Tom Short & Haldane's Dilemma

A letter I just sent to Tom Short (one of my featured campus preachers) and his son on Haldane's (non)dilemma follows. Remember that Tom and I had a dispute on Hitler and evolution which he promised to clarify, but never did? I'm not hoping for much better when it comes to this, either...

TO: "tomshort@columbus.rr.com" Tom Short, "pilgrim3@gmail.com" Tim Short

Hey guys,

This a guy from UF that had a lot of conversation with you when you last visited. I won't be at UF the next time you're slated to return, I see, by the schedule you guys have posted. You may or may not remember me from the "Nazi and Hitler" thing...?

That's why I'm writing you. I know that you visit a lot of places and bring up a lot of different arguments, so it's probably impossible to expect either of you to remember this, but we had a discussion about evolution that I wanted to point out on specific thing about: Haldane's Dilemma. We spoke for a while about it, but you probably don't recall the specifics, and they don't really matter.

The long and short of it is that this is often brought up (as it was by you) as an argument that evolution couldn't account for common descent because the rate of mutations is not fast enough. I was just reading an article and I thought it was a very good resource to share with you about this topic.

http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/07/haldanes_nondil.html

First, recent genomic studies have proven that there is *much* less difference between humans and chimps at the genetic level than previously thought -- of the 14,000 genes studied, only 154 had any phenotype-affecting changes in them whatsoever, and of those, the vast majority were simple point mutations or frame shifts. Second, using Haldane's own work, creationist Walter Remine surmised that only 1,667 phenotype-impacting mutations could occur within the 10M years since we shared a common ancestor with chimps. Third, Haldane was quite misinterpreted by creationists: he never rejected common ancestry, and instead argued brilliantly for it. This should tell you that there is a major problem in citing him to "refute" evolution. Fourth, and most important of all, Haldane's assumptions were undermined by later work.

However, let's assume that you can still validly cite Haldane. Now, being generous, Ian goes through in the article I linked and shows that just using 6M years instead of 10M, and giving up all sorts of ambiguities to favor the creationist accounting, there is still plenty of evidence showing the rate of evolutionary change is perfectly compatible with the observed genomic disparities between ourselves and chimps.

Basically I'm writing you in the hopes that you will consider revising your arguments to make them a bit more intellectually honest. I know you aren't a scientist, and that many of your arguments are prima facie appeals to design, rather than detailed critiques of evolutionary biology. Given both of these two things, and the above-explained problems with using Haldane's work as a "refutation" of evolution, I simply hope you'll stick with integrity and use other appeals and arguments for theism.

Really it's too bad I can't see you again this year; I enjoyed our exchanges.

All the best.

Warmly,
D
http://www.gatorfreethought.org

Don't hold your breath waiting and expecting him to issue a retraction and a promise not to repeat this canard.

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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism

Darwin on Eugenics

It is oft-repeated amongst creationists that evolution = evil, because evolution = eugenics. When Tom Short came to UF and regurgitated this faulty line of reasoning, applying it to the effect that evolution = Hitler = genocide, I called him on it. I also called D. James Kennedy, a creationist pastor whose fraudulent claims are only exceeded by his hubris in delivering them, to the carpet for lying about Darwin and eugenics, all the while ignoring the clear link between Nazi Germany and the Lutheran and Catholic anti-Semitic philosophies.

I examined the non sequiturs in jumping from a description of the way that the natural world operates to a moral 'ought' about how we should or will operate in society. Simple parallels exist to show the fallacy of the logic:

1. Science describes gravity
   
2. Gravity causes things to fall down
3. Therefore, we ought to cause things to fall down

Is not substantially different from:

1. Science describes natural selection
2. Natural selection causes organisms to survive which are more 'fit' and weaker ones to go extinct
   
3. Therefore, we ought to cause organisms/humans to go extinct whom we deem are weaker [even though we have now started artificially selecting since our criteria for 'fitness' are not natural]

See the non sequitur? It is an accurate description of the world to say that all living things share common ancestors. It is not a logical conclusion to draw, a priori, that we ought thus do anything about it or to change it. End of story. To try to draw moral prescriptions from scientific descriptions is a failed leap in logic and is unsupported by the descriptions themselves.

Yet, since so many people love to do what is easy -- namely, to "defeat" evolution by throwing morally outrageous claims against it, it is useful to look at Darwin's own published thoughts on eugenics in The Descent of Man. Let's see what he said about it, although we must all always remember that just as the laws of motion are not equivalent to Newton, so evolution is not solely Charles Darwin, nor general relativity Einstein. These men founded the ideas, did the foundational work, and then died. The science of those things was not the person behind them, and the ideas have expanded and changed and developed throughout time. Nonetheless, let's see what the man thought, keeping in mind that just because the man thought it, doesn't mean evolution requires it.

In Chapter 5, he writes about the problem with vaccinations and how they allow people without natural resistances to survive to reproduce and pass on this lack of resistance:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

It sounds pretty evil, doesn't it? But at the same time, it sounds like he's not yet passing a conclusive ought in here, only saying that it seems that our actions to preserve the lineages of people with serious heredity flaws is "highly injurious to the race of man." So far, he hasn't prescribed any actions, only attempted to describe our humanistic efforts to preserve life. So...what does Darwin think of these actions? Well, the sentences directly after clarify it for us:

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil [emphasis added].

Well, you won't hear that from the mouths of the creationists. Darwin here tells us that if we try to preserve our genetic lineage without corruption, it will only be for a contingent benefit at the cost of an overwhelming present evil, and that we will deteriorate the noblest part of our nature.

His only "solution" to the "problem", then, is a very passive one, indeed:

We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected.

He observes that some of the feeble/retarded/sick are unable to be married and have kids as easily as the mentally competent/healthy, and that there is thus already a natural check in place. He then says that we can just hope for this check to work, notice he says nothing here of enforcing a no-marriage policy.

Darwin's words on eugenics are not those of Hitler, not those of Stalin, not those of creationists. All three of the latter twisted science to serve their own goals and ends in an attempt to justify their immoral beliefs. All three of the latter distort science to preserve falsehoods. The immorality of creationism is its denial of truth, its fight to eradicate scientific fact from our culture, and their refusal to live in reality.
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Technorati tags: Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism

Tom Short at UF: A Summary

As I wrote earlier, Tom Short was on UF campus for three days (and three nights, wink wink), participating in public preaching in Turlington Plaza. I wanted to briefly review some of his major arguments, and some of the discussions I had with him.

Preliminary Observations:

1. Tom is a really good public speaker. One consistent observation was that Tom was good at controlling the conversations. He used the presumption of authority, along with his physical location at the center of the crowd, to cut people off when he wanted, get the attention when he wanted, and use at least 85% of the time for his own responses/preaching. I was told a few times that I needed to "let him talk", when in fact he spent no less than 85% of his time in the plaza talking, and in fact he had no claim to authority in that plaza. I am not (typically) a rude person, but Tom did well at making it seem "rude" to not just give him the ability to control the conversation.
2. His manner was not offensive, per se. His doctrines, of course, are another story.
3. He was extremely dependent upon argumentum ad ignorantium when appealing to the truth of Christianity, in his attempts to undercut naturalism generally.
   
4. From (3), he often resorted to the false dichotomy: if not science/materialism/atheism, then Christianity.
5. He seemed to have a rather poor grasp of the philosophy of science -- he didn't understand why the scientific method proceeds under the assumption of naturalism. He said this is a bias. He's right. But that's the difference between science and non-science. I tried to explain that there is no way to incorporate supernaturalism into the scientific method.
6. When asked hard questions, Tom would fall back to analogies and anecdotes, as a good public speaker, I think he was using these to give himself time to gather his thoughts and also take away some of the "edge" of the question.
7. Tom engaged skeptics, but the skeptics there only asked him a few good questions. One of the better questions involved the problem of free will and determinism as it relates to prophecy and omniscience. Tom completely changed the subject and seemed not to get the philosophical implications of the question at all.
8. A Muslim young man had lots of questions and plugs for Islam that were interesting, and kept some perspective outside of the "Christianity or atheism" false dichotomy.
   

Some highlights:

• I got into a short conversation with Tom about the question of whether Jesus and the Father had two different wills. I asked him this question point-blank, and he refused to answer yes/no. I asked him the question as he was arguing that Jesus always submitted to the will of the father, and that the Garden of Gethsemane was a good passage to refer to for this. I simply pointed to the absurdity of claiming that God can have different minds and different wills. I pointed out that we would all agree that something cannot logically be called "the same" if two of its representations have different properties: say, one object, the word "GATOR" being represented as orange in one instance and blue in another. We would recognize the orange GATOR as one particular, and the blue GATOR as different one. This is a deep metaphysical topic, but those who heard the basics of my outline probably got the problem: that if Jesus and the Father are the same God, we cannot say that they have different minds or wills.
  
• I spent a lot longer trying to explain the problem of the earliest manuscripts (MSS) of Mark, how the earliest version of the resurrection story in the earliest gospel showed much less detail than the later interpolated one. I tried to explain that when it comes to MSS, we use the earliest version to establish additions and interpolations. He made a terrible analogy about people who keep getting new information about a football game as it comes in, and how this is adding to the veracity of the overall account. The problem here is that 40 years or so had already passed at the time that Mark was completed. The story, up until that point, had been passed along by oral tradition only. How could "new information" come about? It is much, much, much more likely that the original story will get distorted with time than that somehow, a 40-year-old story has new information come in from new (reliable) sources. The difference in his analogy and my point is that MSS are supposed to be reliable copies of some original. If we have evidence, such as the pericope adulterae, and the longer Markan ending, that these MSS had been tampered with, why would we assume that our own oldest copies were not themselves interpolated? Our oldest MSS are from the 4th century. Knowing that things were already interpolated, when the story had been (supposedly-faithfully unrefined) and supposedly-faithfully copied for about 300 years, leads, by inference, to skepticism that these oldest copies can be reliably attributed to the originals. This argument didn't go well out there, because it is a subtle and serious argument that required more attention to the detail of what I was saying than he got. He either didn't get it on purpose, or because I wasn't articulate enough. His analogies were very poor.
  
• Tom loved the argument from design. He threw pocket change on the ground to establish inference of random processes, then lined up the pennies (stealing an example from Cressy Morrison) to show inference of design. First, I will just give some references for rebuttals to this argument: i) infidels.org; ii) skepdic.com; iii) Francois Tremblay. Along with the general refutations of this argument, I would also point to another sort of argument: the argument from evil design. Besides evil design, there is also the argument from maladaptive/poor design to consider.
  
• Another point in the argument from design that I made was that we are justified in claiming "design" for those processes that we understand, via induction and science. We are not justified in claiming "design" because of ignorance.
  
• Generally, Tom mischaracterized order/disorder. This is very very common among creationists. They do not understand the huge amount of disorder in the universe, relative to the order that occurs on the local scale. They do not understand that order on earth comes from the huge expense of work done by the sun's energy. They think that any order = design. They royally equivocate on the 2nd Law of Thermo.
  
• Tom went on for a while about pornography in a discussion with a liberal Christian. He chastised the young man pretty harshly when the young man said, "I don't think it's wrong b/c it doesn't hurt anyone." Tom went on and on for a while, citing verses about lust, etc. Then Tom moved on to talk about hypocrisy among Christians, and said something like, "I wouldn't tell you not to do something that I myself do." At this point, there was a quiet moment, and I injected (with perfect timing and tone): "Do you look at porn, Tom?" He was a little taken aback. He said, "No!" Then went on to say, "sometimes things pop up on your screen when you're doing a search...and you're tempted..." It seemed a rather poor justification and the opposite of his long spiel about unconditional repentance and admission of wrongdoing. People in the crowd saw this and gave quiet protests to his attempt to wiggle out of the contradiction I'd caught him in. I asked him how long it had been, and he wouldn't get specific: "a while".
• The most dramatic point I saw in my 3 days was when a young man, a skeptic, got in Tom's face and yelled at him not to malign science. This was during Tom's tortured attempt to try to argue that science is bad because it doesn't say "God might've done it." The young man was very angry, and I strongly disagreed with his outburst. It actually had me worried for a moment that the young man was going to assault Tom. He really got in his face and yelled. I booed at him.
  
• This led to a young man in the audience who had a question for myself and another skeptic (a different guy than the angry one) regarding science that Tom allowed (awful big of him, since it was a public square and free speech zone). The young man (with a large cast on his leg from a recent knee surgery) threw out the classic creationist canard, the PRATT: "Evolution is just a theory. Theories are just beliefs." I and the other skeptic kept interrupting each other in correcting this fallacy, but I don't know how effective it was, because too many people don't know the difference in the colloquial usage of the word, "theory" and the scientific usage.
  
• From that conversation, the other young skeptic was trying to explain cosmology a little, and I have no doubt that he knows some physics, but he was a poor public speaker, and the crowd lost a lot of interest. Tom saw this, and of course got their attention with more theatrics (jumping out of his chair and walking around briskly to recapture the audience). The young man never said: "The evidence for the Big Bang is in the red-shift of galaxies and the cosmic background radiation, as well as alignment with the equations of general relativity." This is what would've been best. He also failed to explain that some of the initial conditions of the Big Bang have been recreated in labs. I think not connecting the theories to the evidence and experiments is the largest failure in trying to convince people that belief in these theories is justified. Just describing the theory, rather than the evidence that supports it and the way it has been subjected to falsification, never helps.
  
• The second most dramatic point I saw was my involvement in the Hitler question, when he refused to read my quotes, or to allow me to have the papers back to read them myself, as I explained earlier.

Tom Short is a nice guy, aside from his beliefs. I look forward to his next visit to campus, and I'm going to come primed with some good soundbytes regarding his favorite lines of argument -- design, incredulity towards scientific claims about evolution and cosmology, obfuscating what science is and how it works, and some solid sources regarding biblical scholarship and the historico-critical method. They will have to be soundbytes, though, as he is quite good at controlling the conversation.

I also hope to have a few people from our freethought group out there, besides the few I did see. A nice-sized "peanut gallery" could keep him on his toes a lot more than one or two people -- we all have different areas of expertise and strengths in arguing different topics.

What I want more than that, though, is a formal debate, in which question-begging and topic-changing, as well as equivocation, can be called out and clearly demonstrated during the response period (which I really didn't have much of). I'm working on setting one up at our campus.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Philosophy, Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism

Discussion With Tom Short Re Nazism and Evolution

Tom Short has been at the UF campus preaching for the last three days. It appears that Gator Christian Life and Cru brought him down. I have been out all three days, making a point to try to spend at least an hour or two out there. I have a lot to report about our exchanges, but first I wanted to briefly highlight something that happened yesterday.

He said that evolutionary theory was basically to blame for Hitler's genocide of the Jews. Immediately, I'm thinking of Luther's anti-Semitic theology, the influence of Christianity in general on Hitler, and the is-ought problem regarding science and morality.

I also am thinking of the fact that Hitler did not believe that all humans shared a common ancestor, or descended from apes. He believed that God made the Aryan race specially, and that Jews were "corrupting" the bloodline. I told Tom this, and told him I could show it to him from Mein Kampf and in some other quotes. He said, "okay, do it." I said, "You will really let me read them?" He said, "Yes, go get the book and I'll let you..." I turned to go to Library West and realized three things: 1) I played racquetball Wed night and left my student ID in my racquetball bag, all the way out in my car; 2) Caesar (my dog) had a vet appt at 5PM and it was already 4PM; 3) I could spend 45 minutes, easily, finding the books (multiple volumes) in Library West (if it wasn't checked out) standing in line, and then trying to flip through and find the passages of interest.

Therefore, since I had reviewed this subject some time back, and knew where some source quotes were with citations, I came to my office (near Turlington), got the quotes (four pages of them) and came back with a printout. In front of a crowd of about 50-60 people, he completely wussed out.

He refused to read them. He said it wasn't the book, and that I might have taken them out of context. He then skipped the first four quotes (see bottom of post) and refused to read those, opting for some rambling speech Hitler gave on how he was following the Creed of the Catholic Church. I said, "Fine, if you won't read them, I will," and reached for the printouts. He literally pulled back and would not let me have them. A lot of people in the crowd booed. I don't think many people there were fooled by his refusal to read what I told him Hitler had said.

He wussed out because I showed him he was wrong. He was more interested in maintaining his commitment to the belief that evolution = Hitler than commitment to what is true. He did promise, though, to respond to my information on his website. We'll keep him accountable and honest.**(as of 6/10/07, he still hasn't posted anything about it)

In light of all this, sent the following email to Tom:

Tom,

Daniel here, the guy who you had lots of "discussion" with ;-)

Do you really think that Darwin personally, or evolutionary theory generally, is somehow to blame for Nazism? Hardly so. Drawing moral extrapolations from natural observations is itself moving away from science. Science is only the statement of how things are, not how things ought to be, or how human beings should relate to one another. (I point this out, despite the fact that even if the Nazis [or anyone] tried to use a scientific theory to justify themselves, they would be committing Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy in so doing, and most people recognize this.)

David Hume was a philosopher who developed this argument (before Darwin's day) in some detail. He called it the "is-ought problem". He pointed out that statements of fact do not lead to moral conclusions, without a moral premise somewhere involved in the mix. Science never offers a moral premise, of any kind. People do find them, within religion especially.

Did you know that it has been very well argued and evidenced that Hitler adopted much of his Anti-Semitic views directly from Luther?

Now, to be fair to Luther, nearly all contemporary Catholics hated Jews too. (also see wiki Anti-Semitism). What, did you really think that the Nazis were atheists? Oh, you could only wish so.

I only wanted to clarify my thoughts on Hitler and creationism. I am not interested in extended general debates about all sorts of topics, or e-preaching, or anything like that. You don't have to feel obligated to reply, obviously.

The reason I had all of those quotes handy, with citations already in place for 95% of them, is because this issue (about Hitler and creationism) is one with which I am rather familiar. A few months ago, when D. James Kennedy aired his propaganda piece on the subject, I did some research, and posted a few items to my blog.

Here is my review piece, written back in August: Review

I wrote a more general piece in June about Luther and his theological influence on Hitler, as well as the general anti-Semitism of medieval Christianity. Funny thing is that I wrote it before the whole D. James Kennedy flap: On Luther and Nazism

The quotes that I had were mostly from this source:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/08/list_of_hitler_quotes_he_was_q.php

But also from this source:
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2006/08/hitler_the_creationist.php

Now, the first four quotes I wanted you to read were from this last source. I did not have the time, nor interest, to explain all of this to you out there in the plaza at Turlington. I couldn't explain to you how I knew, beforehand, so much about this topic, nor how I had so many quotes from Hitler's works on his beliefs and their founding within the Christian religion and God's purpose for the Aryan race.

Ed did not source these last four quotes, but I took the time to do it myself tonight. They are all, indeed, from Hitler, and 3/4 are from Mein Kampf, as I said. The easiest way for you to verify their authenticity is to pull up the electronic version of the text and do a CTRL-F "find" of some key words to jump to the passages in question. One e-version of Mein Kampf is here.

I must admit, though, that the last one below is not from his book, but from a speech he gave. I did not want to get bogged down in the details, and I am sorry if you feel I misled you about that. They are still his words, and they still evidence what I was arguing:

The point I felt was most important was to show you that Hitler did not believe that the Jews and Aryans were of the same lineage. The crux of evolution is common ancestry, and so Hitler rejected evolution for humans. I will admit that Hitler did agree that some other animals and plants do evolve, but he flatly rejected a natural explanation for human beings. He believed God made man, in God's own image, specially creating human beings.

If you didn't know this, Hitler hired a crack team of anthropologists, archaeologists, etc., to try to find any evidence of the Aryan race that he wrote about (see the fifth quote below). The fifth quote gives one of the most clear indications of his views -- a weird mishmash of Biblical creationism (belief that the races were not of one ancestry, but specially created, and that these races were separated from each other until recent times, and of "unmixed" blood) and his own lunatic views.

Tom, I do not blame Christianity any more than I blame anyone else for Hitler. I hold people responsible for what they do, because this is a cause-effect relationship upon which our sense of justice is derived. You think that Hitler twisted Christianity, fine. I don't just think that Hitler "twisted" evolution/eugenics -- there is nothing within a description of how life changes and evolves that is prescriptive about humans should act! This is no ought within evolutionary theory, or any scientific theory. He believed he ought to purify an imaginary race. He believed the Bible supported this lunacy. He twisted both science and religion.

Consider also that natural selection is not the same thing as artificial selection. Evolution simply describes the process of natural selection, saying, "This is how Nature is..." without saying, "This is how Nature ought to be..." Hitler decided to take steps to genocide, which is artificial selection, and has nothing to do with evolutionary theory. That is, unless you think there are moral claims you can make about whether I should breed Saint Bernards or a new type of dog breed, and whether one is more morally correct than the other...(an absurd idea, yes?).

In much the same way, you argued that atheism was responsible for the massive killings of the 20th C at the hands of people like Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, etc. Fascist communist dictators used communism as a sort of para-religion. Evolution had little to nothing to do with their philosophy. The State is like The Church. People were controlled through propaganda to believe that free markets do not work, and that communism was best for them. These fascists murdered anyone who challenged their power. They were indeed evil men, just as some men have been throughout history. The fact that they lived in a time period when technology allowed mass murder doesn't mean that other historical figures wouldn't have done the same thing if they could've to retain control...from Babylon to Nero. These men were delusional, just as Hitler was. Communism and genocide do not follow from science, Tom. Those are moral and political judgments that are completely independent from anything resembling science.

Do you really not see that?

Please don't continue to misrepresent scientific theories as though they come attached with moral claims. I look forward to your delving into this issue and posting something about it on your website. I will keep checking up on it. I hope you do not continue to preach that evolution provides some sort of rationale for Hitler's actions in the meantime.

Likewise, I would not be intellectually honest in claiming that Christianity is to blame for Hitler either.

Human beings always find justification for their actions, whether within religious doctrines or in validation via scientific accuracy. I think (hope) you are an honest man, and so you will consider all of this with careful thought before bringing up this subject again.

Preaching your God need not be debased by appealing to such confusion and obfuscation of science and morality.

With warm regards,
Daniel

Now, here are those quotations, with sourcing:

____

1) Everybody who has the right kind of feeling for his country is solemnly bound, each within his own denomination, to see to it that he is not constantly talking about the Will of God merely from the lips but that in actual fact he fulfils the Will of God and does not allow God's handiwork to be debased. For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God's Creation and God's Will.

[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 2, Chapter 10, The Mask of Federalism]
_________________

2) And, further, they ought to be brought to realize that it is their bounden duty to give to the Almighty Creator beings such as He himself made to His own image.

[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 2, Chapter 2, The State]
_____________

3) Walking about in the garden of Nature, most men have the self-conceit to think that they know everything; yet almost all are blind to one of the outstanding principles that Nature employs in her work. This principle may be called the inner isolation which characterizes each and every living species on this earth.

Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental law--one may call it an iron law of Nature--which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind. Each animal mates only with one of its own species. The titmouse cohabits only with the titmouse, the finch with the finch, the stork with the stork, the field-mouse with the field-mouse, the house-mouse with the house-mouse, the wolf with the she-wolf, etc.

[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter XI, Race and People]
_________________

4) From where do we get the right to believe, that from the very beginning Man was not what he is today? Looking at Nature tells us that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments happen. But nowhere inside a kind shows such a development as the breadth of the jump, as Man must supposedly have made, if he has developed from an ape-like state to what he is today.

==
*** [Daniel's edit:The above English translation is from Hitler's /Tischgespraeche/ for the night of the 25th to 26th 1942:

'Woher nehmen wir das Recht zu glauben, der Mensch sei nicht von Uranfaengen das gewesen , was er heute ist? Der Blick in die Natur zeigt uns, dass im Bereich der Pflanzen und Tiere Veraenderungen und Weiterbildungen vorkommen. Aber nirgends zeigt sich innherhalb einer Gattung eine Entwicklung von der Weite des Sprungs, den der Mensch gemacht haben muesste, sollte er sich aus einem affenartigen Zustand zu dem, was er ist, fortgebildet haben.'

A translation Hitler's words, as recorded by Stephen Carr:

'From where do we get the right to believe that man was not from the very beginning what he is today.
A glance in Nature shows us , that changes and developments happen in the realm of plants and animals. But nowhere do we see inside a kind, a development of the size of the leap that Man must have made, if he supposedly has advanced from an ape-like condition to what he is' (now)

http://stevencarrwork.blogspot.com/2006/08/hitler-creationist.html

'Die zehn Gebote sind Ordnungsgesetze, die absolut lobenswert sind.'] ***

__________________

5) It was not by mere chance that the first forms of civilization arose
there where the Aryan came into contact with inferior races, subjugated
them and forced them to obey his command. The members of the inferior
race became the first mechanical tools in the service of a growing
civilization.

Thereby the way was clearly indicated which the Aryan had to follow. As
a conqueror, he subjugated inferior races and turned their physical
powers into organized channels under his own leadership, forcing them to
follow his will and purpose. By imposing on them a useful, though hard,
manner of employing their powers he not only spared the lives of those
whom he had conquered but probably made their lives easier than these
had been in the former state of so-called 'freedom'. While he ruthlessly
maintained his position as their master, he not only remained master but
he also maintained and advanced civilization. For this depended
exclusively on his inborn abilities and, therefore, on the preservation
of the Aryan race as such. As soon, however, as his subject began to
rise and approach the level of their conqueror, a phase of which
ascension was probably the use of his language, the barriers that had
distinguished master from servant broke down. The Aryan neglected to
maintain his own racial stock unmixed and therewith lost the right to
live in the paradise which he himself had created. He became submerged
in the racial mixture and gradually lost his cultural creativeness,
until he finally grew, not only mentally but also physically, more like
the aborigines whom he had subjected rather than his own ancestors. For
some time he could continue to live on the capital of that culture which
still remained; but a condition of fossilization soon set in and he sank
into oblivion.

That is how cultures and empires decline and yield their places to new
formations.

[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter XI, Race and People]

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6) Steven Carr has another piece of interest that he translated:
==
And in the entry for 27 February 1942 , Hitler says 'Das, was der Mensch von dem Tier voraushat, der veilleicht wunderbarste Beweis fuer die Ueberlegenheit des Menschen ist, dass er begriffen hat, dass es eine Schoepferkraft geben muss.'

Man braucht nur durch ein Teleskop oder durch ein Mikroskop zu sehen: Da erkennt man, dass der Mensch die Faehigkeit hat, diese Gesetze zu begreifen.

Da muss man aber doch demuetig werden. Wird diese Schoepferkraft mt einem Fetisch identifiziert, dann bricht die Gottesvorstellung zusammen, wenn der Fetsich versagt.
==

If this creative power is identified with an idol, then the picture of God will collapse, once the idol fails.

Man has only to look through a telescope or a microscope: Man then recognises, that mankind has the capability to comprehend these laws.

But man must be humble.

[http://stevencarrwork.blogspot.com/2006/08/sill-more-on-hitler-creationist.html]
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Tom had promised that he would have a response to this on his website within a week. Loyal readers, stay tuned. I'll keep you updated.

**PS: See this TO article on Hitler and Darwin**
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