Gerhard Heberer

While researching evolutionary theory during the 1930s I stumbled upon Prof. Gerhard Heberer. He was an ardent darwinist and made some interesting contributions to the modern synthesis during the 50s and 60s. However he also was member of the Deutsches Ahnenerbe since 1938 and gave lectures on germanization at Buchenwald in 1944. For this reason I was quite interested when I noticed that such an ambivalent person actually wrote some texts in the post war years aimed at the general public. Among those a small volume titled "Was heißt heute Darwinismus?" or "The meaning of darwinism in contemporary times", which was written just four years after the end of the war in 1949 stand out. Due to a strange curiosity a bought this essay of fifty pages from amazon and was agog to investigate the perverse ideological spins on evolutionary theory such a gifted but politically tainted mind could envision. In the end I was surprised by the mundanity of this book's content. It is a pretty straight forward representation of the current state of the art in evolutionary theory in the late 1940s and an emotional defense against any kind of religiously motivated denial of its truth and value. Even by today's standards one would find it difficult to call what is written there racist or racialist in any kind of way. Still the prose is mediocre at best and no single topic is explored in depth to justify reading it as some kind of introduction to evolutionary biology or population genetics. Therefore the use of this work in modern times is quite limited.… (más)