Homocentric Universe

APPLIED DARWINISM:

The Creator of the SAT Was an Infamous Eugenicist (Jake Currie, April 6, 2026, Nautilus)

Was Carl Brigham a racist? The short answer is yes. The long answer is also yes, and his racism led him to twist his own data to arrive at faulty—and bigoted—conclusions.

During World War I, Brigham was tasked with developing psychological tests to measure the cognitive abilities of newly drafted soldiers representing a cross-section of American military-aged men. It was a golden opportunity to gather data, and the tests Brigham developed were the ancestors of the modern SAT exam.

During the early 20th century, there was also a eugenics movement sweeping the country, and like many white Americans of the era, Brigham bought into the notion that some races were superior to others. While he viewed Blacks as inferior to whites, this wasn’t his primary concern. Instead, he was focused on the influx of “inferior” white immigrants coming into the country.

Brigham and other eugenicists of the day split white people into three groups: Nordic, from Northern Europe; Alpine, from Central and Eastern Europe; and Mediterranean, from Southern Europe. Based on his testing, Brigham came to the conclusion that the Nordics had the highest intelligence, followed by the Alpines, with the Mediterraneans scoring the lowest. Because of this, he warned that the waves of newly arriving Alpine and Mediterranean immigrants threatened to lower our collective national intelligence level.

Never “just trust the science.”

DARWINISM WAS NOT THE ONLY EVIL MALTHUS UNLEASHED:

The Nonsense Explosion (Ben Wattenberg, 1970, New Republic)

Finally, we must take note of the new thrust by the Explosionists: population control. Note the phrase carefully. This is specifically not “family planning,” where the family concerned does the planning. This is control of population by the government and this is what the apocalyptics are demanding, because, they say, family planning by itself will not deduce us to a zero growth rate. The more popular “soft” position of government control involves what is called “disincentives;” that is, a few minor measures like changing the taxation system, the school system, and the moral code to see if that won’t work before going onto outright baby licensing.

Accordingly, the demographer Judith Blake Davis of the University of California (Berkeley) complained to a House Committee: “We penalize homosexuals of both sexes, we insist that women must bear unwanted children by depriving them of ready access to abortion, we bind individuals to pay for the education of other people’s children, we make people with small families support the schooling of others. . . .” (Italics mine.)

Now, Dr. Davis is not exactly saying that we should go to a private school system or eliminate the tax exemption for children, thereby penalizing the poor but not the rich – but that is the implication. In essence, Senator Packwood recently proposed just that: no tax exemptions for any children beyond the second per family, born after 1972.

The strong position on population control ultimately comes around to some form of government permission, or licensing, for babies.

Dr. Garret Hardin, a professor-biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says, “In the long run, voluntarism is insanity. The result will be continued uncontrolled population growth.”

Astro-physicist Donald Aiken says, “The government has to step in and tamper with religious and personal convictions – maybe even impose penalties for every child a family has beyond two.”

Dr. Melvin Ketchel, professor of physiology at Tufts Medical School, writes in Medical World News: “Scientists will discover ways of controlling the fertility of an entire population . . . the compound . . . could be controlled by adjustments in dosage, [and] a government could regulate the growth of its population without depending upon the voluntary action of individual couples . . . such an agent might be added to the water supply.”

And Dr. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford: “If we don’t do something dramatic about population and environment, and do it immediately, there’s just no hope that civilization will persist. . . . The world’s most serious population-growth problem is right here in the United States among affluent white Americans. . . .”

What it all adds up to is this: why have a long-range manageable population problem that can be coped with gradually over generations when, with a little extra souped-up scare rhetoric, we can drum up a full-fledged crisis? We certainly need one; it’s been months since we’ve had a crisis. After all, Vietnam, we were told, was “the greatest crisis in a hundred years.” Piker. Here’s a crisis that’s a beauty: the greatest crisis in two billion years: we’re about to breed ourselves right into oblivion.

APPLIED DARWINISM:

Why Team Trump Talking About ‘Lethalitymaxxing’ Should Alarm You: Trendy internet slang meets eugenics, the manosphere, and neo-Nazis. (Ilyse Hogue, Feb 20, 2026, The Bulwark)

The fitness-to-radicalization pipeline works like this: A young man who feels defeated by external factors finds power and community in spaces within his control. One of those places is the gym, where self-discipline is celebrated.1 This is not inherently sinister. The desire to be strong, healthy, and competent is deeply human. But if you go deeper into some parts of fitness culture, the message shifts almost imperceptibly from your value is determined by your body to some bodies—and therefore some people—are simply worth more than others.

RFK Jr.’s ‘concern’ about vaccines was never purely about what was in the syringe. He was always alluding to a logic familiar to those within eugenics movements: that strong, healthy, naturally resilient bodies don’t need pharmaceutical intervention, and that those who do are, in some fundamental sense, weaker. It’s no coincidence that Kennedy is now secretary of health and human services, and that Make America Healthy Again is the mainstream-laundered expression of that same ideology, only operating from inside the federal government.

Now, the Department of Defense is getting in on the game. The term “maxxing” comes from the looksmaxxing subculture—a bleak corner of the internet rooted in incel forums and built around the obsessive desire to optimize physical appearance. Where red-pill fitness and MAHA offered self-improvement as aspiration, looksmaxxing suggests natural remedy is not sufficient. Here, the ideology is even more explicit: Human worth is a function not just of genetics but how you can build on it. Your jawline, your clavicle width, your bone structure—these aren’t just aesthetic qualities. They are destiny. To improve them is to improve your social rank, your sexual prospects, and ultimately your value as a human being.

The “looksmaxxing” world grades men on a scale that ranges from “subhuman” to “Chad.” They trade techniques ranging from aggressive fitness regimens to hormone injections to “bonesmashing,” i.e., hitting your own face with a hammer to reshape your cheekbones. The movement’s newest star, a 20-year-old known as Clavicular, has injected his teenage girlfriend with fat-dissolving acid on livestream to reshape her jaw. He says he typically earns between $80,000 and $100,000 a month from streaming.

The looksmaxxing world is, as the Atlantic recently described it, “narcissistic, cruel, racist, shot through with social Darwinism, and proudly anti-compassion.”