Darwin and Hitler

The Expelled movie has roused evolutionists to fury because it links Darwinism with Nazism. Put this down as another reservation I have about this film. Not that there wasn't a link. It's really funny to watch the materialists tie themselves into knots trying to deny and explain away the obvious. I was just at the National Holocaust Museum's traveling exhibit titled "Nazi Medicine." One of the first pictures you see when you enter is a big picture of Darwin. One of the last things you read as you leave is about Dr. Mengele's later writings while in Brazilian exile. They concerned Darwinism. It's not a great leap to connect the stuff in between with Darwinism.

That said, I question the strategy here. No Darwinist today advocates genocide (euthanasia is a trickier question). More importantly neither of the following are true:

* Without Darwinism, the Holocaust would not have happened.
* Given Darwinism, the Holocaust was inevitable.

So what's the point? It's a variety of the genetic fallacy (the cousin of your theory undergirded Nazism!). Again, I wish a high profile vehicle for education and communication like this one would stick to more straightforward arguments in favor of design in science.

Dennett's Dangerous Device

I'm reading Breaking the Spell, Daniel Dennett's exploration of religion's evolutionary origins. In the middle of his baroque speculation, this sentence stopped my progress:

Put these two ideas together - a hyperactive agent-seeking bias and a weakness for certain sorts of memorable combos - and you get a kind of fiction-generation contraption.

Fiction-generation contraption! What a happy phrase. I wonder how many iterations of Dawkins' weasel would suffice to turn that sentence into a perfect description of Darwinism.