Note especially “the demoralizing development of Darwinism:
We owe a great debt to the intellectual historian Richard Weikart of California State University, Stanislaus, for a series of excellent documentary historical studies on the particularly horrific and tragic ascendancy of these scientistic beliefs and ideas in Germany, where Darwinism took very deep ideological root. His From Darwin to Hitler was reviewed in the print edition of National Review (“Murderous Science,” March 28, 2005). Of course Weikart is not original in the conceptual scheme he has recognized, documented, and deplored: Studies of first-rank intellectual importance on the demoralizing development of Darwinism have over the last 80 years been published in English by eminent scholars such as Jacques Barzun (1941), Richard Hofstadter (1944), Gertrude Himmelfarb (1959), Richard Spilsbury (Providence Lost, 1974), and Thomas Nagel (2012), whose outstanding philosophical critique Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (2012) I reviewed in National Review.
But Weikart has doggedly and rightly concentrated on the Darwinian intellectual bacillus as it inspired, affected, and accelerated the modern German tragedy of 1870–1945. Darwin himself wrote with optimism and praise to a German scholar in 1868: “The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.” Prevail they did in Germany, owing not least to the explosive, histrionic rhetorician Nietzsche. And the world bled and wept at the outcome, commencing “the second Fall of Man,” as the philosopher Sidney Hook called history from 1914 onward.
M. D. Aeschliman, “Darwinian Racism: The Angry Ape” at National Review (March 27, 2022)
Now that Aeschliman brings the subject up, why is there a Darwin-in-the-schools lobby?
You may also wish to read: Richard Weikart: Scientists “Should Not Be Immune From Critique” It looks as though the thesis of Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism is getting a broader audience.