Science: The Descent of Aryan Man

Although the Nazis have debased German universities by filling their faculties with political stooges, real German scientists are at last risking their jobs and perhaps their lives to criticize dogmas which the Nazis have tried to substitute for science. Last week U.S. scientists were surprised to see in learned journals newly arrived from Germany counter-attacks against the great Nazi campaign, begun last year, to uproot Darwinism.

Girded like Siegfrieds, rabid Nazis had labeled evolution a British-Plutocratic-Jewish-Materialist theory. They abused it as “the theory of universal racelessness,” a standing menace to Nazi racial dogma (Rasselehre). In Natur & Kultur, one Otto Muck recognized what democratic scientists had long pointed out, that “racial theory and evolutionary theory are incompatible and bluntly contradictory.” So the Nazis “plugged” a different theory—a theory of creation, according to which man developed suddenly during some splendid Wagnerian cataclysm which thrust lower organisms into a new environment where only those creatures survived who modified themselves through sheer force of will power.

This was the doctrine which German scientists were asked to swallow. Nazi scientific papers even attacked the theory of evolution, as the Church had a generation earlier, by printing pictures of ugly ape men and demanding whether Aryans, let alone that super Aryan, Adolf Hitler, could have had such ancestors. Editors of Nazi scientific papers announced that there was no room for the paleontologists’ rubble heaps and old bones in the New Order. Science writers, feeling themselves full of cataclysmic creativeness, flexed their muscles in the Teuton’s chronic, frantic urge to achieve Supermanliness. Perhaps the most effective argument against evolution was the heavy hint that advocacy of “neo-Darwinism” made a German politically suspect.

Against all this, some German scientists have finally risen. In Der Biologe, Geneticist F. Schwanitz pointed out that the anti-evolutionary outbursts have been quite unsupported by scientific references. He seethed at the “shameless attack upon the supporters of evolutionary theory, i.e., the overwhelming majority of biologists.” Another scientist, Chr. von Krogh, writes: “Some have tried to identify a scientific doctrine with the National-Socialist philosophy. Nothing could be more wrong. A detailed scientific theory can never be identified or paralleled with a philosophy.”

Shrewdly Krogh casts himself in the role of defender of Aryanism. For thousands of years, says he, “Nordic man” has believed in the unity of body and spirit. By exaggerating the spirituality of race feeling, the anti-evolutionists are importing a non-Aryan, Oriental dualism of body and spirit.