Abstract
Darwinism helped “lay the foundation for the bloodiest war in history,” declared the pacifist William Jennings Bryan in his campaign to stir up Americans against evolutionary theory.1 Bryan was, of course, referring to the horrors of World War I. He blamed Darwinism for creating a belligerent mentality among German intellectuals and political leaders. Bryan was not alone, for William Roscoe Thayer, in his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1918 stated,
I do not believe that the atrocious war into which the Germans plunged Europe in August, 1914, and which has subsequently involved all lands and all peoples, would ever have been fought, or at least would have attained its actual gigantic proportions, had the Germans not been made mad by the theory of the survival of the fittest.2
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Notes
Quoted in Antonello La Vergata, “Evolution and War, 1871–1918,” Nuncius 9 (1994): 148.
Oscar Peschel, “Ein Rückblick auf die jüngste Vergangenheit,” Das Ausland 39, 36 (September 1866): 874.
Gustav Jaeger, “Ein biologisches Moment der neueren Völkergeschichte,” Das Ausland 59 (1866): 1024–6
Gustav Jaeger, “Naturwissenschaftliche Betrachtungen über den Krieg,” Das Ausland 43 (1870): 1161.
Friedrich Hellwald, “Der Kampf ums Dasein im Menschen-und Völkerleben” Das Ausland 45 (1872): 103–6, 140–4
Friedrich Hellwald, “Der Kampf ums Dasein im Menschen-und Völkerleben,” Das Ausland 45 (1872): 105.
Alfred Kirchhoff, Darwinismus angewandt auf Völker und Staaten (Frankfurt, 1910), 87; see also Alfred Kirchhoff, “Darwinismus in der Völkerentwickelung,” Nord und Süd 31 (1884): 367–77.
Otto Schmidt-Gibichenfels, “Der Krieg als Kulturfaktor,” Politisch-Anthropologische Revue 11 (1912): 393–407
Ernst Haeckel, “Englands Blutschuld am Weltkriege,” Das monistische Jahrhundert 3 (1914-15): 538–48
Haeckel, “Weltkrieg und Naturgeschichte,” Nord und Süd 151 (November 1914): 140–7.
Wilhelm Schallmayer, Vererbung und Auslese (Jena, 1903), 111–15, 177–8, 245, 250, 296; Schallmayer, “Die Erbentwicklung bei Völkern,” Menschheitsziele 1 (1907): 95
Wilhelm Schallmayer, “Die Auslesewirkungen des Krieges,” Menschheitsziele 2 (1908): 381–5.
Arnold Dodel, “Charles Robert Darwin, sein Leben, seine Werke und sein Erfolg,” Die neue Zeit 1 (1883): 117–18.
Alfred Fried, “Und wieder ein Krieg!” Die Friedenswarte 2 (1900): 97–9.
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© 2004 Richard Weikart
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Weikart, R. (2004). War and Peace. In: From Darwin to Hitler. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10986-6_10
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