FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE

Seeking Ancestry in DNA Ties Uncovered by Tests ( Amy Harmon, New York Times, April 12th, 2006)

Alan Moldawer's adopted twins, Matt and Andrew, had always thought of themselves as white. But when it came time for them to apply to college last year, Mr. Moldawer thought it might be worth investigating the origins of their slightly tan-tinted skin, with a new DNA kit that he had heard could determine an individual's genetic ancestry.

The results, designating the boys 9 percent Native American and 11 percent northern African, arrived too late for the admissions process. But Mr. Moldawer, a business executive in Silver Spring, Md., says they could be useful in obtaining financial aid.

"Naturally when you're applying to college you're looking at how your genetic status might help you," said Mr. Moldawer, who knows that the twins' birth parents are white, but has little information about their extended family. "I have three kids going now, and you can bet that any advantage we can take we will."[...]

Given the tests' speculative nature, it seems unlikely that colleges, governments and other institutions will embrace them. But that has not stopped many test-takers from adopting new DNA-based ethnicities — and a sense of entitlement to the privileges typically reserved for them.

Prospective employees with white skin are using the tests to apply as minority candidates, while some with black skin are citing their European ancestry in claiming inheritance rights.

One Christian is using the test to claim Jewish genetic ancestry and to demand Israeli citizenship, and Americans of every shade are staking a DNA claim to Indian scholarships, health services and casino money.

"This is not just somebody's desire to go find out whether their grandfather is Polish," said Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University who has studied the social impact of the tests. "It's about access to money and power."

Darwinism, after being all the rage for close to a century, fell into disfavour for a few decades after World War II. Having so clearly been the intellectual plinth upon which eugenics, scientifically-respectable racism and the horrors of the Holocaust stood, the world had no stomach for its noxious view of mankind, and it retreated to the lab. It was only with the advent of Neo-Darwinists like Dawkins and Dennett in the 1970's that it was resurrected to a receptive public. Historical memories had faded, and it was easy to convince everyone that Jim Crow, the sterilization of “imbeciles” and the Holocaust itself were due entirely to atavistic, uneducated, religiously-inspired ignorance. That they were, in fact, built on a superstructure of cutting-edged scientific thinking from Berlin to Princeton, and were dinner conversations of choice from the nation’s best salons to the White House, was easily hidden from the young boomer iconoclasts so desperate to equate the past with error and celebrate the modern as intrinsically superior.

Today, the march of Darwinism and its handmaiden, genetic engineering, is not advanced by instilling fears of being swarmed by inferior races or “morons”. Rather, it is done by throwing up the spectre of the tragically ill child and promising he/she shall be cured if only society drops the reins of faith, morality and any other archaic reservations that fetter the glorious freedom of unrestrained scientific inquiry. The argument is different, but the consequences will be just as ugly.