From J.D. Watson at the DNA Learning Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory: (Go to the link for the video)
It's appropriate as well that the fact that eugenics is a corollary to evolutionary theory would be emphasized by Dr. Watson, who was the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory during the decades after it had been the Eugenic Records Office, which merged with the Station for Experimental Evolution, under director Charles Davenport, America's preeminent eugenicist. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was the nidus of American eugenics, and the legislative tsunami by which sixty thousand Americans were involuntarily sterilized began and was organized for decades at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The eugenic program at Cold Spring Harbor was the inspiration for the 1933 Nazi eugenic sterilization laws.
Watson, of course, asserts that eugenics should be voluntary, not state-mandated. Yet in doing so he merely echos the refurbishing of post-Nazi eugenics by Fredrick Henry Osborn. Osborn, a founding member of the American Eugenics Society, restructured the eugenics movement in the 1950's and 1960's, covering up its totalitarian roots and marketing it as "voluntary unconscious selection", a corrective to natural selection impaired by human domestication (i.e. civilization).
Osborn's suggested motto for the New Eugenics was "Every Child a Wanted Child", which now adorns Planned Parenthood's website and is available on buttons from pro-abortion organizations.
The slogan under the DNA Learning Center moniker on the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's website is
If you don't feel a chill, you're not reading carefully enough.
"Eugenics is sort of self correcting your evolution, and the message I have is that individuals should direct the evolution of their descendants, don't let the State do it. I think it would be irresponsible not to direct your evolution if you could, in the sense that you could have a healthy child versus an unhealthy child, I think it is irresponsible not to try and direct the evolution to produce a human being who would be an asset to the world as well as to himself."So much for the bizarre claim by some Darwinists and their apologists that eugenics had no real dependence on evolutionary theory. As Watson points out, eugenics only makes sense as a correction to evolution. No one thought in the countless millennia before Darwin to breed man like an animal, because no one thought of man as an animal evolved by natural selection, gone soft under domestication.
It's appropriate as well that the fact that eugenics is a corollary to evolutionary theory would be emphasized by Dr. Watson, who was the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory during the decades after it had been the Eugenic Records Office, which merged with the Station for Experimental Evolution, under director Charles Davenport, America's preeminent eugenicist. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was the nidus of American eugenics, and the legislative tsunami by which sixty thousand Americans were involuntarily sterilized began and was organized for decades at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The eugenic program at Cold Spring Harbor was the inspiration for the 1933 Nazi eugenic sterilization laws.
Watson, of course, asserts that eugenics should be voluntary, not state-mandated. Yet in doing so he merely echos the refurbishing of post-Nazi eugenics by Fredrick Henry Osborn. Osborn, a founding member of the American Eugenics Society, restructured the eugenics movement in the 1950's and 1960's, covering up its totalitarian roots and marketing it as "voluntary unconscious selection", a corrective to natural selection impaired by human domestication (i.e. civilization).
Osborn's suggested motto for the New Eugenics was "Every Child a Wanted Child", which now adorns Planned Parenthood's website and is available on buttons from pro-abortion organizations.
The slogan under the DNA Learning Center moniker on the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's website is
"Preparing students and families to thrive in the gene age"
If you don't feel a chill, you're not reading carefully enough.
When you said JD Watson, I didn't realize that you were referring to James Watson of the famous Watson and Crick duo.
ReplyDeleteDr. Watson is a brilliant scientist. He is also a true believer in the theory of evolution and a casual racist. I think he thinks that he should follow the science wherever it leads, without fear of coming to conclusions that offend people. Watson was under investigation in Britain in 2007 for a statement he made at a conference: "All our social policies are based on the fact that [Africans'] intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really."
I was thinking about that quote the other day when you, Dr. Egnor, were having one of your usual arguments with Hoo, KW, Bachfiend, et al, about racism and evolution. Occasionally, when you back them in the corner, you can get one of these evolution-supporters to admit that the historical origins of the theory are intertwined with racism, but they will never admit that the associated racism persists to this day.
Mark the calender, liberals have finally found one place where they don't see subtle racism lurking beneath the surface! It's a first.
If you don't believe that the racist past of evolution is still around, just ask Dr. James Watson, winner of the Noble Prize. You liberals like the Nobel Prize don't you? We're supposed to be impressed with that.
Think about it this way. The racism of the evolution movement, just like racism in general, started to be embarrassing somewhere around the year 1964. So the proponents of the theory stopped talking about its racial aspects and implications, even if they didn't stop believing them.
But hey, don't let a little accusation of racism ruin your faith in the theory. If you think that men and apes descended from common ancestors, then go ahead and defend your racist theory. Follow the science wherever it goes.
The Torch
jd watson was talking about african cabbages, you fool!
Deletenaidoo
Exactly. Nothing to see here... Move along.
Delete;-)
Watson: "Eugenics is sort of self correcting your evolution..."
ReplyDeleteIn other words, eugenics is Intelligent Design, guided evolution, with a goal "to produce a human being who would be an asset to the world". Much like ranchers, who shop around to buy the very best semen from tested bulls to improve the herd.
Thank you, Doctor, for your tireless efforts to unearth the true history of the eugenics movement. It is imperative that the historical facts be available in the public square so that all may participate equally in the debate.
Egnor: No one thought in the countless millennia before Darwin to breed man like an animal, because no one thought of man as an animal evolved by natural selection, gone soft under domestication.
ReplyDeleteDoc, you can be so naive sometimes that it is pretty damn charming.
Slave breeding in the United States was practiced in the early 19th century. If I am not mistaken, that was well before Charles Darwin published his Origin.
I am losing interest to this blog. One can only watch a train wreck for so long.
Hoo
Doc: "no one thought of man as an animal evolved by natural selection, gone soft under domestication"
DeleteRe: the rationale of slave breeding...
Several factors coalesced to make the breeding of slaves a common practice by the end of the 18th century, chief among them the dehumanization of slaves through the enactment of laws and practices that transformed the view of slaves from "personhood" into "thinghood."
--- Wiki: Slave Breeding (as cited in previous comment)
Eugenics goes back at least as far as the old Greeks. Link.
DeleteThe only reason why Egnor so desperately tries to link it to evolution is because he knows that evolutionary science has shown the Adam & Eve story for the childish fairy tale that it is. Making the sheeple angry with evolution, hoping it will prevent them from thinking.
Your children and grandchildren will piss on your grave, Egnor, for siding with the liars and frauds on this one.
Eugenics is a scientific program to correct the "degradation" of the human gene pool caused by the impairment of natural selection by civilization. It was invented as a science by Francis Galton in 1869, and named by him a decade later.
DeleteThere have been pro-natalist and anti-natalist viewpoints for all of recorded history, but none of them were scientific programs to improve the human gene pool that was degraded by impediment of natural selection.
A caveman choosing a wife because she looked fertile is not the same thing as a Nazi doctor selecting a handicapped child for sterilization or extermination because she might defile the Aryan gene pool.
Doc,
DeleteSlave owners of the early 19th century didn't use the concept of a gene pool because the concept wasn't invented. They used whatever available justifications at the time.
Slave breeding predated Darwin. That contradicts your point, so you should concede it.
Hoo
Slave breeding did precede Darwin. And it was necessary to justify that evil by declaring slaves to be subhuman. It was a tough argument to make. And those who argued for it on purely intellectual grounds lost. At least in Western civilization.
DeleteUntil Darwin.
Darwin put a "scientific" imprimatur on the notion of humans as animals. Post-Darwin, it was not just "subhuman" slaves who were potential objects of a breeding program, it was the entire human species.
And the temptations were great. Because the power to control the genetic destiny of mankind is a great and terrible power. And someone must decide what traits will be selected for and against. Thus was born eugenics within the "scientific" Progressive intellectual community. To improve the assets and the general happiness of the Collective.
Darwinism took the pedestrian depravity of humanity and gave it a National Science Foundation grant. It provided an scientific imprimatur to human breeding, racism, war, and a host of evil.
DeleteDarwinism made evil into science.
You got it backwards as usual, doc.
DeletePeople with an agenda used scientific jargon to accomplish immoral things. Fixed that for ya.
You can abuse science to no end. Deepack Chopra blather about quantum consciousness. That does not discredit quantum physics.
Hoo
The fact that Darwin's theory is the basis for eugenic science is not evidence against the truth of Darwin's theory, any more than the fact that quantum mechanics is the basis for nuclear fission and the Hiroshima bomb is evidence against the truth of quantum mechanics.
DeleteNo one has in fact argued either.
But the fact that Darwin's theory is the basis for eugenics is a fact, and that is worth something. It is also worth something to know how far Darwinists will go to lie about eugenics. Quite far, it seems.
And if Darwinism is not true as science, the fact that it is the basis for eugenics suggests that discrediting it with as much vigor as possible is morally necessary.
Egnor: The fact that Darwin's theory is the basis for eugenic science is not evidence against the truth of Darwin's theory, any more than the fact that quantum mechanics is the basis for nuclear fission and the Hiroshima bomb is evidence against the truth of quantum mechanics.
ReplyDeleteI recall making that point before.
Egnor: But the fact that Darwin's theory is the basis for eugenics is a fact, and that is worth something.
That and 4 bucks buys you a latte at Starbucks.
Egnor: And if Darwinism is not true as science, the fact that it is the basis for eugenics suggests that discrediting it with as much vigor as possible is morally necessary.
The stupid is strong here. Try it with quantum mechanics (QM). "If QM is not valid, the fact that it is the basis for the Hiroshima bomb suggests hat discrediting it with as much vigor as possible is morally necessary."
Well, for starters you need to establish that QM is not valid. Ditto theory of evolution. This is where you might want to start directing your efforts.
Hoo
Smegnor: No one thought in the countless millennia before Darwin to breed man like an animal, because no one thought of man as an animal evolved by natural selection, gone soft under domestication.
ReplyDeleteWow, that's stupid. How easy is it to refute this? We could start with eugenicists themselves, who often insisted that eugenics had been practiced by Christians or Jews or white people etc. for thousands of years, it was a tradition, and that the darn "modernists" had spoiled traditional values (selective breeding) with all their equality twaddle.
But, that is what eugenicists actually wrote themselves, rather than what creationists started writing about them, post-1970.
The idiocy of Smegnor writing "No one thought in the countless millennia before Darwin to breed man like an animal" is so deep that I hardly know where to begin Diogenizing it, but here's a start.
Thomas Jefferson on black slaves: "The circumstances of superior beauty is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic a nimals; why not in that of man” [Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia]
This classical quote from Tacitus is important because it refers to the Germans, and it was in fact cited by the Nazis (who were anti-Darwinist and denied macroevolution, insisting that their race had been created in the image of God) to justify their eugenic program, on the grounds that eugenics and racial purity were the traditional behavior of Germans, which the liberals and Jews had deranged with their revolting notions of equality.
Tacitus: “Personally I associate myself with the opinions of those who hold that in the peoples of Germany there has been given to the world a race unmixed by intermarriage with other races, a peculiar people, and pure, like no one but themselves, whence it comes that their physique is identical: fierce blue eyes, red hair, tall frames; powerful only spasmodically, not correspondingly tolerant of labour and hard work, and by no means habituated to bearing thirst and heat; to cold and hunger, thanks to the climate and the soil, they are accustomed.” [Tacitus, Germania 3.4]
And everyone knows the Spartans practiced eugenics by killing deformed babies.
Here it is spelled out by Plato in his Republic:
Plato: "And if care was not taken in the breeding, your dogs and birds would greatly deteriorate? Undoubtedly. Good heavens! my dear friend, I said, what consummate skill will our rulers need if the same principle holds of the human species! . . . [T]he principle has been already laid down that the best of either sex should be united with the best as often, and the inferior with the inferior, as seldom as possible; and that they should rear the offspring of the one sort of union, but not of the other, if the flock is to be maintained in first-rate condition. Now these goings on must be a secret which the rulers only know, or there will be a further danger of our herd, as the guardians may be termed, breaking out into rebellion." [Plato, The Republic, Book V]
"A secret which the rulers only know." You know, like the non-existence of God and the reality of evolution, which the ID elites know and try to conceal from the plebes.
Now compare the above to Smegnor's story: "No one thought in the countless millennia before Darwin to breed man like an animal". Pathetic.
Egnor: Eugenics is a scientific program to correct the "degradation" of the human gene pool caused by the impairment of natural selection by civilization. It was invented as a science by Francis Galton in 1869, and named by him a decade later.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing Egnor got right is that the word "eugenics" was coined after Darwin was dead. The idea, however, predated the Origin of Species.
In fact, the historian John Waller showed the Victorian era, pre-Darwin was dominated by conservative, traditional ideas that moral and intellectual qualities are inherited in familes, and by explicit calls for eugenics-oriented social intervention.
"Ideas of Heredity, Reproduction and Eugenics in Britain, 1800-1875" John Waller. (Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 32, 457–489, 2001)
I'll copy and paste a quote from the pre-Darwin era when I get a chance.
Diogenes:
DeleteI look forward to it.
Well, here's quote to start with.
DeleteThis is from 1851, eight years before the publication of Origin of Species.
William Farr, 1851: :If by any judicious means the increase of the incurably criminal, idle, insane, idiotic, or unhappily organized parts of the population can be without cruelty repressed, under a system of religious discipline, to a greater extent than it is at present by the selection that pervades, more or less, the whole system of English marriages,—the character and qualities of the race will be immeasurably improved.” (Farr, Census Report, 1851, pp. xliv—vii)
Note that Farr uses the word "selection" eight years before Darwin published The Origin. Obviously, the idea of natural selection in some form was widespread in Victorian society pre-Darwin, but it did not connect different kinds of animals or plants and no one thought it could produce complex new organs with interdependent parts.
The concept of natural selection pre-Darwin was conservative: it could push a species back to the ideal type envisioned by God. It couldn't connect e.g. birds to dinosaurs.
Note also that Farr imagines his selective breeding program as "religious discipline", not atheistic.
And here's another pre-Darwin quote on selective breeding of humans by analogy to animals. This one is historically important because Nazi ideologues cited it as evidence that eugenics had in fact traditionally been practiced by the German people for a millennium and a half, before modernism deranged traditional behavior.
DeleteFrederick the Great (1712-1786): "It annoys me to see how much trouble is taken to cultivate pineapples, bananas and other exotic plants in this rough climate, when so little care is given to the human race. Whatever people say, a human being is more valuable than all the pineapples in the world. He is the plant we must breed-, he deserves all our trouble and care, for he is the ornament and the glory of the Fatherland."
Now compare the above to Smegnor's statement: "No one thought in the countless millennia before Darwin to breed man like an animal."
The Frederick the Great quote was cited by the Nazi ideologue R. W. Darré in A New Aristocracy Based on Blood and Soil (1930). It has a whole chapter on eugenics, extracted in Barbara Miller's Nazi Ideology Before 1933, p. 111.
The chapter in Darré's Nazi book is quite long but makes no mention of Charles Darwin, Darwinismus,Descendezntheorie (theory of descent) or anything like that. Darré's main argument for eugenics is that each rank or caste of the German people had eugenic practices, and laws against race-mixing for a millennium and a half, until modernity deranged the German people's normal eugenic behavior, a derangement which he dates to around a century previously, which would be 1830.
DeleteThis is a common line of argument used by eugenicists-- the people normally practiced eugenics, but liberals or moderns have deranged people's normal behavior with their delusions of equality, so now extreme measures must be taken to return to tradition.
R. W. Darré': The fact that today's German sees any effort to couple breeding questions with those of the public good as contrary to idealism is in itself a peculiarity in intellectual history. What these Germans now condemn was for centuries considered by our people to be an expression of custom and morality... In Germany until well into the nineteenth century, not only the nobility, but also groups of craftsmen and Germanic peasants very consciously pursued a policy of selective breeding.
It is surprising to discover in the old traditions the extent to which German marriage laws were filled with wisdom about the interdependence of blood and culture, especially in those cases
where the Germans intentionally erected a blood barrier, as for example toward the Slavs. Today our people seem to have lost all this wisdom... But it is not so that the application of this term to human propagation would import something new from animal and plant breeding! No, in earlier times the word "breeding" was used for everything living... It is unimportant whether this knowledge of heredity has been gained by belief in a divine creation of the clan, or by belief in descent from an original ancestor, or by observation of human life, or by both of these together... or whether one uses modern instruments, like calipers, tape measure... learned experiments and calculations, to establish that physical and mental abilities are indeed hereditary...
If therefore until about a hundred years ago no journeyman-- not to speak of noblemen or urban patricians-- could become a master without having proved that be was born in "legal wedlock," and that for his four grandparents the same was true, it proves that for one and a half millennia German culture consciously built upon the concept of breeding: a concept of breeding which controlled the legal order and was itself conditioned by it, and which must be seen as the rock upon which the culture of the German people rested, as if created for eternity. [R. W. Darré, A New Aristocracy Based on Blood and Soil (1930), chapter "Marriage Laws and the Principles of Breeding”. Cited in Barbara Miller's Nazi Ideology Before 1933, p. 111-3.]
And so on.
"If you don't feel a chill, you're not reading carefully enough."
ReplyDeleteBut leftists *do* get a chill when they read that ... the difference being that our chill is an "Oh, no!" whereas theirs is an "Ohh! Myyy!"
Great thread.
ReplyDeleteEvolution is indeed all about selection on mutations.
So in the past and present evolutionism leads logically to the conclusion that selection on mankind can make a better or worse mankind.
Then it went from there, here and there.
I understand few diseases are sent to offspring. I don't know the stats.
However it all smells of intrusive control over the people.
It also hints at historic ideas of making a superior type of people.
This is from evolutionism without accusing many or most. Stats again.
It is from Christianity and so creationism that the innate value of a human being and innate smarts that makes human breeding absurd.
People are not a series of attributes but truly made in God's image and can be fantastic. In fact don't interfere with mankind.
By the way every child is a wanted child in our nations.
Abortionists use such slogans to avoid the issue of whether a "fetus" is a human being.
Poverty of a bad case indeed.