Posted on 04/05/2008 12:14:50 PM PDT by wagglebee
A Yale history professor lectured on the history and future of eugenics in America, and hypothesized about the kind of effect it could have if used by governments.
Daniel Kevles gave his lecture in Konover Auditorium Thursday, which was part of The Heinz and Virgina Herrmann Distinguished Lecture Series on Human Rights and the Life Sciences.
Eugenics is the practice of trying to improve human genetics by controlling reproduction, traditionally with sterilization or genocide, as the Nazis attempted during World War II.
Kevles was introduced by history department head Shirley Roe who lauded him for his knowledge and comprehensive work of literature on the topic of science and human rights.
Kevles began the lecture by reflecting on the massive leaps scientists have made in the name of biology and genetic research. Given the success of the human genome project, where scientists map each gene in the human DNA strand, and the booming biotech industry, he predicted that eugenics could re-emerge as a possibility, and commenced a review of how eugenics emerged in American society in the early 1900s, and the human rights violations that came with it.
"Eugenics was not unique to the Nazis," he said. "It could and did happen virtually everywhere."
The surprising thing about the movement, according to Kevles, was how strongly it was picked up by the scientific community of the time. It was supported by many prominent doctors, psychologists and biologists of the period, many of whom found a home in Connecticut.
"Eugenics enjoyed strong support from social scientists, physicians and biologists at many prominent universities, including my university and your sister school, Yale," he said. "In fact, Yale and New Haven were a leading vital center of eugenics and its advocacy in the middle third of the 20th century."
In fact, one of the most prominent groups, The American Eugenics Society, was located in New Haven.
The popularity of eugenics was so great that the government got involved, creating a eugenics record office to conduct research and create an index of negative and positive traits in families.
Kevles said that the rush caused blame for things like criminal behavior, or being poor to be attributed to genetics. He also commented on its uncanny abililty to unite both sides of the political spectrum.
"Such doctrines make eugenics sound like a socially conservative movement, indeed it did draw much support from social conservatives, but much of eugenics belonged at the time to a wave of progressive social reform that swept through the early decades of the 20th century," he said. "For progressives, it was a branch of social improvement or advancement that some people might be acheived form the application of science to social ends."
Progressives and conservatives alike thought that to hunt down the gene that made people perform crime, society could be improved - a notion was even embraced by former president Teddy Roosevelt.
Race and economics quickly entered the equation, however. A great part of eugenics programs that were instituted had to deal with controlling the increasing numbers of eastern European immigrants flooding into the country. Given that the immigrants were generally poor and did not embrace the same values as the western world, they were thought to have inferior genes and according to Kevles, by the 1920s, many states instituted sterialization programs that struck hard against minorities and the poor.
California in particular had aggressive laws that sterilized roughly 6,000 people. Richer people were assumed to be more socially acceptable, and the private healthcare they could afford let them avoid any eugenicist's eyes.
Even the Supreme Court got caught up in the rush. In the 1927 case of Buck vs Bell, a woman, Carrie Bell who gave birth to an illegitimate child, later discovered to be the product of a rape, was declared "feebleminded" and sterilized. In the court opinion, Oliver Wendell Holmes said the decision was utilitarian one.
"We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives," he wrote. "It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices [referring to Bell's reproductive rights] often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped by incompetence."
Holmes went on to liken the sterilization to the laws that obliged citizens to become vaccinated.
With the introduction of the Great Depression, the laws picked up more, partially from need to cut back on government obligations to financially support the mentally ill and needy.
By the end of World War II though, when the human rights violations of the Nazis became apparent, and science was discovering more about human behaviorism and shifting importance away from genetics, the enthusiasm for eugenics died down and disappeared. Kevles said that shifting moral imperatives had an impact on it's decline and unpopularity today.
"We equate individual reproduction rights with social good," he said.
Kevles ended his speech by commenting on eugenics today and the possible future it could have, such as the Chinese government's efforts to convince its educated citizens to reproduce more than it's uneducated members, and to prohibit mentally handicapped marraiges. He hypothesized that any program America embraced to try and strengthen genes would turn sour quickly.
"It's hard to imagine that such power would only be used for good," he said.
He conceded that the most likely scenario for eugenics in American society would be economically based.
"In our own day, the more health care becomes a public responsibility through taxes, and the more expensive this care becomes, the more that taxpayers will rebel against having to take care of those genetics has doomed to disease or disability," he said. "Policy makers may feel pressured to not bring disabled people into the world, not for the sake of the gene pool, but simply in the interest of keeping down taxes."
Still, Kelves was convinced that because of the barbarity of the eugenics programs in the past, and the fiercely democratic sentiments of Western society, no such program could be officially instituted. Private acts of eugenics, he warned, could emerge through certain biotechnicians who are working to help couples choose the sex or attributes of their future children. He was also concerned that employers and insurance companies could try and use eugenics as an excuse to deny jobs or coverage to certain families.
Grace Fisler, a 2nd-semester physiology and neurobiology major, who is also minoring in Human Rights, was shocked to hear about America's sordid eugenic past and expressed disgust at the practice.
"It's a complete violation of a human's right to life, the right to reproduce," she said.
She conceded though, that on its face, eugenics wasn't necessarily evil.
"It could be good if you're trying to get rid of diseases only," she said. "But while you do that, you might start looking to inject better attributes also and it might become more questionable again."
Robert Kosarko, a 6th-semester cognitive science major, agreed.
"If we could institute [eugenics] without all the racism or classism or search for super-soliders or all that nonsense, then I think there's great viability to try and increase human lifespan, human constitution, or maybe make people resilient to radiation in space."
Robert did object to Kelves' presentation of eugencis with Nazism as such a prominent background though.
"When you frame an argument with something that big in the background, you lose perspective," he said.
"When you frame an argument with something that big in the background, you lose perspective," he said.
People who are supportive of eugenics ALWAYS resent it when they are reminded how much they agree with the Nazis.
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Yale Professor Explores History Of Eugenics...
eugenics should be practiced on Yale professors!!!!
The valid application of Eugenics is sterilizing those people who do not take responsibility for their children.
Keep this issue foregrounded. It is the foundation of much that goes on in the world now.
Yes it is.
eugenics - the best chance for liberal humanists to play God.
Why Politicized Science is Dangerous
(Excerpted from State of Fear)
"...Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out.
This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.
I don't mean global warming. I'm talking about another theory, which rose to prominence a century ago.
Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.
These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.
All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.
Today, we know that this famous theory that gained so much support was actually pseudoscience. The crisis it claimed was nonexistent. And the actions taken in the name of theory were morally and criminally wrong. Ultimately, they led to the deaths of millions of people.
The theory was eugenics, and its history is so dreadful --- and, to those who were caught up in it, so embarrassing --- that it is now rarely discussed. But it is a story that should be well know to every citizen, so that its horrors are not repeated..."
A discussion of eugenics is not complete without bringing up its equally dangerous counterpart, dysgenics.
Yet modern society is going against natural selection. Smart kids are encouraged to put career first and discouraged from letting children get in the way. Dumb kids get low-end jobs or none at all and face little opportunity cost to start having families at a young age. So we have crack mamma with 8 kids and women with high IQs maybe having one kid — if they are lucky enough to find a guy wanting to settle down and commit to marriage.
There are only three things good in today’s society from a genetic perspective:
1) Sperm banks that have very high standards for who gets to donate (both in health and in fitness).
2) Mormons — seems the most devout and smartest have big families.
3) Orthodox Jews, see #2.
Yup, dysgenics.
Beyond even those unavoidable socioeconomic considerations, another problem is that the government directly punishes the successful (with higher taxes, for example), and directly rewards the failures (welfare, health-care, etc). If there is a significant genetic component in these outcomes, then our government policies are essentially investing in the growth of parasitic behavior, stupidity, and slothfulness.
IMO, the best policy is laissez-faires government + voluntary assistance meted out via individual judgment of merit (otherwise known as charitable activity).
I thought it was a hate crime to say "right to life" on a college campus these days.
This person was obviously the token conservative at the event.
Not really. This is part of the selection process. If having a higher average IQ (15 pts, say) does not translate directly into survivability and reproduction, IQs will fall to whatever the avg IQ of the groups who survive and breed is. We can’t go against natural selection. We ARE naturally selecting ourselves with all of the tools at our disposal, including technology and war, and hair brained social notions like “we’re all fundamentally equal.”
We do not invest in making sure we get the very most out of our smartest kids (whites/asians/ashkenazi jews) and instead invest in getting ‘underperfoming’ (for fear of using more accurate terms) minorities up to average.
If this works, we will succeed. In contract, Japan, China, and Korea do not bother with this.
My suspicion is the average IQ of th US is going to drop as the smartest people world-wide choose to stay home (rather than go to grad school here).
If we expand our visa program to keep graduate students in engineering (technology) here as long as possible, we can keep our lead with brain influx.
But currently, we’re trying to fit a square peg into a round hole by insisting that we get equal outcomes for Asians and blacks (for example) based on the premise that they’re equal fundamentally.
This fallacy is propped, I think, but delusions like religion which tout a good God would never create people with different average IQs.
Golly gee. From an evolutionary perspective, it would be expected.
Possibly as regards the left-wing faculty, but there are a good many pro-lifers among the young folk today.
The point he raises about economics is a serious one, and one neither side of the pro-life debate has taken very seriously. What happens when society simply can't afford to keep every Alzheimer's patient and ever severely retarded child alive on taxpayer dollars? What happens when the payERs revolt and say, "No more?"
“Such doctrines make eugenics sound like a socially conservative movement...” And the gal in the article majoring in Human Rights was shocked to hear about America having a eugenics history. Yet another huge leftie who has no clue about the history of the left...
Here is the ultimate hero of the left and Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger, and her eugenics NEGRO PROJECT...
http://www.blackgenocide.org/negro.html
And the Nazis were agreeing with Americans when they did it.
Our eugenics program was a model for their own.
Do you resent that?
I am well aware that the eugenics movement was founded by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton and later led by Darwin’s son Leonard. I am also aware that eugenics was encouraged in the United States by the likes of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Margaret Sanger.
I’m not sure if “resent” would be the word I would use, but I deplore this part of American history just as I deplore slavery.
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