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The [[theory of evolution]] suggests that humans are merely evolving animals. The claimed biological struggle for survival that brought humans here is continuing. Man's long-term survival is, according to evolution, a biological survival of the fittest. Evolution theory teaches that there must be a biological struggle for survival among various human races and groups.
[[Charles Darwin]] declared in ''[[The Descent of Man|]]''The Descent of Man'']]:<ref>Darwin, Charles (1901). [http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-descent-of-man/chapter-06.html "Chapter 1"]. ''The Descent of Man'' (London: John Murray), pp. 241-42 (footnote * is a reference to ''Anthropological Review'', April, 1867, p. 236).</ref>
:At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked,* will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
===Eugenics in America===
Between 1907 and 1937, 32 American states passed eugenics laws requiring sterilization of citizens deemed to be misfits, such as the mentally infirm. Oliver Wendell Holmes and all but one conservative Democratic Justice upheld such laws in a Supreme Court decision that included Holmes' offensive statement that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." [[Buck v. Bell|Buck v. Bell]], 274 U.S. 200, 207 (1927).<ref>United States Supreme Court (May 2, 1927). [http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=274&invol=200 "Buck v. Bell"], 274 U.S. 200, 207. Retrieved from ''FindLaw'' on September 24, 2014.</ref> In fact, the third generation "imbecile" was very bright, but was declared by a eugenics "expert" as "supposed to be a mental defective," apparently without an examination.
Eugenics was taught as part of the evolution curriculum of many science classes in America in the early 1900s. For example, it was featured in the textbook used in the famous [[Scopes Trial|Scopes trial]] in 1925.
"By 1928, the American Genetics Association boasted that there were 376 college courses devoted exclusively to eugenics. High-school biology textbooks followed suit by the mid-1930s, with most containing material favorable to the idea of eugenical control of reproduction. It would thus have been difficult to be an even moderately educated reader in the 1920s or 1930s and not have known, at least in general terms, about the claims of eugenics."<ref name="sm">''See'' Allen, Garland E. (August-September August–September 1996). "Science misapplied: the eugenics age revisited". ''Technology Review'', vol. 99, no. 6, at p. 22(10).</ref>
Important remnants of the evolution-eugenics approach exist today, in part because many of Justice Holmes' opinions are still controlling law. The very first quote in the infamous [[Roe v. Wade]] abortion decision is an unprincipled statement of Justice Holmes in a 1905 opinion. Indeed, Holmes once wrote favorably in a letter to a future Supreme Court Justice about "restricting propagation by the undesirables and putting to death infants that didn't pass the examination.<ref>Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. (September 3, 1921). "Letter to Felix Frankfurter". For a detailed criticism of Justice Holmes' judicial Darwinism, see Professor Albert W. Alschuler's ''Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes'' (Univ. of Chicago Press 2000).</ref>
Existing laws requiring students to receive controversial vaccines are based on a eugenics-era decision granting the State the power to forcibly vaccinate residents. <ref>United States Supreme Court (February 20, 1905). [http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=197&invol=11 "Jacobson v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts"], 197 U.S. 11. Retrieved from ''FindLaw'' on September 25, 2014.</ref> That decision, in fact, was the cited precedent for Justice Holmes' offensive "imbeciles" holding quoted above.
For the same reason that evolution teaching led to eugenics, evolution teaching today encourages acceptance of abortion and euthanasia. Under evolution theory, after all, we are merely animals fighting for biological survival.
It wasn't long before intellectuals viewed war as an essential evolutionary process. ''Vom Heutigen Kriege'', a popular book by Geberal Bernhardi, "expounded the thesis that war was a biological necessity and a convenient means of ridding the world of the unfit. These views were not confined to a lunatic fringe, but won wide acceptance especially among journalists, academics and politicians."<ref>Carr, William (October 1991). ''A History of Germany 1815-1990'' (London: Bloomsbury), 4th ed., p. 205.</ref> In America, Justice Holmes similarly wrote that "I always say that society is founded on the death of men - if you don't kill the weakest one way you kill them another."<ref>Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. (February 26, 1922). "Letter to Sir Frederick Pollock".</ref>
World War I entailed a brutality unknown in the history of mankind. Gregg Easterbrook, a senior editor of the liberal ''[[New Republic|]]''New Republic'']] magazine, observed that "prior to the Scopes trial [in 1925, [[William Jennings Bryan|William Jennings] Bryan]] had been on a revival tour of Germany and had been horrified by the signs of incipient Nazism. Before this point, Bryan had been a moderate in the evolution debate; for instance, he had lobbied the Florida legislature not to ban the teaching of Darwin, only to specify that evolution must be taught as a theory rather than a fact. But after hearing the National Socialists talk about the elimination of genetic inferiority, [historian Gary] Wills wrote, Bryan came to feel that evolutionary ideas had become dangerous; he began both to oppose and to lampoon them."
The march of evolution/eugenics continued unabated in Germany. By the 1920s, German textbooks were teaching evolution concepts of heredity and racial hygiene. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927.
:c. 112 [mentally infirm] patients stay longer than 2 years?"
One German student was [[Josef Mengele|Josef Mengele]], who studied anthropology and paleontology and received his Ph.D. for his thesis entitled "Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups." In 1937, Mengele was recommended for and received a position as a research assistant with the Third Reich Institute for Hereditary, Biology and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfort. He became the "Angel of Death" for directing the operation of gas chambers of [[the Holocaust]] and for conducting horrific medical experiments on inmates in pursuit of eugenics.
===Genocide===
===American scientists and Nazi Germany===
From ''The Nazi Connection'':<ref>Kühl, Stefan (2002). [http://books.google.com/books?id=UGYfRv3DWuQC&dq=nazi+socialism&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0 ''The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism'' [preview]] (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Preview retrieved from GoogleBooks on September 25, 2014.</ref>:{{cquote|When Hitler published ''Mein Kampf'' in 1924, he held up a foreign law as a model for his program of racial purification: The U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which prohibited the immigration of those with hereditary illnesses and entire ethnic groups. When the Nazis took power in 1933, they installed a program of eugenics—the attempted "improvement" of the population through forced sterilization and marriage controls—that consciously drew on the U.S. example. By then, many American states had long had compulsory sterilization laws for "defectives," upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927. Small wonder that the Nazi laws led one eugenics activist in Virginia to complain, "The Germans are beating us at our own game."
In ''The Nazi Connection'', Stefan Kuhl uncovers the ties between the American eugenics movement and the Nazi program of racial hygiene, showing that many American scientists actively supported Hitler's policies. After introducing us to the recently resurgent problem of scientific racism, Kuhl carefully recounts the history of the eugenics movement, both in the United States and internationally, demonstrating how widely the idea of sterilization as a genetic control had become accepted by the early twentieth century. From the first, the American eugenicists led the way with radical ideas. Their influence led to sterilization laws in dozens of states—laws which were studied, and praised, by the German racial hygienists. With the rise of Hitler, the Germans enacted compulsory sterilization laws partly based on the U.S. experience, and American eugenists took pride in their influence on Nazi policies. Kuhl recreates astonishing scenes of American eugenicists travelling to Germany to study the new laws, publishing scholarly articles lionizing the Nazi eugenics program, and proudly comparing personal notes from Hitler thanking them for their books. Even after the outbreak of war, he writes, the American eugenicists frowned upon Hitler's totalitarian government, but not his sterilization laws. So deep was the failure to recognize the connection between eugenics and Hitler's genocidal policies, that a prominent liberal Jewish eugenicist who had been forced to flee Germany found it fit to grumble that the Nazis "took over our entire plan of eugenic measures."
[[Category:Pseudoscience]]
[[Category:Philosophy]]
[[Category: Liberalism]]
