| abstract
| - There have been great social effects of evolution in regards to its acceptance by various individuals in the course of history. The theory of evolution has been influential in regards to Social Darwinism, Nazism, Communism, and racism. The staunch evolutionist Stephen Gould admitted the following: Robert E.D. Clark in his work Darwin: Before and After wrote concerning Hitler's evolutionary racism: Dr. Clark also wrote “Adolf Hitler’s mind was captivated by evolutionary teaching — probably since the time he was a boy. Evolutionary ideas — quite undisguised — lie at the basis of all that is worst in Mein Kampf — and in his public speeches”. Richard Hickman in his work Biocreation concurs and wrote the following: Noted evolutionary anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith conceded the following in regards to Hitler: “The German Fuhrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practices of Germany conform to the theory of evolution”. B. Wilder-Smith wrote the following regarding Nazism and the theory of evolution: Pulitzer Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson wrote the following regarding Hitler's racism in the November 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine: . ]] Dr. Josef Mengele's evolutionary thinking was in accordance with social Darwinist theories that Adolf Hitler and a number of German academics found appealing. Dr. Joseph Mengele studied under the leading proponents the "unworthy life" branch of evolutionary thought. Dr. Mengele was one of the most notorious individuals associated with Nazi death camps and the Holocaust. Mengele obtained an infamous reputation due to his experiments on twins while at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Prominent evolutionist and atheist Richard Dawkins stated the following regarding Adolf Hitler in an interview: “What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question." The interviewer of Richard Dawkins wrote the following regarding the Richard Dawkins comment about Hitler: "I was stupefied. He had readily conceded that his own philosophical position did not offer a rational basis for moral judgments. His intellectual honesty was refreshing, if somewhat disturbing on this point." In addition to greatly influencing Hitler's Nazism, evolutionary ideas influenced the thinking of the Communists, including Marx, Engels] Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin. Marx wrote, "Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history." Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn was asked to account for the great tragedies that occurred under the brutal communist. Alexander Solzhenitsyn offered the following explanation: ]] As noted earlier, evolutionary ideas contributed to the scourge of racism. Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley contributed greatly to the theory of evolution broadly being accepted in the 1900s. Darwin, Huxley, and the 19th century evolutionists were racist in sentiment and believed the white race was superior. For example, Charles Darwin wrote in his work The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex the following: John C. Burnham wrote in the journal Science the following: Harvard University's Stephen Jay Gould stated, "Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory." Australian atheist and philosopher David Stove argues that evolutionary ideas were influential in regards to the sexual revolution. In his work entitled Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution, Stove states that The “new religion of selfish genes” classifies all humans as biological errors. Stove further states that “the great sexual emancipators after 1859” (Havelock Ellis, Freud, Vladimir Lenin, Marie Stopes, Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead, Wilhelm Reich) "were all Darwinians" and that genetics supplied "the new religionists" their gods ... the chromosomes of the sex cells.”
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