Creationism - National Center for Science Education

In the final chapter of God—or Gorilla (1922), Alfred W. McCann accuses
evolutionism of fostering German militarism. Popularized versions of evolution were
appealed to by writers such as General Friedrich von Bernhardi to justify their “might
makes right” policies:
Seizing the scientific theory of evolution which the people by this time “understood thoroughly,” the new
prophets of materialism applied it not only to the field of biology but to the field of sociology, so that
Spencer’s phrase “the survival of the fittest” was employed as an explanation of the birth and rise of
NATIONS. Nothing could have been more inevitable. [1922:327]
McCann quotes Bernhardi as saying, in Germany and the Next War (1912):
The struggle for existence is, in the life of Nature, the basis for all healthy development. ... War gives a
biologically just decision. ... But it is not only a biological law, but a moral obligation, and, as such, an
indispensible factor in civilization.
McCann continues:
Darwinism had saturated the war-lords with all the catchwords essential to the prosecution of their designs
and the people, lured by the promises of mad men and the nomenclature of a science which they knew only
through the shallow writings and lectures of popularizers, were prepared to follow to the end, little
dreaming of the carnage, starvation and disease toward which their “progressive” evolution was now
thundering its flight. [1922:328-329]
A work very frequently cited to show the influence of evolutionism on German
militarism during this period was Vernon Kellogg’s Headquarters Nights (1917).
Kellogg was an entomologist (and an evolutionist, the author of Darwinism Today and
popular textbooks of evolution) at Stanford University. During the war he served with
the international Belgian Relief Committee, during which duty he was often stationed at
the headquarters of the German General Staff and German Army of Occupation of
Belgium. In his discussions with German officers, Kellogg was appalled to discover the
extent to which they preached the crudest form of social Darwinism as justification for
aggressive militarism. They sincerely believed that this “might makes right” philosophy
was firmly based on biological laws of the struggle for existence as established by
Darwin’s evolution. “It is a point of view that justifies itself by a wholehearted
acceptance of the worst of Neo-Darwinism, the Allmacht of natural selection aplied
rigorously to human life and society and Kultur” (1917:22).
Kellogg met one officer who was a prominent biology professor, and they
discussed at length the biological argument for war.
Professor von Flussen is Neo-Darwinian, as are most German biologists and natural philosophers. The
creed of the Allmacht of a natural selection based on violent and fatal competitive struggle is the gospel of
the German intellectuals; all else is illusion and anathema. [1917:28]
This struggle not only must go on, for that is the natural law, but it should go on, so that this natural law
may work out in its cruel, inevitable way the salvation of the human species. By its salvation is meant its
desirable natural evolution. That human group which is in the most advanced evolutionary stage as regards
internal organization and for of social relationship is best, and should, for the sake of the species, be
preserved at the expense of the less advanced, the less effective. It should win in the struggle for existence,
and this struggle should occur precisely that the various types may be tested, and the best not only
preserved, but put in position to impose its kind of social organization—its Kultur—on the others, or
alternatively, to destroy and replace them.