Ben Stein takes the failboat on a ride

5/01/2008 | 11:56 PM | Evolved Rationalist

All Stein manages to show in Expelled is that he is as ignorant of history as he is of science. Before the trolls start whining like the bunch of deluded morons that they are, I am not claiming that Christianity was the reason for the Holocaust. I am just pointing out the obvious fact that Stein epically fails when he claims that 'Darwinism' is a root cause of Nazism and that Hitler used 'Darwinist' theories as a justification for exterminating millions of people.

Now, let's all sit back and wait for the trolls to start screaming about how I am a Nazi in 3, 2, 1...

If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to our feed

33 Comments

  1. notheistards |

    A picture speaks a thousand words. If Hitler was so obsessed with Darwinism or atheism or whatever else that Stein thinks is caused by Big Science, why is he all chummy with Big Religion? Failboat.

     
  2. James W. |

    He's all chummy with Big Religion because religion isn't a killer, only Science is. Science hasn't created drugs that heal only drugs that kill that much more slowly. Everyone knows that those Jews didn't pray enough to G-d to get saved and believed too much in science.

     
  3. creationist |

    You are disrespecting the Jews by putting this picture here!!!!!

    Shalini Sehkar EXPOSED!!!

     
  4. DB |

    These clowns reject science because it isn't explained in their book, why would they treat history any different? If the facts don't agree with their story, they change the facts.

     
  5. The Thinking Man |

    Creationist: "You are disrespecting the Jews by putting this picture here!!!!!"

    Mr. Creationist, you are disrespecting the Constitution of the United States with that statement. Freedom of speech is more important than your feelings. One, there is nothing disrespectful to jews or anyone in that picture. Two, no one has the right not to be offended and that includes "god's special people". I hope you don't find my statement disrespectful.

     
  6. Anonymous |

    Shalini loves her idol Hitler!

     
  7. Evolved Rationalist |

    Creationist,

    I don't give a flying fuck about your foolish opinions. The picture does not disrespect the Jews in any way, and unless you can back up your idiotic statements with evidence, you should just shut the fuck up.

     
  8. Ojalanpoika |

    Ben(jamin) Stein is under heavy artillery for 'exaggerating' or 'going easy' on the influence of evolutionism behind Nazism and Stalinism (super evolution of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Russia). But the monstrous Haeckelian type of vulgar evolutionism drove not only the 'Politics-is-applied-biology' Nazi takeover in the continental Europe, but even the nationalistic collision at the World War I. It was Charles Darwin himself, who praised and raised the monstrous German Ernst Haeckel with his still recycled embryo drawing frauds etc. in the spotlight as the greatest authority in the field of human evolution, even in the preface to his Descent of man in 1871. If Thomas Henry Huxley with his concept of 'agnostism' was Darwins bulldog in England, Haeckel was his Rotweiler in Germany.

    'Kampf' was a direct translation of 'struggle' from On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). Seinen Kampf. His application.

    Catch 22: As an indication of the evolutionary 'PUS', Haeckel's 140 years old fake embryo drawings have been mindlessly recycled in most biology text books until this millennium. This despite the fact that Haeckel's crackpot raging Recapitulation/Biogenetic Law and functioning gill slits of human embryos have been at the ethical tangent race hygiene/eugenics/genocide, infanticide, and Freudian psychoanalysis (subconscious atavisms). It was the second to most cross/scientific paradigm in the 20th century. Dawkins is the Oxford professor for PUS - and should gather the courage of Stephen Jay Gould who could feel ashamed about it. Text book authors are making a mockery out of science.

    More from conference posters and articles defended and published in the field of bioethics and history of biology:
    http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Asian_Bioethics.pdf
    http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Haeckelianlegacy_ABC5.pdf

    Today, developmental biologists are anticipating legislation of laws that would define the do’s and dont’s. In England, they are fertilizing human embryos for research purposes and pipetting chimera embryos of humans and monkeys, 'legally'. The legislation should not distract individual researchers from their personal awareness of responsibility. A permissive law merely defines the ethical minimum. The lesson is that a law is no substitute for morals and that dissidents should not be intimidated.

    [email protected]
    Biochemist, drop-out (Master of Sciing)
    http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Expelled-ID.htm

     
  9. splendidelles |

    "Everyone knows that those Jews didn't pray enough to G-d to get saved and believed too much in science."

    The Judeo-Christian god is selecting based on prayer? That's about as bad as Hitler.

    And as for drugs that only heal drugs, I'd stay away from bacteria, if I were you.

    If anything disrespects the Jews, it's that statement.

     
  10. Cetacea |

    "'Kampf' was a direct translation of 'struggle' from On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). Seinen Kampf. His application."

    Wow... brilliant...

    The full title of the book was "Mein Kampf" or "My Struggle". You must really know a hell of a lot because I have no idea how you came to the conclusion that Hitler got it from the full title of Origin of Species, without mentioning either Origin of Species nor Darwin.

     
  11. splendidelles |

    "Catch 22: As an indication of the evolutionary 'PUS', Haeckel's 140 years old fake embryo drawings have been mindlessly recycled in most biology text books until this millennium."

    I was surprised to hear that most textbooks contained Haeckel's drawings, which were scientfic fraud. Being in the school library while reading this, I took the opportunity to search all the biology textbooks available for Haekel. When I found no reference to him in the index, I gave you the benefit of the doubt and searched all the sections in all the books pertaining to embryos. I still did not find his drawings.

    Could you cite your source, please?

     
  12. Ojalanpoika |

    I think I already referred to my article published in a book aside the fifth Asian conference on bioethics:
    http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Haeckelianlegacy_ABC5.pdf

    I will quote from there:

    The art of embryology used to be called Entwicklungsgeschicte, the developmental history
    of the organism. This history was to be seen repeating itself during the development of every new
    individual. Until recently, Ernst Haeckel's (1834-1919) drawings of the external morphology of
    vertebrate embryos remained the most comprehensive comparative data displaying their
    conserved stage. E.g. Molecular Biology of the Cell (Alberts et al. 1994, p. 33) referred to
    Haeckel's Anthropogenie from the year 1874 in its 1994 edition (Fig. 1A).

    When a group of zoologists from six universities reproduced the old figures (Richardson et
    al 1997), it lead to a popular claim that the topic is “turning out to be one of the most famous fakes
    in biology” (commentary in Science 277, p. 1435, 1997).
    On the basis of the correct appearance from over 40 different embryos, Stephen Jay Gould
    (1941-2002) - the last scholar with a type writer and proofreading in the footnotes – wrote before
    his untimely death:
    "But we do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has
    led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks!"(Gould 2000.)

    NOTE! Alberts was the text book I had to study at university in 1998. It used to be the most widely used university level book on cell biology in the world.

    I have browsed and scanned the Finnish text books in biology and have to conclude that the schematized embryo drawings were the most recycled figures in the 20th century. In 1911, it all began by the implicit claim that human embryos had functioning gills, as they climbed up through fish/stage, amphibian stage and reptilian stage:
    http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Koulukirjat.html

     
  13. James W. |

    @splendidelles

    I'm pretty sure that I laid on the sarcasm thick enough for anyone to figure out it was sarcastic.

     
  14. Cetacea |

    "I have browsed and scanned the Finnish text books in biology and have to conclude that the schematized embryo drawings were the most recycled figures in the 20th century."

    You mean the 1900's? Welcome to the 21st century. Could you please provide exact precentages of textooks containing the embryos, the number of textbooks you scanned, and... something along the lines of the average year of publication?

     
  15. Ojalanpoika |

    My emphasis has been to tract, how did the evolutionary indoctrination disembarked to the Finnish coast. The biggest achievement has been the source discovery of the letters of Finnish scholars to Ernst Haeckel when the archives of the old Eastern Germany were opened. Played my academic career for it (PhD manuscript). Hold 'Em High. But I was not accepted to the whole peer review circle. 'Delete this. Delete that.' The actual substance was not touched even with a long stick. I think I was not even expelled but merely laughed out.

    We published, however, later on one peer reviewed article, with a focus on Harry Federley who was the first professor of genetics in Finland. He applied Haeckel's evolutionary racism especially in the Finnish civil war, which ended in executing about 1% of the population (the 'Mongolian' portion of the population, not the Swedish speaking 'German' seed) in what seems to be based on rassenhygiene, not politics only. It was later re-edited to Journal of Creation in 2007.

    As for the Finnish text books, I went through the era between 1850-2000, since the MK Richardson reproduction of the fraudulent embryos were published in 1998. On that timepoint I also contacted the Finnish publishers and text book authors and asked them to reconsider the recycling. The simplified Haeckelian embryos on the imaginary identical 'phylotypic' stage of the 'time-glass' development were used in all the text books to 1990. Until 1970's there were only one major version of the text book at the time, out of which up to 10 editions were made.

    This is a lesson of the dynamics of science. Evolutionism was sold to public by long shot arguments such as the continuing spontaneous generation of life from mud:
    http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Haeckels_After_Pasteur.htm

    For Haeckel, even stone crystals were living. Such underestimation of the information concept behind nature.

    If the people would only have known about the machineries so vividly visualized in the Expelled:
    http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Videos_animations

     
  16. dale |

    Your LIES and Propaganda are unfitting as an atheist.

    You need to step back, and get some professional help.

    /d

     
  17. Evolved Rationalist |

    Ojalanpoika,

    Evolutionary theory posits nothing of that sort. It is no small wonder that you were laughed out of the academic circle. You were flunked, not expelled.

    Dale,

    Care to elaborate? Put up or shut up.

     
  18. miken |

    Science hasn't created drugs that heal only drugs that kill that much more slowly.

    Sometimes it takes those evil drugs decades to kill the patient!

    :)

     
  19. Gerhard |

    james w. enlightened us with:
    ... Science hasn't created drugs that heal only drugs that kill that much more slowly.


    < sarcasm >And to add insult to injury, "Science" is so incompetent that most patients die of natural causes long before the drugs can kill them ...< /sarcasm >

    Oh, and to Pauli, thank you for pointing out that Haeckel oversimplified his drawings to make his point. But we already knew.

    He thought ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis. He was not completely right.

    But this doesn't change the fact that the early embryonic stages of almost all forms of life are virtually indistinguishable but for the trained eye. Haeckel thought those were (functional) stages, and that was wrong. Today we know better, and we do not only have pictures but also DNA evidence work with and enhance our understanding of early development.

    You see, we scientist make errors, errare humanum est and all that, but we do not try to hide them. And if there is some truth, we salvage it and use it to make a better model which is free of the error.

    That is why you may still find the drawings (or more likely a modified copy of it) in some text books. And if you had a good biology teacher, (s)he will have told you the story about how Haeckel came up with a hypothesis, found some evidence and got overzealous, and that modern biology has found homologous structures but no longer considers the Recapitulation theory to be correct.

    G.

     
  20. Jay |

    Wow. Why are there so many whack jobs here in one place? Seriously, it's Poe's Law all over the place. Are these people serious?

     
  21. saveau |

    PaulyShorla said -

    Ben(jamin) Stein is under heavy artillery for 'exaggerating' or 'going easy' on the influence of evolutionism behind Nazism and Stalinism (super evolution of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Russia). But the monstrous Haeckelian type of vulgar evolutionism drove not only the 'Politics-is-applied-biology' Nazi takeover in the continental Europe, but even the nationalistic collision at the World War I. It was Charles Darwin himself, who praised and raised the monstrous German Ernst Haeckel with his still recycled embryo drawing frauds etc. in the spotlight as the greatest authority in the field of human evolution, even in the preface to his Descent of man in 1871. If Thomas Henry Huxley with his concept of 'agnostism' was Darwins bulldog in England, Haeckel was his Rotweiler in Germany.

    Wow. what a bizarre collection of non sequiturs, contradictions, irrelevancies and half-truths.

    Haeckel is known for the quote "politics is applied biology", that is true, and the relevance there is that Haeckel was a German Nationalist FIRST, and a naturalist second. Darwin and Haeckel didn't see eye to eye on much, really. Haeckel didn't buy natural selection despite the evidence; he preferred Lamarckism. Darwin respected Haeckel's intellect and scientific pursuits, but flatly and uncompromisingly disagreed with his racism (Darwin's denouncment of racism is easily found in "On the Origin of Species" by anyone who, you know, bothers to actually read the book.

    Natural selection, which was the key understanding and central theme of Darwin's reasearch and publications, was NOWHERE TO BE FOUND in the machinations of either Hitler or Stalin. Hitler explicitly REJECTED Darwin's work and threw his books on the fires at the Nuremburg Rallies to burn along with the writings of Einstein, specifically because the common descent of all mankind contradicted the notion of a Master Race. Stalin rejected natural selection - and sent those who spoke of it to the Gulags - because it conflicted with the resurrected Lamarckism of Trofim Lysenko, whose notions of forcible improvability better suited Stalin's political rhetoric.

    All of these kinds of ideas were things that appalled Darwin.

    Haeckel's notion that "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", which is what I think Pauly Shorla is referring to in his otherwise incoherent line "still recycled embryo drawing frauds etc.", is an interesting footnote in the history of science and nothing more; a clever and potentially illuminating idea that turned out to be wrong. Shrug. Beyond that, the guilt-by-association bullshit that creos love to indulge in is silly on its face; i.e., that fact that some of my co-workers are Republicans doesn't imply that I share their views, however competent I may find them to be in other areas.

    As ERV would say, EPIC FAIL.

     
  22. Ed Darrell |

    As an indication of the evolutionary 'PUS', Haeckel's 140 years old fake embryo drawings have been mindlessly recycled in most biology text books until this millennium.

    I call "bovine excrement!"
    Once ojalanpoika gets his pants fire put out, he can either confess his error or compound it -- but this claim is simply untrue.

    (Name the book, publisher and edition, if you wish to contradict, please. Enough of unevidenced canards.)

     
  23. Green Eagle |

    A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. After 1930, when Hitler saw his election numbers start to fall, he made alliances with a number of segments of the population out of sheer convenience. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, this all changed, and he turned on many groups that thought he was their ally, including elements of the church. Though it is clear that Hitler never embraced the crazy schemes of Himmler, et. al. to replace Christianity with some sort of perverted Wotan-worship, he did clamp down pretty severely on any religious elements which he saw as threats.

    There was even a period in the mid-1930's when Hitler halted overt persecution of Jews, in an effort to win loans from Jewish financiers. We know how heartfelt that was. I don't think pictures like the one above indicate much more than that.

     
  24. Ed Darrell |

    ojalanpoika, my recollection is that the Alberts book notes the problems with Haeckel's drawings, does it not?

    It is true that the drawings get reproduced a lot. Over the past three decades, most of that reproduction accompanies a description of Haeckel's errors.

    We can't even correct errors without getting criticized?

    It's useful to note that it has been biologists who have worked hard to correct the error wherever found, and not creationists.

    It is also useful to note that where creationists generally complain, often they're wrong. In Texas they complained about drawings in the books. The drawings turned out not to be Haeckel's. But just to emphasize the point, the drawings were replaced with photos of embryoes. The photos were used to illustrate a different point, but the creationists, not knowing their own burro from a burrow, missed it.

     
  25. Ed Darrell |

    Green eagle, all those photos show is that Ben Stein's mockumentary is wrong.

    You can claim the photos don't demonstrate what they show, but the fact is there is no photo of Hitler going to Down House on a pilgrimage, no photo of Hitler embracing teachers of evolution, no photos of Hitler reading Origin of Species, and blessedly little else that would connect Hitler to Darwin, to a rational mind.

    Hitler didn't put much stock in biological science. He believed heritage was carried in blood, for example -- an idea from the Bible, not from biology. Based on this anti-scientific thinking, he banned the use of blood banks to stockpile blood for transfusions, fearing that if the blood supply got tainted with Jewish blood, it would sap his soldiers' will to be anti-Semitic.

    Both tragic and hilarious at the same time, Hitler even designated one blood type as "Aryan." His own advisors and scientists didn't think it wise to apprise him that the type he picked was also the most common blood type among local populations of Jews.

    When idiocy is at its high-water mark, there really is no rational explanation.

    Which suggests further that attempts to make a linkage of rational thought from Darwin to Hitler is ill-informed, and probably could not be correct under the best of circumstances.

    Hitler was a painter, too. Should we eschew paint and painting? Using the logic of Ben Stein, yes.

    Do you?

     
  26. creationist |

    Shalini Sehkar (Evolved Rationalist) EXPOSED as a Nazi!!!!

     
  27. Anastasia |

    So true. We've got all kinds of silliness going on here at Iowa State on the subject due to Hector Avalos's recent disarming of Expelled while people were still raw from Guillermo Gonzalez's tenure denial! I've got some links to the campus news stories in a recent blog post God is ok with evolution, really.

     
  28. Calilasseia |

    For some reason this comment died a death the first time I posted it. Here goes again.

    First of all, let's deal with the Haeckel nonsense.

    Among other things, Haeckel is libelled as an anti-Semite and the man who supposedly turned the starting handle on Hitler's extermination engine. Let's examine some actual evidence, shall we?

    This is a line that has been developed egregiously into a series of lucrative books by one Daniel Gasman, whose theme has been expanded upon by the even more egregiously mendacious Richard Weikart of the Discovery Institute (no surprises there), I found two references from one Robert J. Richards of the University of Chicago, which are available online as PDF files. These references are as follows:

    [1] Ernst Haeckel's Alleged Anti-Semitism and Contributions to Nazi Biology - downloadable PDF from here

    [2] Response to Daniel Gasman's Objections to my Article "Haeckel's Alleged Anti-Semitism and Contributions to Nazi Biology" (Biological Theory 2:97-103 (2007)) - downloadable from here.

    From the first link, we have the following:

    Quote

    Haeckel’s racial theories might lead one incautiously to presume that he was also an anti-Semite. That is certainly the belief of a number of scholars, most prominently of Gasman and Weikart. [22] On its face, though, the indictment seems improbable, since the most rabid anti-Semites during Haeckel’s time were conservative Christians, for example, the Berlin court-preacher Adolf Stöcker (1835-1909). Given Haeckel’s extreme anti-religious views, it is unlikely that he would be allied with such Christian apologists; and he loathed Stöcker in particular. [23] Moreover, after Haeckel’s death, a one time student turned opponent, Ludwig Plate (1862-1937), declared that while he (Plate) was “an idealist, free-thinking Christian, German populist, and anti-Semite,” Haeckel was “a crass materialist and atheist, and one who ridiculed Christianity in every way possible. For this reason he was celebrated at every opportunity by the Social Democrats and Jews as the world-famous light of true science.” [24]

    One bit of alleged evidence of Haeckel’s anti-Semitism can be quickly disposed of. Gasman asserts that Haeckel enlisted as a member, in late 1918, of the right-wing Bavarian Thule Society, which became instrumental in the rise of Hitler’s Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. [25] The society, as Gasman accurately describes it, was “a political-theosophical-astrological-anti-Semitic secret organization.” However, in late 1918, Haeckel was an invalid and could not leave the second floor of his home; thus, he was hardly in a position to join this Bavarian group. Moreover, he disdained such superstitions as theosophy and astrology—doctrines that he would have dismissed as completely antithetic to progressive modernism. Rudolf von Sebottendorff (1875-1945?), founder of the Thule Society, did list a one “Ernst Häckel” as a member of his group, but distinguished this individual from “Ernst Haeckel, Professor in Jena.” [26] The Thule Society Ernst Häckel, a painter, also lived in Jena at this time. He wrote a few letters to Ernst Haeckel, “the professor,” and these letters have been preserved in the archives of Ernst-Haeckel Haus. The designation of the professor and zoologist Haeckel as member of the Thule Society is, thus, a pure artefact.

    And, of course, there is Haeckel’s placement of Semites in the highest branches of his tree of human progress. In his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, Haeckel depicted his theory of the evolution of the human species using his new graphic device of the stem-tree. In the first edition of the book (1868), he arranged the human groups—different species, as he regarded them—into a hierarchy of descent, with Papuans, Hottentots, and Australians (and their respective races) sitting on the bottom branches and Caucasians (with their several varieties) on the top (see fig. 1). Haeckel meant vertical position in the tree to indicate the level of progressive advance attained by the various species and races. For different reasons, perhaps, neither his nineteenth-century readers nor we would be surprised to see the Germans and Greco-Romans, among the Caucasian races, at the “pinnacle” (Spitze) of the human species. [27] But readers, both then and now, might wonder at the placement of the Jews and Berbers. He located them at the same highly developed level as the Germans and within the same species. [28]

    References to footnotes inserted by Richards above:

    [22]Even Weikart thinks Gasman has overemphasized Haeckel’s “anti-Semitism.” Weikart is, nonetheless, convinced that Haeckel was an anti-Semite. See Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, pp. 216-17.

    [23]See Ernst Haeckel, Die Naturanschauung von Darwin, Goethe und Lamarck (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1882), p. 60, n. 18. Stöcker had demanded the employment only of religiously orthodox professors at Jena.

    [24]Ludwig Plate, as cited by Heinrich Schmidt, Ernst Haeckel und seine Nachfolger Ludwig Plate (Jena: Volksbuchhandlung, 1921), p. 19.

    [25]Gasman, Scientific Origins of National Socialism, p. 73.

    [26]Rudolf von Sebottendorff, Bevor Hitler kam (Munich: Deukula Verlag, 1933), p. 240.

    [27]Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, p. 519.

    [28]Stem-trees in subsequent editions of the Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte place the Jews just a bit behind the Germans. In those later editions, Haeckel continually altered the tree; but the Jews were always neck and neck with the Germans. In the text of the first edition, he did say that it was from “the Indo-German branch that the most highly developed cultural peoples spring.” This judgment, he claimed, was based on the evidence of comparative linguistics as shown by August Schleicher. See ibid., p. 520

    End quote

    Now, I have taken the liberty of extracting the figure from Richards' paper to highlight one of the points made above. Namely, Haeckel's own supposed "tree of human evolution", and I have underlined two entries that are apposite. The image is as follows:

    Image From Haeckel's Book

    The entry underlined in the above image in blue is headed "Juden" (Jews), and the entry underlined in red is headed "Germanen" (Germans). In other words, Haeckel placed Jews and Germans together in the highest ranks of human development in his analysis. Hardly the action of an anti-Semite, as Richards cogently observes above.

    Meanwhile, returning to the egregious canard that Darwin provided the ideological impetus for Hitler, which should be manifestly recognisable as a canard by anyone with functioning neurons, the following evidence I shall provide is interesting to peruse. It also destroys at a stroke the idea that Haeckel was responsible for Nazi eugenics.

    There is a web page, namely here at the University of Arizona website, a history page that contains source material on the Nazi policy on seditious literature to be destroyed. Scroll down to the appropriate point on that page, and we find the following description of a category of work to be removed from public libraries and destroyed:

    Quote

    6. Schriften weltanschaulichen und lebenskundlichen Charakters, deren Inhalt die falsche naturwissenschaftliche Aufklärung eines primitiven Darwinismus und Monismus ist (Häckel). [Die Bücherei, 2:6 (1935)]

    End Quote

    This translates into English as follows:

    Quote

    6. Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel).

    End Quote

    So, in other words, the Nazis listed books on Darwinian evolutionarh theory and books by Haeckel as being seditions works that should be removed from public libraries and destroyed. Interesting.

    Oh, by the way, I have a searchable electronic copy of Mein Kampf specifically for the purpose of tracking creationist canards centred upon egregious attempts to forge specious and mendacious links between Hitler and Darwin. I performed an interesting exercise with this, searching for key words within the text (mine is the Unexpurgated Edition available freely online from the Gutenberg Web project). The results of this search are interesting:

    Number of occurrences of "Darwin" : ZERO

    Number of occurrences of "God" : 37

    Number of occurrences of "Almighty" : 6

    Number of occurrences of "Creator" : 8

    Again, interesting isn't it?

    So, I think we can flush these canards down the toilet where they belong.

    Sorry about the inelegant quoting format I used, only this blog doesn't support "blockquote" tags.

     
  29. Gene Goldring |

    All righty then. If Haeckel's influence is dead in the water, joined later by Darwin's non-existent influence, how about Luther and his anti-Semitism being an influence on the Nazi's?

    If this Wikipedia section is at all accurate, I think there's a much better case that Luthor sr. had a profound influence but not much is ever said about it.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther#Luther_and_antisemitism

     
  30. christislord12 |

    Jews burn in hell!

     
  31. flea |

    I'll never understand why some blogs are like catnip to the crazies.

     
  32. Ojalanpoika |

    The Russian pogroms did not yet have the biological foundation for them, in contrast to the evolutionary babble of Jews as a weeds of the mankind.

    Here's my 50-page analysis of the evolutionary genocide and infanticide, plus inserts on antisemitism from the final chapter scanned from an D. Gasmans The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (1971, new edition in 2004):
    http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Gasman.htm

    In the Wonders of Life - A popular study of biological philosophy (1904), Haeckel declared that the newborn human infant is deaf and without consciousness, from which he reasons that there is no soul or spirit even by birth. Haeckel advocated the destruction of abnormal new born infants' and argued that it cannot rationally be classed as murder.

    Haeckel had written: 'Among the Spartans all newly born children were subject to a careful examination and selection. All those that were weak, sickly, or affected with any bodily infirmity, were killed. Only the perfectly healthy and strong children were allowed to live, and they alone afterwards propagated the race.' [The History of Creation, 1883, I, p. 170.]
    Hitler continued literally from these sentiments: 'Sparta must be regarded as the first folkish state. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject.'

    Haeckel was AN ORGANIZER:Three years before his retirement, in 1906, Haeckel founded the International Monist League (Monistebund) in Jena. Within five years, it grew to about six thousand members and maintained local group meetings in 42 places of Germany and Austria.

    Paradoxically, the idea of man's animality and materialism in the Haeckelian legacy seems to have been absorbed from National Socialism to Marxism, from psychoanalysis to Free-Thought Movement and theosophism. Gasman has released a more recent and extensive "testament" entitled Haeckel's Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology (1998). In it, he extends his evidence and ends up in stating that Haeckel’s nature books were crucial inspiration to much of modern art, including symbolist poetry, Art Nouveau and aesthetics of avant-garde modernism. Gasman goes on to argue that a complex, and not necessarily strictly opposing relationship evolved between fascism, modernism and positivism. Haeckel's riddles provided for criticism of many values of conventional civilization.

    But antisemitism was built-in for the Haeckelian Monism as it argued that the Jews (inventors of the monotheistic God and Christianity) were in charge for the introduction of transcendental dualism into the Western society in its accelerating decline. Jews were the explicit scapegoat, for Haeckel. Jews were the great symbol of man's rebellion against nature. Jews were the source of the decadence - and so haeckel sought their immediate exclusion from contemporary society. Haeckel did not speak openly of genocide in the case of the Jews, but justified antisemitism by charging the Jews themselves as overwhelmingly responsible for persecution's eternal return. Gasman shows, how close followers such as the French authors Jules Soury and George Vacher de Lapouge demanded destruction of the Jews. It was all in the name of science, and far more extreme and physically threatening than the the harangues of Houston Stewart Chamberlain with his program of Aryan Christianity (Gasman 1998 and 2002).

    Recently, Gasman (2002) has tried to prove, that Haeckel's was the first consistent and total program for the Jewish Question. That is: To expel all of the Jews from their chairs at the universities.

    Gasman, Daniel. (2002) Haeckel's scientific monism as theory of history. Theory Biosci. 121: 260-79
    Nietzsche did not kill God. It was not done by belles lettres but by the popular nonfiction.

    [email protected]
    Biochemist, drop-out (M.Sci. Master of Sciing)
    http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Gasman.htm
    PS. Thanks for the correction on Thule!
    http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Thule.html

     
  33. Laser Potato |

    Erm.
    Ojalanpoika, you *do* know that Stalin uttlery rejected Darwin's TOE outright, embracing Lamarckism instead? And that people were routinely thrown in the gulags for attempting to advocate Darwin's theories?

     

Post a Comment