HOLOCAUST AND GRADUAL EVOLUTION IN THE SAME CREDIBILITY BRACKET, SAYS RICHARD DAWKINS: DESPERATE, FALSE AND IN POOR TASTE

I have watched over the years Richard Dawkins, an adult with a degree in science presenting himself in front of the world with bravado as being a man of reason and clear thinking, and yet making the most irrational claims ever produced by a “science communicator.”  Nothing surpasses though the one he came up with in his 2009 book The Greatest Show on Earth. He writes there, “The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust.”

In response to that David Klinghoffer asks rhetorically in a blog titled Richard Dawkins’ Jewish Problem, at the same time wondering why the Anti-Defamation League did not react to what was falsehood turned into insult, 

“Is that some sort of cruel joke? The evidence for Darwin’s account of evolution and, more so, its controversial mechanism of natural selection is a matter of inference, no matter how strong you think the inference is. The evidence for the Holocaust includes countless eye-witness accounts — a very different and superior order of evidence.”

A classic case of pretend journalism, soon after the book was out in stores, Sarah Lyall writes for The New York Times a second article on Dawkins and his new book published by the paper within a matter of weeks, this one titled A Raconteur of Nature’s Back Story (more on this and other evolution related New York Times pearls in A Time of Change). It was a singing of the praises to a Dawkins apparently upset with a not so flattering recent review of his book published in the same newspaper. A nonchalant Lyall makes it clear she does not understand the basics of how science operates while her ambition is to make it look like she does because, you know, science is so great, isn't it, (yay!), and because Richard Dawkins is a scientist with a "precise," she says, English accent. 

Baffled by the fact that certain people would not listen to Dawkins' words of wisdom and that they refused  to go to a museum to see with their own eyes the evidence for evolution (Did she ever do that? Did she see it?), evidence otherwise utterly missing, as she showers the reader with a plethora of irrelevant when not inept comments she was not about to forget to mention, and one sense a tinge of admiration there, Dawkins making the absurd comparison between evidence for evolution and evidence for Holocaust. For her, this is what the Great Dawkins is all about, a super-intelligent master of argumentation scolding wicked pupils who for some unfathomable reasons refuse to embrace his “evolution is fact” mantra.

With all due respect for the human beings they are, when your only public supporters and defenders of evolution are individuals like Dawkins, Ken Miller, deGrasse, Eugenie Scott, Michael Shermer, and Jerry Coyne, all of them coming across as either playing ignorant, genuinely ignorant or completely dishonest, the inevitable question is why scientists able to communicate rational ideas in a coherent manner are never seen making public appearances to speak in support of evolution. Under the circumstances, one has no other choice but to remind Lady Evolution of the old adagio: “Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are.”   

Excerpts from “A Time to Change – On the Necessary Return to a Rational Understanding of the Nature of Man and the Universe.”

“Life on Earth is not the result of a series of miracles performed by a divine god-creator and is definitely not the product of bio-parts and organs being added to existing species during an alleged chance evolutionary process supervised by a Lady Natural Selection who was turning rabbits into lions.”                                                                - A Time of Change         

                          

Chapter 13.

When one runs out of false arguments while fully dedicated to the task of making the world believe he was, is, and will always be right about something he knows is not true, he inevitably ends up making desperate, illogical claims. “The evidence for evolution,” writes Dawkins “is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eyewitness to the Holocaust.” Was he trying to imply that if you don’t believe in evolution that means you also don’t believe the Holocaust happened? Some would say this is an uncalled for association, a propagandistic scheme in very poor taste.

It certainly revealed an insecure Dawkins conscious of the fact that he was running out of ways to pretend he could make a valid case for evolution. He politicized his argument convinced this was a very smart move, aiming apparently at bringing certain segments of the public on his side based on something that happens to be a very sensitive issue yet totally unrelated to this specific scientific debate. Desperate, indeed, and this was not the first time when for his own reasons Dawkins would awkwardly seek to introduce the tragic history of the Jewish community into the conversation in order to force the hand of the undecided to embrace evolution. According to his twisted logic, evolution deniers should also be seen as Holocaust deniers and thus as possible anti-Semites. 

Leaving no doubts he was aware he could no longer get away with promoting the usual false pro-evolution arguments, and probably disgusted with the poll numbers showing that very few people are falling for his hard selling of the theory of evolution, in his 2009 book the former Charles Simony Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford loses, again, his cool and calls everyone who does not embrace his views “history-deniers,” individuals who are “worse than ignorant” and “deluded to the point of perversity” to whom he could demonstrate evolution is a fact “beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt.” As Nicholas Wade puts it in his New York Times review, “This is not the language of science, or civility.”

No, it's not. This is the language of intellectual impotence, and we know that because most of us have spoken it when we were in grammar school.

Chapter 17.

There is something about Darwin’s other controversial book that is never discussed in science class: he entertained views that can only be described today as extremely racist. While these views gained prominence in The Descent of Man, a book that followed in the misleading footsteps of the On the Origin of Species, as seen, the Origin itself is not exactly promoting racial unity either.

He talks in it about inferior and superior races, and he claims human development too was tributary to a vicious process of selection whose definition Herbert Spencer would only rephrase by calling it “the survival of the fittest.” According to Darwin, Mother Nature presents all races with two options: either die or cause the weaker ones to go extinct and you survive. He claimed this principle was behind the emergence of the more favored races, the ones that one day would conquer the Earth.

Similar to what we have in the Bible where the Old Testament god wants his chosen race to kill most everyone else who does not swear obedience to him, Darwin’s human world is a dog-eat-dog kind of world. His take on human evolution led actually to scientists developing at the beginning of the 20th century the so-called science of eugenics, a science most everyone has abandoned because they realized it was unethical and irrational. It is not as if they misinterpreted his views, as some are trying to suggest today in his defense. Eugenics derived fluently from the Darwinian racist opinion expressed first in the Origin and then amplified in The Descent of Man, that slowly but surely, superior races, human races included, will overcome the weaker ones.

Contrary to the claim made during an episode of the Decoding the Past series dedicated to Hitler’s biography (History Channel), it was Darwin’s inaccurate depiction of how the natural world operates and not Helena Blavatsky’s rational interpretation of esoteric knowledge in her Secret Doctrine that provided the Third Reich’s ideologues with the justification they were looking for in order to exterminate people Hitler did not like. In perfect accord with Darwin’s opinion that favored races were destined to eliminate the inferior ones, the Nazis would conveniently put the label of inferior member of the human race to the Jewish people, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, the disabled, the mentally challenged, as well as Hitler’s political adversaries.

So why in his 2009 book The Greatest Show on Earth evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins would make such a nonsensical association  between non-believers in holocaust and non-believers in Darwin’s theory of evolution when the views expressed by Darwin in this popular at one time theory was what allowed the Nazi Germany to rationalize the barbaric killing of millions of Jewish people throughout Europe? Was that simply a slip up moment or perhaps a desperate and not so classy attempt at making people embrace Darwinism out of fear of someone branding them anti-Semitic?

True, Dawkins was running short on made-up pro-evolution arguments, and the polls were indicating that belief in evolution made no significant gain among the American people, as only fourteen percent of them embraced Darwinism as real science. His calculations seem to have been that by inserting into his pro-evolution propaganda this very sensitive issue, perhaps out of guilt, people would no longer refuse to believe in evolution and on top of that, he would receive now support from the Jewish community as a compensation for stating the obvious about the Holocaust.

To deny evolution is fact, he claimed, would be similar to denying Holocaust happened. By declaring that, though, he placed the theory of evolution, a known myth no one has ever witnessed happening, on the same moral and factual pedestal with the Holocaust. The Holocaust, however, is a well document tragedy in the history of man. Unlike Dawkins’ gradual evolution, people have actually lived and witnessed the Holocaust. We had survivors of the Holocaust telling the world the story of what they went through. We have pictures, film footage and other documents attesting to what happened all over Europe, in and outside concentration camps. On the other hand, as demonstrated here and as stated by a many reputable scientists along the time, there is not one single shred of true evidence proving evolution happened. No one ever witnessed parts being added to another species, and no one ever will. The question is did Dawkins, who was voted one of the most intelligent people on Earth by his fan club really think he could get away with that?  

The eugenics movement gathered prominence in America when Charles Davenport created the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations. German scientists joined eventually the organization and the Swiss-born German psychiatrist and geneticist Ernst Rüdin became one of the presidents of IFEO. He was later appointed director of the Genealogical-Demographic Department at the German Institute for Psychiatric Research in Munich (1917-1945), director of the German Society for Racial Hygiene, of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and, most importantly, he is considered the father of the National Socialist ideology.

He also wrote the official racial policy of Nazi Germany. Hitler praised him personally and some of the most famous Ernst Rüdin quotes are

“The significance of Rassenhygiene [racial hygiene] did not become evident to all aware Germans until the political activity of Adolf Hitler, and only through his work has our 30-year long dream of translating Rassenhygiene into action finally become a reality.”

and

“Whoever is not physically or mentally fit must not pass on his defects to his children. The state must take care [ensure] that only the fit produce children. Conversely, it must be regarded as reprehensible to withhold healthy children from the state.”

This is how the erroneous perception of reality advanced by Darwin in his theory of evolution, and presented by him and by others back than and by some neo-Darwinist scientists today as genuine science, ended up creating the premises for one the most insane and barbaric era in the history of Earth-man. Notice that the “Rassenhygiene,” the idea of applying racial hygiene to improve racial purity was in the making actually for over 30 years at the time Hitler came to power. This detail establishes a direct link between the Nazis’ racial policies and the Social Darwinism founded on Darwin’s racist views on favored races.

Francis Galton developed the concept of eugenics in the 1860s and 1870s. His passion for this pseudo-science was a direct result of the influence exerted on him by recently published works on natural and racial selection. Those works happened to be authored by his cousin, two best sellers titled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Indeed, his cousin was none other than Charles Darwin, and no one has ever heard Charles Darwin denouncing cousin Francis’ work.

No one knows for sure if Hitler has ever read Darwin’s books, but the idea of “favoured races” reverberates throughout his Mein Kampf. Without a doubt, though, his scientists were very familiar with his entire body of work way before he came to power. Hitler relied upon them, was listening to them, and they provided support for his absurd social doctrine. As a result, to draw a parallel between the Holocaust and the theory of evolution, as Richard Dawkins did, is an uninspired choice on many levels. It is scientifically proven false, at the same time it is morally repugnant.

(Last revised on 04.24 2013)

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