Of course if there ever had been a truly genuine Peace Process, these fundamental matters, would in all the time I and others have given it, have already been addressed in a transparent way. The concept of "social Darwinism"has it's origins, in the class struggle of post industrial revolution England, and is often used as a justification and evolutionary model for a scum state, using it as a biological basis for neo-apartheid, as in place like Israel and the former South Africa. Drawing on social Darwinism, Orange men and Zionists of the powerful International eugenics movement, rationalize it as "improving" the human genetic stock, whether it be blue shirted Mayo mountain peasants or Fianna Fail bog trotters, garbed in Offaly shirts or even their own goat shaggers from Markethill.
As an alternative to the McGuinness/Robinson, doctrine and social policies of devolution, that includes cultivating a separate scum state gene pool from the survivors of a cultivated, medicated, moronic, incestious, underclass of paedophiles and people of no property, for unbridled indentured slavery, the following piece, examines the evolution of eugenics, so that the lessons of history, are not forgotten or ignored, by the few remaining class conscious activists, in the two scum states of Ireland. The author of the article below is Dan Kevles, a historian and a professor of history at Yale. It has been adapted with the permission of Harvard University Press, from the 1995 Preface to, In the Name of Eugenics,
Eugenics
The specter of eugenics hovers over virtually all contemporary developments in human genetics. Eugenics was rooted in the social Darwinism of the late 19th century, a period in which notions of fitness, competition, and biological rationalizations of inequality were popular. At the time, a growing number of theorists introduced Darwinian analogies of "survival of the fittest" into social argument. Many social Darwinists insisted that biology was destiny, at least for the unfit, and that a broad spectrum of socially deleterious traits, ranging from "pauperism" to mental illness, resulted from heredity.
The word "eugenics" was coined in 1883 by the English scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, to promote the ideal of perfecting the human race by, as he put it, getting rid of its "undesirables" while multiplying its "desirables" -- that is, by encouraging the procreation of the social Darwinian fit and discouraging that of the unfit. In Galton's day, the science of genetics was not yet understood. Nevertheless, Darwin's theory of evolution taught that species did change as a result of natural selection, and it was well known that by artificial selection a farmer could obtain permanent breeds of plants and animals strong in particular characteristics. Galton wondered, "Could not the race of men be similarly improved?"
Heyday of Eugenics
Eugenics took popular hold after the turn of the 20th century, flourishing for several decades. During its heyday, social prejudice suffused human genetics, often attributing to genetics social differences that were actually rooted in race and class. After World War II, however, biologists in the United States and Britain fought -- by and large successfully -- toemancipate human genetics from such biases in order to establish it as a solid field of science that would explain the complexities of human heredity and assist medicine by illuminating the relationship of genetics to disease.
During the past 50 years, molecular geneticists have located, isolated, manipulated, and analyzed thousands of human genes, including many implicated in diseases and other conditions. Their work has been greatly accelerated by theHuman Genome Project, which began in the late 1980s and which in 2001 completed a first draft of the entire sequence of DNA in the human genome.
In the long run, human genetic knowledge will very likely lead to therapies and cures for many diseases. But some fear that the techniques of gene therapy, embryo selection, and the engineering of sperm could all become tools of a kind of human genetic manipulation that would be offensive to humane and egalitarian values. The manipulation could discriminate against socially costly or devalued groups and individuals.
The Bell Curve sparks controversy
These anxieties are rooted in thesocial tensions that beset contemporary society. They were heightened by the recent renewal of assertions -- notably in The Bell Curve,Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein's widely discussed book of 1994 -- that racial groups differ from each other in their innate mental capacities. Murray and Herrnstein reported that the principal difference lies between whites on the one side, and Latinos and, especially, blacks on the other. Blacks on average score 15 points lower than whites on IQ tests.Herrnstein and Murray concluded that therefore blacks as a group are less intelligent than whites. They held that genes place blacks, along with whites of comparable test performance, disproportionately in poverty, in prison, on the welfare rolls, and in the statistics of illegitimate births. They insisted that the high maternity rate of low-income groups is fostering "dysgenics," the increase of inadequate genes in the population.
Such claims are not new. They formed part of the core of the eugenics movement that swept through the Anglo-American world and many other countries during the first third of the 20th century. In the United States, however, the biological distinctions that mainly obsessed eugenicists were not those between whites and blacks, but those then believed to divide whites -- differences between the old-stock white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant majority and the numerous Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.
Eugenicists, who were themselves predominantly of the old majority, considered scholastic intelligence -- the kind indicated in IQ tests -- a paramount measure of human merit, ignoring other abilities such as business acumen and artistic creativity that such tests did not capture. To them, IQ tests appeared to determine that the newer immigrants were innately endowed with low intelligence, while their high birth rates seemed to indicate that they were spreading inferior genes into the population at a rapid rate. In the interest of reducing the proportion of the "less fit" in society, eugenicists in the United States helped restrict immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. They promoted the passage of eugenic sterilization laws that disproportionately threatened lower-income groups. The laws and programs they fostered supplied a model for the Nazis, who sterilized several hundred thousand people and, brandishing their research into the genetics of individual and racial differences, claimed scientific justifications for the Holocaust
Distinctions of "race" Discredited
The Nazi horrors discredited eugenics as a social program.Studies in social and biological science repudiated its stigmatizing theories of human difference, showing that what it took to be distinctions of race were actually those of ethnicity. In the United States, the social policies that reduced discrimination and expanded opportunity worked with the passage of time to produce their salubrious effects among the newer immigrants and their descendants, including socioeconomic improvement and, eventually, par performance on IQ tests. Between the 1930s and the 1980s, whites' scores on such tests rose some 14 points. Blacks' scores rose, too, though not as much. Still, along with the change in whites' scores, the increase indicates thattest results are not rigidly fixed by genes, but are also sensitive to changes in education, opportunity, and scholastic ambition.
Blacks have resided on the American continent for the better part of four centuries; nevertheless, it is mainly since World War II -- but even more so since the 1960s -- that they have passed on their migration to freedom from a United States that was legally segregated and in countless ways racially oppressive to the contemporary nation, where, although racism continues its poisonous work, new standards of law and tolerance better protect dignity and beckon ambition. In a sense, blacks as a community have only just embarked on the journey that many white immigrant groups took several generations to complete. It is not unreasonable to conceive that, as it was for those white minorities, so it will be -- given enough time and good will -- for nonwhite minorities, including the flood of recent newcomers to the United States.
The roots of human behaviors and capacities are complicated.Attempts to probe them for the role of genes may try to allow for contemporary environmental differences, but they tend to be blind to the cultural and psychological impact of past experience. They rely on measures that fail to capture attitudes, aspirations, expectations, and, above all, social hope. In short, they can be blind to the legacy of history.
The word "eugenics" was coined in 1883 by the English scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, to promote the ideal of perfecting the human race by, as he put it, getting rid of its "undesirables" while multiplying its "desirables" -- that is, by encouraging the procreation of the social Darwinian fit and discouraging that of the unfit. In Galton's day, the science of genetics was not yet understood. Nevertheless, Darwin's theory of evolution taught that species did change as a result of natural selection, and it was well known that by artificial selection a farmer could obtain permanent breeds of plants and animals strong in particular characteristics. Galton wondered, "Could not the race of men be similarly improved?"
Heyday of Eugenics
Eugenics took popular hold after the turn of the 20th century, flourishing for several decades. During its heyday, social prejudice suffused human genetics, often attributing to genetics social differences that were actually rooted in race and class. After World War II, however, biologists in the United States and Britain fought -- by and large successfully -- toemancipate human genetics from such biases in order to establish it as a solid field of science that would explain the complexities of human heredity and assist medicine by illuminating the relationship of genetics to disease.
During the past 50 years, molecular geneticists have located, isolated, manipulated, and analyzed thousands of human genes, including many implicated in diseases and other conditions. Their work has been greatly accelerated by theHuman Genome Project, which began in the late 1980s and which in 2001 completed a first draft of the entire sequence of DNA in the human genome.
In the long run, human genetic knowledge will very likely lead to therapies and cures for many diseases. But some fear that the techniques of gene therapy, embryo selection, and the engineering of sperm could all become tools of a kind of human genetic manipulation that would be offensive to humane and egalitarian values. The manipulation could discriminate against socially costly or devalued groups and individuals.
The Bell Curve sparks controversy
These anxieties are rooted in thesocial tensions that beset contemporary society. They were heightened by the recent renewal of assertions -- notably in The Bell Curve,Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein's widely discussed book of 1994 -- that racial groups differ from each other in their innate mental capacities. Murray and Herrnstein reported that the principal difference lies between whites on the one side, and Latinos and, especially, blacks on the other. Blacks on average score 15 points lower than whites on IQ tests.Herrnstein and Murray concluded that therefore blacks as a group are less intelligent than whites. They held that genes place blacks, along with whites of comparable test performance, disproportionately in poverty, in prison, on the welfare rolls, and in the statistics of illegitimate births. They insisted that the high maternity rate of low-income groups is fostering "dysgenics," the increase of inadequate genes in the population.
Such claims are not new. They formed part of the core of the eugenics movement that swept through the Anglo-American world and many other countries during the first third of the 20th century. In the United States, however, the biological distinctions that mainly obsessed eugenicists were not those between whites and blacks, but those then believed to divide whites -- differences between the old-stock white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant majority and the numerous Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.
Eugenicists, who were themselves predominantly of the old majority, considered scholastic intelligence -- the kind indicated in IQ tests -- a paramount measure of human merit, ignoring other abilities such as business acumen and artistic creativity that such tests did not capture. To them, IQ tests appeared to determine that the newer immigrants were innately endowed with low intelligence, while their high birth rates seemed to indicate that they were spreading inferior genes into the population at a rapid rate. In the interest of reducing the proportion of the "less fit" in society, eugenicists in the United States helped restrict immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. They promoted the passage of eugenic sterilization laws that disproportionately threatened lower-income groups. The laws and programs they fostered supplied a model for the Nazis, who sterilized several hundred thousand people and, brandishing their research into the genetics of individual and racial differences, claimed scientific justifications for the Holocaust
Distinctions of "race" Discredited
The Nazi horrors discredited eugenics as a social program.Studies in social and biological science repudiated its stigmatizing theories of human difference, showing that what it took to be distinctions of race were actually those of ethnicity. In the United States, the social policies that reduced discrimination and expanded opportunity worked with the passage of time to produce their salubrious effects among the newer immigrants and their descendants, including socioeconomic improvement and, eventually, par performance on IQ tests. Between the 1930s and the 1980s, whites' scores on such tests rose some 14 points. Blacks' scores rose, too, though not as much. Still, along with the change in whites' scores, the increase indicates thattest results are not rigidly fixed by genes, but are also sensitive to changes in education, opportunity, and scholastic ambition.
Blacks have resided on the American continent for the better part of four centuries; nevertheless, it is mainly since World War II -- but even more so since the 1960s -- that they have passed on their migration to freedom from a United States that was legally segregated and in countless ways racially oppressive to the contemporary nation, where, although racism continues its poisonous work, new standards of law and tolerance better protect dignity and beckon ambition. In a sense, blacks as a community have only just embarked on the journey that many white immigrant groups took several generations to complete. It is not unreasonable to conceive that, as it was for those white minorities, so it will be -- given enough time and good will -- for nonwhite minorities, including the flood of recent newcomers to the United States.
The roots of human behaviors and capacities are complicated.Attempts to probe them for the role of genes may try to allow for contemporary environmental differences, but they tend to be blind to the cultural and psychological impact of past experience. They rely on measures that fail to capture attitudes, aspirations, expectations, and, above all, social hope. In short, they can be blind to the legacy of history.
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