Congratulations to our colleague Richard Weikart who has not one but two important books forthcoming. The Death of Humanity: Confronting the Secularist Attack on the Value of Human Life and Hitler’s Religion have both been accepted for publication by Regnery and should appear in early 2016.

The former includes two chapters that discuss the impact of Darwinism on the value of human life. The latter includes two chapters that discuss the role of Darwinism in Hitler’s thought; its main argument is that Hitler’s religion was pantheism, and his worship of nature included seeking to obey the laws of nature, including the Darwinian law of the human struggle for existence.

Dr. Weikart is a historian at California State University, Stanislaus, a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, and the author of From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany and Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress.

It can’t be said too often that the inspiration drawn by Nazi race theorists from Darwinian theory doesn’t make Darwinian biology scientifically mistaken. But it’s one reason among others to take a second, skeptical look at that science rather than uncritically embrace it because everyone else seems to do so.

Darwin defenders are almost uniformly in denial on this point.

Image credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1969-054-53A / CC-BY-SA [CC BY-SA 3.0 de], via Wikimedia Commons.