Michael Prescott's Blog

A depressing book

In his historical overview From Darwin to Hitler, Richard Weikart traces the origin of some elements of the Nazi social philosophy to strands of social Darwinism, and even to Darwinism itself. Since Darwinism has become a highly contentious political issue, let me immediately be clear: Weikart is not saying that Darwinism leads inexorably to the Holocaust, or that Darwin and his early supporters were proto-Nazis, or that Hitler could not have come to power without the influence of Darwinism. His thesis is more nuanced than that.

Basically, he is saying that the aspects of Hitler's program involving racial purification were inspired by generations of German intellectuals who applied Darwin's ideas to social and racial issues (as Darwin himself had done, to a certain extent, in his book The Descent of Man). In other words, Weikart sees the roots of the Holocaust in such trendy turn-of-the-century ideas as eugenics, voluntary and involuntary euthanasia, selective abortion (with "inferior" races or classes being singled out), and forced sterilization. He also finds some (not all) roots of Nazi militarism in the increasingly heated rhetoric in German intellectual circles about "racial struggle" and the need to purify the population through war.

It's a fascinating but inevitably depressing book. Scores of German thinkers, many highly influential in their day, are quoted or paraphrased as they advocate ideas that, to any normal mind, are simply appalling. The extermination of whole peoples is casually advanced as a valid geopolitical goal based on supposedly impeccable "scientific" reasoning. The value of human lives is estimated according to various allegedly "scientific" criteria, with the less valuable lives consigned to the grave -- for the good of the race, of course. In these armchair discussions of genocide, we can almost hear the distant tread of jackboots, can almost smell the charnel houses of the death camps.

But don't take my word for it. Here are some representative quotations. The first is from Ernst Haeckel, Darwin's greatest champion in Germany, the man who coined the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" and worked up a series of heavily doctored woodcuts to prove it. Musing on the plight of a handicapped child -- one of the dreaded "inferiors" who threatened the evolutionary progress of the race -- Haeckel observed:

"A small dose of morphine or cyanide would not only free this pitiable creature itself, but also its relatives from the burden of a long, worthless and painful existence."

Is this immoral? Not at all, says Austrian sociologist Ludwig Gumplowitz. Quite the opposite:

"To comply with the obvious will of nature is the highest morality: With a perceptible voice nature calls back into its bosom those who are sick and weary of life. To follow this call and to make space for healthy people filled with zeal for life is certainly no evil deed, but rather a good deed, for there are not too few people on the earth -- rather too many."

Gumplowitz, at least, was no hypocrite. He followed his own advice, committing suicide by cyanide.

Adolf Jost reasoned, "There really are cases, in which, mathematically considered, the value of a human life is negative." August Forel pose the rhetorical question, "Is it really a duty of conscience to help with the birth and even the conception of every cripple, who descends from thoroughly degenerate parents? Is it really a duty to keep alive every idiot (even every blind idiot), every most wretched cripple with three fourths of the brain damaged?"

Needless to say, Forel's answer was no.

"One cannot avoid the thought that it might be better to quickly dispose of useless, corrupt and dangerous individuals, instead of supporting them till death in jail," pronounced Alfred Hegar.

Anyone troubled by such prospects need only subject his sentimental feelings to the hard logic of evolutionary science, as framed by Friedrich Hellwald:

"Science knows no 'natural right.' In nature only one right reigns, which is no right, the right of the stronger, violence. But violence is also the highest source of law, since without it [i.e., violence] legislation is unthinkable. I will in the course of my presentation easily prove, that properly speaking the right of the stronger has also been valid at all times in human history."

That is to say, might makes right -- and now "science" proves it! And what is a greater demonstration of this principle then victory in war? Thus Heinrich Ziegler could argue,

"According to Darwin's theory wars have always been of the greatest importance for the general progress of the human species, in that the physically weaker, the less intelligent, the morally lower or morally degenerate peoples must give place to the stronger and the better developed."

War then serves the great purpose of culling the herd and allowing evolution to advance. "If our consciousness of our people allows the fit to oust the unfit from this planet, so that high culture increases," Klaus Wagner wrote, "then there is progress on earth."

Note that science, properly understood, has nothing to say about the values or progress in any ethical sense. These enthusiastic Darwinists were mixing categories -- assuming that progress, in the sense of evolutionary adaptation to changing conditions, is somehow equivalent to moral progress. By this means they claimed to have discovered a scientific foundation for a new ethics, which would supplant the old Judeo-Christian ethic of concern for the weak and downtrodden. With this new ethical calculus in mind, they could easily quantify the value of any particular human life. As Haeckel noted toward the end of World War I:

"A single well-educated German warrior, though unfortunately they are now falling in droves, has a higher intellectual and moral value of life than hundreds of the raw primitive peoples, which England and France, Russia and Italy set against us."

This wasn't just Haeckel's private opinion, mind you. No, it was a scientific fact! Or so he and his fellow intellectuals of the same stripe ardently believed.

The new ethos was harsh. Some of its proponents did not shrink from this truth.

"Whoever it may be, he must stride over the corpses of the vanquished; that is natural law. Whoever shrinks back in hesitation from this, deprives himself of the chance for existence," wrote social Darwinist Robert Byr.

And there would be plenty of corpses to stride over. Whole populations would have to go. Oscar Schmidt assessed the situation calmly:

"If we contemplate the ethnology and anthropology of savages, not from the standpoint of philanthropists and missionaries, but as cool and sober naturalists, destruction in the struggle for existence as a consequence of their retardation (itself regulated by the universal conditions of development), is the natural course of things."

Schmidt was not the only "cool and sober naturalist" to oversee "the natural course of things." There was also Ludwig Buchner:

"The white or Caucasian human species [sic] is ordained to take dominion of the earth, while the lowest human races, like [native] Americans, [aboriginal] Australians, Alfuren, Hottentots, and such others, are proceeding toward their destruction with huge steps."

And the Frenchman Georges Lapouge:

"In the next century people will be slaughtered by the millions for the sake of one or two degrees on the cephalic index [i.e., measurements of the cranium that supposedly indicated intellectual advancement]... the superior races will substitute themselves by force for the human groups retarded in evolution, and the last sentimentalists will witness the copious extermination of entire peoples."

Some Darwinists were content to let nature take its course to the gradual, bloodless extinction of native populations. Others preferred to lend nature a hand and speed up the evolutionary process by making war on the natives and exterminating them wholesale. Otto Ammon observed:

"In its complete effect war is a good deed for humanity, since it offers the only means to measure the powers of nations and to grant the victory to the fittest. War is the highest and most majestic form of the struggle for existence and cannot be dispensed with, and thus also cannot be abolished."

Others steered a middle course, thinking it best to leave the natives alive for the time being, while they could be profitably exploited, but mandating their destruction once they became superfluous. Eugen Fischer:

"Therefore one should guarantee to [native peoples] only the measure of protection that they need as a race inferior to us, in order to survive, but no more, and only so long as they are useful to us -- otherwise [allow] free competition, which in my opinion means [their] demise! This viewpoint sounds almost brutally egoistic -- but whoever thinks through the racial concept in the points portrayed in the above section on 'Psychology,' cannot take any other view."

Klaus Wagner foresaw a global race war among Europeans, Asians, and Africans, and warned darkly that only one of the three would be left standing.

"Only one group can remain as ruler. The two others will be destroyed, where they are in the way of the stronger race, and enslaved, where they can serve them... We Germans have the power to destroy and smash the might and future of the two other groups, if we clearly see this necessity, vigorously arm ourselves, and keep our blood pure..."

This sounds a lot like mere nationalism, but intellectuals like August Forel perceived a higher purpose.

"Which races can be of service in the further evolution of mankind," Forel asked, "and which are useless? And if the lowest races are useless, how can they be gradually extinguished?"

This was the intellectual climate in which Adolf Hitler came of age. These ideas were circulating in academic books, including medical texts. They were prominently discussed in political and sociological journals. They were common, not only in Germany, but throughout the Western world; there was a flourishing eugenics movement in the United States. But it was in Germany that the social Darwinist idea was most widely accepted and most vigorously championed. Hitler was not much of an intellectual, but he could have imbibed these ideas from the right-wing, racist newspapers he read daily, and from a variety of other sources.

We can hear the echo of the fanatical Darwinists quoted above in Hitler's own writings and speeches.

"Decisive [in history] is the power that the peoples have within them; it turns out that the stronger before God and the world has the right to impose its will. From history one sees that the right by itself is completely useless, if a mighty power does not stand behind it. Right alone is of no use to whomever does not have the power to impose his right. The strong has always triumphed... All of nature is a constant struggle between power and weakness, a constant triumph of the strong over the weak."

"A stronger race will supplant the weaker, since the drive for life in its final form will decimate every ridiculous fetter of the so-called humaneness of individuals, in order to make place for the humaneness of nature, which destroys the weak to make place for the strong."

"[The proper worldview] by no means believes in the equality of races, but recognizes along with their differences their higher or lower value, and through this knowledge feels obliged, according to the eternal will that rules this universe, to promote the victory of the better, the stronger, and to demand the submission of the worse and weaker. It embraces thereby in principle the aristocratic law of nature and believes in the validity of this law down to the last individual being. It recognizes not only the different value of races, but also the different value of individuals... But by no means can it approve of the right of an ethical idea existing, if this idea is a danger for the racial life of the bearer of a higher ethic."

"There is only one most holy human right, and this right is at the same time the most holy duty, namely, to take care to keep one's blood pure."

Materialists never tire of citing the Spanish Inquisition and other horrors as proof that religious or spiritual tendencies are dangerous. They seem somewhat less inclined to examine the dark side of their own belief system. Darwin's ideas, however true or false they may ultimately prove to be, laid the foundation for generations of intellectuals who advocated the extermination of so-called "inferiors," whether individually or en masse. Moreover, the conflation of evolutionary progress with moral progress gave an ethical veneer to these inhuman proposals. It only remained for an ambitious and ruthless demagogue to snatch up these ideas and use them for his own purposes. The wait was not long.

Worth a look

I'm doing my best to avoid blogging on David Thompson again, but for those who are interested, there are some very worthwhile discussions going on at Spiritualist Chatroom.

To access these discussions, you first must register with the site. (It's free.) Then log on to the forums and go to the Physical Mediumship Newsgroup.

Two threads of particular interest right now are "Let there be light on these questions DT," which includes some posts from a participant named Empress about the amount of money Thompson and his promoters are charging for a US tour (it's a lot), and "FAO Lettherebelight," which in recent posts deals with Victor Zammit's answers to various specific questions posed by the group.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

Death takes a holiday

The Chicago Tribune makes the case that nuclear terrorism is highly unlikely.

One less thing to worry about, at least.

The Chronicles of "Lost"

I like Lost. Now, I'm not one of those hardcore fans who replay each episode looking for clues, or who hang out in chat rooms trading theories on how the multiple mysteries will finally be resolved. The mythology of Lost is so convoluted, its various quirks and tics and twists so incomprehensible, that I don't believe there will be or can be any satisfying resolution. There simply isn't any logical way of putting the pieces of this puzzle together. Lost will string along its fans with the promise that all will make sense at the end, but that's a promise it just can't keep. Or so I suspect.

And that's okay with me. I like the show on its own terms, on an episode-by-episode basis. I like the lush Hawaiian scenery, the fine production values, the (usually) sharp writing. And I think Terry O'Quinn, who plays Locke, and Elizabeth Mitchell, who plays Juliet, are some kind of acting savants who can make any scene interesting. 

But for those benighted souls who do nurse the hope of unraveling Lost's secrets, tonight's episode gave them still more to work with. The show, you see, has penchant for naming characters after historical figures and famous literary creations. We already had characters named John Locke  and Rousseau, none-too-subtle references to 18th century philosophers with dueling visions. We had Sawyer (as in Tom Sawyer) and Juliet (as in Romeo's starcrossed lover - and yes, this was the intent; the producers have copped to it).

Tonight a new character joined the fray. She's British, and her name, we are informed, is Charlotte Staples Lewis.

Hey, wait a minute. Isn't that pretty close to Clive Staples Lewis?

You know, this guy?

Yeah, that's right. It seems C.S. Lewis is now on the island.

But ... why? Is the name a reference to Lewis's religious beliefs? Or to the magical world of Narnia, which could be accessed through the back of a wardrobe? Is the island part of an alternate universe? Are the castaways just an idea in the mind of God?

What does it all mean?

Nothing, I'm pretty sure. Just more misdirection and playing with the fans' heads. If and when the whole thing turns out to be an elaborate shaggy dog story, a lot of loyal longtime viewers are gonna be seriously peeved.

Not me, though. I don't care about the destination. I'm enjoying the ride.

Who knows? Next week some dude named Tolkien may parachute in.  

Building a better fish

In an early chapter of A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilber discusses the shortcomings of current evolutionary theory. With all the Sturm und Drang about creationism, intelligent design, and Richard Dawkins-style Darwinian polemics, comparatively few people realize there is a vigorous ongoing debate among evolutionary biologists themselves as to the exact mechanisms by which one species evolves into another.

Microevolution -- small changes such as the shape of a bird's beak or the color of a bear's fur -- seems to be adequately explained by Darwinian theory in conjunction with genetics. But the much more vexing question of macroevolution -- the really interesting changes, such as evolution from a fish to a frog -- remains up in the air.

As Wilber puts it, writing in 1996:

The standard neo-Darwinian explanation of chance mutation and natural selection -- very few theorists believe this anymore. Evolution clearly operates in part by Darwinian natural selection, but this process simply selects those transformations that have already occurred by mechanisms that absolutely nobody understands...

Takes the standard notion that wings simply evolved from forelegs. It takes perhaps a hundred mutations to produce a functional wing from a leg -- a half-wing will not do. A half-wing is no good as a leg and no good as a wing -- you can't run and you can't fly. It has no adaptive value whatsoever. In other words, with a half-wing you are dinner. The wing will work only if these hundred mutations happen all at once, in one animal...

Talk about mind-boggling. This is infinitely, absolutely, utterly mind-boggling. Random mutations cannot even begin to explain this. The vast majority of mutations are lethal anyway; how are we going to get a hundred nonlethal mutations happening simultaneously? Or even four or five, for that matter? But once this incredible transformation has occurred, then natural selection will indeed select the better wings from the less workable wings -- but the wings themselves? Nobody has a clue.

For the moment, everybody has simply agreed to call this "quantum evolution" or "punctuated evolution" or "emergent evolution" -- radically novel and emergent and incredibly complex [features] come into existence in a huge leap, in a quantum-like fashion -- with no evidence whatsoever of intermediate forms. Dozens or hundreds of simultaneous nonlethal mutations have to happen at the same time in order to survive at all -- the wing, for example, or the eyeball.

However we decide these extraordinary transformations occur, the fact is undeniable that they do. Thus, many theorists, like Erich Jantsch, simply refer to evolution as "self-realization through self-transcendence." Evolution is a wildly self-transcending process: it has the utterly amazing capacity to go beyond what went before. So evolution is in part a process of transcendence, which incorporates what went before and then adds incredibly novel components. [Pages 31-33]

Wilber's particular example is perhaps not the strongest one that could be given. There are, after all, some possible uses for a "half-wing" -- it might be used to catch air currents and permit a small animal to drop to the ground more safely or even soar briefly, a la the flying squirrel. There's also been speculation that the feathered wings of early birdlike creatures may have been used, not for flying, but for sweeping up small insects.

Nevertheless, his basic point has merit, and other writers have illustrated the idea with more convincing examples. In his 1991 book Beyond Natural Selection, Robert Wesson considers many specific cases of biological adaptations that are hard to explain by purely neo-Darwinian mechanisms.

In one passage he looks at the phenomenon of electric organs in fish, which may be used as weapons or as a form of radar ("electrolocation"). He writes:

Darwin, who could propose an explanation for almost anything, admitted that he could not conceive how the electric organs of the fish could have been evolved. Modern science has not come much closer.

Certain sharks have developed such sensitivity to the discharges from the muscles of fish (like the impulses that make up an electrocardiogram) that they can perceive as little as .01 microvolt per meter, equivalent to about 10 volts at a distance of a kilometer. Other fish, combining the abilities to generate electricity and to perceive it, use an electric field up to several volts as a sort of radar, sensing disturbances caused in the field by other fish or solid objects....

Other electric fish use their discharge as a weapon. Electric eels (Electrophorus), with some 6,000 generating plaques, can produce about one ampere at 500 volts; they do well not to electrocute themselves....

For electrolocation, many things must work together: an apparatus to generate fairly strong electric pulses at a rate of as many as 1,700 per second, consisting of a large number of plates stacked up like batteries in series; effective insulation of the electric generator from the body to make it possible to pile up voltage without allowing it to leak backwards; special fins to swim without flexing the body and thus disturbing the field; a means of controlling the pulses; incredibly sensitive receptors capable of registering minute changes in the strong primary gradient of the field; means of filtering out the electric discharges of other fish, which are immensely stronger than the echoes of its own field; and a special structure in the brain to process and use the information received.

The various parts of the radar system would seem hard to achieve even quite separately. For example, the electric generating apparatus is derived from muscle tissue, but how a muscle could turn into a generator while remaining always useful is hard to imagine. Muscles have minute electric discharges, but for any probable utility, the discharge of many plates must be strengthened, coordinated and made part of an intricate response system.

Not the least of the difficulties is insulation. Living tissues contain dissolved salts, that is, positive and negative ions capable of conducting electricity; it is difficult for any tissue to be nonconductive unless it is cut off from the ordinary processes of the body. The blood supply and the nerve fibers activating the organ have to be conductive. Moreover, fresh water is a much poorer conductor than animal flesh; when the fish makes a voltage difference between head and tail, the easiest path for the current would normally be through its body. The fish consequently has thin, conducted skin where the current exits and reenters the body and thick skin elsewhere, composed mostly of nonconductive connective tissue; it also has an extremely elaborate system of membranes to permit the transport of nutrients and nerve signals while preventing ions from traveling out of the electric organ despite the powerful discharge.

A detail is that the electric generating plaques have to be stimulated at exactly the same time. Since they are strung out along the body, the nervous impulse must travel more rapidly to cells farther from the body; hence nerve fibers (axons) to farther parts of the electric organ are proportionally thicker or those to nearer parts take a circuitous route....

Despite their apparent improbability, electric organs have been perfected more or less independently in most of the ten different families in which they occur. [Pages 64-66, citations omitted]

Polemicists like Richard Dawkins are prone to suggesting that all the fundamental questions about evolution have been answered by neo-Darwinian incrementalism. This claim may be effective as propaganda in the Darwinists' war against creationists and intelligent design advocates, but it appears to be both premature and misleading. While Darwin's theory represented a huge advance in our understanding of life on Earth, it is not yet the final word on the subject.