Page 60 - The Disasters Darwinism Brought To Humanity

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importance in those publications which sup-
ported eugenics, "Eugenics is man's taking
charge of his own evolution," it was said.
Kenneth Ludmerer, a medical histo-
rian at Washington University, noted
that the idea of eugenics is as old as
Plato's Republic but he also added that
Darwinism was the reason for the rise in
th
interest in the idea in the 19 century:
… modern eugenics thought arose only
in the nineteenth century. The emergence
of interest in eugenics during that century
had multiple roots. The most important was
the theory of evolution, for Francis Galton's
Ernst Haeckel
ideas on eugenics–and it was he who created the
term "eugenics"–were a direct logical outgrowth
of the scientific doctrine elaborated by his cousin, Charles Darwin. 47
In Germany the first person to be influenced by and to spread eugen-
ics was the famous evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel was a
close friend and supporter of Darwin. To support the theory of evolution,
he put forward the claim "recapitulation," which proposed that the
embryos of different living creatures resembled one another. It later
emerged that Haeckel had falsified the data when putting forward this
claim.
While Haeckel was on the one hand making scientific forgeries of
this kind, on the other he was putting forward eugenic propaganda. He
suggested that newly-born handicapped children should be killed forth-
with and that this would speed up the evolution of society. He went even
further, claiming that lepers and people with cancer and mental illnesses
should be painlessly killed, or else these people would be a burden on
society and would slow down evolution.
The American researcher George Stein summed up Haeckel's blind
allegiance to the theory of evolution in an article of his in the magazine