Andrea Heidemarie: Ludicrous biography attempts to link Darwin to Hitler

Monday, October 15, 2012

Ludicrous biography attempts to link Darwin to Hitler

Rowan Hooper, news editor

It was only on reaching the third-from-last paragraph of this book that I realised why historian Paul Johnson had written it. Leading up to this revelation is what amounts to a very long list of gripes about Charles Darwin. We hear at length about how lucky he was - in being born into wealth and fluking passage on the Beagle, for example - and about how various concepts of evolution were already in the intellectual air and even well accepted.

We are told that Darwin was very poor at mathematics, lazy in his avoidance of the "hard cerebral activity of thinking through fundamental scientific principles", and that Gregor Mendel was "in some ways a more thorough scientist than Darwin". Darwin is scolded for not having come up with the Mendelian principles of genetics himself and for the misfortune of not reading Mendel's work.

Darwin is criticised for emphasising the suffering and violence inherent in the natural world, and amazingly, his use of the word "struggle" - as in "the struggle for existence" - is somehow blamed for Hitler's use of the word in Mein Kampf.

The aim of all this, while incidentally acknowledging Darwin's genius, seems to be to manufacture an air of mediocrity over his achievements.

Then we get to the end of the book. After once more noting that Darwin was one of a select band who "dispersed the darkness of ignorance", Johnson says, "None of this justifies the enthusiasm of the Darwinian fundamentalists, who over the last few decades have sought to give Darwin a quasi-divine status." He goes on, "The biologists responsible for Darwinian fundamentalism have themselves been deified by an ingenious but perverse band of philosophers."

So that's why Johnson has written this book - he's fed up, basically, with the prominence of the work of Richard Dawkins (the biologist) and Daniel Dennett (the philosopher).

Only Johnson makes no attempt to explain what he dislikes about their work, or, indeed, what he believes "Darwinian fundamentalism" to be. History teaches us, Johnson concludes, irrelevantly, "that science, like everything else, becomes out of date". We don't need history to tell us that, it is almost a definition of science itself.

And notwithstanding a few interesting snippets of Darwin's life to be learned here, this book adds nothing to our understanding of the man: it is a vendetta, an agenda-driven hatchet-job. It is written, one suspects, by someone who is deeply resentful of the power of Darwin?s ideas. For more insight and less pre-formed opinion, there are far better books out there - we don't need to add another to the pile.