John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution. He used a textbook called A Civic Biology, by GW Hunter, which, if you ever seen it, is a rather awful book, and is certainly something we wouldn’t want poisoining our classrooms today. Michael Egnor, as behind the times and obtuse as ever, uses the ugly racism of A Civic Biology to falsely damn evolution. He quotes some nasty bits of the book, such as suggestions to prevent breeding with the feeble-minded and its equation of civilization with white skins, and then concludes with a foolish switcheroo.
The struggle between a ‘benighted’ and an ‘enlightened’ understanding of man continues to this day. The people of Tennessee objected to the lessions taught in A Civic Biology, and they objected to the Darwinist ‘science’ that was the explicit basis for Hunter’s textbook. In rejecting dogmatic Darwinism as an ideology unfit for the education of their children, the people of Tennessee were a bit ahead of their time.
Did you catch that? He cites racist phrases from the book, and then claims that the “people of Tennessee objected to the lessons”, as if the outraged residents of a small Southern town were horrified that their children were being taught the superiority of the white race or that they shouldn’t have children with the feeble-minded.
This is a sneaky lie. The people were not espousing an enlightened understanding of man — the racist parts of the book were not objectionable to them at all, and probably passed them by as hardly worth noticing (unless, of course, you were one of those people judged inferior.) The law Scopes broke was against teaching evolution, not against teaching that clever white people were the best.
These “civics” books that endorsed eugenics were dime-a-dozen. It isn’t that evolution encouraged people to be racists, it’s that people were already outrageously racist, and they readily twisted the science, or the Christianity, to support their prejudices. For instance, here’s another book from roughly the same era, Applied Eugenics, by Paul Popenoe, that is in many ways far worse than A Civic Biology. The long section raging against the inferiority of the Negro race alone will leave you disgusted. It’s also noteworthy because it has a whole section on eugenics and religion, though, and throughout is quite happy to support religion.
For society to sterilize the feeble-minded, the insane, the alcoholic, the born criminals, the epileptic, and then turn them out to shift for themselves, saying, “We have no further concern with you, now that we know you will leave no children behind you,” is unwise. People of this sort should be humanely isolated, so that they will be brought into competition only with their own kind; and they should be kept so segregated, not only until they have passed the reproductive age, but until death brings them relief from their misfortunes. Such a course is, in most cases, the only one worthy of a Christian nation; and it is obvious that if such a course is followed, the sexes can be effectively separated without difficulty, and any sterilization operation will be unnecessary.
In fact, religion is a necessity. It’s essential to our racial welfare.
We have endeavored to point out that as a race rises, and instinct becomes less important in guiding the conduct of its members, religion has often put a restraint on reason, guiding the individual in racially profitable paths. What is to happen when religion gives way? Unbridled selfishness too often takes the reins, and the interests of the species are disregarded. Religion, therefore, appears to be a necessity for the perpetuation of any race. It is essential to racial welfare that the national religion should be of such a character as to appeal to the emotions effectively and yet conciliate the reason.
And who has been helping the eugenicists promote their ideas? Why, the churches!
The churches have been important instruments in this connection, and the worth of their services can hardly be over-estimated, as they tend to bring together young people of similar tastes and, in general, of a superior character. Such organizations as the Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor serve the eugenic end in a satisfactory way; it is almost the unanimous opinion of competent observers that matches “made in the church” turn out well.
Did you know that one huge booster of eugenics was … the Young Men’s Christian Association? Hmmm. Evolution has only been around since 1859, but Christianity and racism long preceded it. If we’re going to make a stupid argument by correlation as Egnor has done, maybe we should be making the religious connection.
That would be stupid, too, only slightly less stupid than Egnor’s own argument. America was and is a fundamentally racist nation that denied full citizenship to a significant proportion of its inhabitants on the basis of their skin color, and even now is grossly unequal in the opportunities offered to its people. Racists would cheerfully appropriate any justification for their bigotry: they quoted the Bible as readily as they did their bastardized Darwin.
The very idea that anyone in Dayton Tennessee has EVER been “ahead of their time” is patently absurd. We’re talking about a town that tried to ban homosexuals from living there… not 50 years ago, not 20 years ago but TWO years ago.
I live 30 miles away from that hellhole and it makes Chattanooga (the city of today, tommorrow!) look like a hive of bohemian permissiveness.
Citing an ignorant book published in 1914 as proof against evolution is like citing a book over 2000 years old as evidence for… …do I need to say more?
Engor will lie and lie again about these matters. He has been shown in several columns and many letters that religion had its dirty paw deep into the Eugenics jar. (Also, of course, slavery).
However, on the basis of what you post here, the quote does not directly implicate religion in eugenics. The interpretation I put on it in this case is that religion serves eugenics because young Christians will meet and marry each other in their (all white) churches thus helping the race. But there is nothing to say that the churches were activily involved in eugenics (that is not to say the were not, but the evidence is not in this quote)
“Such organizations as the Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor serve the eugenic end in a satisfactory way; it is almost the unanimous opinion of competent observers that matches “made in the church” turn out well.”
Remind me not to let Egnor poke around in my brain with a knife.
Oooh, thanks for linking to the Applied Eugenics book. This could come in handy.
One thing that’s important to remember when reading all this stuff is that the idea that the “minority” races were destined for extinction was almost universally held among American and European thinkers in the late 19th century.
It’s easy to forget this in an era where India is synonymous with “overpopulation” and one out of every six people is Chinese, but prior to WWI, roughly 40% of the world’s population was white! With British colonialism in full flower and the US’ westward expansion going like wildfire, it was all but self-evident that the more melanin-enhanced races were on the way out. Then 1914 came along and, well, you can probably work the rest out for yourself.
It isn’t that evolution encouraged people to be racists, it’s that people were already outrageously racist, and they readily twisted the science, or the Christianity, to support their prejudices.
What in the world makes you think that they “twisted” Christianity?
However, on the basis of what you post here, the quote does not directly implicate religion in eugenics.
Fair enough; how about Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement by Christine Rosen. Even a reviewer from the Discovery Institute found it compelling. And here’s some details from another source.
Well, isn’t it as they say?
Teach a person s/he comes from animals and s/he’ll behave like one; teach a person s/he comes from dirt and s/he’ll muddy everything s/he touches.
Think if I pray hard enough, God will reward me with gender-neutral English pronouns.
QrazyQatv, thanks for the links.
I never doubted that religon supported eugenics, it was just I did not feel in this case the paragraph supported PZs contention. We get so much lying and quote mining from Egnor and the like, and there is so much evidence (as you pointed out), it might have been better to back it up with something other than the paragraph given in this case.
Egnor is perfect for the DI. One thing those people have in common is that taking apart their bullshit only galvanizes them. I’m pretty sure that despite whatever weight of delusional beliefs each brought with them to the fold, all are alert and sane enough to know when they’ve been exposed as bellowing frauds. But they’re also arrogant enough to continue battling, simply jumping to other topics when the flames under their asses are turned up too high.
Can you imagine what their blog would be like if they accepted comments? The very fact that they don’t is a tacit admission that they’re full of shit and the last thing they want is for their naive hangers-on among the rabble to see arguments directly shredded on home turf by some ‘Neo-Darwinist.”
sailor,
If you look around some, I’m sure you’ll find that there were awards given for the best eugenics sermon delivered from the pulpit. Yes, churches were involved, as was the Bush family.
On a similar note, theists often cite MLKjr as being a religious man who stood for equality, as if that legitimizes religion.
The question I ask them in response is, “Well, who was against MLKjr and his message of equality? Atheist groups, or religious groups? Were the criticisms of MLKjr coming from the biology departments at universities, or were they coming from church pulpits?”
“as was the Bush family”
Why? Really, why?
Isn’t GW guilty of enough all by himself?
Do we really need to dig up crap from almost a century ago?
Greetings. My first post here.
I do love the “unanimous opinion of competent observers” criterion.
Everybody says it, so it’s true. Sounds familiar
cue back to the topic of the thread: Egnor’s idiocy based on a near 100 year old text.
answer:
absolutely.
Do we really need to dig up crap from almost a century ago?
cue back to the topic of the thread: Egnor’s idiocy based on a near 100 year old text.
answer:
absolutely.
Eugenics was a multipartisan idea. You could find someone from pretty much any group you can think of it who supported it, including many people who should have known better.
“Eugenics was a multipartisan idea. You could find someone from pretty much any group you can think of it who supported it, including many people who should have known better.”
Pretty easy to say someone ought to have ‘known better’ in retrospect but the pseudo-science of eugenics was cloaked in the august form of the most wealthy and respected institutions of the day. Edwin Black wrote a tremendously elucidiating book titled “War Against the Weak” in which he exposes (with the cooperation of the institutions themselves, Yay for historical accountability) the history of eugenics in America. Personally my fav section illuminates the outrageously racist/classist agenda of the orgins of Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger in particular.
P.S. <3 this site. First found the link on Netscape yesterday and have been lurking ever since.
orz
ran out of room on the last comment anyway >.>
P.S. <3 this site. First found the link on Netscape yesterday and have been lurking ever since.
When another Egnor screed surfaces, my first thought is always that The Mighty Surgeon teaches a course in ethics at NYU Stony Brook. Disgusting.
Sailor, you also need to separate positive eugenics (getting the “most” fit to have more children) from negative eugenics (not allowing the “least” fit to breed). the church quote is a good example of positive eugenics
Sorry, I thought the entire topic was about crap from almost a century ago.
The complete text of CIVIC BIOLOGY is available for download from google books.
Paul Popenoe enjoyed a career into the 1960s writing a marriage advice column for LADIES HOME JOURNAL.
Being a person with epilespy, the “sterilize and isolate epileptics” bit made me a tad insane. Crap. Now I’m epileptic AND insane… a double candidate for sterilization!
Too bad that I’m already 5 months pregnant… :P
Eugenics again, huh? Crap, these people really have got nuthin. Reading these people is a little bit like watching cable tv late at night — the Creationist Channel: All Reruns, All the Time.
Incidentally, I’m not about to take that slur on Planned Parenthood lying down, either. I’m not sure what Black was up to there (I haven’t read that particular book of his, although I’ve read two of his others), but I have actually read a goodly amount of what Margaret Sanger actually wrote. Saying that she was somehow exceptionally racist and/or classist is the world’s second-most common pro-forced-birth/anti-Planned Parenthood rhetorical device, especially since she really wasn’t.
Advocating that the poor should have only as many children as they’re able to care for adequately doesn’t strike me as being a “classist” position, especially in terms of the social conditions of the late Gilded Age; and who was going to advocate for the poor, besides the wealthy? Eugene Debs went to jail, but FDR passed the New Deal, and doesn’t that still rankle a lot of people? I also don’t see Sanger as having been any more racist than the average person back then, either, and probably considerably less, since she was willing to work with and alongside members of the black community. The idea that her outreach efforts were designed to exterminate nonwhite people by attrition is a despicable libel, and not supported by her writings. (She did, however, garner support from some of those quarters, which isn’t exactly her fault.)
Ah, I’m glad that Applied Eugenics is quoted in a non-evil way. When it was going through DP (the proofreading site for Project Gutenberg), there were a lot of concerns that this isn’t the sort of thing we should be spending our time preserving, but of course, that goes both ways. I know the person who post-processed it into an etext, and she was constantly sending out quotes of the more appalling bits.
“Sailor, you also need to separate positive eugenics (getting the “most” fit to have more children) from negative eugenics (not allowing the “least” fit to breed). the church quote is a good example of positive eugenics”
Yes positive is better than negative, though I am not sure that is saying much. I think part of the mission of Mensa was originally to get intelligent people to meet each other hopefully resulting in occasional progeny. I am not sure if it got us any geniuses. Breeding for a particular characteristic often has unintended consequences as any dog breeder knows. In the case of dating Christians you might end up breeding for gullibility.
I seem to remember that an actress once asked George Bernard Shaw to sire a child with her. Her reasoning was that with her beauty and his brains it would be an incredible child. He refused saying ‘What happens if it is born with your brains and my beauty”
“Incidentally, I’m not about to take that slur on Planned Parenthood lying down”
No slur intended. Preamble I believe needed; I am male. I did however help organize my school’s trip to The March for Women’s lives a few years back. 5 bus loads of people made the trip, which from a school of 30,000 is not incredibly exceptionial but I am still proud of the work I have done to further the cause of reproductive freedom in this country.
The fact is Sanger DID wring her hands about “inferiors” “breeding out” the “worthy”. Just because those who lack any sense of ethics in their debates seize upon the prevalence of racism of the times and of Sanger in particular does not devalue her contribution. To ignore the facts of history in order to canonize Sanger is intelectually dishonest. Black is an incredibly respected journalist who I believe has no motivation to present falsehoods when his argument is so articulate without them. Try reading the book. Veritas and all that.
ciao
I haven’t read Black’s book on eugenics, but on other issues he’s proven to be atrociously one-sided & prone to demonizing.
As for Sanger, she’s been subject to an even greater smear campaign than Charles Darwin, with extensive quote mining (see link below).
As Planned Parenthood notes, some of Sanger’s political positions are unacceptable today, but that doesn’t excuse the organized dishonesty which “conservative” forces muster against her.
Anyone wanna let me know how to get super-cool Qoute boxes going >.> anyway.
“I haven’t read Black’s book on eugenics, but on other issues he’s proven to be atrociously one-sided & prone to demonizing”
Demonizing? At the risk of having Godwin’s Law invoked “IBM & the Holocaust” examines the evidence of complicity in genocide by American buisness. I personally pardon his editorializing on that subject. I suppose the Pulitzer Prize committee would agree with that considering they have nominated him 9 times now :/
“As for Sanger, she’s been subject to an even greater smear campaign than Charles Darwin, with extensive quote mining (see link below).”
You are correct. I acknowledge that those who lack ethics have abused the historical record to further their ignominiable posistions. But we know better, right? We can view Sanger through the lens of history and accept her flaws as well as her contributions because we understand that the Zeitgeist has moved forward. If she had been born in this day there would be no shadow of racist ideology dogging her. We cant rewrite history just because some opponents of her work have. Hold yourself to a higher standard.
Eugenics pretty much cut across religious lines. Note I would draw a distinction between the eugenics proponents who wanted to use legal force to prevent the ‘worst’ from reproducing and those who wanted to encourage the ‘best’ to reproduce but were against legal force. Legal force included forcible installation into ‘homes’ or involuntary sterilization. The German government eventually extended legal force to death.
The Catholic church was usually opposed and I suspect for several reasons including
1. Forcible eugenics meant birth control which they were opposed to in general (forcible or not)
2. The ‘underclasses’ at whom many of the measures were aimed were often Catholic especially in Britain and the US.
Unfortunately much of the scientific establishment did support strong Eugenics measures. Looking at the letters in support to The Times in London over the Mental Deficiency Bills of 1912 and 1913, they are signed by people such as
the vice-chancellor of the University of London or the Cambridge Regius Professor of Physics. From the religious side
by the Rector of St. George’s in Southwark (Dec. 02, 1912)
(I have a somewhat family history interest as one of my great-grandfathers was one of the more vehement opponents of the involuntary parts of the British Mental Deficiency Bill though I have other relatives who were more for it.)
I think it was a copy of “Applied Eugenics” I remember reading as a curiosity in college. It was a present from my Mother- her textbook (I don’t know what class) at the University of Washington in the mid-thirties. I gave it to Frank Stahl, at the U of Oregon, when I finished my degree there- he was delighted to have this relic of a bygone age, and I was anxious to divest myself of baggage to prepare for the itinerant life of a postdoc.
Put blockquote html tags around the quote.
Piffle. This guy Egnor’s got no scholarship and no style. His original depends so heavily on the Hovanissian piece that was forwarded to me a week ago by a family member that, if it were handed in as a short paper by one of my students, would be rejected out of hand as a cut-and-paste job if not properly cited….which of course, it isn’t. He doesn’t capitalize ‘weekly standard’, for example. At least the misleading FAQ pages at AIG provide sources for their crackpottery.
Typical nonsense from the Egnor tool.
the Hovanissian piece
link’s busted, Scott.
As usual for such things, the real history is a tangle that propagandists (like Egnor) can exploit to prove just about any group guilty of something. One interesting aspect is that the rise of the negative type of eugenics — the sort we associate with injustice and cruelty — occurred during the “Eclipse of Darwin” that began in earnest in the 1890s and lasted until the advent of the Modern Synthesis in the 1930s.
As Janet Browne points out in her most recent book, Darwin’s Origin of Species: a Biography, the non-Darwinian doctrine of orthogenesis, which held there were intrinsic tendencies in evolutionary development over generations and even across species, played a large role in fostering negative eugenics. The advocates of orthogenesis (mostly paleontologists) argued that adaptive trends not only could but almost always would carry on beyond their usefulness. The huge antlers of the Irish elk, believed by orthogenesis advocates to have led to it extinction, were the canonical case cited. As Browne recounts the times:
Among the authors of the Modern Synthesis, R.A. Fisher was Galton Professor of eugenics at University College and an avid proponent. On the other hand, it was Theodosius Dobzhansky’s demonstration that genetic variation is not only more plentiful in populations but more evenly distributed than envisioned in “classical” population genetics, instead of being bunched up at one end or the other of a statistical curve, that showed why eugenics could not possibly be successful. As pointed out by Marjorie Grene and David Depew in their The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History, eugenics is “bad biology, depending as it does on the false assumption that one can locate exceptionally bad and exceptionally good traits, and genes ‘for them,’ at the extreme ends of a ‘normal’ statistical distribution.”
But also note what type of biology it is that eugenics is bad at: genetics. If anyone ought to be given blame for having come up with the ideas that led to eugenics, it should be that pious Moravian monk. If Darwin had been right about “pangenesis,” Fleeming Jenkin’s objection, that any trait selected for (naturally or artificially) would be “swamped out” of the population under “blending inheritance,” would also have had to be true. Eugenicists then would have had to adopt a strong role for the inheritance of acquired traits, just as Darwin did for the later editions of the Origin. In short, any eugenics based on Darwin would have wound up arguing for such things as education, better nutrition and better health care as an answer to any “degeneracy” in society.
I really don’t get what Egnor’s game is. Is he only out to win souls by lying? Is it the vacuity of the Intelligent Design “science” which forces him into this corner? It certainly can’t be helping his academic credibility at all. Is he waiting until Denyse O’Leary finishes running spell check through her collaboration with Beauregard, so that he can co-write a book with her?
I wonder if he is so blinded by his dislike for the implications of evolution through natural methodology that he is unable to read with comprehension the criticisms of what he has said so far regarding evolution. I am sure that if I needed him to perform an excision of a tumor, I would be fine (just as I don’t really need my auto mechanic or pizza delivery boy to understand or accept evolution in order to do their job well.) But he is also a teacher. This is what bothers me the most about him. He is unable to think critically, and he is using this false crap to carp about evolution. I doubt that he is getting paid to write this stuff, and like I said above, it is damaging his academic credibility.
Is he secretly hoping that Sam Brownback or Mike Huckabee is elected President and then he gets on the fast track to be surgeon general? There must be some other, hidden agenda behind his participation with evolutionnews.org.
I am told – I haven’t seen it myself, so I am posting this for confirmation, or disconfirmation – that the revised edition of “Civic Biology”, in the wake of the Scopes trial, duly removed much about evolution – but retained the eugenics.
If this is true, then it is further evidence that eugenics was not perceived to be dependent upon evolution.
If, on the other hand, “Civic Biology” removed eugenics when it removed evolution, then this would be evidence of a perceived connection between the two.
Either way, this would be significant for understanding the perception of people of that era.
TomS:
There is this from Mitch Coffey. I’ve looked at Larson’s Summer for the Gods and he confirms that the evolutionary material was removed but does not say anything I can find about what happened to the eugenics in Hunter’s revision. Maybe the other book cited by Mitch, Under God: Religion and American Politics by Garry Wills, has the answer.
Mitch may be wrong about the Hunter book continuing to be used in Tennessee. As Larson says, it was dropped by the state shortly after Scopes was indicted but for reasons unrelated to the case, due to the state’s contract with the publisher running out before any revision was ready and the availability of a somewhat newer and cheaper book. It might have been picked up again some time after that, of course.
Let’s face it, many prominent figures of the eugenics era – including those who are often considered heroes, as well as obvious villains – were on the wrong side of the eugenics issue. (And, of course, there was more than one approach to eugenics.)
Who was on the right side? Two names come to mind: Alfred Russel Wallace and Franz Boas.
Egnor teaches ethics at SUNY Stony Brook?
Any DI shill should automatically be disqualified from teaching ethics.
I know that feminism in general is often tagged as racist by the more crazed anti-feminists because, when women were fighting for suffrage, some of them (and their allies) argued that if horrible Negro men had the vote, how on earth could it be that nice white women did not? I’m pretty sure some folks did argue just that; but does that make sexism okay and women’s suffrage unnecessary? Same with the “I don’t like the [usually spurious to boot] results” argument about evolution: It’s just bad reasoning and in a more ideal world could be dismissed with a “Pffft!”
But then, I just like to say “Pffft!”
Abstruse –
My comment on Edwin Black’s penchant for demonizing comes from an article I saw a few years ago in which he dragged out every negative stereotype about the Palestinians: a thoroughly deplorable piece of propaganda which disqualified him forever from my list of fair-minded historians. Having read and, at the time, admired his IBM & the Holocaust, I’m now hoping to find a review of that topic by someone of less tendentious tendencies. (Last I heard, the Pulitzer committees do not include fact-checkers, fwiw.)
I’m confused about your call for a “higher standard” regarding Sanger. Given that totally bogus accusations of racism are still flung at Planned Parenthood almost daily, who can doubt that a modern Sanger would escape a similar barrage? Though she was no less a racist than other progressive whites of her time – and arguably an opportunist who regularly tried to hitch her campaign for legalized voluntary birth control to the eugenics bandwagon whenever she could – I think her bona fides are established by the fact that leading contemporary black intellectuals and activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Mary McLeod Bethune willingly collaborated with her work.
Shell Goddamnit –
You might enjoy reading Louise Newman’s White Women’s Rights, which recounts the (often embarrassing) interactions between 19th-century feminism/suffrage and racial issues in the US (unfortunately, Sanger, as a 20th-century figure, is not included).
Mr. Butler,
I haven’t read that article and am thankful I have not. After reading “Drinking the Sea at Gaza” (I think thats what it was called >.>) I decided to refrain from angering myself with the absolute futility of that situation. I can understand why that would colour your opinion.
The “higher standard” argument comes from the fact that our positions (generically invoking the collective here seems dangerous but WTH) are untainted by the whims of a magic man in the sky. So why ignore the history? Why not critically examine the claims/documents etc for the sake of understanding the history, not for the sake of defending a modern organization. Why should we care if the wack-jobs criticize a dead woman? The worth of planned parenthood is not increased or decreased by the statements one woman made approaching a century ago. Ignoring what was said to try and defend a modern organization seems a bit silly to me.
Was a discussion on Retrospectical on the very subject of if something like gene therapy could be called eugenics, and if it would be wrong. My stance was to point out a news blurb on a study with deer (though I forgot the link), found here:
http://www.livescience.com/animals/070718_evolution_runts.html
And state that the real problem isn’t trying to fix problems, it making the mistake of assuming you found one in the first place, without knowing why the “problem” exists or what the consequence of fixing it is. This is why curing gays, as some nuts on the right would love to do, might not be an optimal strategy, because, if we are anything like deer, forcing 100% of males to be only attracted to women *might* screw up genes needed to produce women that have all the good traits for being women, and by the same token, trying to cure lesbianism could screw up the men. More to the point, it might not even be possible to produce fewer of one, without also producing a significant increase in the other. Assuming their is analogous mechanisms in people as in deer, which would seem probable.
On the other hand, there *are* some traits for which, as far as we can tell, there are **no** up sides and which the elimination of would generally improve the species, if for no other reason than that they **would have been lethal**, without modern medicine to *fix*, treat or control the problems arising from them in the first place, and which, if pass on, only increase the risk of more people, whose conditions have to be treated *before* they can survive in the first place. One would think that these sorts of things would be just common sense to correct prior to when less direct and far more expensive techniques would be needed, like multiple plastic surgeries, life long medicine use, etc. Yet, even suggesting that will bring out anti-eugenics nuts, who can’t fracking tell the difference.
BTW, the article is also a perfect example of why morons, that think evolution means linear progress, are full of it. lol
Which was not only non-Darwinian but anti-Darwinian. Darwin himself thought that the selection pressures for various mental traits fluctuated on a scale of decades in human society, so that no population was consistently ahead. The Greeks were the smartest two thousand years ago; the Spanish were the smartest a few centuries ago; the British were the smartest just before Darwin’s day; and the Americans were the smartest at the time he was writing. The African slaves were the cleverest people in Brazil, and though they were currently artificially held back by slavery, shortly they’d rebel against the Portuguese and gain control over the regions they had populated.
Biological racism? Certainly. But not of a form congenial to eugenics.
Well, yes. But I hesitate to use the term because it is so hard to determine exactly what it means at any one time in history. The … er … orthogenians allowed for natural selection to work as a negative force, possibly to the point of causing the extinction of heavily over-specialized species. But they were about as far away from Darwin as any group got during the Eclipse of Darwiin.
Where exactly does Mr. Engor stand on the question of eugenics?. After all, the differences between each of us, are so minor they go without saying. We know this today only because of the path on which Darwin and his theories have placed us and all other life on the planet. At the very least, he should acknowledge the debt owed to Darwin, for producing the only useful argument against all forms racism and bigotry, not just eugenics. In fact, for the first time ever, we now know that all life is unequivocally related and to a degree unimaginable to those people living during the time of the Scope’s trial.
Mr. Engor may prefer to sidestep this particular aspect of Darwin’s theories, and how they have shone a revealing light on the dismal ignorance of outmoded and antiquated convictions, but then again, what else is new to a mind living in the past?.
The only thing to recommend the sterilization of the alcoholics, feeble-minded and insane is that the fate of the children of alcoholic, feeble-minded or insane people is often tragic and ghastly.
Abstruse –
I think we’re still not quite on the same wavelength.
The importance of how “the wack-jobs criticize a dead woman” is that they distort history in doing so, which does have implications for our present sociopolitics – and I care both about politics and our understanding of history for its own sake.
Maybe I missed it– has anyone else mentioned that “A civic biology” is not a text that Scopes chose, but one that was chosen for him? The problem was not that he chose a textbook that included evolution, but that he chose to teach the chapter on evolution from the standard textbook.
The evolution chapter in “A civic biology” does discuss “the five races of man,” but that chapter does not even mention eugenics. The really distrubing content comes from a later chapter on “Heredity and variation,” and since that chapter doesn’t discuss evolution, it was perfectly acceptable classroom fodder under the anti-evolution law. In fact, the third extended quote that Egnor takes from Hovannisian (beginning “Hovannisian notes”) comes from the “Heredity and variation” chapter.
So the Jesus crowd now wants to demonize Scopes for the constraints that their own uptight forefathers forced upon him; and we’re supposed to think that the men who approved the text in the first place were on the side of righteousness all along.
The only thing that surprises me is that someone buys it.
Where do the creationists stand on eugenics?
If they were consistent – fortunately, they are not – they would point out that natural selection works fine within a “kind” – in particular, within “mankind” – and therefore, the whole argument that they present, that the operation of natural selection within “mankind” promotes eugenics, they would thereby accept.
There is nothing about what they call “macro-evolution” involved in eugenics. It’s all what they call “micro-evolution”.
There is nothing about the origins of the structure of the bacterial flagellum, nothing about the relationship between birds and dinosaurs, nothing about the Cambrian Explosion that has anything at all to do with eugenics.
If there is anything at all about eugenics in evolution (but, of course, there isn’t), it is all about “micro-evolution”. And the creationists insist upon telling us that they accept “micro-evolution”.
Fortunately, the creationists are not consistent, otherwise we’d be engaged in another battle with them. We’d have another reason for evolutionary biology: That it doesn’t support eugenics.
Re: my previous comment (#15)
I probably should have been more clear.
Egnor is attribting eugenics to the ToE based on a textbook contested in the Scopes trial.
PZ pointed out that the contested part of the book had nothing to do with eugenics, and also mentioned the fact that eugenics was a pretty popular idea among the protesters.
My point was supposed to be that specifically dragging the Bush name into it seemed like a pretty clear attempt to further smear GW with guilt-by-association.
Why? He’s bad enough all on his own.