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Eugenics

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    Eugenics

    OK, having just read "State of Fear" by Michael Crichton I thought I'd put in a little research...

    Charles Darwin's theories of evolution by natural selection rocked the scientific world in 1859, and prompted his cousin, Galton, to study human evolution. Galton's first book, Hereditary Genius (1869), analyzed famous European families and concluded that "genius," which he defined as the ability to succeed in life, tended to run in families. Galton believed that individuals inherited the traits that destined them to either success or failure. Thus, success resulted from biology, not from the wealth or poverty of a person's background, and controlled breeding might permanently improve the human race.

    Galton hoped to speed and direct human evolution. Writing in Inquiries into the Human Faculty and Its Development (1883), Galton defined eugenics as "the science of improving stock … to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had." Familiar with farmers' achievements in breeding more-valuable plants and animals, Galton believed that such methods were "equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants."

    Galton identified those fit folk who should have children and stigmatized those he deemed unfit for parenthood. He also believed then-accepted notions of "racial" superiority and inferiority, had more to do with class and cultural prejudice than with biological difference. Galton assumed that wealthy people like himself were fit, whereas poor folk were unfit. Northern European "white" people stood atop the evolutionary scale of fitness, followed by "whites" from southeast Europe, Asians, Native Americans, Africans, and Australian Aborigines.
    Eugenics is commonly associated with the Nazi racial hygiene program that began in 1933 and ended in May 1945, with Germany's defeat near the end of World War II. Although the German eugenics movement existed long before the Nazis came to power, scholars have shown that Nazi eugenicists were inspired by American eugenic studies and sterilization, as well as their antimiscegenation and immigration restriction laws.
    Convinced that "feeblemindedness" and other complex antisocial behaviors behaved like simple Mendelian traits, eugenicists lobbied for compulsory sterilization laws. Between 1907 and the mid-1930s, such laws were adopted by thirty-two American states. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld these laws in 1927, when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that, "the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination of schoolchildren is broad enough to cover the cutting of the fallopian tubes. … Three generations of imbeciles are enough." "Feebleminded" individuals were prominent among the more than 60,000 individuals sterilized in the United States under eugenic sterilization laws between 1927 and 1979.

    What a bloody eye opener! Social engineering on an even bigger scale than New Liebour!

    #2
    I like the Red headed ladies...does that count as Social engineering ??

    Comment


      #3
      It was only a very few years ago that Sweden got rid of its eugenics laws.

      Allegedly one of the singers in Abba is the product of a eugenic breeding program...
      Insanity: repeating the same actions, but expecting different results.
      threadeds website, and here's my blog.

      Comment


        #4
        Undertaken by the nazis

        Originally posted by threaded
        It was only a very few years ago that Sweden got rid of its eugenics laws.

        Allegedly one of the singers in Abba is the product of a eugenic breeding program...
        Not Abba, but the eugenics program.
        Mind you, it might explain a lot......
        Why not?

        Comment


          #5
          At last members of the board know what I have known for a long time. Hitler was a secular humanist. His ideology was based on his secular humanism. Thats what you get when secular humanism is left unchecked - 6 million dead Jews.
          Sola gratia

          Sola fide

          Soli Deo gloria

          Comment


            #6
            IIRC the breeding program was in Norway, and Swedens was forced sterilisation.
            Insanity: repeating the same actions, but expecting different results.
            threadeds website, and here's my blog.

            Comment


              #7
              Looney alert looney alert

              Originally posted by Chico
              At last members of the board know what I have known for a long time. Hitler was a secular humanist. His ideology was based on his secular humanism. Thats what you get when secular humanism is left unchecked - 6 million dead Jews.
              Mwahahaha.
              And did Hitler ask any of his generals to kill their own sons?
              Why not?

              Comment


                #8
                Originally posted by Chico
                At last members of the board know what I have known for a long time. Hitler was a secular humanist. His ideology was based on his secular humanism. Thats what you get when secular humanism is left unchecked - 6 million dead Jews.
                You haven't quite grasped the timeline here have you Chico...

                Eugenics is commonly associated with the Nazi racial hygiene program that began in 1933 and ended in May 1945, with Germany's defeat near the end of World War II. Although the German eugenics movement existed long before the Nazis came to power, scholars have shown that Nazi eugenicists were inspired by American eugenic studies and sterilization, as well as their antimiscegenation and immigration restriction laws.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Originally posted by Dundeegeorge
                  Not Abba, but the eugenics program.
                  Mind you, it might explain a lot......
                  The Yanks were at it first!

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Some of that true. The working class are all short and ugly.
                    bloggoth

                    If everything isn't black and white, I say, 'Why the hell not?'
                    John Wayne (My guru, not to be confused with my beloved prophet Jeremy Clarkson)

                    Comment

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