I was responding more to:
"So, encyclopedias got "Social Darwinism" wrong, because it's "just a name". "
It IS just a name, coined by people describing the unwarranted extrapolation from/misinterpretation of what Darwin actually proposed.
Those folks - the 'Social Darwinists', just like the KKK, just like you, MISINTERPRET what 'survival of the fittest' meant in evolution and ran with it.
In real life, intelligent, informed people would write:
Social + DARWINISM = Whaaa? What does that even mean?
That is like writing:
Social + Newton's Laws of Motion = ????
Let us recall that you are on this kick because:
1. You lack the ability to provide scientific/empirical evidence for creation and thus feel compelled to attack "Darwin" by any means necessary.
2. You have bought into the lies and nonsense churned out by professional creationists and their right-wing religious "scholar" pals who have traded in their integrity for acceptance, money, and the furtherance of their sickening beliefs - all because it suits your needs.
3. Being a creationist, you are immune to correction and refuse to stop using phony arguments that you were just so convinced would be winners - since they were put forth by your hero Christian types and they totally convinced you, a multi-degree holding scholar and minister of some sort - since you believe that admitting error on things (even things that you foolishly
demolished all on your own) you have based your greatest anti-evolution "argument" on will undermine your whole sense of self and being. Which it will because you base your sense of self on a worldview that relies on the promulgation of disinformation and fibs to survive.
And let us end with a reminder that all of your hemming and hawing and re-defining and re-iteration and re-assertion and burden shifting and pedanatery will not save this, your worst, most-failed "argument", a well poisoning fallacy on its best day, desperate mendacity on its worst, and an utter failure-
as shown by your own unwitting hand:
I categorically reject anything by Weikart due to many instances of his
shoddy scholarship:
"Weikart is best known for his 2004 book
From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany.
[24][25] The Discovery Institute, the hub of the intelligent design movement, funded the book's research.[26] The academic community has been widely critical of the book.[4][13] Regarding the thesis of Weikart's book, University of Chicago historian Robert Richards wrote that Hitler was not a Darwinian and criticized Weikart for trying to undermine evolution.[27] Richards said that there was no evidence that Hitler read Darwin, and that some influencers of Nazism such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain were opposed to evolution.
[27]"
But I do thank you for linking the Roberts article, for it would appear that you did not read it, for it concludes, any emphases mine:
"Countless conservative religious and political tracts have attempted to undermine Darwinian evolutionary theory by arguing that it had been endorsed by Hitler and led to the biological ideas responsible for the crimes of the Nazis. These dogmatically driven accounts have been abetted by more reputable scholars who have written books with titles like From Darwin to Hitler [was that not written by your hero, Weikart the righty propagandist?] . Ernst Haeckel, Darwin’s great German disciple, is presumed to have virtually packed his sidecar with Darwinian theory and monistic philosophy and delivered their toxic message directly to Berchtesgaden or at least,individuals like Daniel Gasman, Stephen Jay Gould, and Larry Arnhardt have so argued. Many more scholars are ready to apply the casual, but nonetheless, telling sobriquet to Hitler of "social Darwinian.” In this essay I have maintained these assumptions simply cannot be sustained after a careful examination of the evidence.
To be considered a Darwinian at least three propositions would have to be endorsed: that the human races exhibit a hierarchy of more advanced and less advanced peoples; that the transmutation of species has occurred over long stretches of time and that human beings have descended from ape -like ancestors; and that natural selection — as Darwin understood it — is the principle means by which transmutation occurs. Hitler and the Nazi biologists I have considered certainly claimed a hierarchy of races, but that idea far antedated the publication of Darwin’s theory and was hardly unique to it. There is no evidence linking Hitler’s presumption of such a hierarchy and Darwin’s conception. Moreover, Hitler explicitly denied the descent of species, utterly rejecting the idea that Aryan man descended from ape - like predecessors. And most of the Nazi scientists I have cited likewise opposed that aspect of Darwin’s theory. Hitler did speak of the “struggle for existence,” but likely derived that language from his friend and supporter Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an avowed anti-Darwinian. Moreover, by Hitler’s own testimony, his anti-Semitism had political, not scientific or biological roots; there is no evidence that he had any special feeling for these scientific questions. And in any case, remote and abstract scientific conceptions can hardly provide the motivation for extreme political acts and desperate measures.
Among Nazi biologists, at least those publishing in an official organ of the Party, Mendelian genetics and de Vriesian mutation theory were favored, both vying at the beginning of the twentieth century to replace Darwinian theory. Moreover, the perceived mechanistic character of Darwinism stood in opposition to the more vitalistic conceptions of Nazi biologists and that of Hitler — or at least vitalism accords with the
drift of his thought about race. Finally, though his own religious views remain uncertain, Hitler often enough claimed religious justification for racial attitudes, assuming thereby the kind of theism usually pitted against Darwinian theory.
If “Social Darwinian” is a concept with definite meaning, it would have to refer to individuals who apply evolutionary theory to human beings in social settings. There is little difficulty, then, in denominating Herbert Spencer or Ernst Haeckel a social Darwinian. With that understanding, Darwin himself also would have to be so called.
But how could one possibly ascribe that term to Hitler, who rejected evolutionary theory? Only in the very loosest sense, when the phrase has no relationship to the theory of Charles Darwin, might it be used for Hitler. In order to sustain the thesis that Hitler was a Darwinian one would have to ignore all the explicit statements of Hitler rejecting any theory like Darwin’s and draw fanciful implications from vague words, errant phrases, and ambiguous sentences,neglecting altogether more straight -forward, contextual interpretations of such utterances. Only the ideologically blinded would still try to sustain the thesis in the face of the contrary, manifest evidence.
Yet, as I suggested at the beginning of this essay, there is an obvious sense in which my own claims must be moot. Even if Hitler could recite the Origin of Species by heart and referred to Darwin as his scientific hero, that would not have the slightest bearing on the validity of Darwinian theory or the moral standing of its author. The only reasonable answer to the question that gives this essay its title is a very loud and unequivocal No!
So please, for the sake of your integrity as a human, STOP trying to trot out this failed implication that Darwin=Hitler that you do so often when all your other lame arguments fail. Your own links are not going to disappear, your own failure will just keep being documented.
