Replies

Now consider this... If Darwin is correct, science was not misused. The science of eugenics is sound, and the technology of eugenics was used as intended. The Nazi understood that it was just animal husbandry - objectively tried and true, scientifically testable and falsifiable. It works.

Darwin opened the door to animal husbandry on humans (Darwin's big revelation was that we’re all just different animals from the same tree, right?) and the subjective element was unleashed like Pandora's Box. An animal breeder can subjectively pick and choose whichever traits are desirable or undesirable. Runts can be eliminated as "unfit" or "burdensome" like pigs, or they can be kept and bred further for "cuteness", like dogs. Once humans are determined to be just animals, there is no objective reason to value one trait over another and it should not be surprising then that different breeders have different goals in mind for their livestock.

If the purpose of life really is just survival and producing fit offspring, then science should simply observe only that the fit survived and the unfit died. Nope science was not being misused... the only thing that was misused was the term "Human". Reduce the meaning of "human" to "just another animal", and eugenics is fair game, and the scientific data is well supported. Eugenics is only abhorrent to those who recognize that there is something transcendently special about humans.

Here is more from Hunter’s Civic Biology:

Parasitism and its Cost to Society. - Hundreds of families such as those described above exist to-day, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.
The Remedy. - If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country.

Above was taught as fact in schools and the perversion was not of animal husbandry or of Darwin's theory. The perversion was not even of science. The perversion was the definition of what it meant to be human. When man became a mere animal, it was only a matter of time till he was treated like one.

Darwin opened the door to animal husbandry on humans

Yes, it became backed by so-called science:

The influence primarily responsible for the modern eugenics movement was the establishment of the doctrine of organic evolution following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859.
—Samuel J. Holmes, Human Genetics, ch.25 (1936).

Here is more from Hunter’s Civic Biology:

That book got a lot of milage out of the Jukes and Kallikaks and Davenport. Hunter's civic biology and loads more stuff like it can be found here (along with William Jennings Bryan's essays) Inbred Science.

I like this one by Karl Pearson, addressed to an audience of surgeons:

Let me, even at the risk of talking about the familiar, sketch for you the broad outlines of Darwin's theory of evolutionary progress. The individual better fitted to its environment lived longer than its fellows, had more offspring, and these, inheriting its better fitness, raised the type of the race. The environment against which the individual had to struggle here was not only formed by the other members of its species, not only by its physical surroundings, but by the germs of disease of all types. According to Darwin -- and some of us still believe him to be right -- the ascent of man, physical and mental, was brought about by this survival of the fitter. Now, if you are going lo take Darwinism as your theory of life and apply it to human problems, you must not only believe it to be true, but you must set to, and demonstrate that it actually applies.
Darwin's theory means this, that if individuals are reared under a constant environment, and a larger percentage of them are killed off in the first year of life, then a smaller percentage of those remaining will die in the later years of life, because more of the weaklings have been killed off... Now if there be -- and I, for one, think that two independent lines of inquiry demonstrate that there is -- a fairly stringent selection of the weaker individuals by the mortality of infancy and childhood, what will happen, if by increased medical skill and by increased state support and private charity, we enable the weaklings to survive and to propagate their kind? Why, undoubtedly we shall have a weaker race... Surely here is an antinomy -- a fundamental opposition between medical progress and the science of national eugenics, of race efficiency. Gentlemen, I venture to think it is an antinomy, and will remain one until the nation at large recognises as a fundamental doctrine the principle that everyone, being born, has the right to live, but the right to live does not in itself convey the right to everyone to reproduce their kind... Our social instincts, our common humanity enforce upon us the conception that each person born has the right to live, yet this right essentially connotes a suspension of the full intensity of natural selection. Darwinism and medical progress are opposed forces, and we shall gain nothing by screening that fact, or, in opposition to ample evidence, asserting that Darwinism has no application to civilised man... I say that only a very thorough eugenic policy can possibly save our race from the evils which must flow from the antagonism between natural selection and medical progress.

The arrogance of evolutionists is striking. Imagine it, telling an audience of surgeons that the medical profession is in conflict with Darwinism, and they have to do something about it.

Reduce the meaning of "human" to "just another animal", and eugenics is fair game, and the scientific data is well supported. Eugenics is only abhorrent to those who recognize that there is something transcendently special about humans.

Yes, good point. That's the reason why some of Haeckel's nonsense theories were put into textbooks, even though everyone knew they were false. If you can get the public to believe men have no souls and human embryos are just fish or chickens, then abortion, euthanasia and all that becomes easier to sell.