Ray Comfort is a Half-Wit and a Libelous Scalawag : The Primate Diaries - http://scienceblogs.com/primate...
"Now that his plan has backfired drastically (his own website has removed the link to his "Introduction" of Darwin's book) and more people were offended by his distortions than anything else, let me briefly point out some useful information. Comfort makes the following assertions in his introduction: Adolf Hitler took Darwin's evolutionary philosophy to its logical conclusions [and] the legacy of Darwin's theory can be seen in the rise of eugenics, euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion. As the National Center for Science Education has pointed out: This is simply hyperbole on Comfort's part. This laundry-list of unrelated controversial issues is meant to inflame passions rather than inform. Connecting Hitler's crimes with a woman's right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy and an elderly patient's right to terminate their life when suffering from a debilitating disease have nothing to do with anything other than Comfort's extreme right-wing fundamentalism. However, his pathetic attempt to link Darwin to eugenics and Hitler's policies, just as Ken Ham and Harun Yahya have attempted to do, I have addressed earlier. The creationist link between Darwin and Hitler is done through the German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel. However, Haeckel's evolutionary ideas were specifically rejected by the Nazi party. Günther Hecht, official representative for the National Socialist Party's Department of Race-Politics (Rassenpolitischen Amt der NSDAP), insisted in the Reich's official scientific journal: The party and its representatives must not only reject a part of the Haeckelian conception--other parts of it have occasionally been advanced--but, more generally, every internal party dispute that involves the particulars of research and the teachings of Haeckel must cease. Comfort also claims that Darwin is responsible for "social Darwinism," the argument that the poor are where they are because they are not as "fit" and should be left to die. This disgusting idea was created by the English sociologist Herbert Spencer, not Darwin. Darwin had no use for Spencer's arguments and rejected them totally, as he wrote in his Autobiography: I did not like him particularly, and did not feel that I could easily have become intimate with him. I think that he was extremely egotistical. . . I am not conscious of having profited in my own work from Spencer's writings. His deductive manner of treating any subject is wholly opposed to my frame of mind. His conclusions never convince me . . . They partake more of the nature of definitions than of laws of nature. They do not aid one in predicting what will happen in any particular case. Anyhow they have not been of any use to me. There's nothing more that needs to be written about this. Comfort is wrong. Can we finally stop regurgitating these obviously false assertions? How many times do they need to be revealed as false before creationists will move on?" - Richard Walker