Art frankly asks:

> Call me old-fashioned, but isn't one of the unspoken rules of netiquette
>  that a thread should die once Hitler is mentioned?

You *are* old-fashioned. In that regard, I'll cross-post a posting I put up
sci.bio.evolution this morning. It probably won't appear on that list until
tomorrow because the group is moderated, thus you're seeing it here early.

Let me say at the outset that it's meant to be sardonic. I'm relatively sure
that most everyone on sci.bio.evolution will understand that without me having
to say so, but it's not nearly so clear that the same will be true here.

The subject of the sci.bio.evolution thread is evolutionary theory and
Hitlerian Germany's use of it. Germany was not the only state to interpret Darwinian
evolutionary biology in its own self-serving manner. Marxist-Leninism
incorporated Darwinian theory in a fashion so as to demonstrate the inevitability of
the class struggle, while the robber-baron capitalists of the United States
used it to demonstrate the survival of the fittest in their battles with one
another, as well as their justification for the exploitation of the lower classes.

George Bernard Shaw once said that "Darwin had the great misfortune to be
useful to anyone that had an axe to grind." In the following posting, Malcolm
conflated evolutionary theory with political motivations, which was quite unusual
to that list, but not uncommon here. I simply added a few more thoughts along
those same lines:

=======================================

Subj:    Re: From Mein kampf: Hitler on Evolution
Date:   2/10/04 11:20:19 AM Mountain Standard Time
From:   [log in to unmask] (Wirt Atmar)
To: [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask]

Malcom writes:

>Hitler has understood that natural selection, generally, acts on the
>individual. However he then offers a "good of the species" argument for not
>interfering with evolutionary processes. Usually we associate a belief in
>group selection with political liberals, so this is a bit incongruous.

If that's the case, and I have no reason to dispute your analysis, there must
have been an enormous wave of optimism and progressive thought that must have
swept over the world 540-570 mya, just prior to the "Cambrian Explosion",
when individual, free-living cells -- who, as rugged individualists, up to that
time had fervently advocated a "live free or die" stance -- first adopted the
radical, if not outrightly socialist political position of task-partitioned
multicellularity as a way to achieve the liberal uptopian goal of cooperative
complexity.

Wirt Atmar

========================================

Wirt Atmar

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