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

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.

Weikart on Racism, Darwinism and Christianity

Richard Weikart
September 23, 2019
On this episode of ID the Future, Cal State history professor Richard Weikart, author of The Death of Humanity and the Case for Life, talks racism past and present, in both Christian and “scientific” secular history.

Richard Weikart on Michael Ruse and the Darwinian Religion

Richard Weikart
September 16, 2019
On this episode of ID the Future, From Darwin to Hitler author and historian Richard Weikart speaks with Mike Keas about a recent book on Darwinism, Christianity, and war by Michael Ruse. Weikart says that in the course of the book Ruse appears to shift from warning others about treating Darwinism as a secular religion to himself embracing it as such.

How Darwinian Evolution Informed Hitler’s Ethics

Richard Weikart
November 8, 2017
On this episode of ID The Future, Tod Butterfield talks with historian Dr. Richard Weikart about his new book Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich. In this episode, Dr. Weikart explains how Darwinian evolution informed Hitler’s ethics.

Was Hitler a Creationist? Hitler Historian Says No.

Richard Weikart
November 6, 2017
On this episode of ID The Future, Tod Butterfield talks with historian Dr. Richard Weikart about his new book Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich. Here Dr. Weikart explores the claim that Hitler was a creationist and shows why it misses the mark.

Richard Weikart on Hitler’s Religion: Complex and Contradictory

Richard Weikart
November 1, 2017
On this episode of ID The Future, Tod Butterfield talks with CSC Senior Fellow Dr. Richard Weikart about his recently published book Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich. In particular, Weikart explores Hitler’s pantheism and his antipathy toward Christianity.