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Was Hitler a Darwinian? Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory Robert J Was Hitler a Darwinian? disputed questions in the history of evolutionary theory Robert J. Richards The University of Chicago Press c h i c ag o & l o n d o n 2013 c o n t e n t s 1 • Introduction 1 2 • Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection and Its Moral Purpose 13 Appendix 1 The Logic of Darwin’s Long Argument 45 Appendix 2 The Historical Ontology and Location of Scientific Theories 50 3 • Darwin’s Principle of Divergence: Why Fodor Was Almost Right 55 4 • Darwin’s Romantic Quest: Mind, Morals, and Emotions 90 Appendix Assessment of Darwin’s Moral Theory 112 5 • The Relation of Spencer’s Evolutionary Theory to Darwin’s 116 6 • Ernst Haeckel’s Scientific and Artistic Struggles 135 7 • Haeckel’s Embryos: Fraud Not Proven 151 8 • The Linguistic Creation of Man: August Schleicher and the Missing Link in Darwinian Theory 159 9 • Was Hitler a Darwinian? 192 Acknowledgments 243 Bibliography 245 Index 263 Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Albumen print, 1865–1866, by Ernest Edwards. (© National Portrait Gallery) Chapter one Introduction The past refuses to remain stable. This is due to its strange kind of existence— or rather, nonexistence—since past events no longer exist. Only the present exists, and, of course, the future is yet to be. So what kind of thing is the past? Is it merely what the actors of the time understood about their present—the objects, events, and individuals they experienced and thought about? Some historians maintain it is anachronistic to describe the past in terms other than those familiar to the persons of the period. This kind of practice would limit historians to what earlier individuals were aware of; scholars would thus be restricted to a narrow range of events and objects, only those falling under the actors’ purview. Historians certainly want to discover how earlier individuals experienced their world. But, of course, some events of the past would not have been perceived correctly—at least, correct by our lights. Should we not try to get a handle also on those elusive events, articulating them, where ap- propriate, from the perspective of modern science? Consider the Hippocratic physicians of the ancient period. They discriminated some three kinds of fe- ver: those that spiked every other day, every third day, and every fourth day. Around those perceptions the ancient physicians draped an elaborate medi- cal theory we no longer accept. While scrutinizing the features of that theory, might we be inclined to dismiss the observations of periodicity, thinking those early individuals to be under the sway of some numerical fantasy? We might . Someone like Jan Golinski seems to think we ought not apply contemporary science to help con- strue the past. See Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 998), 4: “Today’s historians are more likely to set themselves the goal of understanding the past ‘in its own terms’ . rather than in the light of subsequent developments.” Chapter One so reject their observations, if we did not know that malaria was endemic to Greece and that there are three strains of microorganism, each causing fevers to peak in the way the physicians described. It would be foolish not to use our contemporary knowledge as a way of determining what those past actors might actually have experienced, to show that the periodicity they ascribed to fevers was not completely tangled in the web of an antique imagination. Then again, if we limited our descriptions to what individuals of the time might have recognized, we must ask: Which individuals? Were there millions of pasts but no single past? Presumably historians have the task of weaving together the experience of the world as lived by the pertinent players—and, at times, adjudicating: judging which historical individuals had a better grasp on the world and which deviated because of particular social, political, or re- ligious convictions, or, in the case of naturalists, stumbled because of faulty instruments, poorly conceived experiments, or unconstrained imagination. Consider some of the organisms pictured in Serpentum et draconum historiae libri duo (640), the posthumous work of the extraordinary, sixteenth-century naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (522–605). The first book provides illustrations of snakes of various sorts, some of monstrous birth (e.g., two-headed ser- pents); the text describes the earlier literature that had discussed a particular kind of serpent, the etymology of its name, its habits, medical uses, and so on. The second book describes, under similar headings, different kinds of dragon and includes illustrations of their many types (figs. and .2). We know that dragons, those monsters of legend, don’t exist, and it’s foolish not to admit that. Our current knowledge allows us to explore the evidence that might have suggested the existence of dragons. It seems fairly certain that the creature in figure . is an African python—dragon-like enough. The small, two-footed dragon in figure .2 may well be based on the skeleton of a large, Indian fox-bat or the fossil remains of a pterodactyl. Aldrovandi had a collection of fossils in his cabinet of curiosity, so his belief in the mythical monsters he so naturalisti- cally illustrated might well have had substantial grounds in direct observa- tion—and the historian should lay out these possibilities, since they allow us to better understand the history of those times and the mentality of its individu- als. We are left only with traces of the past, but as Marc Bloch observed, “we 2. In her prizewinning book Possessing Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 994), a scholarly account of the origins of natural history museums in early modern Italy, Paula Findlen begins her history with the tale of an omen that occurred on the occasion of the investiture of Pope Gregory XIII in 572: “a fearsome dragon appeared in the countryside near Bologna” (7). She uses the appearance to introduce the collecting and descriptive activity of Ulisse Aldrovandi, relating how the event led to his pro- duction of the book on serpents and dragons and how this particular dragon provided a central attraction Introduction F i g u r e . “Pythonic dragon.” From Ulisse Aldrovandi, Serpentum et draconum (640). for his natural history collection. Nowhere in her recounting of this history (7–3) does she even hint that Aldrovandi brought into his collection something other than a real dragon. Her descriptions simply adopt Aldrovandi’s point of view. Perhaps, though, she took it for granted that her readers knew dragons did not exist. Yet she makes no effort to suggest what he might actually have seen and what evidence he used to depict the many dragons displayed in his book. Her prose would lead the reader to believe that there really were dragons in those times—or to assume that Aldrovandi and his countrymen must have been suffering from mass hysteria. Chapter One F i g u r e . 2 “Aethiopian dragon.” From Ulisse Aldrovandi, Serpentum et draconum (640). are nevertheless successful in knowing far more of the past than the past itself had thought good to tell us.” The blanket proscription on the application of contemporary considerations to understand the past would only produce a crippled world, one in which the actors would hardly be recognizable as of our species. The past comes into articulate existence only when historians gather evi- dence for events that no longer exist, when they construct those events in their accounts. But as new evidence becomes available and more reliable construc- tions are advanced, then the past, as we know it, changes, becomes other than it was. It’s not just that interpretations of some perfectly articulated past time change. Rather, the only existence that the past has—as a creation of the histo- rian—changes with new evidence or a richer understanding. Though I am using the language of creation, bringing into existence a new past, I would not wish to deny an anchor for evidence and theory about the past. The situation is, I believe, much as the neo-Kantians have argued: there is a reality beyond the constructions of the human mind, but our only access to that reality is through the application of concepts to make events humanly tractable—the elusive shadow is made flesh through evidence and theory. The actors of the past deployed a web of concepts to grapple with nature and to bring it into living experience; historians, in their turn, also apply theory and 3. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage Books, 953), 63–64. Bloch was a founder of the Annales school of French historians, who used the various social sciences (e.g., demography, economics, etc.) to discover what the past might be forced to tell us. Introduction evidence to bring not only the actors’ experience into their narratives but also events beyond the actors’ ken. Some evidence and concepts about past events will be better than others, will provide a more reliable guide in the construction of the past; and since the world—whether the social world or the natural—is not made of tapioca, the objects, the events, and the individuals with which historians deal will resist faulty constructions, which will then tumble to the ground when more adequate evidence and theory are advanced and slammed into place. Though some historians may ignore these few historiographical principles, most simply follow them without much reflection on their epistemological im- port. And most historians of science, at any rate, conceive science as a special phenomenon, growing in accuracy and power as we approach the modern period.
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