Roots of genocide

Interview | Richard Weikart on how Hitler was Darwin's ideological grandson | Marvin Olasky

Phillip Johnson, leader of the Intelligent Design movement, writes, “The philosophy that fueled German militarism and Hitlerism is taught as fact in every American public school, with no disagreement allowed.”

That philosophy is Darwinism, and its influence on Adolf Hitler has been much debated—but Richard Weikart, a professor at California State University-Stanislaus and a Research Fellow at the Discovery Institute, should close the debate with a well-researched, scholarly book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). He shows how Darwinism made abortion and racial extermination keys to progress rather than reversions to barbarism, and convincingly argues that Hitler built his view of ethics on Darwinian rather than nihilistic principles.