain how they came to be skeptical of Darwinism.  They explain in very clear terms the challenges facing Darwinian evolution based on what scientists know today that Darwin never knew.

It’s well worth your time.