With eugenics, as with racism, all critics want is an honest acknowledgment of the sources, not butt-covering bafflegab. It doesn’t matter now except for the butt-covering bafflegab.
Tag: eugenics
Francis Galton (1822-1911), Darwin’s cousin, risks getting disappeared
We warned the Darwinians to take the racism and eugenics in their past seriously while there was time but they assumed that if they spoke in Darwin’s name, all would be forgiven.
PBS’s American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade
A friend writes to recommend it: American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen and I have watched many hundreds of them. As the movie documents, it started with Darwin, then moved on to Galton who spent his life developing the science of eugenics, then the American eugenics […]
Why genetic determinism can’t simply be disproven
Reviewing behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin’s Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, a history of medicine prof writes, Crude hereditarianism often re-emerges after major advances in biological knowledge: Darwinism begat eugenics; Mendelism begat worse eugenics. The flowering of medical genetics in the 1950s led to the notorious, now-debunked idea that men with an extra […]
Paper: “Dangerous tendencies” of Catholic theistic evolutionist included support for “racist eugenic practices”
Abstract: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin loved the world, but, theologically and spiritually, he often tried to leave it behind. This essay shows that from the 1920s until his death in 1955, Teilhard de Chardin unequivocally supported racist eugenic practices, praised the possibilities of the Nazi experiments, and looked down upon those who he deemed “imperfect” […]