Richard Weikart

Richard Weikart is Emeritus Professor of History at California State University, Stanislaus, and author of From Darwin to Hitler, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Ideas that Drove the Third Reich, The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life, and Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism. His most recent book is Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent from Healing to Killing (2024). He completed his Ph.D. in modern European history at the University of Iowa in 1994, receiving the biennial prize of the Forum for History of Human Sciences for the best dissertation in that field. His revised dissertation, Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein, was published in 1999.

His book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, documents the influence of naturalistic evolution on ethical thought, euthanasia, militarism, racism, and ultimately Hitler's ideology. It was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2004. For more information on this book, visit darwintohitler.com.

His "From Darwin to Hitler" lecture delivered at the University of California San Diego is available here.

Dr. Weikart has also written Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) which helps explain the mystery of Hitler’s pernicious ideology by demonstrating that Hitler’s immorality flowed from a coherent ethic, inspired by an evolutionary utopian project of biologically improving the human race.

He published two books in 2016: The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life, which contains chapters on materialism, Darwinism, and biological determinism, among other issues; and Hitler’s Religion, which shows that Hitler was a pantheist who deified nature and based his morality on the laws of nature, especially the Darwinian struggle for existence.

His latest book is Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism (2022), which takes his earlier scholarship a step further by examining the Nazi biology curriculum, textbooks used in German schools during the Third Reich, Nazi propaganda, and the writings of prominent German biologists and anthropologists during the Third Reich. He thereby demonstrates the importance of Darwinism for the Nazi worldview. In the final chapter he shows how white nationalists and neo-Nazis today still rely on Darwinism to buttress their racist ideology.

Richard Weikart's Vitae can be accessed here.

Archives

Did Darwin Banish Teleology from Nature or Not?

_{Richard Weikart
December 16, 2024}

James G. Lennox quotes from an 1862 essay, where Darwin wrote that “the final cause of all this mimicry” among butterflies is evading predation.

Is It a Myth That Darwin Rejected Design?

_{Richard Weikart
December 12, 2024}

Deism is the idea that God created the cosmos and its natural laws, but thereafter did not intervene with miraculous events.

A New Scholarly Book Trying to Debunk Myths about Charles Darwin and His Theory

_{Richard Weikart
December 11, 2024}

Some debunkers need to be debunked themselves, because instead of correcting falsehoods, they end up creating or perpetuating falsehoods.

Richard Weikart: Promoting Life in a Culture of Death

_{Richard Weikart
October 30, 2024}

The urge to help people kill themselves has intensified in recent decades, even to the point of pushing the reluctant towards death. How did we reach this place? On this ID The Future, historian and author Dr. Richard Weikart joins veteran radio and podcast host Dr. Jerry Newcombe to discuss how the evolutionary ethic has undermined the value of human life, the topic of his latest book, Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent From Healing to Killing.

The Contradiction in Peter Singer’s Worldview

_{Richard Weikart
September 9, 2024}

He never provides any reason why rationality, self-consciousness, and the ability to plan the future have any value.

Darwinian Death: Euthanasia Meets Eugenics

_{Richard Weikart
August 26, 2024}

One powerful influence on the early euthanasia movement was eugenics ideology, which emerged first in the 1860s under the leadership of Francis Galton.

Life Devalued: Suicide and Infanticide in Classical Antiquity

_{Richard Weikart
August 19, 2024}

Nick Vujicic’s story would probably have turned out quite differently if he had been born in ancient Greece or Rome.

Unalienable Rights, You Say? Why We Must Resist Yuval Harari’s “Scientific” Nihilism

_{Richard Weikart
August 12, 2024}

History attests that when a culture does not draw a firm line protecting human life, it inevitably progresses to ending lives for all manner of reasons.

Richard Weikart Reads From His New Book Unnatural Death

_{Richard Weikart
August 7, 2024}

On this episode, Dr. Richard Weikart reads selections from his new book Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent From Healing to Killing. Dr. Weikart is Emeritus Professor of History at California State University Stanislaus and a Senior Fellow with the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture. He is author of From Darwin to Hitler, Hitler’s Ethic, Hitler’s Religion and The Death of Humanity. Dr. Weikart begins with a portion from the book’s Introduction, which sets the stage and defines some key terms used in the book. Weikart concludes with an excerpt from Chapter 3: Euthanasia Meets Eugenics, where he gets into the influence of Darwinism on eugenics ideology and how it shaped attitudes toward euthanasia and assisted suicide in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Richard Weikart: Medicine’s Descent From Healing to Killing

_{Richard Weikart
August 5, 2024}

If we believe there is no qualitative distinction between animals and humans, are we more likely to protect human life or devalue it? On this episode of ID The Future, host Eric Anderson talks to historian Dr. Richard Weikart about his latest book, Unnatural Death: Medicine's Descent From Healing to Killing, now available from Discovery Institute Press. The book is a wide-ranging history of euthanasia and assisted suicide from Ancient Greece to today. How did we get to the point we are at today, and how do we turn the tide to promote the sanctity of human life? Tune in to find out.

Darwinian Racism Then and Now

_{Richard Weikart
October 3, 2022}

Today’s ID the Future spotlights Darwinian racism, past and present. In this first half of a panel discussion at the 2022 Center for Science and Culture Insider’s Briefing, Darwin Day in America author John West introduces the other panel members, teases an upcoming book, Darwin Comes to Africa, and discusses his experience visiting the Museum of Criminal Anthropology in Turin, Italy, where the work of infamous Darwinian criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s racist ideas about evolution and race are on dramatic display. Then historian Richard Weikart, author of Darwinian Racism, debunks the popular media claim that white nationalist racism in America is a Southern evangelical phenomenon. Weikart shows that the most prominent white nationalists show little if any interest in promoting …

Darwinian Racism vs. Evolutionary Ethics that Devalue All Men Equally

_{Richard Weikart
June 22, 2022}

Today’s ID the Future again features Darwinian Racism author and historian Richard Weikart and radio host Hank Hanegraaff exploring the pernicious impact Charles Darwin and Darwinism have had on modern ethics. Ideas laid out in Darwin’s The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man fueled scientific racism in the United States and Nazi Germany, Weikart says, and undergird the ideas of contemporary white nationalists, who tend to be virulently anti-Christian and pro-Darwin. We can take some comfort from the fact that white nationalists are a fringe movement and that most evolutionists today are anti-racist, Weikart says, but he notes that Darwinian materialism has poisoned mainstream ethics in another way, by devaluing humans generally. This is why someone as mainstream as Oxford …

Richard Weikart and Hank Hanegraaff Talk Darwinian Racism

_{Richard Weikart
June 20, 2022}

On today’s ID the Future, radio host Hank Hanegraaff interviews historian and Center for Science and Culture senior fellow Richard Weikart about his book, Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism. The two look at how Darwinism fueled scientific racism and an aggressive and frequently racist eugenics movement not just in Nazi Germany but, earlier, in the United States, where many leading, even mainstream voices, including Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, top business magnates, and some liberal Protestants enamored of evolutionary theory pushed compulsory sterilization laws, which were passed in Indiana, California, and other states. Weikart shows how these laws were fueled and informed by ideas laid out in Darwin’s The Descent of Man, …

Linking Darwin Skepticism with Anti-Communism, Historian Offers a Misguided Attack

_{Richard Weikart
June 3, 2022}

Weinberg's evidence that Discovery Institute uses intelligent design to bash communism is completely lacking.

Do Darwin Critics Reject Evolution Because They’re Anti-Communists? Carl Weinberg Says Yes

_{Richard Weikart
June 2, 2022}

In a couple of cases, Weinberg goes beyond the pale, making accusations that are bizarre and even slanderous.

Rejecting Evolution Because of Anti-Communism? Charge by Cornell U Press Book Fails to Detonate

_{Richard Weikart
June 1, 2022}

Weinberg takes a historically accurate claim — that many creationists over the years blamed communism on evolution — and then blows it way out of proportion.

Anti-Racists Often Ignore This Non-Religious Source of Racism

_{Richard Weikart
May 10, 2022}

Many white nationalists claim that Darwinism directly supports their ideology, because they think that races have evolved to different levels.

Does Disbelief in Human Evolution Foment Racism?

_{Richard Weikart
April 15, 2022}

This study does not provide an adequate explanation as to why belief in evolution would cause one to be less racist. Indeed, the logic seems backwards.

Eric Metaxas and Richard Weikart Spotlight Darwinian Racism

_{Richard Weikart
March 21, 2022}

Today’s ID the Future brings listeners a lively conversation between radio host and bestselling author Eric Metaxas and historian Richard Weikart about Weikart’s new book, Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism. Weikart provides a quick flyover of the evidence that the outlook of Hitler, the Nazis, and contemporary white nationalists is significantly shaped by Darwinism and the arguments of early Darwinists. Metaxas and Weikart then contrast the Darwinian foundation for morality with the Judeo-Christian foundation, which holds that all humans are made in the image of God and therefore possess inherent worth, regardless of race and regardless of one’s “fitness.” This episode is reposted here, with permission, from The Eric Metaxas Show. …

Darwinian Influences on the Alt-Right

_{Richard Weikart
March 1, 2022}

The overlapping categories of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and alt-right proponents regularly invoke Darwinism.