Posted on 04/10/2007 3:17:18 AM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode
Francis Galton was Charles Darwin's cousin. He coined the word "Eugenics" in 1883. He founded the biometric approach to heredity, and to further this theory, R.A Fisher and Karl Pearson established the influential Biometrica journal in 1901. His most important legacy was the Eugenics Education Society, later to be re-named the Eugenics Society. It still exists today, though under a different name. The Biometrica journal delved deeply into that peculiar field of study, popularized by Charles Darwin in Descent of Man, which holds for darwinians an inexplicably gripping fascination. That is, the meticulous scientific comparison of Black people with apes.
Early darwinians laboured in the infancy of this pathological obsession, without the benefit of more modern methods developed by Galton and Pearson. For example, Richard Owen writes in The Gorilla and the Negro (1861)...
A ready way to obtain the capacity of the cranial cavity is to fill that cavity with millet-seed, to weigh the skull, and then deduct the weight of the empty skull from the filled one. The range of capacity in the male Gorilla was thus found to be from 17 oz. 3 dr. to 19 oz. 5 dr. whilst in the male Negroes’ skulls the range of capacity was from 38 oz. 5 dr. to 51 oz. 6 dr. Tiedemann records an Ethiopian skull with a capacity of 54 oz. 2 dr. 33 gr. troy; the highest capacity in an European skull being 57 oz. 3 dr. .56 gr. troy. The weight of a Negro’s brain has been found to be from 3 1b. I oz. to 3 lb. 9 oz. 4 dr. troy; that of a full-grown male Gorilla may be estimated at from 10 oz. to 12 oz. troy. In regard to the principal parts of the brain, the difference of size of the medulla oblongata is rather in favour of the Gorilla: the cerebellum of the Gorilla is smaller, the cerebrum is much smaller than in the Negro.Important as these facts must be to the darwinian, we cannot but remark as to the primitiveness of the science. Millet seed. One of Darwin's many points of ape-man comparison concerned the anatomy of the foot. He suggested that "savages" have vestiges of the opposable toe found in apes. He wrote: "With some savages, however, the foot has not altogether lost its prehensile power, as shown by their manner of climbing trees, and of using them (sic) in other ways." Which serves to prove that Charles knew little about anatomy. But this man-monkey opposable toe myth dies hard. For example...
Note carefully the separated big toe of the "Negro" fetus. It is intended to mislead you into thinking that Blacks have a vestigial trait from apes. This is a critical point, because the opposable toe is considered to be characteristic anatomical difference between apes and man. I have seen this kind of "opposable toe drawing" in other places - in some books on ape-man evolution.
Anyway, with Biometrica you can see the science developing to a high art. Complex formulae are developed for calculation of Negro skull volume, intricate regression analyses skin coloration are discussed, and so on. I am sure that Pearson et al. discovered many crucial scientific facts and evidence for yet more. Julian Huxley reports, in one of his essays, that evidence now exists that Eskimoes have mating seasons like cats and dogs do.
It should be pointed out that both Pearson and Galton won the Darwin Medal for "work of acknowledged distinction in the broad area of biology in which Charles Darwin worked." It should also be pointed out that Karl Pearson was both a eugenicist and a racist, albeit a scientific one. He held the first Chair of Eugenics as the University of London.
Galton was honorary president of the Eugenics society until he was succeeded by Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin. Leonard Darwin was chairman of The Eugenics Society from 1911 to 1928, when he became honorary president. The Eugenics Society spawned many other societies in many nations, it helped create them, and encouraged them in various ways. Keeping track of them all involves considerable investigation. There are family planning bureaus, human betterment societies, racial hygene organizations, human heredity federations, etc. There was even an American Institute for the Study of the Feeble-Minded - though it should have properly been called "the American Institute for the Extermination of the Feeble-Minded". By 1912, when the First International Eugenic Congress was held, eugenics was well on its way as a world-wide movement. Alfred Ploetz and Ernst Radin collaborated with eugenicists in both Britain and America. They were proponents of the notion that the problems of the weak, sick, old, or otherwise undesireable or defective, can be cured with a painless lethal injection.
To manage statistical and hereditary records, the Eugenic Records Office was established by Charles Davenport at Cold Spring Harbour laboratory. Davenport also ran the Station for Experimental Evolution. He was president of the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations (IFEO), and was succeeded by Ernst Rudin. Davenport was probably the most famous american biologist of his time. There is some suspicion that Davenport was involved in the notorious "Tuskegee Experiments". The ERO was a major contributor to eugenics in Germany. Here is one of Davenport's reports to Leonard Darwin, concerning the progress of eugenics in Germany.
When you consider how profoundly rooted the world-wide eugenics movement was in the fertile soil called the Darwin family, it is no surprise that the Darwin family should find itself exemplified as the model of good eugenic breeding, as in this poster...
If I were an adherent of the darwinian view of heredity and variation, I would be tempted to conclude, after looking at that chart, that the eugenical cast of mind runs in the germ-plasm, and is inherited, just like imbecility, feeble-mindedness, prostitution, and chronic unemployment. But I'm not.
Following the thread of history, we see that Davenport served on the board of directors of the American Eugenics Society, along with Harry Laughlin and a fellow named Paul Popenoe. Popenoe wrote a popular textbook called Applied Eugenics, and in order to understand the eugenics movement in america, you must read this book.
Popenoe presents the usual bleak eugenic picture of a catastrophic future: humanity's germ-plasm is threatened by the procreation of imbeciles, idiots, morons, the feeble-minded, prostitutes, alcoholics, and shiftless bums, who must all be sterilized or segragated in order to avert corruption of the nation's germ-plasm. In chapter 6 he discusses the theory of evolution and natural selection - it is well worth reading because you can see how his darwinian preconceptions lead him into all sorts of gross errors about human genetics. Popenoe distills the central thesis into the form of a question...
To-day, how is it? The inefficients, the wastrels, the physical, mental, and moral cripples are carefully preserved at public expense. The criminal is turned out on parole after a few years, to become the father of a family. The insane is discharged as "cured," again to take up the duties of citizenship. The feeble-minded child is painfully "educated," often at the expense of his normal brother or sister. In short, the undesirables of the race, with whom the bloody hand of natural selection would have made short work early in life, are now nursed along to old age.In chapter 8, we get to the hillbillies. For whatever reason, darwinians spent considerable time and effort studying "dysgenic" families. For example, there was the famous Juke family studies, begun by Richard Dugdale in 1877 and then continued by Estabrook at the Eugenics Record Office. Estabrook also wrote Mongrel Virginians (1926), which was described by Abraham Myerson as "a really absurd and useless book". Much of this, and the studies on other "dysgenic" families like the Kallikaks, etc, turned out to be fraudulent or worthless. But they made the headlines. And they are firmly fixed in popular culture. Along with the usual threat feeble-minded people pose to the germ plasm, Popenoe introduces us to a new threat, the hilbillies of Pennsylvania and Ohio, like "Sore-Eyed Hank" here, who ought to be sterilized so he can't "reproduce his kind"...
Popenoe concludes: "From cases of this sort, which represent the least striking kind of bad breeding, the student may pass through many types up to the great tribes of Jukes, Nams, Kallikaks, Zeros, Dacks, Ishmaels, Sixties, Hickories, Hill Folk, Piney Folk, and the rest, with which the readers of the literature of restrictive eugenics are familiar. It is abundantly demonstrated that much, if not most, of their trouble is the outcome of bad heredity. Indeed, when a branch of one of these clans is transported, or emigrates, to a wholly new environment, it soon creates for itself, in many cases, an environment similar to that from which it came. Whether it goes to the city, or to the agricultural districts of the west, it may soon manage to re-establish the debasing atmosphere to which it has always been accustomed."
Popenoe elaborates on positive methods to solve these difficult problems: sterilization and segregation. He gives helpful suggestions about putting "moron boys" and "idiot boys" to hard labor. Then, in chapter 14, called The Color Line, he comes to the issue of color. Popenoe writes...
The social heritage of the Negro has been described at great length and often with little regard for fact, by hundreds of writers. Only a glance can be given the subject here, but it may profitably be asked what the Negro did when he was left to himself in Africa.And now, with Darwin Medalist Dr Karl Pearson, we have come back full circle. Full circle to that compulsive "science" of the darwinian: that "science" which consists in obsessively, meticuliously, methodically and relentlessly comparing Black people to monkeys and apes.If the number of original contributions which it has made to the world's civilization is any fair criterion of the relative value of a race, then the Negro race must be placed very near zero on the scale.[133]
As a result of the careful measurement of many skulls, Karl Pearson[134] has come to the following conclusions:
"There is for the best ascertainable characters a continuous relationship from the European skull, through prehistoric European, prehistoric Egyptian, Congo-Gaboon Negroes to Zulus and Kafirs.
"The indication is that of a long differentiated evolution, in which the Negro lies nearer to the common stem than the European; he is nearer to the childhood of man."
There can be a connection between eugenics and evolution.
When scientists study the record of life on the planet, life clearly was here first as very simple lifeforms and developed over a long time to more complex forms - better adapted species survived - individuals who survived and mated had a chance to pass their genes along.
Now its not hard to see how that scientific evidence could be misused. That doesn’t make the science bad - it makes the misuse of the science bad.
Even the Bible can be distorted. Certainly it the bible has been used as an excuse for racism and slavery. That doesn’t make the Bible bad either - it shows good things can be misused.
For example, say a person were to ignore all the rational responses to this question and keep posting misleading allegations on Freep. That would be a similar misuse of something good.
Did the cat walk across your keyboard or something?
Care to try again?
Eugenics goes back to the Bible
Numbers chapter 5
1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,
2 Command the children of Israel, that they put out of the camp every leper, and every one that hath an issue, and whosoever is defiled by the dead:
3 Both male and female shall ye put out, without the camp shall ye put them; that they defile not their camps, in the midst whereof I dwell.
4 And the children of Israel did so, and put them out without the camp: as the LORD spake unto Moses, so did the children of Israel.
Eugenics is an outgrowth of a deliberate misinterpretation of evolution. Smart evolution realizes that it’s a natural process and if human beings are to evolve to a higher form it’s going to happen on its. By attempting to steer that normal process eugenics interferes with it, and could outright prevent it, there’s a built in false assumption that these people can figure out which humans are “better” and steer evolution in that direction. The problem is they don’t really know what’s better, there are too many factors in natural selection for any group of people to really be able to figure out who the good breeding stock is now.
The reality is there’s always some crowd on the planet who use some part of their culture to boost their own ego and maltreat others. Some people abused to idea of Protestant Predestination saying that people whose lives sucked were supposed to have sucky lives so they shouldn’t be helped. Even now many people abuse the Hindu caste system in the same way. It doesn’t mean that of the culture is bad, it just means there’s somebody out there that can screw up anything.
You left out the part where Owen, the backslider, accepted geology and physics. Not all minions of Satan serve Darwin. There's Lyell, Einstein, Dirac, Bell and the rest of the creatures of darkness.
You must've missed something in my post at #40..
Are you a primate?.. If so its understandable (poor reading abilites) ;)
Like punctuation?
Historically it's the other way 'round. Eugenics has been practiced for thousands of years. The oldest surviving essay recommending human eugenics was written by Plato, but we know that animal breeding goes back many more thousands of years.
Darwin's theory was inspired in part by his discussions with animal breeders.
There really hasn't been a time in recorded history when the upper crust of society didn't openly practice eugenics, arranging the best possible marriages for their children. India regulated its eugenics ideology through the caste system.
Well that's one way to look at it, hosepipe! Another way is to say they are simply becoming fully what they were intended to be, so there's no transition from one creature to another, just the perfection of a specifically human nature. After all, God created human nature with the potentiality for this.
As you can see, I do tend to take the view that the human nature that God made is something fairly fixed and constant over time. That nature has both immanent (in time) and transcendent (timeless) extensions, which is imaged in the fact that we are comprised of body and spirit -- your donkey and rider metaphor. The born-again transfiguration is a movement from immanence to transcendence, not a movement of a "lower" species to a "higher" species. Or at least, that's how I view the problem, FWIW.
Maybe..
Could be... or born again is a metaphor about something indescribable.. If so we are talking about the same thing.. A transfiguration.. or even re-figuration.. or re-modeling..
I am glad you are a Bible student as am I, however the Numbers passage you quote enumerates one of God's rules for maintaining health within the Israelite camp. Being "put out of the camp" did not include killing or sterilizing these unfortunate people. In fact, there were rules for purification to enable these people readmittance.
"Historically it's the other way 'round. Eugenics has been practiced for thousands of years. The oldest surviving essay recommending human eugenics was written by Plato, but we know that animal breeding goes back many more thousands of years. |
It's about time someone mentioned this.
This ongoing attempt to falsify evolution through appeal to consequences is really getting tiresome. Bad logic is nothing more than bad logic.
Does Martin Luther's viscious antisemitism count?
It's well documented too that Darwin himself was also a serious racist.
Where is that documented? I find it surprising, given that he was an early proponent of the abolition of slavery.
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