7 Reasons Why It's Easier for Humans to Believe in God Than Evolution

What science can tell us about our not-so-scientific minds.

By Chris Mooney

Tue Nov. 26, 2013 8:31 AM GMT

 

The ascent of man? José-manuel Benitos/Wikimedia Commons. Photoillustration by Matt Connolly.

Late last week, the Texas Board of Education failed to approve a leading high school biology textbook—whose authors include the Roman Catholic biologist Kenneth Miller of Brown University—because of its treatment of evolution. According to The New York Times, critiques from a textbook reviewer identified as a "Darwin Skeptic" were a principal cause.
Yet even as creationists keep trying to undermine modern science, modern science is beginning to explain creationism scientifically. And it looks like evolution—the scientifically uncontested explanation for the diversity and interrelatedness of life on Earth, emphatically including human life—will be a major part of the story. Our brains are a stunning product of evolution; and yet ironically, they may naturally pre-dispose us against its acceptance.

1871 satirical image depicting Charles Darwin as an ape. The Hornet/Wikimedia Commons

"I don't think there's any question that a variety of our mental dispositions are ones that discourage us from taking evolutionary theory as seriously as it should be taken," explains Robert N. McCauley, director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture at Emory University and author of the book Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not.
So what can science tell us about our not-so-scientific minds? Here's a list of cognitive traits, thinking styles, and psychological factors identified in recent research that seem to thwart evolution acceptance:
Biological Essentialism. First, we seem to have a deep tendency to think about biology in a way that is "essentialist"—in other words, assuming that each separate kind of animal species has a fundamental, unique nature that unites all members of that species, and that is inviolate. Fish have gills, birds have wings, fish make more fish, birds make more birds, and that's how it all works. Essentialist thinking has been demonstrated in young children. "Little kids as young as my 2 and a half year old granddaughter are quite clear that puppies don't have ponies for mommies and daddies," explains McCauley.
If essentialism is a default style of thinking, as much research suggests, then that puts evolution at a major disadvantage. Charles Darwin and his many scientific disciples have shown that essentialism is just plain wrong: Given enough time, biological kinds are not fixed but actually change. Species are connected through intermediate types to other species—and all are ultimately related to one another.

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Teleological Thinking. Essentialism is just one basic cognitive trait, observed in young children, that seems to hinder evolutionary thinking. Another is "teleology," or the tendency to ascribe purposes to things and objects so as to assume they exist to serve some goal.
Recent research suggests that 4 and 5 year old children are highly teleological in their thinking, tending to opine, for instance, that clouds are "for raining" and that the purpose of lions is "to go in the zoo." The same tendency has been observed in 7 and 8 year olds who, when asked why "prehistoric rocks are pointy," offered answers like "so that animals could scratch on them when they got itchy" and "so that animals wouldn't sit on them and smash them."

Title page of the Reverend William Paley's 1802 work Natural Theology, which famously propounded an argument for God's existence based on the appearance of design in nature. Wikimedia Commons

Why do children think like this? One study speculates that this teleological disposition may be a "side [effect] of a socially intelligent mind that is naturally inclined to privilege intentional explanation." In other words, our brains developed for thinking about what people are thinking, and people have intentions and goals. If that's right, the playing field may be naturally tilted toward anti-evolutionist doctrines like "intelligent design," which postulates an intelligent agent (God) as the cause of the diversity of life on Earth, and seeks  to uncover evidence of purposeful design in biological organisms.
Overactive Agency Detection. But how do you know the designer is "God"? That too may be the result of a default brain setting.
Another trait, closely related to teleological thinking, is our tendency to treat any number of inanimate objects as if they have minds and intentions. Examples of faulty agency detection, explains University of British Columbia origins of religion scholar Ara Norenzayan, range from seeing "faces in the clouds" to "getting really angry at your computer when it starts to malfunction." People engage in such "anthropomorphizing" all the time; it seems to come naturally. And it's a short step to religion: "When people anthropomorphize gods, they are inferring mental states," says Norenzayan.
There has been much speculation about the evolutionary origin of our anthropomorphizing tendency. One idea is that our brains developed to rapidly assume that objects in the world are alive and may pose a threat, simply because while wrongly mistaking a rustle of leaves for a bear won't get you killed, failing to detect a bear early (when the leaves rustle) most certainly will. "Supernatural agents are readily conjured up because natural selection has trip-wired cognitive schema for agency detection in the face of uncertainty," write Norenzayan and fellow origin of religion scholar Scott Atran.

Illustration by Rene Descartes of the pineal gland, which he believed to be the location of the soul within the brain. Wikimedia Commons

Dualism. Yet another apparent feature of our cognitive architecture is the tendency to think that minds (or the "self" and the "soul") are somehow separate from brains. Once again, this inclination has been found in young children, suggesting that it emerges early in human development. "Preschool children will claim that the brain is responsible for some aspects of mental life, typically those involving deliberative mental work, such as solving math problems," write Yale psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. "But preschoolers will also claim that the brain is not involved in a host of other activities, such as pretending to be a kangaroo, loving one's brother, or brushing one's teeth."
Dualistic thinking is closely related to belief in phenomena like spirits and ghosts. But in a recent study, it was also the cognitive factor most strongly associated with believing in God. As for evolutionary science? Dualism is pretty clearly implicated in resistance to the idea that human beings could have developed from purely natural processes—for if they did, how could there ever be a soul or self beyond the body, to say nothing of an afterlife?
Inability to Comprehend Vast Time Scales. According to Norenzayan, there's one more basic cognitive factor that prevents us from easily understanding evolution. Evolution occurred due to the accumulation of many small changes over vast time periods—which means that it is unlike anything we've experienced. So even thinking about it isn't very easy. "The only way you can appreciate the process of evolution is in an abstract way," says Norenzayan. "Over millions of years, small changes accumulate, but it's not intuitive. There's nothing in our brain that says that's true. We have to override our incredulity."
Group Morality and Tribalism. All of these cognitive factors seem to make evolution hard to grasp, even as they render religion (or creationist ideas) simpler and more natural to us. But beyond these cognitive factors, there are also emotional reasons why a lot of people don't want to believe in evolution. When we see resistance to its teaching, after all, it is usually because a religious community fears that this body of science will undermine a belief system—in the US, usually fundamentalist Christianity—deemed to serve as the foundation for shared values and understanding. In other words, evolution is resisted because it is perceived as a threat to the group.
So how appropriate that one current scientific theory about religion is that it exists (and, maybe, that it evolved) to bind groups together and keep them cohesive. In his recent book The Righteous Mind, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that religions provide a shared set of beliefs and practices that, in effect, serve as social glue. "Gods and religions," writes Haidt, "are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust." The upside is unity; the downside, Haidt continues, is "groupishness, tribalism, and nationalism." Ideas and beliefs that threaten the group or the beliefs that hold it together—ideas like evolution—are bound to fare badly in this context.

Everett Collection/Shutterstock

Fear and the Need for Certainty. Finally, there appears to be something about fear and doubt that impels religiosity and dispels acceptance of evolution. "People seem to take more comfort from a stance that says, someone designed the world with good intentions, instead of that the world is just an intention-less, random place," says Norenzayan. "This is especially true when we feel a sense of threat, or a feeling of not being in control."
Indeed, in one amazing study, New Zealanders who had just suffered through a severe earthquake showed stronger religiosity, but only if they had been directly affected by the quake. Other research suggests that making people think about death increases their religiosity and also decreases evolution acceptance. It's not just death: It's also randomness, disorder. In one telling study, research participants who were asked to think of a situation in which they had lacked control and then to "provide three reasons supporting the notion that the future is (un-) controllable," showed a marked decline in their acceptance of evolution, opting instead for an intelligent design-style explanation. (Another study found that anti-evolutionists displayed higher fear sensitivity and a trait called the "need for cognitive closure," which describes a psychological need to find an answer that can resolve uncertainty and dispel doubt.)
Such is the research, and it's important to point out a few caveats. First, this doesn't mean science and religion are fundamentally incompatible. The conflict may run very deep indeed, but nevertheless, some individuals can and do find a way to retain their religious beliefs and also accept evolution—including the aforementioned biology textbook author Kenneth Miller of Brown University, a Catholic.
Second, while there are many reasons to think that the traits above comprise a core part of who we are, it doesn't automatically follow that religion is the direct result of evolution by natural selection. It is also possible that religion arises as a byproduct of more basic traits that were, in turn, selected for because they conferred greater fitness (such as agency detection). This "byproduct" view is defended by Steven Pinker here.
In any event, the evidence is clear that both our cognitive architecture, and also our emotional dispositions, make it difficult or unnatural for many people to accept evolution. "Natural selection is like quantum physics...we might intellectually grasp it, with considerable effort, but it will never feel right to us," writes the Yale psychologist Paul Bloom. Often, people express surprise that in an age so suffused with science, science causes so much angst and resistance.
Perhaps more surprising would be if it didn't.
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Chris Mooney

CorrespondentChris Mooney is a science and political journalist, podcaster, and the host of Climate Desk Live. He is the author of four books, including the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science 

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The Nazi Anatomists—and American abortion politics.

The Nazi Anatomists

How the corpses of Hitler's victims are still haunting modern science—and American abortion politics.

By Emily Bazelon

 

n 1941, Charlotte Pommer graduated from medical school at the University of Berlin and went to work for Hermann Stieve, head of the school’s Institute of Anatomy. The daughter of a bookseller, Pommer had grown up in Germany’s capital city as Hitler rose to power. But she didn’t appreciate what the Nazis meant for her chosen field until Dec. 22, 1942. What she saw in Stieve’s laboratory that day changed the course of her life—and led her to a singular act of protest.

Stieve got his “material,” as he called the bodies he used for research, from nearby Plötzensee Prison, where the courts sent defendants for execution after sentencing them to die. In the years following the war, Stieve would claim that he dissected the corpses of only “dangerous criminals.” But on that day, Pommer saw in his laboratory the bodies of political dissidents. She recognized these people. She knew them.

Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen

Courtesy of Kelisi/Creative Commons

On one table lay Libertas Schulze-Boysen, granddaughter of a Prussian prince. She’d been raised in the family castle, gone to finishing school in Switzerland, and worked as the Berlin press officer for the Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She joined the Nazi Party in 1933. On a hunting party, she flirted with Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe, the German air force. But in 1937 Schulze-Boysen joined the resistance with her husband, Harro, a Luftwaffe lieutenant. They helped form a small rebel group the Nazis called the Red Orchestra. When Libertas started working for Hitler’s movie empire in 1941, she gathered photos of atrocities from the front for a secret archive. Harro was transferred to Göring’s command center and with other dissidents started passing to the Soviets detailed information about Hitler’s plan to invade Russia. The Gestapo decoded their radio messages in 1942 and arrested Harro at the end of August. They came for Libertas eight days later. Both she and her husband were sentenced to death for espionage and treason.

Now Harro’s body lay on another table in the lab. Pommer could see that he had been hanged and Libertas had been decapitated by guillotine. On a third table, Pommer identified Arvid Harnack, another member of the Red Orchestra who had been a key informant for the American Embassy as well as the Soviets. In the 1920s, Harnack had studied economics as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, where he wandered into a literature class by mistake and met a young American teaching assistant named Mildred Fish. They traded English and German lessons and got married on her brother’s farm. After the couple moved to Germany, Mildred also helped the resistance effort by carrying messages and trailing her husband to meetings to make sure he wasn’t being followed. They were caught in the same Gestapo operation that ensnared the Schulze-Boysens. "Can you remember Picnic Point, when we got engaged?” Arvid asked his wife in his final letter to her from prison. “And before that our first serious talk at lunch in a restaurant in State Street? That talk became my guiding star.” At the time, Mildred was serving a six-year sentence for her part in the Red Orchestra. Before he was executed, Arvid wrote to his family about his joy that her life had been spared. But Hitler refused to accept the sentence, and Mildred, too, would be beheaded on his order two months later.*

“I was paralyzed,” Pommer later wrote of the sight of the bodies. “I could hardly perform my task as an assistant to Professor Stieve, who did his scientific study as always with the greatest diligence. I could barely follow.”

Pommer was 28. Libertas Schulze-Boysen was 29 when she died. In her last letter to her mother, she said she’d asked for her body to go to her family. “Don’t fret about things that possibly could have been done, this or the other,” she wrote. “If you can, bury me in a beautiful place amid sunny nature.”

Pommer stopped working for Stieve—and left the field of anatomy—because of what she saw that day in his laboratory. She went on to help resist the Nazis herself, by hiding the child of a man who participated in the “July Plot” to assassinate Hitler in 1944. In the spring of 1945, just before the war’s end, Pommer was herself sent to prison.

By that time, German anatomists had accepted the bodies of thousands of people killed by Hitler’s regime. Beginning in 1933, all 31 anatomy departments in the territory the Third Reich occupied—including Poland, Austria, and the Czech Republic as well as Germany—accepted these corpses. “Charlotte Pommer is the only one we know of who left this work because of what she learned about the bodies,” says Sabine Hildebrandt, a historian and anatomist at Harvard Medical School.

Unlike the research of Nazi scientists who became obsessed with racial typing and Aryan superiority, Stieve’s work didn’t end up in the dustbin of history. The tainted origins of this research—along with other studies and education that capitalized on the Nazi supply of human body parts—continue to haunt German and Austrian science, which is only now fully grappling with the implications. Some of the facts, amazingly, are still coming to light. And some German, Austrian, and Polish universities have yet to face up to the likely presence of the remains of Hitler’s victims—their cell and bone and tissue—in university collections that still exist today.

This history matters for its own sake. It also matters for debates that remain unresolved—about how anatomists get bodies and what to do with research that is scientifically valuable but morally disturbing.

Then there’s this eerie relevance: Stieve’s work was the source of an explosive controversy in the 2012 U.S. elections. It’s the basis for a claim that Republicans in Congress threw like a piece of dynamite into the abortion debate: The idea that women rarely or never get pregnant from rape.

To take a step back for a moment, in one sense, the use of executed prisoners for science isn’t surprising. For centuries, anatomists around the globe struggled to find an adequate supply of bodies. The need was keen—without corpses, there could be no dissection for research and medical training. In France, the bodies of poor people who died in hospitals were used widely in the 1700s. An 1832 law in Britain permitted access to the unclaimed bodies of anyone who died in a prison or workhouse. In the United States, medical students robbed graves, often of African-Americans. ‘‘In Baltimore the bodies of colored people exclusively are taken for dissection because the whites do not like it, and the colored people cannot resist,’’ a British travel writer observed in 1838. When paupers were the target of body snatching, the practice was justified by their poverty. “Why would those who have made war on society or have been a burden to it be permitted to say what shall be done with their remains?” the Washington Post asked in an 1877 editorial. “Why should they not be compelled to be of some use after death, having failed to be of value to the world during life?”

Plötzensee Prison in 2012

Courtesy of Ahle, Fischer & Co. Bau GmbH/Creative Commons

Before Hitler, German anatomists had complained to the government for decades about the lack of supply. They had the right to claim the bodies of the executed, but few death sentences were carried out. That changed as the Nazi courts ordered dozens and then hundreds of civilian executions each year, for an estimated total of 12,000 to 16,000 from 1933 to 1945. (The 6 million who were killed in concentration camps are counted separately, as are the many millions more who were otherwise mass-murdered.) Plötzensee and other prisons delivered to anatomists a sudden abundance. In the mid-1930s, British anatomists described with envy the “valuable sources of material” their German counterparts had.

The “sources of material” included many people the Nazis sentenced to death for minor crimes, such as looting, and many convicted for political crimes that particularly incensed the regime, ranging from treason to the vague offense of “defeatism.” The victims included political protesters like the Schulze-Boysens and the Harnacks, who would one day be seen as heroes. By refusing them graves, anatomists such as Stieve humiliated the victims’ families and disturbed the peace of the dead. A few of these anatomists followed the Nazis further down their twisted path: They committed or acceded to acts of mass killing, in the name of science and from inside the halls of academe.

2 Dr. Stieve and “Legitimate Rape”

Stieve had a taste for the theatrical: He liked to wear his long black academic robe to give lectures. At the age of 35, he became the youngest doctor to chair a German medical department. That was in 1921, soon after Stieve backed a coup that would have knocked out the Weimar Republic in favor of authoritarian rule. Stieve was a nationalist about language, too: He supported a drive to replace Anglified words like April and Mai with Germanic alternatives. Stieve welcomed Hitler for his promise to restore the country’s pride, although he did not join the Nazi Party. Like most academics, Stieve did not protest when the Nazis began to expel Jews from universities in 1933.

Charlotte Pommer is the only one we know of who left this work because of what she learned about the bodies.

Sabine Hildebrandt

Stieve’s main research interest, throughout his career, was the effect of stress and other environmental conditions on the female reproductive system. He studied whether hens would lay eggs with a caged fox nearby, and he set up conditions of stress for newts. Stieve studied human uteruses and ovaries when he could get them from accident victims or from gynecologists who’d removed the organs in the course of an operation. Before the Nazis, the access that German anatomists had to the bodies of executed prisoners was of less use to Stieve. During the Weimar Republic, no women received death sentences.

The Third Reich and the war changed that. At Plötzensee alone the Nazis executed 3,000 people. Stieve agreed to take all these bodies off the hands of the prison officials—many more than he needed for his research. By accommodating Plötzensee, he won concessions that aided his work on the “unprecedented number of women” now available to him, as the German anatomist and historian Andreas Winkelmann puts it. In 1942, when the prison shifted the time of executions to the evening, Stieve visited the prison and got the time moved back to the morning so he could continue to process organs and tissues on the same day. He also got details of the women’s medical histories before they died, including information about their menstrual cycles, their reactions to the prison environment, and the impact of receiving a death sentence.

We know this because Stieve kept a list. The official record of the bodies he received was lost when the Institute of Anatomy’s registry was destroyed in 1945, either deliberately or in a bombing. But a Protestant minister who tended to the Plötzensee prisoners during the war helped search for and record information about them afterward. He reported that in 1946, Stieve handed him a typed list of names—the people whose bodies he had used. It was located decades later in German government archives, with handwritten additions. There were 182 names: 174 women and eight men. Their ages ranged from 18 to 68, with most of reproductive age. Two of the women were pregnant when they were killed. The majority were executed for political reasons. They came from Germany, for the most part, and seven other countries. Libertas Schulze-Boysen is No. 37 on Stieve’s list. Mildred Harnack is No. 87.

Mildred Harnack's Red Orchestra Counterintelligence Corps file, circa 1947

Courtesy of National Archives, College Park, Md.

Stieve published 230 anatomical papers. With the data he gathered pre-execution, as well as the tissues and organs he harvested and studied, he could chart the effect of an impending execution on ovulation. Stieve found that women living with a looming death sentence ovulated less predictably and sometimes experienced what he called “shock bleedings.” In a book published after the war, Stieve included an illustration of the left ovary of a 22-year-old woman, noting that she “had not menstruated for 157 days due to nervous agitation.”

Stieve drew two conclusions that continue to be cited (for the most part, uncritically). He figured out that the rhythm method doesn’t effectively prevent pregnancy. (He got the physiological details wrong but the conclusion right.) And he discovered that chronic stress—awaiting execution—affects the female reproductive system.

In August 2012, then–Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri said that women can prevent themselves from getting pregnant after a “legitimate rape.” Following an uproar, Akin lost his bid for a Senate seat.* Still, a few other Republicans have followed along, arguing that rape rarely results in pregnancy, to explain why they oppose an exception for rape victims in laws that restrict access to abortion. Whether they know it or not, Stieve’s work is the source for their discredited claim. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists warned that saying rape victims rarely get pregnant was “medically inaccurate, offensive, and dangerous.” But the anti-abortion doctor Jack Willke, former head of the National Right to Life Committee, insisted otherwise. "This goes back 30 and 40 years,” he told the Los Angeles Times in the midst of the Akin furor. “When a woman is assaulted and raped, there's a tremendous amount of emotional upset within her body." Willke has written that "one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant” is “physical trauma."

Where did he get this idea? In 1972, another anti-abortion doctor, Fred Mecklenburg, wrote an essay in a book financed by the group Americans United for Life in which he asserted that women rarely get pregnant from rape. Mecklenburg said that:

The Nazis tested the hypothesis that stress inhibits ovulation by selecting women who were about to ovulate and sending them to the gas chambers, only to bring them back after their realistic mock killing, to see what effects this had on their ovulatory pattern. An extremely high percentage of these women did not ovulate.

Mecklenburg got his facts wrong. Plötzensee Prison wasn’t the gas chamber. And the prolonged trauma of anticipating execution isn’t the same as the shock of rape. But when Hildebrandt, the Harvard historian and anatomist, read about Mecklenburg’s rationale after I wrote about it for the New York Times Magazine and Slate, she recognized the handiwork of Stieve. Mecklenburg had quoted a presentation on a “Nazi experiment” by another obstetrician, from Georgetown University, at a 1967 Washington, D.C., conference on abortion. That doctor had to be talking about Stieve, Hildebrandt says, since “there is no other ‘Nazi experiment’ like this.” It was another link in the chain from Stieve to Mecklenburg to Willke to today’s anti-abortion Republicans.

Hildebrandt wrote to me about Stieve, and that’s how I learned about her work. She is 55 and was born in Germany; her parents were children during the Third Reich. “It was always around us,” she said. “I had no Jewish neighbors. I went to an elementary school named after a member of the German resistance.”

Hildebrandt came to live in the United States in 2002. Her interest in the history of anatomy is recent. “In many ways it was helpful for me to formulate my first ideas all by myself, with physical distance from Germany,” she said. “I didn’t have to worry about treading on anyone’s toes. I’m not a brave person.”

Hermann Stieve lecturing on anatomy, 1943

Courtesy of Privatbesitz/Creative Commons

By contrast, Hildebrandt says that Stieve “never doubted himself.” She thinks he refused to see that the ethics of how he procured bodies shifted under the Nazis. “He knew better, but he didn’t want to realize it, because this was a great opportunity for him,” she says. “He really could do the work that he always wanted to do.”

When I asked to learn more about Stieve, Hildebrandt sent me to Winkelmann, the German doctor and lecturer in anatomy at Charité, the major university hospital in Berlin. Born in 1963, Winkelmann is also of the “grandchildren generation,” as he put it when we spoke by phone. I asked him how he got interested in Stieve, and he said, “Stieve was a Berlin anatomist like me. He is part of my history. He worked in the same building that we work in today.”

Winkelmann has helped make the ethical case against Stieve. “His research cannot be validated without justifying, at least to some extent, the entire Nazi justice system, which was instead one of injustice,” he argued in a 2009 article, co-written with Udo Schagen, a medical historian at Charité. Stieve abetted the Nazis with his willingness to accept far more bodies than he needed for research, and he kept his supply line quiet. And Winkelmann pointed out that Stieve’s “use of the terror of death row as a sober scientific variable is undoubtedly callous.”

But Winkelmann has also pleaded for a kind of mercy for Stieve—or at least for nuance. “People tend to forget that it was only in the 1950s and ’60s that body donation programs were invented,” he said. “Stieve thought using the bodies of executed prisoners was something normal to do. He didn’t do research to prove some people were subhuman, as some doctors did. I don’t think that vindicates what he did, but you could say, at least he didn’t do that.”

In 1944, Stieve dissected one of his own friends.

Winkelmann has also pushed back against two allegations that turn Stieve into a monster. William Seidelman, a University of Toronto medical professor who has written extensively on medicine in the Third Reich, thinks Stieve allowed SS officers to rape women on his list before they were executed, so he could study the migration of sperm. Seidelman’s allegation is based on a 1997 letter from a former student of Stieve. Winkelmann’s co-author, Schagen, spoke to the former student, and they think he was repeating a rumor or misinterpreting Stieve’s remarks about his work. None of Stieve’s papers discuss sperm migration. The former student has since died, and Seidelman stands by his accusation. Winkelmann calls it “far-fetched.” But he adds, “I can understand how Seidelman would think it’s true, because whenever you look into Nazi medicine, you find that the very worst things—they have happened.”

Case in point: There is a rumor that Stieve’s lab made soap from the remains of the victims. Winkelmann has refuted that one, too. “But another anatomist named Spanner did make bodies into soap,” he told me. Rudolf Spanner was director of the Danzig Anatomical Institute. He didn’t go into mass production—“Professor Spanner’s Soap Factory” is a myth. But the remains of 147 unidentified people were found in Spanner’s institute after the war, and “during several interrogations Spanner conceded the production of small amounts of soap for anatomical purposes but was not prosecuted,” Hildebrandt writes.

After the war, Stieve falsely insisted that he hadn’t conducted research with the bodies of political prisoners. The anatomist, he argued, “only tries to retrieve results from those incidents that belong to the saddest experiences known in the history of mankind.” He continued to see himself as a man of science. “In no way do I need to be ashamed of the fact that I was able to reveal new data from the bodies of the executed, facts that were unknown before and are now recognized by the whole world.”

Like almost every other anatomist of his time, Stieve was never professionally penalized or prosecuted for conducting research on the corpses of murdered prisoners. He continued to direct his university’s Institute of Anatomy until his death from a stroke in 1952. Stieve’s obituaries didn’t describe his negotiations with Plötzensee Prison over the timing of executions to ensure the daily delivery of fresh bodies. They lauded him as a highly respected scientist who loved hunting and mountaineering.

Winkelmann told me a strange story that supports his interpretation of Stieve as blinded by science, not ideology. In 1944, Stieve dissected one of his own friends. Walter Arndt was a doctor and zoologist who converted to Judaism in 1931. He was executed after being convicted for criticizing the Nazis. “Stieve took out his heart and kept it,” Winkelmann told me.

“Stieve wanted to donate his own body to science when he died,” he continued. “But his wife objected. So in the end, he was buried.”

3 “A Few Perverted Psychopaths”

With the war’s end came an early chance for investigation. The occupying military governments operating after the war tried to find the bodies of political dissidents and foreign nationals. And families looking for their loved ones started visiting Germany’s anatomical institutes. The procurement of bodies had been an open secret. “Thus, anatomists were asked about the identity and fate of the bodies remaining in their institutes’ storage spaces,” Hildebrandt writes.

Often, however, identification was out of reach—documents had been lost, dissected bodies rendered unrecognizable. At the Nuremberg trials, 23 doctors faced charges. But those few charged with crimes were the physicians at the Nazi forefront: the ones who experimented on live subjects in the concentration camps, not the much larger number of academics who stayed in the universities. “Many people in the medical profession who played leading roles during the Third Reich retained power after the war—especially in the academy,” Seidelman told me. “They were able to keep the lid on things.”

Exhibition entitled “Physical and Emotional Appearance of the Jews,” which opened at the Museum of Natural History in Vienna in 1939

Courtesy of the Museum of Natural History in Vienna

Half of Germany’s doctors had joined the Nazi Party. Despite the denazification that followed the war, almost all of them continued practicing. “People didn’t want to know,” said Arthur Caplan, a New York University bioethicist and author of When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust. “Who would be the doctors if not the doctors from before the war? Who else would staff the universities? The German establishment wasn’t looking to weed out all the doctors who’d done bad things.”

So it was expedient when an influential German physician, asked to study the matter, declared at a 1948 national meeting that among the country’s 90,000 doctors, only 300 to 400 had been involved in Nazi crimes. Other doctors quickly adopted this assessment, “as it conveniently allowed them to declare that the National Socialist medical atrocities were committed by only a few perverted psychopaths,” Hildebrandt writes.

Caplan emphasizes that this is a trap. He argues for the importance of seeing the doctors who took advantage of Nazi immorality to benefit their research not as “kooks,” but instead as typical and conventional for their time and place. “One of the great challenges in all of ethics is, how do mainstream, legitimate people do evil things?” he said. “It’s not like we can necessarily stop it. But to understand how it happened—that is our best shot.”

The more perspective gained, perhaps, the more this kind of far-reaching inquiry becomes possible. In the years after the war, though, when the horrors of the camps were fresh, punishing the worst of the worst doctors took precedence. The single German anatomist who went to prison was one of them.

Johann Paul Kremer at the "trial of 40 German butchers of Auschwitz camp," Nov. 25, 1947

Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration

Johann Paul Kremer was an SS officer as well as an anatomist at the University of Münster. There he had conducted animal experiments on hunger. Detailed to Auschwitz, he continued his research on humans. He would observe prisoners, he said later, “and when one of them interested me because of a highly advanced state of starvation, I commanded the orderly to reserve that patient for me, and inform me of when that patient would be killed with the help of an injection.” Kremer often witnessed the killings. He collected tissue and sent it back to Münster.

In another facet of his job, Kremer selected 10,717 prisoners for death on the train ramp in Auschwitz. For that, he was sentenced to death in Poland in 1948. He served 10 years before he was released and returned to Münster.

Other anatomists ensconced in the academy, meanwhile, got away with terrible crimes even when the Allies had direct knowledge of them. In June 1945, a Boston neurologist named Leo Alexander, a consultant for the United States secretary of war, visited Julius Hallervorden, a doctor and member of the Nazi Party who in 1938 became head of the neuropathology department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research (one of the world’s pre-eminent psychiatric research centers, with a building financed in the 1920s by the Rockefeller Foundation). Hallervorden showed Alexander a collection of 110,000 brain samples from 2,800 people. Hallervorden said that with the director of his institute, Hugo Spatz, he had harvested the brains of victims of the T-4 killings—the Nazi program to gas psychiatric patients at six “euthanasia” centers in Germany and Austria. “Hallervorden was present at the time of the killings and removed brains from the murdered victims,” Seidelman writes.

Alexander reported what he learned, but no one took action against Hallervorden and Spatz. They were allowed to help relocate the Kaiser Wilhelm institute to Frankfurt, Germany, where it was renamed the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research. They continued to be recognized for their signature scientific accomplishment: In 1922, Hallervorden and Spatz had discovered a degenerative brain disease that was named after them.

The two neuropathologists finished their careers and died in the 1960s. In 1982, Hallervorden was honored by a German university; the citation called him “the grand old man of German and international neuropathology.”

Now, because of Hallervorden and Spatz’s later methods, the disease they discovered is called something else. That is the right decision, NYU’s Caplan says. While he does not think science has to throw out Hallervorden and Spatz’s findings, he also has rules for dealing with tainted data. “If you use it, you had better be sure you don’t have any choice,” he said. “The purpose should be life-saving or very, very important. And you have to admit you are using it, but without giving credit to the person who gave you the tainted experiments. You say, ‘This came from a prominent German scientist under the Nazis.’ But you don’t recognize them by name.” That is fitting. But it took a long time to get there.

4 “Dirtying the Nest”

By the 1980s, the doctors and scientists of the World War II generation no longer ran Germany’s medical schools and anatomical institutes. They’d passed the baton to their pupils. But this second generation was hardly more eager to dig into the past. When German medical students and a few researchers, Seidelman among them, started asking questions about the conduct of anatomists under Hitler—and the status of the slides and tissue samples they’d left behind as teaching materials—their queries mostly ran into a wall of denial. The professors rebuked the new generation of students for demanding more information, scolding them for being Nestbeschmutzer, for “dirtying the nest.”

The wall of denial began to crack, though, when a German historian and journalist, Götz Aly, persisted in applying for access to the Max Planck Institute’s specimen collection. Once he got inside, Aly identified some of the T-4 euthanasia victims and started pushing for the burial of the specimens. It was a novel idea.

The Max Planck Society admitted that its collection contained the tissue of euthanasia victims—including 700 children.

The director of the Max Planck Institute resisted, contesting Aly’s claims. But Aly had solid evidence. In small groups, German medical students began taking up the same cause. At the University of Heidelberg, where Gerrit Hohendorf (now a professor at the Technical University of Munich) was a student, “They didn’t want an independent inquiry or students to deal with these things,” he told me. “We organized a student lecture series on our own with no support by the medical faculty or teachers of medicine. We heard something about children being euthanized at the Heidelberg psychiatric hospital, so we went into the hospital and asked the professors.”

The new wave of attention crested at the University of Tübingen in 1989, when student demand for an inquiry sparked national press attention. TV and print stories spotlighted the continuing use of Nazi-era specimens for research and teaching. Demonstrators protested outside the German Embassy in Israel, and the Israeli minister of religion demanded that Chancellor Helmut Kohl return the remains of all Nazi victims for proper burial. Aly added fuel to the fire with an article quoting Hallervorden saying “the more the better” about the brains he’d acquired. “I have not heard of one German anatomist who after the war repudiated Nazi practices and buried his ill-gotten collection,” Aly wrote.

Two important books appeared—Doctors Under Hitler, by York University historian Michael Kater, and Oxford Brookes historian Paul Weindling’s volume on health, race, and German politics. Caplan held the first conference on medicine and science during the Nazi era in Minnesota. A proposal to boycott German data collected under Hitler was a major topic. The University of Tübingen issued a public apology and set up a commission to investigate that served as a model for other schools. And the Max Planck Society admitted that its collection contained the tissue of euthanasia victims—including 700 children.

The Max Planck Society buried these remains in a May 1990 memorial service. It was the demand Aly had been making. But it wasn’t enough, in the view of Seidelman and Caplan, who’d begun to play a leading activist role among Western researchers. Seidelman protested the disposal of the human specimens in a mass grave, without uncovering “who these people were, how they died,” and how their remains had been used for almost half a century. He and Caplan called for an international commemoration and bioethical inquiry. It didn’t happen. “They weren’t ready,” Seidelman says.

In 1992, the German government ordered all state universities to investigate their anatomical collections. Some followed Tübingen. Others followed the Max Planck example of mass disposal. “The victims’ bodies were seen as ‘polluting’ German universities,” Weindling, the British historian, writes. And some universities brushed off the government’s order or claimed they couldn’t comply because their buildings had been bombed during the war.

The effort to carry out a full national inquiry foundered at a time of momentous distraction: The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, and the Soviet Union soon collapsed. Amid the upheaval, indifference won out. As one anatomy professor said two decades later, at the age of 96, when he was interviewed about the use of the bodies of the executed at his Vienna institute: “Nobody cared, and why should we have cared?” A 77-year-old colleague echoed him: “Nobody cared.”

Illustration from Eduard Pernkopf's Atlas of Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy

Pernkopf atlas/Urban & Schwarzenberg. Scans via Codex99.

The two men were talking about a controversy that flared up at their own institute. It concerned a work of lasting scientific importance, one that occupies its own niche and is used by doctors and researchers around the world: the Pernkopf atlas.

Eduard Pernkopf toiled over his four-volume atlas in Vienna for more than 20 years beginning in 1933. “He put in 18-hour days dissecting human bodies and supervising a team of artists who painted what he revealed in intricate detail,” Heather Pringle explains in Science. The New England Journal of Medicine called the atlas “an outstanding book of great value” in 1990. “If you’re a serious anatomist like I am, you still look at the thing, because it has more detail than anything else,” Hildebrandt says. “And some of the images pop up in later anatomy books.”

Pernkopf was a Nazi. As dean of the medical school at the University of Vienna, he expelled Jews from the faculty faster than any university official in the Third Reich. Nazi insignia appear in his atlas, woven into the signatures of the artists. A Columbia professor of dentistry, Howard Israel, started asking about the insignia in 1994. “His wife gave him the atlas as a gift when he was in dental school,” Seidelman says. “He used it every day.”

Seidelman brought Israel’s concerns to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. One of the men portrayed in the atlas had a shaved head—was he a Jewish concentration camp victim? Letters started flying back and forth between Yad Vashem and Vienna. Austrian officials at first denied that any illustrations in the atlas came from the Nazi era. The hair of all cadavers was shaved at the institute, they said.

When informed consent is not the rule, the people whose bodies and tissues go to medicine have been overwhelmingly the poor and the marginalized.

“We pointed out why they were wrong,” Seidelman says. At a 1999 University of Vienna symposium called Medicine Under Scrutiny, the rector of the university announced a committee of investigation. “He said he’d turned to the faculty of medicine, and he realized they’d lied,” recalls Seidelman, who also spoke at the symposium. “For him to stand up in public and say that—it was risky. It was a big deal.”

The investigating committee documented the delivery of 1,377 bodies to the university from the execution chambers of the regional Vienna court. The images in the Pernkopf atlas could not be traced to individual victims, but the historians I talked to think there is a great likelihood that the drawings depict people executed by the Nazis.

And there was more: a link between university scientists and Heinrich Gross, the doctor who headed the infants’ ward of Spiegelgrund, the children’s wing of the Vienna Psychiatric Hospital, during the war. Gross did painful experiments on living children there, some of whom died as a result. One child who survived said the children called Gross “the Scythe”; another remembered that his arrival on the ward “was like a cold wind coming.” All told, 772 children were killed at Spiegelgrund, about half of them from Gross’ ward. In 1948, he was charged with murder. But the penal code he was prosecuted under did not define murder to include disabled people because they were “not capable of reasoning.” He was found guilty only of manslaughter, and when Gross appealed and won, the prosecutor chose not to retry him.

Memorial for the children murdered by the National Socialist Euthanasia Program at Spiegelgrund from 1940-45 in Vienna

Courtesy of Haeferl/Creative Commons

Gross returned to Spiegelgrund (it had been renamed) and continued his research using brain specimens from the children who had been killed there. He published 35 papers, some written with University of Vienna faculty. He also testified as a psychiatric expert in thousands of cases in the Austrian court. In 1975, he was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art.

As the University of Vienna committee brought renewed attention to this history, evidence against Gross also surfaced in the files of the Stasi, the East German secret police. In 1999, he was indicted for murder again. But Gross’ lawyers said he had Alzheimer’s and could not understand the proceedings against him. The court accepted this defense. But Seidelman does not believe it. “Do you know what Gross did?” he asked. “He smiled and went off to a coffee shop with his friends and family to celebrate.”

Gross lived for six more years, until the age of 90. In 2002, the wartime human specimens at the University of Vienna were buried in the city’s Jewish cemetery, and the brains of the Spiegelgrund children were placed in the main graveyard. The Austrian Cross was stripped from Gross the following year.

5 The Henrietta Lacks Problem

The long-buried history of Nazi-era anatomy is surfacing now because of a burst of investigation by the third postwar generation. These scholars also want to memorialize the victims. “I never expected to see this reckoning in my lifetime,” Seidelman told me. Still, it is “just a beginning,” Hildebrandt wrote last year with Christoph Redies, director of the anatomy department at Germany’s Jena University and another leader in the new history, following the first public symposium on anatomy during the Third Reich, held by Germany’s prestigious international anatomical society, Anatomische Gesellschaft, founded in 1886.

Hildebrandt has tracked down evidence showing that after World War II, during the Allied occupation, the Allies questioned anatomists at 11 of the 31 anatomical institutes at universities in Germany, Austria, Poland, and the rest of the territory occupied by the Third Reich. Since 1992, when the German government ordered the universities to investigate their anatomical collections and their wartime histories, only 14 of the 31 universities have done full-fledged and thorough examinations. The other 17 conducted preliminary investigations or none at all. This means they still have a giant Henrietta Lacks problem. For example, at Jena, which opened its collections to outside inspection in 2005, more than a dozen paraffin blocks with histological specimens, taken from four people executed under Hitler, have been found in the past three years. It’s impossible to say what lies in the collections of the schools that have not undertaken this kind of inquiry.

In Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 best-seller about Lacks, whose cervical cancer produced a fast-growing cell line that became the basis for decades of scientific advances, the author raises deep ethical questions about the use of Lacks’ cells: After all, she and her family never consented to any of the research done with her tissue.

Harro Schulze-Boysen, 1930s

Courtesy of I.M. Bondarenko Archive/Creative Commons

Informed consent is the moral difference between the fate of the bodies of Libertas and Harro Schulze-Boysen and of voluntary donors. Anatomists and medical students do need cadavers. Science does need bones and tissue. The utilitarian case for using the bodies of the executed or people who die in public institutions and whose corpses go unclaimed is that the scientific benefit is greater than the moral harm. And the deceased will never know.

When informed consent is not the rule, the people whose bodies and tissues go to medicine have been overwhelmingly the poor and the marginalized. In an article in Clinical Anatomy published last year, bioethicist Gareth Jones and anatomist Maja Whitaker, both from New Zealand, called for an international standard of informed consent. “Anatomists should cease using unclaimed bodies,” they write.

That would change the ongoing practice in some African countries and also in Bangladesh, India, and Brazil, Jones and Whitaker say, where bequests are rare or nonexistent. It would also require the law to change in parts of the United States. “Maryland, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, and Texas, automatically pass on unclaimed bodies to state anatomy boards,” the authors write. There are concerns, too, about the use of bodies of the executed in China.

In an email, Jones told me he sees the state laws that still allow for the use of unclaimed bodies as “a historic hangover.” It’s time for these statutes to go. Countries without a tradition of body donation pose a greater dilemma, but Jones thinks cadavers could be sent from places where there is a good supply to those where there is not. “We have not seriously begun to consider this,” he wrote. “Bodies are bequeathed where there are good relations between those requiring bodies (anatomy departments) and those able to provide the bodies (ordinary people in the community). This requires mutual trust and understanding, something that is built up over many years. In my estimation this side of bequeathing has been seriously overlooked and downplayed by anatomists.” The same can apply to organ donation.

As Jones and Whitaker write, “There will always be tension between obtaining a satisfactory range of acceptable human material both for teaching and research, and abiding by demanding ethical standards.” The field of anatomy has long failed to get the balance right. That helps explain what went so wrong among the anatomists of Nazi Germany. “It is deeply unfortunate that they belonged to a discipline that at that time gave little thought to ethics (a criticism that applied for many years after the 1940s in any country),” Jones wrote to me. “Consequently they were operating in an ethos that allowed for appallingly unethical behavior. This in no way justifies any of their practices, but if anatomy as a discipline had been radically different, at least some of the horrors of this corner of Nazi atrocities may not have taken place.”

6 Attending to the Victims

August Hirt (1898–1945)

Courtesy of Hans-Joachim Lang

In 2001, Hubert Markl, president of the Max Planck Society, gave a landmark speech about the wartime culpability of the society’s doctors and scientists. Markl acknowledged that Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor who selected people for life or death at Auschwitz, did his perverse research on twins with his mentor, an anthropologist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, the precursor to the Max Planck Society. In attendance were a few survivors of Mengele’s experiments. Markl apologized to them personally. “It is a painful way to meet the past when one personally stands face to face with the victims of these crimes,” he said. “I beg you, the surviving victims, from the bottom of my heart to forgive those who, no matter what their reasons, failed to ask you themselves.”

This is the latest stage of reckoning: Trying to attend to the victims and to their memory. The most startling breakthrough comes from German journalist and Tübingen culture professor Hans-Joachim Lang. He has identified all of the Jews selected for gassing by August Hirt, director of the anatomical institute in Strasbourg who had a singularly ghoulish plan for their remains.

Hirt was interested in adding to a collection of skulls at the University of Strasbourg. “Although extensive skulls collections existed from nearly all races and peoples,” the Jews were missing, he wrote to the director of an SS research group established to prove Aryan superiority. “From the Jewish-Bolshevik commissars, who embody a disgusting, but characteristic type of subhuman, we have the opportunity to acquire a tangible scientific document by securing their skulls.”

As I wrote this piece and lived with its horrors, the photographs of the women and men at its center held me close.

Hirt was essentially competing with the Natural History Museum in Vienna, which procured Jewish skulls from another anatomist, Hermann Voss. In consultation with the staff of Heinrich Himmler, Hirt received permission to go ahead. Two staff members were sent to Auschwitz to separate out a group of Jews, 30 women and 79 men. They were examined according to the standards for racial typing of the time: Their skin, hair, and eye color were noted and coded using special tables, and the shapes of their heads, foreheads, noses, mouths, and ears measured. Fifty-seven of the men and 29 of the women were chosen. They were gassed in a special chamber and their bodies delivered to Hirt at his anatomical institute.

Hirt stored the bodies in the basement. In the end, he didn’t work on them—he lacked the equipment during the course of the war. At the war’s end, Himmler ordered the bodies destroyed. But in January 1945, after the liberation of Strasbourg, the London Daily Mail reported their discovery in the anatomical institute. Accused as a fanatic, Hirt pointed out that bodies could be found in every anatomical institute. The corpses, he wrote, “are the usual cadavers for dissection training.”

Frank Sachnowitz (1925–1943)

Courtesy of Hans-Joachim Lang

Hirt went into hiding in April of that year and committed suicide two months later. It turned out that Himmler’s order had been partially followed: The heads of 70 of the bodies had been removed and cremated. The French military, which controlled Strasbourg, gave up trying to identify them and buried the bodies in the local Jewish cemetery in a mass grave.

But the French left behind documents showing that Hirt’s lab workers had forgotten to remove the concentration camp numbers on some of the bodies. And one of those workers revealed at the Nuremberg doctors’ trials that he had written the numbers down without knowing what they were. He kept the piece of paper.

After a long search, Lang found a copy of it in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He translated the numbers back into names. He found pictures of a few of the victims. He learned their cities of origin. One man, Frank Sachnowitz, came from Norway. His brother, who survived Auschwitz, wrote in a memoir that his father had planted an apple tree—a tree of life—for himself, his wife, and each of their eight children in the family garden. Before the war.

In 2005, a memorial stone with the names of the victims was added to their grave. Lang created a website about them. “Remembrance of their fates … does not, as is often said, return dignity to the victims,” he wrote this year in an article in Annals of Anatomy. “It is not the victims who lost their dignity, but rather those who had persecuted them. The perpetrators should not be allowed to have the final word.”

Erna, Elfriede, and Erich Remarque during their childhood

Courtesy of the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Center Osnabrück

Hildebrandt also sees this as her mission: “to turn numbers back into names,” as she puts it. She has publicized Stieve’s list, giving the BBC photographs and details of some of the women and helping Slate with this piece. She opens one of her articles with a 1946 quote:

The difficulty is, you see, that our imaginations cannot count ... And if I say one died—a man I have made you know and understand ... then perhaps I have told you something that you should know about the Nazis.

The words come from a man who knew the power of narrative: Erich Maria Remarque. He wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, the classic novel about World War I. Remarque served in a World War I battle with Hitler. But the Nazis banned and burned his book. He left Germany for Switzerland in the 1930s. His sister, Elfriede Scholz, remained in the country with her husband and two children. She was found guilty of “undermining morale” in 1943 for saying she thought the war was lost. "Your brother is unfortunately beyond our reach—you, however, will not escape us,” the judge said when he gave Scholz a death sentence. Like Libertas Schulze-Boysen and Mildred Harnack, she was executed in Plötzensee Prison, and her body was given to Stieve.

Hildebrandt has counted about 2,000 execution victims of Nazi-era anatomy who have been individually identified. She points out that still, “existing memorials rarely name individuals.” Weindling has been trying to identify the victims of all Nazi-era medical experiments, including those from the T-4 euthanasia killings. He has been blocked by the rules for German archives, which dictate that the names may not be released for privacy reasons because they were once psychiatric patients.

Arvid and Mildred Harnack

Courtesy of the German Resistance Memorial Center*

And yet, so many years have passed—is privacy really the reigning concern? As I wrote this piece and lived with its horrors, the photographs of the women and men at its center held me close. They are young. They are full of life. They are wearing the hats and clothing of my grandparents’ generation. I learn little from the faces of the anatomists. But I could look forever at Libertas and Harro Schulze-Boysen, and Arvid and Mildred Harnack, and Frank Sachnowitz.

I could not find a photograph of Charlotte Pommer. She never married or had children. She died in a retirement home near Munich in 2004 and donated her body to anatomy.

Correction, Nov. 6, 2013: This article originally misstated the date of Mildred Harnack's death. She was executed two months after her husband, not 15 months. (Return.) This article also stated that former Missouri Rep. Todd Akin lost a bid for re-election to his House seat. He lost a bid for the Senate. (Return.)

Correction, Nov. 7, 2013: Due to a production error, this article misidentified the source of a photo of Arvid and Mildred Harnack. It is from the German Resistance Memorial Center.

Update, Nov. 7, 2013: This article has been updated to clarify that in addition to the 6 million people who were killed in concentration camps, most of them Jews, many millions more who were murdered by the Nazis, including Soviet prisoners of war, Roma, and ethnic Poles and Slavs, were excluded from the number of civilian executions from 1933 to 1945.

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor and the Truman Capote Fellow at Yale Law School. She is the author of Sticks and Stones.
 

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10 worst right-wing statements of the week — abortion typhoon edition

One Christian historian has decided women's rights around the world helped power deadly Typhoon Haiyan

Janet Allon, AlterNet

This image provided by NASA shows Typhoon Haiyan (Credit: AP/NASA)

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

Rand Paul may have assumed the mantle of Wacko-in-Chief this week, but lots of lesser known right-wing nutjobs had banner weeks as well.
1. Christian historian: Abortions caused Typhoon Haiyan.
This might come as news to the grieving survivors of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines: the cause of the powerful storm was abortion. Not necessarily their abortions, but just the fact that anyone has abortions, especially legally, even though abortion is illegal in the Philippines. God is very, very pissed about that, and that’s why he sent a typhoon that killed all those Filipinos on its way to Vietnam. He’s vindictive like that. That is why he is causing all these very destructive and scary storms.
What is not causing any of this climatological havoc is global warming—not that it even exists. Burning fossil fuels is something God actually wants us to do more of. So goes the theory of Christian denialist, oops, we mean “historian” David Barton. The blanket explanation for all this “climate stuff that we can’t explain,” he said this week in a conversation with televangelist Kenneth Copeland, as well as murder and pedophilia, is legalized abortion. America voted for politicians who support abortion rights, and in doing so “opened the door to the curse.”
Here is the historical background. In the good old days, when America was first starting out, Barton explained that if there was really bad weather, leaders would “call for a national day of repentance, humiliation, fasting and prayer … and today we’re saying, ‘Oh no, it’s global warming.’”
That’s how we lost God’s protection. We chose to lose it. What did we expect?
2. Radio host Damon Bruce: Sports are set to the dial of men.
Sports are for men, and Richie Incognito is a man, acting manly in a man’s world. And if you don’t like it, ladies, you can lump it. That is the short version of a nine-minute tirade against women in sports this week by KNBR sports radio host Damon Bruce.
Bruce is mad at women because women are to blame for the suspension of Miami Dolphins guard Richie Incognito after his alleged (and apparently legendary) harassment, bullying and threats against teammate Jonathan Martin drove Martin from the team.

Here’s how the tirade starts:

“A lot of sports has lost its way and I’m gonna tell you, part of the reason is because we’ve got women giving us directions. For some of you, this is going to come across as very misogynistic. I don’t care, because I’m very right. I’m willing to share my sandbox, as long as you remember you’re in my box. I didn’t slip into your box….”

Allowing women to “slip into the box” of professional sports has pretty much ruined sports, Bruce thinks. It has feminized men and made it hard for men to bond the way they like to bond—by being assholes. That’s what Jonathan Martin didn’t understand. Incognito was trying to bond with him when he called him racial slurs and threatened to rape his sister.
Here’s Bruce’s sage advice to women sports journalists who can’t hack it: “If sports get too gruesome for you, go write a restaurant column. Go write a housekeeping column.”
Sweet of him to be concerned.
3. Rand Paul overtakes Ted Cruz as chief Republican wacko bird.
This is a tightly contested race—neck and neck. Lately, Texas Tea Partier Cruz has been relatively subdued since his widely ridiculed Obamacare filibuster which led to the widely reviled government shutdown.

So, Kentucky libertarian Paul was good enough to step into the breach to fulfill the role of what Senator John McCain coined as “chief of the wacko birds.” Paul has distinguished himself in the last week or so with his passionate defense, or is it ignorance, of plagiarism, challenging Rachel Maddow to a duel for repeatedly pointing out that he lifts passages from Wikipedia wholesale for speeches, articles, books, whatever. She’s impugning his honor by doing so, “spreading hate” on him. Besides libertarians don’t attribute stuff; that’s for big government suckers.

A plagiarism scandal, or multiple plagiarism scandals, need not be devastating. Hey, mistakes happen. Admit them and move on, we say. But no, Paul started talking “duel” during an interview with ABC’s “This Week.”
“If, you know, if dueling were legal in Kentucky, if they keep it up, you know, it would be a duel challenge. But I can’t do that, because I can’t hold office in Kentucky then.”
Note to Paul: Toto, you’re not in 19th-century Kentucky anymore.
4. Antonin Scalia brings up the devil in case about prayer.
It’s almost as if there’s a little red guy with horns and a tail sitting on the shoulder of the Supreme Court’s most verbose right-winger, making him say really off-the-wall things. Justice Antonin Scalia just keeps seeing the devil and his worshippers everywhere, bringing them up during oral arguments in a case about the constitutionality of legislative prayer. This, just weeks after a somewhat embarrassing interview in New York magazine in which he gleefully affirmed his belief in the Antichrist. And what’s wrong with that?
During this week’s case, fellow conservative jurist Samuel Alito was asking questions about whether any kind of prayer would be permissible before a legislative session, one that would not offend Christians, Jews, Muslims, or Hindus.
“What about devil worshippers?” Scalia interjected. Laughter ensued. He’s such a card.
His larger point was that not letting people pray before legislative meetings deprives them of their religious freedom, and that it is impossible to design a prayer that satisfies all faiths—not to mention lack thereof.
“What is the equivalent of prayer for someone who is not religious?” Scalia asked. “There are many people who do not believe in God. … If you had an atheist [town] board, you would not have any prayer. I guarantee you.”
After all, who do you think makes people atheists? Guy with the horns, we’re talking to you.
5. Louie Gohmert: Shutdown was necessary to save people from Obamacare.
Two quick refreshers: 1) Obamacare is the “worst law known to man,” worse than slavery, Nuremberg laws, Indian removal act—you get the idea; and 2) Tea Partiers received a drubbing in this week’s election, but seem not to realize it.
Texas Tea Partier Louie Gohmert was out stumping this week, bizarrely bragging that the devastating shutdown was necessary because people would “suffer and potentially die” because of the Affordable Care Act. Yup, nothing kills people faster than health insurance. It is deadly stuff.
He made the statement at a nursing home in East Texas, where he hoped to scare the bejeezus out of seniors so they won’t sign up for the dreaded healthcare coverage. “Anybody that thinks the Affordable Care Act helps seniors doesn’t really understand what’s unaffordable to seniors,” Gohmert helpfully and misleadingly explained. “It makes most of the Medicare Advantage plans go up, but you’ve got to remember, Obamacare actually cut $716 billion from Medicare and seniors rely on Medicare.”
That, of course, is either a lie or make-believe, or both, but since when has that stopped the opponents of Obamacare?
6. Rep. Steve King knows personally—don’t ask him how—that Saddam Hussein purchased uranium from Niger.
Who can forget the fiction that fueled the invasion of Iraq in 2003? Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, was building the bomb, and was ready to use all of it against us or Israel. He got his uranium from Niger, high-level intelligence said. President George Bush even said so in a speech.
Cut to a couple months after “Shock and Awe” and not even Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney or President Bush was standing by that statement. They were misled by some bum intelligence. Sorry. Our bad.
But crazy Iowa Rep. Steve King still believes it because, as he said on Jan Mickelson’s radio show this week: “I have had hands-on evidence that what George Bush said in that State of the Union address was the truth.”
What Bush said was: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
When the claim unraveled, the Bush administration had to eat crow and admit the so-called intelligence was “bogus,” documents “forged.” Spokesman Ari Fleischer admitted the statement should never have found its way into the president’s speech. But nobody took the war back.
But King has “hands-on” knowledge. He just does.
7. Illinois Rep.: Marriage equality has nothing to do with rights; it’s about the Bible.
As the Illinois legislature began to debate whether to join the growing number of enlightened states that have legalized same-sex marriage, State Rep. Dwight Kay, R-Glen Carbon, pointed out that everyone has it bass-ackwards. Our nation was built on “the scriptures, then came the Constitution. Is that not right?”
It was, of course, a rhetorical question. “I think it is,” Kay continued. A brief course in American history could clear this up for the confused legislator, but never mind.
Kay is at a loss to understand why everyone keeps talking about human rights, and civil rights, and equal rights all the time when they talk about marriage equality. What do human rights have to do with a nation built on scripture? Who you gonna believe, that Constitution with its Bill of Rights written by men, or the word of God?
8. Larry Pratt: Trayvon Martin’s broken family is what killed him.
It’s never too late to pile more pain onto the grieving parents and loved ones of slain teenager Trayvon Martin. His killer is free, Trayvon has been blamed for his own death, and now, taking it one step further, Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America has suggested that Martin’s dysfunctional family is responsible for the boy’s death.
That’s what he said in an interview with NewsMax’s Steve Malzberg this week: Trayvon Martin was killed because he had a “broken family.”
Who else can you blame? Triggerman, neighborhood-watch volunteer George Zimmerman was just lawfully “standing his ground” when he shot unarmed Martin. “Stand Your Ground” laws can’t be to blame because, as Sen. Ted Cruz explained to Martin’s mother Sybrina Fulton in a Senate hearing on the controversial law, she’s just “mourning the loss of her son.” Stand-your-ground laws in fact “protect those in African-American communities,” he said.
Facts be damned, gun nuts and Tea Partiers agree. According to Right-Wing Watch, a recent “Tampa Bay Times analysis of stand-your-ground cases in Florida found substantial racial disparities in the application of the law, including that ‘people who killed a black person walked free 73 percent of the time, while those who killed a white person went free 59 percent of the time. A national study found a similar disparity.”
But, it’s Trayvon Martin’s family’s fault he’s dead. Probably his mother’s.
9. White, anti-LGBT Texan wins office by pretending to be black.
Dave Wilson, a Houston electrician, has become pretty adept at creating literature for the causes he believes in. While not rewiring people’s homes, he long pursued his sideline of mailing homophobic fliers to thousands of Houston voters attacking the city’s lesbian mayor Annise Parker. His argument is pretty simple. Open homosexuality is bad. It leads to extinction. (Closeted homosexuality, not so much.)
Recently, Wilson expanded his literary efforts into fiction, when he got himself elected to the Houston Community College Board of Trustees by out-and-out pretending to be someone else. He pretended to be a black man, defeating longtime incumbent Bruce Austin, who actually is black, in an overwhelmingly African-American district.
According to Right-Wing Watch, “Wilson’s campaign fliers were filled with black faces that he admits to simply pulling off of websites, along with captions such as ‘Please vote for our friend and neighbor Dave Wilson.’ Another flier announces that he was ‘Endorsed by Ron Wilson,’ which is the name of an African-American former state representative. Only by reading the fine print will voters discover that the ‘Ron Wilson’ who actually endorsed Dave is his cousin. The cousin lives in Iowa.”
Wilson is fine with this whole deception thing. After all, lying is what politicians do, he points out.
10. Nutjob former classmate of Obama reminisces about his cocaine-snorting, gay-hustling high school days.
Scott Lively’s “Defend The Family” website got a real scoop this week with an interview that nutjob preacher James David Manning conducted with Mia Marie Pope, who says—and why would we not believe her?—that she knew President Obama back in high school in Hawaii in the 1970s, when he was a foreigner (this is a birther website, after all) and a gay druggie.
“He very much was within sort of the gay community,” Pope claimed. “And we knew Barry as just common knowledge that girls were never anything that he ever was interested in … He would get with these older white gay men, and this is how we just pretty much had the impression that that’s how he was procuring his cocaine. In other words, he was having sex with these older white guys and that’s how he was getting this cocaine to be able to freebase.”
That clears a lot up.

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