His message is that evolution kills morality. "If everything is a product of chance - purposeless - which is widespread in biology textbooks . . . then I don't think you have any grounds to criticize Hitler."
Those are fighting words, and a number of thinkers have challenged them. Most recently University of Chicago historian Robert Richards took Weikart to task in a paper titled "Was Hitler a Darwinian?", to which he answers a definitive no.
Weikart said he began exploring the topic when he wrote his dissertation on the influence of Darwin on German socialism in the 19th century. There, he said, Darwinism was used to justify eugenics - the attempt to influence selection in the human race, usually by killing or sterilizing anyone considered "unfit."
As Weikart learned more, he said, "the connection to Nazism leapt out at me." Darwin's second evolution book, The Descent of Man, is rife with racist statements about "higher" and "lower" races, said Weikart, and Darwin viewed the extermination of native people in Tasmania and Australia as part of natural selection.
Darwin, Weikart admits, didn't advocate such killings, and he abhorred slavery. Darwin also disavowed the more extreme eugenicist views, instead saying that helping those in need exercised the better part of our nature.
But Darwinian thinkers of Hilter's time were trying to use evolution to justify racism, said Weikart, and this influenced Hitler. "Hitler spoke and wrote incessantly about evolution, natural selection and the struggle for existence, especially the struggle between races," he wrote in one of his books.
Richards calls this all a desperate tactic to undermine evolution. Creationism and Intelligent Design don't hold up scientifically, he said, so people like Weikart are trying to show that evolution is somehow morally dangerous.
