From Designing Babies: The Brave New World of Reproductive Technology by Roger Gosden. W.H. Freeman and Company, New York. 1999. Page 3-4 According to Darwin’s theory, natural selection decides which individuals are fit to survive and breed. So powerful was this idea that it quickly engaged not only fellow biologists but also intellectuals who were …
Category: eugenics
Eugenics, Progressives, and Miscegenation: Popenoe’s “Applied Eugenics”
It is very common to hear people speak as though it was Republican/conservatives/Christians that opposed intermarriage between black and whites (miscegenation), and that this attitude represented rank bigotry and amounted to open racism. This is a white-washing of history. The truth is that progressives and secularists thoroughly embraced anti-miscegenation. The reader can be assured that …
Davenport: Death is Nature’s Great Blessing to the Race. Why Keep Defectives Alive?
Charles Davenport, in The Eugenic Programme And Progress in its Achievement (1914) [italics in original, bold added] The lowest stratum of society has, on the other hand, neither intelligence nor self-control enough to justify the State to leave its matings in their own hands. On the contrary, the defectives and criminalistic are, so far as …
Defective Genes are Like Pathogenic bacteria and viruses the Law Must Control
As quoted in The New Diagnostics by Dorothy Nelkin and Laurence Tancredi, 1989 (pg 13-14) Although the old eugenic generalizations have been cast off, the logic behind them persists, refueled from diagnostic tests and justified in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and cost. Thus some geneticists suggest the social importance of improving the “gene pool.” For …
Charity a Hindrance to Natural Selection
In the following foreword from a compilation of 12 eugenic lectures (1914), we see that eugenics is perceived as merely applied evolution. Furthermore, ‘modern man,’ being a sympathetic being, keeps alive those that should die. With luck, principles of breeding already used with animals will be brought to bear on humans. ——————- Foreword by Lewellys …
A resurgence of eugenics: From Chance to Choice
In a book that seeks to re-assert the importance of the government in charting humanity’s genetic course without avoiding the abuses that are associated with eugenics, there are nonetheless some contentions made that are consistent with the goal of this website. From pages 9-10: The Shadow of Eugenics Even the brightest aspirations of the new …
The Geneticists Manifesto (1939) or Social Biology and Population Improvement, by H.J. Muller
Social Biology and Population Improvement (aka, the Geneticist’s Manifesto) by H.J. Muller [Source #1, Source #2] The Seventh International Congress of Genetics adjourned at Edinburgh only three days before World War II got under way. It is interesting to recall that just before the shooting started a group of geneticists at that Congress-informally formulated what …
Bentley Glass: “No parent will have the right to burden society with a defective child”
Excerpt from Dangerous Diagnostics by Dorothy Nelkin and Laurence R. Tancredi (pg 12, 1994) [Source] And in the same year [1970], Bentley Glass, in his retirement address as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, called for “the use of the new biology to assure the quality of all new babies. … …
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