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Screenwriter Ray Galton, who co-wrote the landmark British comedy series “Hancock’s Half Hour” and “Steptoe and Son,” has died at 88. Galton’s family said Saturday that he died Friday evening after a “long and heart-breaking battle with dementia.” […] Galton and (Alan) Simpson wrote “Hancock’s Half Hour” for popular post-war comedian Tony Hancock. Their biggest hit was “Steptoe and Son,” a sitcom about father-and-son junk dealers, which ran between 1962 and 1974. Producer Norman Lear adapted it into the U.S. sitcom “Sanford and Son.” …

In the mid-1800s, a cousin of Charles Darwin by the name of Francis Galton wrote a series of works expanding on an old idea of selective breeding in human beings. Galton’s theory became known as eugenics. At its core, eugenics was underpinned by an assumption that talent and genius were hereditary traits, and that deliberate breeding could improve the human race. Within decades, intellectuals were spending their entire careers studying these ideas, quickly spawning a number of different fields dedicated to ‘racial sciences.’ Scholars began closely examining racial differences and building volumes of statistics on everything ranging from intelligence to...

Eugenics … death of the defenceless The legacy of Darwin’s cousin Galton By Russell Grigg Few ideas have done more harm to the human race in the last 120 years than those of Sir Francis Galton. He founded the evolutionary pseudo-science of eugenics. Today, ethnic cleansing, the use of abortion to eliminate ‘defective’ unborn babies, infanticide, euthanasia, and the harvesting of unborn babies for research purposes all have a common foundation in the survival-of-the-fittest theory of eugenics. So who was Galton, what is eugenics, and how has it harmed humanity?...

Ed. Note: this is the first instalment of a detailed critique of a major New Scientist anti-creationist diatribe. This one deals with a substantial section in the article, which tries to downplay the Nazi reliance on Darwinian theories, and instead tries to smear Christianity as a cause of the Holocaust...

An Apology for Support of Eugenics (81175-C2-R9999)Add new resolution: Eugenics, the belief that certain “genetic” traits are good and others bad, is associated in the public mind mostly with the extreme eugenics policies of Adolf Hitler, which ultimately led to the Holocaust. The study of eugenics did not begin with Hitler or his German scientists, but rather was first promoted by Sir Francis Galton, in England. Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, who expanded on Darwin’s theories and applied them to the human population. In an article entitled "Hereditary Character and Talent" (published in two parts in MacMillan's Magazine, vol....

In 1967 and 1968, Japan, Europe and America were aflame with violence. From the London School of Economics, to the Sorbonne, from Japan to Rome and in dozens of cities across the United States, tens of thousands of students staged protests and sit-ins throughout the countries of the First World. While dozens of books with varying theories concerning the causes of this conflagration have been written, most agree implicitly or explicitly on one thing: post-war fecundity, the unusually high world-wide population of young people following World War II, was the fuel for the fire. The irony is rather interesting.