AT THE INTERSECTION OF "SCIENCE" AND POLITICS:

The Darwinian Basis for Eugenics: a review of Darwin Day in America. By John G. West (Anne Barbeau Gardiner. September 2008, New Oxford Review)

Darwinists are always trying to set a distance between the theory of evolution and the eugenics movement, but West cites Darwin, in The Descent, as approving of how "the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated" among "savages," and disapproving of how civilized men "build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick," with the result that "the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind." Then, comparing man to livestock, Darwin added, "no one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man." After this statement, he gave lip service to compassion for the weak, but the implication remained that such compassion undercut the survival of the human race. Darwin again complained about how "the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members." He would return to this point in his last conversations with Alfred Russel Wallace, speaking "very gloomily on the future of humanity" because "in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive." (Although Herbert Spencer coined the phrase "survival of the fittest," Darwin readily appropriated it as an "accurate" description of natural selection.) The Darwinian basis for eugenics is often down­played, West observes, yet it is a fact that eugenicists drew their "inspiration" directly from Darwinian biology. A number of the chief eugenicists of the early 20th century declared that natural selection was the "law" they followed to improve the race. Moreover, the American leaders in eugenics, who were "largely university-trained biologists and doctors" affiliated with places like Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Stan­ford, and the Museum of Natural History, presented eugenics as biologically "justified." Between 1920 and 1939, West shows, Darwin's theory was constantly used in high-school biology textbooks to support eugenics, something that shows how much mainstream science accepted this form of population control. The book that Darwinist schoolteacher John Scopes was using in his Tennessee high-school classroom before his infamous "Monkey Trial" was G.W. Hunter's Civil Biology (1914), which followed the trend of advocating eugenics on Darwinian grounds. There Hunter spoke of "parasites" in society who, if they "were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading."

Scholars today place the blame for the eugenics debacle on politicians, but West finds it more accurate to describe the movement as "an effort by scientists to dictate government social policy based on their presumed scientific expertise." This was the first time they used science "to expand the power of the state over social matters."

Scholars also turn a blind eye to the argument for racism that eugenicists drew from The Descent. Darwin there claimed that the break between apes and man in evolution fell "between the negro or Australian and the gorilla." West argues that Darwin's allegation about blacks belonging to "a more primitive stage of human evolution" soon became a powerful scientific rationale for racist public policies, including laws against miscegenation.

The effect of Darwinian materialism on criminal law was deadly too. In 1876, Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso argued that criminals were a "throwback to earlier stages of Darwinian evolution," and in 1924 Clar­ence Darrow argued (in defense of Leopold and Loeb) that criminals were "programmed for crime by material forces over which they had no control." Since eugenicists believed that criminal tendencies were inherited, they strove to curtail the breeding of groups that produced criminals. By the early 1930s, thirty states in the U.S. had sterilization laws, and by 1958, around 60,000 Americans had been sterilized, many by coercion. When Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Supreme Court Justice, approved of Virginia's forced-sterilization law, he said it was the way to "build a race." Later, when Nazis forcibly sterilized the "unfit" in the 1930s, they claimed to be acting, like us, on "biological principles." Hitler even declared that he had studied the laws of several American states for the sterilization of people whose breeding was "injurious to the racial stock."

After eugenics was discredited by Nazi use, leading American eugenicists turned to contraception and abortion for population control. In 1953 they issued a document entitled "Freedom of Choice for Parenthood: A Program of Positive Eugenics," in which they linked so-called "voluntary parenthood" to natural selection. The tactics were new, the principles the same: West cites Alexander Sanger, grandson of Margaret, as making a Darwinian defense of abortion in 2004, asserting that "abortion is good," and "we must become proud that we have taken control of our reproduction. This has been a major factor in advancing human evolution and survival."

How many people do you have to kill before Progressives acknowledge it isn't an advance?

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 30, 2008 6:42 AM