Logo from the Second International Eugenics Conference in 1921
Eugenics is the pseudoscientific belief of improving the human race through selective breeding. Though forms of it still exist today (proponents focus on prenatal genetic screening, in vitro fertilization, and genetic engineering), its association with Nazism and the use of eugenics to rationalize the Holocaust have caused it to become thoroughly discredited.
Max-Bro blog has a fascinating post about the 33 disturbing but true facts about Eugenics. For example:
- Even with concentration camps, euthanasia campaigns and sterilization wards public knowledge in both Germany and America, early eugenic founders looked on with approval as Nazi Germany enacted brutal racial campaigns against its own citizens. Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital even complained in 1934, “Hitler is beating us at our own game.”
- The term “moron” comes from the eugenic movement. Coined by Henry Goddard, an early eugenic founder, it comes from the Greek word moros, meaning “stupid and foolish.” We use the term lightly these days as a kind of vague, almost teasing insult. For Goddard and the eugenic community, a “moron” was anyone deemed unfit for life and indeed a target to be eliminated.
- Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan served as a member of the state board of health and operated a sanitarium known for its unorthodox food regimens. He developed for his patients a natural product made of wheat flakes. In 1898 his brother, Will Kellogg, invented the corn flake and began selling it commercially through a company that would ultimately become the cereal behemoth the Kellogg Company. In the same year as the founding of the company, Dr. Kellogg founded the Race Betterment Foundation to help stop the “propagation of defectives.”
- For years one of eugenics greatest crusaders, Harry Hamilton Laughlin, fought to sterilize the feebleminded and people diagnosed with epilepsy. He was well known for believing that people with epilepsy did not belong in society. Laughlin was also known among colleagues for his occasional seizures. It turned out the doctor kept a tightly held secret for most of his life: Harry Laughlin, the attacker of the “unfit” and eugenic co-founder, himself had epilepsy.
Read more here: http://max-bro.net/2008/09/02/33-disturbing-but-true-facts-about-eugenics/ - Thanks Max-Bro!
What is it about human nature that makes some people deal with their flaws by attacking others with the same problem?
I'm not in favour of it, by the way, it's a hateful thing and very narrow minded and all that, but "pseudo"? Would it not actually work in the narrow sense of removing those inherited traits selected for removal?
Lary Craig is exhibit A.
It's gotten to the point where any time I hear a politician pushing "family values" I wonder what he/she's hiding.
Other animals do this naturally; they'll kill inferior offspring. Sure, we humans know better... but I think you could make an argument that our gene pool is in a bit of a mess because of our heightened sense of compassion.
However, on the other hand, its hard not to look around these days and come to the conclusion that some people just shouldn't be having kids. Idiocracy anyone?
I wish genetic screening for defects was required. However, the reality is for every responsible pregnancy, there's probably a few hundred thousand babies being churned out by people who really shouldn't have them in the first place.
I've said it before: Watch the movie "Idiocracy" for a funny-yet-sadly-probable futuristic movie depicting the western world.
It's not clear science but it's not pseudoscience.
It will result in Giant Aryan overlords.... who are simpleton bed wetters all their lives.
Basically it's Crufts (look it up*) for people.
Yes you'll breed a 9 foot tall muscle bound thor.... who lives to 16 and has a jaw like Calos Segundo....(see *)
Also according to Eugenics there is no use in Steven Hawking.
Or Samuel Peyps
Or me.
Ok may have a point on re me.
People have the option to choose the sex of their unborn children, and they also have the option to abort any babies with known (or suspected) defects.
Human evolution has actually been moving a lot faster in the past few thousand years. I don't think we really need any artificial help.
On a side note, the US government is doing a pretty amazing job at preventing breeding among the black population by keeping a sizable portion of their male population in prison during their most fertile years. Good job, guys!
It is pseudoscience, on several levels. One of the simplest arguments against it is the work of JDS Haldane, which you will have to look up yourself. The basic idea is that any sort of negative eugenics, any attempt to alter the human genome by killing people with undesirable genetic defects simply will not work. Mutations are quite common in human DNA (please don't think of mutations in comic book/sci-fi terms, they are simply random changes in the genome, every human as about 100 or so in their genome). The problem is that mutations will show up naturally in every generation. And the rate in which they show up is greater than the rate negative eugenics can get rid of them. It would be absurdly impractical and quite frankly vile, the number of murders negative eugenics would require.
And this was work that was done in, IIRC, the 1920s or 30s. So, yes, it's pseudoscience, we've known for a long time it simply would not work. I would also add that not only would it not work, but it's based on a bizarre conception of natural selection. There's no such thing as making the human genetic code "purer" or any such nonsense, it's all based on our relationship to our environment, which thankfully we can alter. Take near-sightedness (mentioned earlier). Now why on earth would you want to use eugenics to eliminate near-sightedness? We live in an environment where near-sightedness doesn't really make any difference. We can buy you the darn glasses. We can either buy them glasses, or kill so many people that the streets run red with blood (and still fail to eliminate near-sightedness, see Haldane), for what? Some mistaken idea we need to be made more "fit", while ignoring that fitness is determined by the environment. A near-sighted person is "fit". He/she can survive well in their environment.
To put it another way, owls have better eyesight than humans. Would it make any sense to kill humans that have poorer eyesight than owls? Are we, as a species, somehow "unfit" because our sight is not as good as that of owls?
In the UK US france and Sweden, amongst others, it was routine to sterilise the mentally handicapped, a lot of the time the physically too. Also the insane and alcoholics...that'll be the poor alcoholics mark you.
Tenessee Williams siters was lobotomised and sterilised for having sex with a black man and being a wee bit not all there.
It wasn't all Them pesky Nazis.
Ok they weren't herded into Zyklon B shower rooms, but it was just as solidly Eugenic as the nazis.
Repellent to know that your own country did this stuff too.
Gotta get that dig in there, doncha?
The reason eugenics isn't also wholeheartedly embraced by Scientologists is because they recruit people with reduced mental capacity - and their money.
For example, there are diseases and ailments which are more likely to haunt people of certain races. Ellis-van Creveld syndrome with the Amish and Tay-Sachs disease with Ashkenazi Jews (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_health). And no one wants to tackle this issue because of the racist implications inherent in doing so. We are not talking about forming an aryan master-race or eradicating undesirable traits, just helping people.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/classic-articles/mg19225780.022-how-can-man-improve-man.html
Dude, are you seriously suggestion the mutation rate makes natural or artificial selection impossible? This is amazingly stupid. You are denying evolution.
Both positive and negative eugenics would work. Neither the desire to do so, nor the desire to refrain from doing so is "science", it's politics. Genetics is a science, eugenics is a political platform.
We don't call pro-life or pro-choice "science" or "pseudoscience" either. I don't see how eugenics is different.
No. The point is there will always be some few instances of genetic defects due to random mutations.
The only way to get some sort of "perfect" genetic pool would be in vitro gene therapy with technology and knowledge at a level closer to Star Trek than what we have now.
And at the risk of repeating myself, it's a matter of math. It is true that the classic negative eugenics could, for example, get rid of something like, say, color-blindness. The problem is that it would take something on the order of 10,000 years (IIRC) and would require the participation of the entire human race. And that would be to just get rid of color-blindness, what about nearsightedness? What about people born with allergies? There are a tremendous amount of "less-than-perfect" genes out there, and many of them are recessive genes.
Here's a description of why Idiocracy won't happen by a biology professor, if anyone's interested.
The "fathers" of contraception in the U.S. and Great (?) Britain, Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, were open eugenicists, who were trying to wipe out what they considered the dregs of society.
Sanger explicitly published the fact that she wanted to "create a race of thoroughbreds," so she developed the American Birth Control League, which was later renamed as Planned Parenthood (more rightly called "Planned BARRENhood" and "Banned Parenthood).
Sanger was jailed for illegally making contraceptives available -- which was against most states' laws, passed by Protestant legislators (for, prior to 1930, ALL Protestant denominations rightly condemned contraception as gravely sinful).
Sanger also collaborated with evil doctors in Nazi Germany, but after World War II hid her earlier, enthusiastic promotion of eugenics.
Finally, in 1939, Sanger had a "Negro Project." In a private letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble (associated with Proctor and Gamble), she wrote: "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."
[You can read more here: http://www.blackgenocide.org/negro.html ]
Ok, so what you're saying is that eugenics "can't work" when you give it your own extreme strawman definition.
Eugenics is a normative social philosophy about improving human life (to whatever extent) through artificial selection. Nothing about the science of genetics precludes it, and I am not aware of anyone who ever defined 'eugenics' as trying to halt the natural occurrence of genetic mutation.
"The problem is that it would take something on the order of 10,000 years (IIRC) and would require the participation of the entire human race"
Again, this is your fictitious definition. A eugenics policy could be entirely limited to any given nation or population, and with limited and specific goals. And your claim that it would take "10,000" years to virtually eliminate color-blindness in a population is just nonsense. It took a short handful of decades for Ashkenazi Jews to virtually eliminate Tay-Sachs.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E0D81E3AF93BA25751C0A9659C8B63
My eyes glazed over at the Pharyngula link. It was just a breathless rant. There was no "debunking" of artificial selection for the simple reason that it can't be debunked. Nothing about eugenics need contradict genetics.
I was using a commonly used definition of eugenics, the whole linked post is full of descriptions of that kind of eugenics, "negative eugenics", which I tried to differentiate from the uncontroversial positive eugenics, which I agree can be beneficial.
Eugenics is a normative social philosophy about improving human life (to whatever extent) through artificial selection. Nothing about the science of genetics precludes it, and I am not aware of anyone who ever defined ‘eugenics’ as trying to halt the natural occurrence of genetic mutation. (emphasis added)
That was my point, which you have entirely missed. The natural occurrence of genetic mutation cannot be stopped. It's like a boat with a hole in the bottom, if you try and bail it out with the bucket of negative eugenics, it won't help.
It's impractical in the common conception of the word, it can work in certain circumstances. Note that the Ashkenazi Jew example you gave, it's about a very specific genetic defect found in a small subpopulation. That is very different from popular conceptions like Idiocracy and ideas like those in the linked article that there were "ten groups classified as “socially unfit” and deserving of elimination. These included, in order of priority: the feebleminded, the pauper class, alcoholics, criminals of varying degrees such as petty thieves and those imprisoned for not paying fines, epileptics, the insane, the constitutionally weak class, those genetically predisposed to specific diseases, the deformed, and finally, the deaf, blind and mute." And the NYT article doesn't say anything about any Ashkenazi being "eliminated".
I also would suggest you improve your argumentative style, perhaps stick to the facts, and avoid calling people "moronic", claiming they "deny evolution" and are creating strawmen? Particularly when you later complain about a "breathless rant".
I merely wanted to point people in the right direction regarding why negative eugenics is pseudoscience. Anyone interested can also look up Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, particularly Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. I have no intention of continuing this conversation and I am leaving this thread.
its the truth
not ur fault its genetic LOL