In moral terms, WWII boils down to one simple - scientific - question : are the small a part of the future, or just of the past ?

 G F Hegel, the 19th century's most influential philosopher, was famous for claiming that history wasn't an endless cycles of birth, maturity and death laced with infinite variations , as people had always observed.

Instead, he ventured that history has a single purpose and a single goal  - together with a linear unbreakable path upwards to that goal  - linear, unidirectional "Progress" with a capital "P".

Mass Extinctions : most of the mighty are crushed while most of the weak survive

The geological record certainly doesn't support the idea that Might is Right and that the mighty and the wise species will inevitably replace the weak and the foolish species : far from it.

The Earth has had enough episodes of Mass Extinctions to suggest a consistent pattern : in tough times, the mighty (and the mighty consumers of resources) starve and the weak and tiny hang on, surviving on scraps.

Stephen Jay Gould noted this geological confounding of dogmatic Darwinism, as presumably did another author writing some 1900 years before Gould, in a letter to some people in Corinth ....