Is It Sheer Ignorance? God, I Hope So

I know intellectual history isn't everyone's cup of tea, but this is getting stupid:

If you can stomach watching it, you'll see Stein explain, with Hannity and Colmes' help, that "Darwinism" wasn't really responsible for the death camps, and biologists aren't really Nazis, it's just that evolution logically led to ... the Nazi death camps. Stein's two-faced con is on display everywhere you look, here using a quote from the Expelled website itself:

Alas, Darwinism has had a far bloodier life span than Imperialism. Darwinism, perhaps mixed with Imperialism, gave us Social Darwinism, a form of racism so vicious that it countenanced the Holocaust against the Jews and mass murder of many other groups in the name of speeding along the evolutionary process.

Gosh Ben, how could anyone possibly get the mysterious idea that evolution is pro Holocaust?

OK I can understand disliking the simplistic correlation Stein puts forward, but is there really any doubt that "social Darwinism" played an active role in the perpetration of the Holocaust?

The answer to that question is a resounding "no." The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an exhibit travelling the country now called "Deadly Medicine" that connects the dots. The first thing to remember is that the roots of the Holocaust lie not in Hitler's warped brain. The underlying pathology pre-date Hitler's political rise:

Following Germany’s defeat in World War I and during the ensuing political and economic crises of the Weimar Republic, ideas known as racial hygiene or eugenics began to inform population policy, public health education, and government-funded research. By keeping the “unfit” alive to reproduce and multiply, eugenics proponents argued, modern medicine and costly welfare programs interfered with natural selection –the concept Charles Darwin applied to the “survival of the fittest” in the animal and plant world. In addition, members of the “fit,” educated classes were marrying later and using birth control methods to limit family size. The result, eugenics advocates believed, was an overall biological “degeneration” of the population. As a solution, they proposed “positive” government policies such as tax credits to foster large, “valuable” families, and “negative” measures, mainly the sterilization of genetic “inferiors.”

Eugenics advocates in Germany included physicians, public health officials, and academics in the biomedical fields, on the political left and right. Serving on government committees and conducting research on heredity, experts warned that if the nation did not produce more fit children, it was headed for extinction. A growing faction, linking eugenics to race, championed the long-headed, fair “Nordics” as “eugenically advantageous” and discussed “race mixing” as a source of biological degeneration. Eugenic ideas were absorbed into the ideology and platform of the nascent Nazi Party during the 1920s.

Thus, the Nazi's didn't originate these ideas, they turned them into a political platform, a platform that had enthusiastic support from much of the scientific community:

Nazism was “applied biology,” stated Hitler deputy Rudolf Hess. During the Third Reich, a politically extreme, antisemitic variation of eugenics determined the course of state policy. Hitler’s regime touted the “Nordic race” as its eugenic ideal and attempted to mold Germany into a cohesive national community that excluded anyone deemed hereditarily “less valuable” or “racially foreign.” Public health measures to control reproduction and marriage aimed at strengthening the “national body” by eliminating biologically threatening genes from the population. Many German physicians and scientists who had supported racial hygiene ideas before 1933 embraced the new regime’s emphasis on biology and heredity, the new career opportunities, and the additional funding for research.

On July 14, 1933, the Nazi dictatorship fulfilled the long-held dreams of eugenics proponents by enacting the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, based on a voluntary sterilization law drafted by Prussian health officials in 1932. The new Nazi law was coauthored by Falk Ruttke, a lawyer, Arthur Gütt, a physician and director of public health affairs, and Ernst Rüdin, a psychiatrist and early leader of the German racial hygiene movement. Individuals who were subject to the law were those men and women who “suffered” from any of nine conditions assumed to be hereditary: feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorder, genetic epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea (a fatal form of dementia), genetic blindness, genetic deafness, severe physical deformity, and chronic alcoholism.

Special hereditary health courts lent an aura of due process to the sterilization measure, but the decision to sterilize was generally routine. Nearly all better-known geneticists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists sat on such courts at one time or another, mandating the sterilizations of an estimated 400,000 Germans. Vasectomy was the usual sterilization method for men, and for women, tubal ligation, an invasive procedure that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of women.

International reaction to the Nazi sterilization law varied. In the United States, some newspaper editors noted the mass scale of the policy and feared that “Hitlerites” would apply the law to Jews and political opponents. In contrast, American eugenicists viewed the law as the logical development of earlier thinking by Germany’s “best specialists” and not as “the hasty improvisation of the Hitler regime.”

In his 1934 book, American eugenicist Leon Whitney wrote: “Many farsighted men and women in both England and America have long been working earnestly toward something very like what Hitler has now made compulsory.”

It amazes and saddens me that I felt the need to write this post. The historical record is clear, so I'm uncertain what political advantage people believe they are gaining by trying to muddy it. There is no "war against science" whatever the hysterical or bigoted try to tell us all. And, there is nothing wrong with noting that, yes, science too has a dark side. Those who wish to deify the scientific endeavor into something akin to the Platonic "Good" are profoundly misunderstanding it.

Science does not sit above moral standards, and it is not the source of such standards. It is open to criticism and it has at times been blameworthy. The best science flourishes because of these facts not despite them, and we do it (and ourselves) a disservice by trying to pretend otherwise.