Eugenic Darwinism

Charles Darwin is partly to blame for eugenics, according to Discovery Institute senior fellow John West. Merriam-Webster’s defines eugenics as “a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed.”

Darwin said that because of our sense of compassion we couldn’t simply follow the dictates of reason and get rid of the unfit, “but he certainly provided the logical basis for why we should do so and later the eugenicists quoted this passage and they weren’t quoting it out of context, because in The Descent of Man Darwin really did argue that our progress as humans is dependent on a struggle for survival and that we were really impeding human progress by trying to undercut that struggle for survival,” Dr. West explained to an audience at the Family Research Council recently.

“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health,” Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man. “We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment.”

“There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox,” Darwin wrote. “Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind.”

“No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”

Darwin was not alone in his conception of a “supreme” or “perfected” human:

• Harvard Biologist Edward East felt nature eliminates the unfit but we are very capable of getting rid of “fools.”

• Charles Davenport, head of the Biological Research lab in Cold Spring Harbor and the Eugenics Record Office, thought man was nothing less then an animal: “Man is an animal and the laws of improvement of corn and of racehorses hold to true for him also.”

• Alexander Graham Bell thought that “The laws of heredity which apply to animals also apply to man, therefore the breeder of animals is fitted to guide public opinion on questions relating to human heredity.”

“Dressed up in quasi-religious terms, eugenicists promised to create a utopia through the magic of human breeding,” said Dr. West. “One eugenicist was even quoted saying, ‘The Garden of Eden is not in the past, it’s in the future.’”

Connecticut enacted the first marriage law in 1896 and by 1914 more than half of the states also imposed them, Dr. West noted. These laws were a way of regulating who can marry, to make sure “inferior” people were not breeding, he claimed.

One target of the eugenicists was American Immigration law. “They thought America was being overrun with biological defectives primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe—they weren’t [as] ‘biologically helpful’ as Nordic stock,” said Dr. West.

Immigration quotas were set so that only a certain number of people were allowed to come to the U.S. from certain countries. These laws were extremely harmful during the 1920’s when the Nazi’s were moving into countries such as Poland and starting concentration camps.

Poles, then, could not come to America because the quota on Polish immigrants was reached, while Norwegians, for example, still had plenty of open spots under U. S. restrictions. Nonetheless, beyond marriage laws and immigration rules, eugenicists were concerned with the “defectives” already in America.

Indiana enacted the first forced sterilization law in 1907 and, by the 1930s, 30 states had similar statutes on their books. Some of these states still have the law in place today, but not enforced.

Eugenicists promoted this policy as the answer to the looming welfare crisis. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, felt very strongly that sterilization was the answer to all sorts of problems.

“In 1923 over 9 billions of dollars were spent on state and federal charities for the care and maintenance and perpetuation of these undesirables, year by year their numbers are mounting and year by year their costs are increasing,” she said at Vassar in 1926. “The American public is taxed, heavily taxed to maintain an increasing race of morons, which threatens the very foundations of our civilization.”

“Our eyes should be opened to the terrific cost to the community of this dead weight of human waste.”

“The revolution of the Nazi Germany experience is what really killed off forced sterilization more than anything else,” said Dr. West. Some of their extermination and sterilization laws were modeled after American laws; only they did things much more rigorously, sterilizing hundreds of thousands of people just within a few years before they started killing them.

During Dr. West’s presentation he showed some of the German propaganda used to promote eugenics to its citizens, one of which had a bunch of flags on it (the American flag was located top center) to show “this is what the world is doing.” According to Dr. West, eugenics may not be explicitly happening but you can find the idea of it still implicit in other ideas hidden by new verbiage.

“If you were a eugenicist post-World War II you had a problem, because eugenics was a bad word,” said Dr. West. “But if you believed in it, you didn’t just go away.”

He believes eugenics has sort of morphed into other areas today such as, “freedom of choice” on abortion. This is evident from writings of pro-eugenicists who thought renaming it freedom of choice in parenting was a way to keep the idea alive but avoid the controversy, Dr. West argues.

If you would like to comment on this article, please e-mail mal.kline@academia.org

It’s not that cut and dry. Hard reason, to an extent, does dictate the obviously flawed shouldn’t breed. BUT, and Darwin is actually hinting at this in the passage I quoted, hard reason also says that there must be a reason we developed this sense of sympathy that tells us to fight the other urge of hard reason. Because the more advanced civilizations have this sympathy for the weak and the ill that sympathy is clearly a positive trait, and clearly, as Darwin states, should not be checked when contemplating how to treat these people. What Darwin was dancing around, though hadn’t figured out fully yet, was the concept of emotional evolution, evolution at a level beyond the obvious physical traits, the evolution of a society to figure out that the Spartans were wrong and that the crippled people can be useful.

Not only is in not Darwin being a eugenicist, it’s Darwin realizing the core flaw in eugenics, it’s checking sympathy in favor of hard reason, it’s not realizing that the Spartans were wrong, it’s missing the opportunity to have Stephen Hawkins. So actually you got it 100% backwards.

No actually he clearly doesn’t get it. He makes the classic flaw of the eugenicist, that of thinking he is better than others and therefore his traits should be passed on. Someone with an understanding of Darwin would realize there must be some sort of reason why the people he thinks are inferior are breeding more than the people he thinks are superior, and he needs to re-examine his value judgements because natural selection says they’re wrong.

Actually Nazi medicine learned a lot. Sadly the torture method of medical experimentation has proven useful for learning things. From the early vivisectionists who functionally invented invasive surgery, to the Nazi’s who put Germany’s medical technology ahead of the rest of the world by a couple of decades with their messed up experiments, there is sadly a lot that can be learned the wrong way. Hopefully the invention of CT scans and MRIs has given us the tools to finally be able to learn the next level without the torture.

No actually he clearly doesn’t get it.

Baker's book Race was endorsed by Peter Medawar, the Nobel Laureate. Those guys know more about biology than you ever will.

He makes the classic flaw of the eugenicist, that of thinking he is better than others and therefore his traits should be passed on.

The mistake Darwin made was in thinking they can be passed on. He thought any variation he liked was germinal. Descent of Man is based on this error. Darwinism is based on this error. Eugenics is based on this error.

The people deciding whether or not you get to breed even though they’re not in competition with you for a mate. Natural selection is all about direct interaction, you acquire food and live longer or you don’t, you become food and help something else live longer or you don’t, you acquire a mate and carry on your genetic traits or you don’t. Eugenics is all about indirect interaction some third party is deciding who breeds and who doesn’t, heck they might even go so far as to decide who gets to eat and who doesn’t.

Arafat was a Nobel Laureate too, it doesn’t impress me. Anybody can be wrong, and Baker is wrong.

Sorry that’s not an error. Every farmer for the entire length of recorded human history knows that traits get passed on. The entire concept of purebred animals is built around the knowledge that passing on traits is the truth and what happens. The fact that you think that’s in error shows that you simply don’t have the knowledge to actually be participating in this discussion. Lurk it and read, you need a lot of education on this matter.

[Osgoode] The mistake Darwin made was in thinking they can be passed on. He thought any variation he liked was germinal. Descent of Man is based on this error. Darwinism is based on this error. Eugenics is based on this error.

[discostu] Sorry that’s not an error... The fact that you think that’s in error shows that you simply don’t have the knowledge to actually be participating in this discussion. Lurk it and read, you need a lot of education on this matter.

Horatio Newman:

"Darwin insisted upon the idea that minute fluctuating variations, which we now know are to a large extent non-heritable, were the principal, if not the sole, materials for natural selection to work upon… Darwin considered all variations as heritable. He did not distinguish between somatic variations and germinal variations."

The people deciding whether or not you get to breed even though they’re not in competition with you for a mate.

If a wolf decides to kill a deer, then the deer's ability to reproduce may be severely effected. Does this mean that the wolf may be in competition with the deer for a mate?

Eugenics is all about indirect interaction some third party is deciding who breeds and who doesn’t

Female chimpanzees will sometimes gang up on an unpopular female chimpanzee who has just given birth in order to kill the offspring. Not in direct competition for a mate anymore, but seemingly done to free up more resources for preferred offspring. If humans were to do this, would this be natural selection or not?

...heck they might even go so far as to decide who gets to eat and who doesn’t.

Like stronger animals preventing weaker animals from eating the available food. All part of natural selection.

In a well formed naturalist view there is no "third party". You must be borrowing the notion from somewhere else. The reason I agree with you that Darwin should not be blamed for the horrors of eugenics is that he had similar sensibilities -- not from his theory, but in spite of it.

No that means the deer failed the “not become food” test.

The chimpanzees are doing fairly normal resource competition. A lot of animals that pack will go after competing offspring.

It becomes not a part of natural selection when you start having governing bodies. There’s nothing natural about a beauracracy. I’m not into hardcore naturalist views because they’re too often used to excuse aberant behavior. We’re humans, we found a way to evolve things like sympathy and social contracts, even from an atheistic we’re supposed to be better than the animals because we’re further along the evolutionary and food chains. We really don’t have the level of resource competition that would excuse being like chimps, and we have enough capacity for logic to know that the concept of “undesirable” isn’t that cut and dry.

I’m not into hardcore naturalist views because they’re too often used to excuse aberant behavior.

Agreed.

We really don’t have the level of resource competition that would excuse being like chimps, and we have enough capacity for logic to know that the concept of “undesirable” isn’t that cut and dry.

Have to disagree. Severe resource competition is common to the human condition.

Most of the places where we’re having survival resource problems on the planet it’s because the distribution network is being hosed with. The resources exist, they could even get to where they’re needed, but they’re being blocked. The African warlords learned about famine as a weapon and use it a lot.

So let me get this straight. The aggressive cruelty of war lords and the thugs that work for them is an anomaly in the process of natural selection, as is the behavior of eugenicists. But a distribution network that gives to masses of needy humans on another Continent is an obviously evolved trait?

Eugenics is a long ways from social Darwinism, but we are a long ways from the historical setting of the 1800s. Most of us anyway. Consensus was different then on almost everything we think is important now: Global Warming, cigarettes, the Pill. Still, it is not good to ignore that America provided a large part of the thinking on both eugenics and socialism at that time. It can happen here; it probably did happen here if it was an early experiment in Communism.

No, the warlord issue I raised was at best tangenital to the natural selection discussion. I had said there wasn’t any real resource competition among humans anymore, you said resource competition was still common, I said the only resource competition issues we really have anymore aren’t really competitions so much as deliberate failure in distribution. When you get to the point of warlords cutting off the food from districts you’re not really dealing with resource competition, famine as a weapon isn’t resource competition it’s a war strategy. And frankly deciding whether war strategies are part of natural selection is just way too much hair splitting BS for me.

you said resource competition was still common

I said it was common to the human condition. Specifically in the context in which we evolved.

When you get to the point of warlords cutting off the food from districts you’re not really dealing with resource competition, famine as a weapon isn’t resource competition it’s a war strategy. And frankly deciding whether war strategies are part of natural selection is just way too much hair splitting BS for me.

Agreed, evolution is not a sufficient explanation for human behavior and social constructs.

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