Adolf Hitler and His Fallacies

Today in class, we learned about fallacies, forms of bad argumentation or inductive reasoning, which lead to wrong conclusions. In "Nation and Race", Adolf Hitler carelessly included some fallacies which were noticeable and created loopholes in his argument.

"Thus men without exception wander about in the garden of Nature; they imagine that they know practically everything and yet with few exceptions pass blindly by one of the most patent principles of Nature's rule: the inner segregation of the species of all living beings on this earth.

Even the most superficial observation shows that Nature's restricted form of propagation and increase is an almost rigid basic law of all the innumerable forms of expression of her vital urge. Every animal mates only with a member of the same species. The titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the finch, the stork the stork, the field mouse the field mouse, the dormouse the dormouse, the wolf the she-wolf, etc.

Only unusual circumstances can change this, primarily the compulsion of captivity or any other cause that makes it impossible to mate within the same species. But then Nature begins to resist this with all possible means, and her most visible protest consists either in refusing further capacity for propagation to bastards or in limiting the fertility of later offspring; in most cases, however, she takes away the power of resistance to disease or hostile attacks.This is only too natural."

This is an example of a type of fallicy called the false analogy. A false analogy is when an analogy is descriptive, but does not offer proof of a connection between the two things being compared. Here, Hitler is trying to compare humans to animal species. He is basically trying to argue that because in Nature, species only mate with those of their own species, humans should only mate with those of their own race. However, the analogy made between humans and animals did not truly apply because unlike species, which have subspecies, there is no such thing as a subspecies of humans. As humans we do not have inferior or superior groups of "subspecies" which we place ourselves in. We are just human. However, with animal species, subspecies do exist. But, we cannot say that race or ethnicity serves as a "subspecies" for humans, because it does not; we're all the same if you take away things like ethnicity or gender. Therefore, Hitler cannot truly use the science of species-with-species breeding to support his argument that humans are to breed with only individuals of the same race as them, (since, unlike animal species, humans do not have subspecies which bring about diversity) .