Page 113 - The Social Weapon: Darwinism

111

hood are left over from evolutionary adult ancestors. For example,
Haeckel and his followers maintained that a “civilized” child possessed
the same intelligence and behavioral characteristics as a “savage”
adult, and used these claims to prove the superiority of the white race.
In his book Ever Since Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould summarizes the sup-
port that the theory of recapitulation provided for racism:
Recapitulation was Haeckel's favorite argument… Haeckel and his
colleagues also invoked recapitulation to affirm the racial superiority
of northern European whites, ... Herbert Spencer wrote that “the in-
tellectual traits of the uncivilized… are traits recurring in the children
of the civilized.” Carl Vogt said it more strongly in 1864: “The grown
up Negro partakes, as regards his intellectual faculties, of the nature
of the child…” 3
Of course, this claim put forward by Spencer, Vogt and others did
not reflect the truth in any way. These claims were gradually invali-
dated by science itself and abandoned. In his The Panda's Thumb, Gould
wrote:
This theory, often expressed by the mouthful “ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny,” held that higher animals, in their embryonic develop-
ment, pass through a series of stages representing, in proper se-
quence, the adult forms of ancestral, lower creatures. ...
Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the pervasive racism
of white scientists... 4
Professor George J. Stein, director of the International Security
Studies Core at the Air War College, published an article headed
“Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism” in American Scientist. “In
essence,” he wrote, “Haeckel and his fellow social Darwinists ad-
vanced the ideas that were to become the core assumptions of national
5
socialism,” thus summarizing the deadly relationship between
Haeckel, Social Darwinism and racism.

1. Keith S. Thompson, "Ontogeny and Phylogeny Recapitulated," American Scientist,
vol. 76, May/June 1988, p. 273.
2. Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong, New York: Tick-
nor and Fields, 1982, p. 204.
3. Stephen Jay Gould, "Racism and Recapitulation," chapter 27 of Ever Since Darwin,
New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977, p. 217.
4. Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
1992, p. 163.
5. George J. Stein, "Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism," American Scientist, vol.
76, Jan/Feb. 1988, p. 56.