Blue Collar Scientist

The BCS does a lot of public speaking about science. It’s mostly astronomy, and some physics, but I emphasize the scientific method and how we know what we know, and that opens up the dialog with the audience to just about any scientific subject. Because so many whackjobs hate science in general, and evolution in particular, a lot of the give-and-take involves evolution.

Over the last six months or so, the under-20 crowd seems to be parroting the meme that Hitler practiced Darwinism, therefore Darwinism is bad. (Nevermind that a lot of evolutionary theory these days is non-Darwinian.) I’m guessing that there is some creationist propaganda mill that is priming these foot soldiers with the talking points, because everyone who brings the topic up says pretty much the same thing.

I’m working up a mini-program in response to these kinds of claims, and collecting pertinent quotations of Hitler’s to show the sources of his ideas. Via Bay of Fundy, here’s the latest addition to my collection:

At one time the Spartans were capable of such a wise measure, but not our present, mendaciously sentimental, bourgeois patriotic nonsense. The rule of six thousand Spartans over three hundred and fifty thousand Helots was only thinkable in consequence of the high racial value of the Spartans. But this was the result of a systematic race preservation; thus Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch 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, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.

That’s from Hitler’s Zweites Buch, which wasn’t published until 1961. What this quotation helps establish is twofold - first, that eugenics was practiced long before Darwin’s time, and second, that a significant source of Hitler’s ideas on the subject derive from ancient Greece.

More as the program takes shape….