David Berlinski Quotes
Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism but I think it's certainly a necessary one.
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Directed by Nathan Frankowski, Premise Media Corporation, 2008.
This is a very important quotation. This was not the ravings of a right wing extremist. It was a normative view. This book was a best seller in Germany. This quotation illustrates the mentality of the conservative, militarist, culture that dominated Germany at the time. Racism was normative then in Germany. It was not the Nazis who introduced the concept of inferior races to Germany. Through this book and much before it, the idea was well established in aristocratic, militaristic culture. Also, note that the “inferior races” were considered a threat to civilization, not just inferior beings.
This quote was the beginning of the now discredited Eugenics movement. The essential problems were twofold: One was that someone had to decide which characteristics were desirable and undesirable, and there is wide difference of opinion that there is no way of resolving. Genocide is the result of Eugenics taken to extremes. Second, it the issue of human rights. No person, organization, or government has the right to tell a particular individual what genetic characteristics he/she may have with his/her children. Note that the issue of Population Control for size was also a part of the early Eugenics movement but is a totally separate issue. It is the voluntary verses the compulsory nature of Population control the is the critical ethical element.
At the time there were some Americans who supported Hitler and Fascism. Even senior military men like Osborne.
Fisher, a brilliant scientist and mathematician, engaged in some major blunders like denying that tobacco had any relationship to lung cancer and other disease. This was another. His “conclusion” that the more “successful” members of society should breed in preference to the less successful. There are three major fallacies in his argument and that of other eugenics supporters other than the obvious ethical and moral problems. First, human success in any society is determined by both genetic and environmental factors. In general, it is currently impossible to know who the successful would be if environmental factors were equal. Second, our concept of success is quite narrow from an evolutionary point of view. The most successful humans might be those who produce that most children, or those who extend man’s habitat, or those who will be most resistant to a pandemic that will arise in the near future. Third, by the standards of much of English society at the time, the most “successful” people were the monarchy and heredity aristocracy, There was already too much inbreeding in these groups and increasing this groups breeding rather than others would not only weaken the species over time, but would limit the variation that is necessary for natural selection and further evolution of the human species.
David Berlinski (born 1942) is an American author, academic and mathematician known for his criticism of the theory of evolution. He is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Berlinski received his PhD in philosophy from Princeton University. He was later a Fellow of the faculty of Mathematics, and a postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology at Columbia University. He has taught philosophy, mathematics and English at Stanford University, Rutgers, the City University of New York and the Université de Paris. He was a research fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) in France.
