Richard Weikart

Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture

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, and The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life.  His most recent book is Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism (2022).  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

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 Christianity, Read More ›

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 Read More ›

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, ideas that also Read More ›

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. Check out Weikart’s new Read More ›

Darwinian Racism Webinar, Pt. 2

Richard Weikart
February 16, 2022
Today’s ID the Future features the second half of a recent webinar spotlighting historian Richard Weikart and his new book, Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism. Here Weikart fields questions from the webinar audience. Along the way Weikart touches on the connection between Darwinism and scientific racism, the objection that Darwinism, properly understood, doesn’t support scientific racism (much less Nazi racism), the racism inherent in Darwin’s own writings and those of prominent early Darwinists such as Ernst Haeckel, and more recent manifestations of Darwinian-inspired scientific racism both academic and populist. This and much more is explored in Weikart’s new book, available here. And for scientific reasons to reject Darwinism along with its racists implications, jump over Read More ›

Darwinian Racism: The Author Webinar, Pt. 1

Richard Weikart
February 9, 2022
Today’s ID the Future is part one of a recent webinar featuring Darwinian Racism author and noted historian Richard Weikart, discussing his new book with webinar host and Center for Science and Culture managing director John West. Weikart and West begin by discussing Whoopi Goldberg’s recent claim that the Jewish Holocaust under Nazi Germany was not racist. Yes it was, explains Weikart. Hitler and the Nazis believed that the Nordic or Aryan Europeans, which included Germans, were a superior race, and they viewed Jews, blacks, Slavs, and other races as inferior. Worse, Hitler and other Nazis drew upon Darwin’s theory of evolution, and in particular ideas laid out in Darwin’s The Descent of Man, as well as the work of Read More ›

Richard Weikart on Scientific Racism and the War on Humanity

Richard Weikart
November 22, 2021
Today’s ID the Future again spotlights The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. Historian Richard Weikart and host Casey Luskin discuss Weikart’s contribution to the new anthology, his essay “How Evil Has Been Done in the Name of Science.” As Weikart explains, over the past century and a half, science has been misused to fuel racist policies and undermine human rights. Darwinian ideas helped lay the groundwork for Nazi ideology in Germany. And we shouldn’t imagine the problem was restricted to Nazi Germany. Scientific racism also reared its head in the United States, including in the long-running and infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment. More broadly, a marriage of scientism and evolutionary thinking continues to undermine the idea of inherent human worth Read More ›

Richard Weikart Reviews New Book on Social Darwinism

Richard Weikart
April 28, 2021
In today’s ID the Future historian Richard Weikart (Cal State Stanislaus) dissects a new Cambridge University Press book on social Darwinism by Jeffrey O’Connell and Michael Ruse. Weikart, author of Hitler’s Ethic, From Darwin to Hitler, Hitler’s Religion, and The Death of Humanity,* says that a major shortcoming of the new book is the authors’ attempt to put as much distance as possible between Darwin and eugenics thinking, and between Darwin and Hitler. The new book paints Darwin follower Herbert Spencer as the eugenics-championing bad guy and posits that Darwin and Darwinism had little or no influence on Hitler’s warped master race ethic. Weikart patiently highlights some key evidence to the contrary, statements front and center in Hitler’s writing. Did Read More ›

Richard Weikart on Darwinian Racism, Eugenics, and Slavery

Richard Weikart
September 23, 2020
The evil of racism was nothing new when Darwin and his evolutionary theory came on the scene, but according to Weikart, racist thinking, increased “by orders of magnitude” under the influence of Darwinism and evolutionary thinking, and became mainstream science.