Daily Archives: March 11, 2021

The eugenic movement, therefore, cannot be a short campaign like many political or social movements. It is, rather, like the founding and development of Christianity, something to be handed on from age to age.

~Report of the President of the American Eugenics Society, Inc., 1926.

As this short history of the eugenics movement shows, eugenicists have always been associated with bigotry, racism, and elitism while working in favor of wealthy white people.

In 1798, the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society. This shortwork stressed that the human population was growing at a geometrical rate, but food production was only growing at an arithmetic (straightline) rate. This meant that, sooner or later, widespread starvation and famine would occur, resulting in a catastrophic collapse in the human population. As the following ninety-second video explains, Malthus reasoning was faulty.

This idea was argued in academia and in other milieu for several decades. For example, Charles Dickens character Ebenezer Scrooge presented Malthus ideas in his novella The Christmas Carol.

The debate over the possibility of an inevitable food shortage reached a full boil when Charles Darwin set the scientific world on its ear in 1856 by publishing On the Origin of Species, which set forth for the first time a coherent explanation of the theory of evolution. In his preface, Darwin stated that evolution was an application of the theories of Malthus to the entire animal and vegetable kingdom. Darwin stated that his theory of natural selection why some species endured as others disappeared was based on Malthus mathematical theories.

In 1871, Darwin extended this thesis in his book The Descent of Man. He stated that humanity would see some of the weaker races reduced in number or even wiped out by natural selection in the form of famine, diseases, war, and other influences, while the stronger races would survive and thrive.

Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term eugenics in 1883, a derivation of the Greek good birth (it is no coincidence that the term euthanasia, the control of death, is derived from the Greek good death). Galton described eugenics as the science of improving [human] stockto give the more suitable races a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.1 He founded the Eugenics Society in 1907, whose purpose was to spread eugenic teaching and bring human parenthood under the domination of eugenic ideals.2

Galtons new science, which came to be known as Social Darwinism, held that the struggle for existence in society and evolution would inevitably lead to the fittest races achieving domination over the less fit.

In 1869, Galton had published his work Hereditary Genius, in which he wondered if it might be possible to produce geniuses by inbreeding the upper classes through several generations, while sequestering the less desirable elements in monasteries, convents, and institutions, a combined program of both positive and negative eugenics.

Galton held the popular view that the naturally occurring evolution of the human race was being thwarted by philanthropy directed towards undesirable segments of the population. He proposed allowing Darwins natural selection to operate more freely without interference by society, and, further, combining it with humanengineered artificial selection in order to accelerate the evolution of the human race.

Galtons desire to eliminate these undesirable portions of humanity remains at the core of the eugenics movement until this day, as we shall see.

One of the first tasks at hand for the new eugenicists was to cut off, as far as possible, aid to the poor so that natural selection could once again do its work.

Margaret Sanger, in her book Pivot of Civilization, stated:

Such philanthropy, as Dean Inge has so unanswerably pointed out, is kind only to be cruel, and unwittingly promotes precisely the results most deprecated. It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.3

Galton believed in the power of religion to move mens souls and minds, so he proposed that eugenics evolve from a hard science into national policy and eventually into a religion.4 The American Eugenics Society even published a Eugenics Catechism for Clergymen, which outlined the tenets and dogmas of this new religion.5

Atheist and racist Julian Huxley was the most important strategist of the early twentieth-century eugenics movement. He was the first DirectorGeneral of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and President of the English Eugenics Society. He also founded the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and was a member of both the British Euthanasia Society and Great Britains Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA). His grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was a leading advocate of Darwins theories. His brother Aldous was the famous New Age psychedelic drug lobbyist.6

Julian Huxley seconded Galtons view that eugenics should eventually evolve into a religion:

I find myself inevitably driven to use the language of religion, for the fact is that all this does add up to something in the nature of a religion: perhaps one might call it Evolutionary Humanism. The word religion is often used restrictively to mean belief in gods; but I am not using it in this sense.I am using it in a broader sense, to denote an overall relation between man and his destiny, and one involving his deepest feelings, including his sense of what is sacred. In this broad sense, evolutionary humanism, it seems to me, is capable of becoming the germ of a new religion, not necessarily supplanting existing religions but supplementing them.7

One of the foremost eugenicists of the first half of the twentieth century is known to almost all prolifers as the founder of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) Margaret Sanger. Her journal The Birth Control Review, along with her many books, features hundreds of examples of racist and eugenicist thinking, culminating in her 1932 Plan for Peace. In light of all of these racist and eugenicist statements, it is astounding that Planned Parenthood continues to deny that Margaret Sanger had a program for Negroes.

American eugenicists confined themselves primarily to theorizing and philosophizing until the early 1920s, when state and local governments began to try out (purely for academic or fiscal reasons, of course) some of their more apparently innocuous schemes. These plans naturally targeted those who had the weakest voices, the poor and the institutionalized. The eugenicists soon found the simplest and most effective way of preventing the less desirable classes from reproducing widespread involuntary surgical sterilization.

Famous New York urologist William Robinson was certainly not unique in his view that it is the acme of stupidity to talk in such cases of individual liberty, of the rights of the individual. Such [unfit] individuals have no rights. They have no right in the first instance to be born, but, having been born, they have no right to propagate their kind.8 And this disgustingly arrogant attitude within the eugenics movement would find even more extreme measures.

Adolf Hitler was personally fascinated by the American eugenics program, and at one point said:

Now that we know the laws of heredity, it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world. I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock. Im sure that occasionally mistakes occur as a result. But the possibility of excess and error is still no proof of the incorrectness of these laws.9

In the early 1930s, a number of leading German academics began to lay the foundation of thought and theory that would soon culminate in the mass elimination of the unfit, and ultimately the Holocaust. For example, Halle Universitys Professor Doctor Karl Krtner pioneered the first German university course on race hygiene for physicians. He based it on the American pathfinders Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard Stoddard being, of course, the author of The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy and a board member of Margaret Sangers American Birth Control League for a decade. Krtner also explained that he used American racial and eugenic legislation as a model for the German extermination program.10

By 1935, leading American geneticist Hermann J. Muller complained that the legitimate aspects of the science of eugenics had been hopelessly perverted into a cult for advocates for race and class prejudice, defenders of vested interests of church and state, Fascists, Hitlerites, and reactionaries generally.8 He was right: if there was ever any ethically sound eugenics which focused simply on improving the overall health of the human race, it has been entirely taken over by bigots who want all non-whites and all poor classes eliminated.

Of course, Britain, the United States, and Germany were not the only nations to violate their citizens rights on a vast scale through enforced eugenic sterilization. As shown in the history of the world eugenics movement, Japan, Sweden, Finland and other nations enacted and enforced draconian sterilization measures on their most helpless citizens.

The eugenics movement is not an aspect of American history that we should be proud of. Why are we supporting those who continue to propagate eugenics(such as Planned Parenthood), when we ought to be exposing the injustice of the abortion industry toward the poor and racial minorities?

[1] Francis Galton. Inquiries into Human Faculty. London: Macmillan, 1883, page 25.

[2] Francis Galton. Memories of My Life. London: Melhuen Publishers, 1908.

[3] Margaret Sanger. The Pivot of Civilization. New York: Brentanos, 1922. See especially Chapter V, The Cruelty of Charity. Sanger condemns philanthropy repeatedly in this book. She also said:

The curious situation has come about that while our statesmen are busy upon their propaganda of repopulation, and are encouraging the production of large families, they are ignoring the exigent problem of the elimination of the feebleminded. In this, however, the politicians are at one with the traditions of a civilization which, with its charities and philanthropies, has propped up the defective and degenerate and relieved them of the burdens borne by the healthy sections of the community, thus enabling them more easily and more numerously to propagate their kind. [pages 82 and 83]

But there is a point at which philanthropy may become positively dysgenic, when charity is converted into injustice to the selfsupporting citizen, into positive injury to the future of the race. Such a point, it seems obvious, is reached when the incurably defective are permitted to procreate and thus increase their numbers. [page 99]

My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the failure of philanthropy, but rather at its success. These dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have today produced their full harvest of human waste, of inequality and inefficiency, were fully recognized in the last century at the moment when such ideas were first put into practice. Readers of Huxleys attack on the Salvation Army will recall his penetrating and stimulating condemnation of the debauch of sentimentalism which expressed itself in so uncontrolled a fashion in the Victorian era. [pages 108 and 109]

The effect of maternity endowments and philanthropy would have, perhaps already have had, exactly the most dysgenic tendency. The new government program would facilitate the function of maternity among the very classes in which the absolute necessity is to discourage it. Such benevolence is not merely superficial and near sighted. It conceals a stupid cruelty, because it is not courageous enough to face unpleasant facts. Aside from the question of the unfitness of many women to become mothers, aside from the very definite deterioration in the human stock that such programs would inevitably hasten, we may question its value even to the normal though unfortunate mother. [page 115]

[4] Francis Galton. Eugenics, Its Definition, Scope and Aims. Sociological Papers. London, 1905.

[5] Eugenics Catechism for Clergymen, prepared by the Committee on Cooperation with Clergymen of the American Eugenics Society. Advertised among other publications in the Report of the President of the American Eugenics Society, Inc., June 26, 1926, page 25.

[6] Julian Huxley wrote:

The negro mind is as different from the white mind as the negro body from the white body. The typical negro servant, for instance, is wonderful with children, for the reason that she really enjoys doing the things that children do.You have only to go to a nigger campmeeting to see the African mind in operation the shrieks, the dancing and yelling and sweating, the surrender to the most violent emotion, the ecstatic blending of the soul of the Congo with the practice of the Salvation Army. So far, no very satisfactory psychological measure has been found for racial differences; that will come, but meanwhile the differences are patent.[intermarriage between the] negro and Caucasian typegives rise to all sorts of disharmonious organisms.By putting some of the white mans mind into the mulatto, you not only make him more capable and more ambitious (there are no wellauthenticated cases of pure blacks rising to any eminence), but you increase his discontent and create an obvious injustice if you continue to treat him like any fullblooded African. The American negro is making trouble because of the American white blood that is in him.

Julian Huxley. America Revisited III. The Negro Problem. The Spectator, November 29, 1924.

[7] Julian Huxley. Evolution in Action. New York City: Signet, 1957, page 132.

[8] Gregory E. Pence, M.D. Classic Cases in Medical Ethics: Accounts of the Cases That Have Shaped Medical Ethics, with Philosophical, Legal, and Historical Backgrounds. New York City: McGrawHill Publishers, 1990. Chapter 14, Preventing Undesirable Teenage Pregnancies, pages 286 to 302.

[9] Adolf Hitler, quoted in Otto Wagener. Hitler aus nchster Nhe: Aufzeichnungen eines Vertrauten 19291932, edited by Henry A. Turner. Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1978, page 264.

[10] Reich Opens Race Study: Halle University Course Said to be Based on American Models. The New York Times, August 2, 1933

William McDonald revealed that Grant openly advocated for the establishment of a Nordic, Protestant America in his review of Grants book The Conquest of a Continent, or the Expansion of Races in America [New York City: Charles Scribners Sons, 1933]. This book featured a foreword by prominent eugenicist and racist, Professor Henry Fairchild Osborn.

The rest is here:

An Early History of the Eugenics Movement

By Pamela Bedore, Ph.D., University of ConnecticutSamuel Butler presents the difference between the Europeans and the Erewhonians in Erewhon. (Image: Sohel Parvez Haque/Shutterstock)Religion in Erewhonian Society

Erewhon has two religious movements, both containing substantial humor: the Musical Banks and the goddess Ydgrun. The Musical Banks are the official churches of Erewhon. These are beautiful edifices and all the people insist that the currency traded at the Musical Banks is worth far more than the worldly currency with which they dirty their hands every day.

Higgs visits the Musical Banks with great interest, only to find that theyre mostly emptycompletely respected by lip service, but in actual fact considered old, empty institutions. Theres nothing subtle about constructing devotion as lip service, or about constructing the Church as a kind of bank, thus underlining the intersections of religious institutions with money and power.

Higgs also learns that many Erewhonians actually worship the goddess Ydgrun. Ydgrun an anagram for Grundy, as in Mrs. Grundy, from an 18th-century play, a namesake for hypocrisy and prudery.

And Ydgrun is the goddess that Erewhonians arent supposed to care about, but that most of them actually worship secretly. In Erewhon, maybe like everywhere else, hypocrisy is publicly denounced but secretly accepted.

This is a transcript from the video seriesGreat Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

Another interesting feature of the Erewhonian society is the approach to illness and criminality, which might be Butlers best joke of the whole novel.

In Erewhon, a person faces punishment for having a physical ailmentjail time or even, in the case of incurable or chronic conditions, execution. If you commit a crime, on the other hand, you get medical attention and a whole lot of sympathy from friends and family.

If you have a headache, you would never mention it to anyone but your most intimate acquaintances. Higgs is initially astonished by the seemingly uniform beauty and health of the Erewhonians, but this becomes a bit more understandable as he learns that they disguise minor ailments and are jailed or executed for major ones.

Learn more about the origins of utopian genre.

The Erewhonians, are just as surprised to hear about the European approaches to health and crimecompletely misguidedas Higgs is to learn about theirs. They explain that there are physicians living secretly among them and these arent actively prosecuted.

After all, its understandable that people would want to hide their illnesses to avoid punishment and might even abet family membersin doing so. But if doctors were allowed to become frequent visitors in every household, one of the Erewhonians explains to Higgs, their organization and their intimate acquaintance with all family secrets would give them a power, both social and political, which nothing could resist.

Theres a certain comedy of errors element to Higgssand perhaps the readersmisunderstanding about the treatments of criminality and illness, but is there something else going on? What does it mean to imprison or even execute those who are ill? Is this a form of eugenics?

Following Charles Darwins incredibly influential Origin of Species in 1859, other thinkers, most notably Darwins half-cousin Francis Galton, began to speculate on the possibility of selective mating for humans.

It wasnt a new idea, Plato suggested it in the Republic, but it started to gain traction in the Victorian period.

Eugenics, a Greek compound, meaning good genes, wasnt named until 1883, by Galton. But still, the ideas were circulating in 1872 when Butler wrote Erewhon, and the Erewhonians seem to practice negative eugenics, the idea of limiting reproduction by the less fit, but not positive eugenics, the idea of encouraging reproduction in the more fit.

So what exactly is Butler saying about eugenics? Well, thats a hard question to answer, given that Erewhon is a true utopia, with a blendmaybe even a balanceof positive and satirical representations. The reader is certainly not meant to take seriously all the Erewhonian ideas.

A promising young Erewhonian would attend one of the Colleges of Unreason, whichnurture scholars inthe advanced study of hypothetics as well as the basic disciplines of Inconsistency and Evasion.

Higgs is toldbut absolutely refuses to acceptthat the problem with Reason is that it, betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines, and to the defining by languagelanguage being like the sun, which rears and then scorches.

The topics of study are funny, and the reader may certainly enjoy a superior laugh along with Higgs at the very concept of the College of Unreason. But still, its an interesting thought, isnt it? That Reason justifies the human tendency to see the world in black and white; that the notion of language as rigid, as able to accurately represent the world, contains perils that are for the Erewhonians very real.

Learn more about science and technology in Victorian Britain.

Higgs tells the readers at some length about the Erewhonians long battle in figuring out what to do about vegetarianism. At one point, centuries ago, a major thinkeran expert in Unreasonmade a decree that animals are intelligent creatures and should thus not be killed. It was considered fine to eat the meat of animals that had died of natural causes, including suicide. Heres how Higgs puts it:

It was found that animals were continually dying natural deaths under more or less suspicious circumstances. Suicidal mania, again, which had hitherto been confined exclusively to donkeys, became alarmingly prevalent even among such for the most part self-respecting creatures as sheep and cattle.

Things continued on in this absurd way until another Unthinkercame along and made another argument, this one even more extreme: vegetables are intelligent creatures, too. The result? The Erewhonians stopped worrying about eating intelligent creatures, since they certainly couldnt survive with neither animal nor vegetable substance, and the Erewhonian mindset on the important issue of what to eat changed again, nimbly and without any great stress.

This is how Butler presents the difference between the Europeans and Erewhonians, within a satirical construct which, at first glance, is laughable.

Erewhon has two religious movements: the Musical Banks and the goddess Ydgrun.

In Erewhon, a person faces punishment for having a physical ailmentjail time or even, in the case of incurable or chronic conditions, execution.

In Erewhon, a promising young person would attend one of the Colleges of Unreason, whichnurture scholars inthe advanced study of hypothetics as well as the basic disciplines of Inconsistency and Evasion.

More here:

Social Norms of the Erewhonians - The Great Courses Daily News

New Eastern Outlook

ITS no secret that Bill Gates and the advocates of the UN Sustainable Development Agenda 2030 are also devout promoters of human eugenics, the thinning of the human herd as Britains misanthropic prince Philip once put it. Some such as Joachim Schnellnhuber, climate adviser to the Pope, openly welcome a human population below one billion as sustainable. Now serious research is emerging that one of the most effective reducers of the human population is being spread by so-called modern scientific agriculture through the select use of toxic agrochemicals, pesticides deemed safe which are anything but safe.

According to a new book by Dr Shanna Shaw, Count Down, the male sperm count in western industrial countries, including the European Union and the United States, is falling at a dramatic rate. Shaw estimates that over the past four decades the average sperm count has dropped by 50 per cent or more. In other words a young male today seeking to have a family has only half the sperm count his grandfather did, half the chance to conceive. Shaw estimates that unless toxic chemical exposures in agriculture and the environment are dramatically altered, we may not have the ability to reproduce naturally much longer, and that by 2050 most human beings in the industrial countries, including China, will need technological assistance to procreate.

Shaws book is a further elaboration of a 2017 peer-reviewed scientific paper which Shaw and colleagues published. In the paper, Shaw carefully analysed a total of 244 estimates of sperm concentration and Total Sperm Count, or TSC, from 185 studies of 42,935 men who provided semen samples in 19732011. What they found was alarming to the extreme. But beyond a few media headlines, no changes of consequence resulted, as the powerful agrochemical corporations such as Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta, DowDuPont (now Corteva) lobbied regulators to ignore the findings.

Shaw found that Among unselected western studies, the mean sperm concentration declined, on average, 1.4 per cent per year with an overall decline of 52.4 per cent between 1973 and 2011. The same group of males, had an average decline in mean TSC of 1.6 per cent per year and overall decline of 59.3 per cent. That is a sperm count decline as of a decade ago of more than 59 per cent in men, unselected by fertility, from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. And it continues to decline year by year.

Because of lack of serious support for new studies, updated data is limited. Fifteen years ago, over half of potential sperm donors in Hunan Province, China, met quality standards. Now, only 18 per cent do, a decline blamed on endocrine disrupting chemicals according to one study. A similar fall in sperm count was registered by researchers in Taiwan, as well as a similar result for Israel. Shaw concludes, male reproductive health, not just semen quality by the way, is in trouble, and this has consequences, not just for the ability to have a child, but it also impacts the health of the man. She cites as examples, low sperm count, infertility, testicular cancer, and various general defects. One of them is undescended testicles, another one is a condition where the opening of the urethra is not where it should be.

Endocrine disruptors

SWAN, today with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, believes the cause is to be found in the huge rise in toxic chemical exposures in recent decades, especially of chemicals known as endocrine disruptors or hormone disruptors. She points to chemicals that make plastics soft, which are phthalates, or chemicals that make plastics hard like Bisphenol A, or chemicals that are flame retardants, chemicals that are in Teflon, and so on, pesticides.

The last, pesticides, is the group that should send loud alarm bells ringing because it is proven to get into groundwater and the human food chain. Today the two most widely used pesticides in the world are Bayer-Monsantos Roundup containing the probable carcinogen, glyphosate, and Azatrine made by Syngenta, which today is owned by ChemChina.

Atrazine effects

IN 2010, a renowned University of California, Berkeley scientist, Tyrone B Hayes, professor of integrative biology, led a major study of the effect of Atrazine exposure for frogs. He found that the pesticide, widely used on US corn crops and sugarcane, wreaks havoc with the sex lives of adult male frogs, emasculating three-quarters of them and turning one in 10 into females. He found ,These male frogs are missing testosterone and all the things that testosterone controls, including sperm. Moreover, Hayes noted that the 10 per cent of frogs exposed to Atrazine that turn from males into females something not known to occur under natural conditions in amphibians can successfully mate with male frogs but, because these females are genetically male, all their offspring are male. Hayes declared, I believe that the preponderance of the evidence shows atrazine to be a risk to wildlife and humans.

Atrazine is a potent endocrine disruptor. Atrazine is also the second-most widely used herbicide in the US behind Monsantos glyphosate product, Roundup. Despite the evidence, in a controversial ruling the US Environmental Protection Agency, in 2007 ruled that Atrazine does not adversely affect amphibian sexual development and that no additional testing was warranted. End of story? Hardly. But in 2004 the EU banned Atrazine saying Syngenta failed to prove its safety in drinking water.

Another agrochemical that has been determined to be an endocrine disruptor is Monsantos Roundup with glyphosate. Roundup is the worlds most widely used pesticide, in over 140 countries including Russia and China. Its use on US genetically modified crops has exploded in recent years as almost 90 per cent of US corn is genetically modified, and a similar percentage of its soybeans. Between 1996 when genetically modified Monsanto corn and soybeans were authorised in the USA, and 2017, Americans exposure to the chemical grew 500 per cent. It has been tested in drinking water, cereals in stores and in urine of pregnant women. Almost all meat and poultry is saturated with glyphosate from animal feed.

A recent study carried out in Australia by researchers at Flinders University found that Roundup killed the cells that produce progesterone in women, causing their levels to drop. Glyphosate and Roundup have been linked to birth defects, reproductive problems and liver disease, and it has been shown to have the potential to harm the DNA of human umbilical cord, placental and embryonic cells.

In 2015, scientists in Nigeria examined the effects of combined exposure to both glyphosate and Atrazine on rats. They found the combination was even worse with effects on sperm, testosterone synthesis and male reproductive organs.

In 2016, Chinas state-owned chemicals giant, ChemChina, bought Syngenta for a colossal $43 billion. At the time ChemChina had distribution rights in China and other Asian countries for Monsanto Roundup as well. On the ChemChina website it lists Atrazine among the herbicides it sells, calling it a safe and efficient herbicide for corn fields. ChemChina is also the leading producer of glyphosate for the Chinese agriculture market.

Today China is facing, by its own admission, a major agriculture crisis and is also struggling with ways to insure food security. Reports are that an increased role for genetically modified crops with Chinese patents will be a central part of a new five year plan which would undoubtedly mean using glyphosate and Atrazine. At the same time the state is increasingly alarmed by the falling birth rate which has not improved despite relaxations on the one child policy. With Chinese farmers using significant amounts of pesticide chemicals including glyphosate and Atrazine to improve yields, they are pursuing a disastrous combination that will not only not solve the growing food crisis, but also may destroy the reproductive potential of a major portion of its 890 million rural population, as well as countless millions of urban citizens.

Are these dangerous endocrine disrupting agrochemicals allowed worldwide because of bureaucratic ignorance of the damage caused by glyphosates, Atrazine and other endocrine disrupters on the human reproduction? Is it only because of corporate greed for hyper profits that they exist? A 1975 quote from Henry Kissinger, author of the eugenics document NSSM-200 during the Nixon-Ford era is instructive: Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world, because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries. And from Bill Gates: The world today has 6.8 billion people thats headed up to about nine billion. If we do a really great job on vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 to 15 per cent. Or the grand old dog of eugenics, prince Philip: I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus. (In his foreword to If I Were an Animal United Kingdom, Robin Clark Ltd, 1986).

We are rapidly making the human species extinct as we continue to ignore the dangers of these toxins to human and other life forms.

New Eastern Outlook, March 9. F William Engdahl is a strategic risk consultant and lecturer.

Continue reading here:

Will mankind be extinct in a few years? - newagebd.net

The summer of 2020 brought a renewal of calls for racial justice around the world. For the first time, many scientists, including those in the geosciences, began to confront the ways in which racism and colonialism are systemic within their fields and institutions. In seeking ways to dismantle the systemic disenfranchisement of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) scholars, one group of geoscientists looked back on the origins of their field.

The way that were being trained today is similar to the way people were being trained at the turn of the [20th] century. The science we can envision doing, what we expect these tool sets to allow us to do, is limited in this framework, said Tamara Pico, an ice age geodynamics and feminist science studies researcher. Pico is part of a team of scientists who developed GeoContext, a set of supplementary teaching modules that aims to give the social and political context of geoscience history.

If we keep using the same tool sets without being a little critical and maybe skeptical of what these tools were designed to do, we are unknowingly perpetuating a lot of the same practices of exclusion and practices of exploitation, Pico added. Thats why we use GeoContext as our title, because giving the context of the past might help students see where their tools come from and how, if we keep using those tools, then we wont get a different outcome.

Eos staff writer Kimberly Cartier spoke with four of the scientists behind the development of the GeoContext curriculum: Pico, who will be an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz; geologist Christine Y. Chen, who conducted this research as a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.; Seth Olinger, a Ph.D. student studying glacial geophysics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.; and Wesley Wiggins, a geoscience undergraduate student at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. Our conversation, below, has been edited for length and clarity.

Eos: What is scientific racism? In what ways is it present in the geosciences today?

Pico: Scientific racism is using science to create or justify racist ideas.Sometimes we think scientific racism is something of the past, but it exists in science today. Its pretty common to think that the Earth sciences are separate from social issues. But early geology, especially the early American geology that is [often] seen as the foundation of our field, was largely motivated by social issues, and especially issues of race.

Wiggins: There are not a lot of people of color in the geosciences, and part of that has to do with the values that these fathers of geoscience perpetuated through their work and through their teachings.Confronting our own history in our field is important for acknowledging those divisions and healing and repairing from the damage that has been done and also allowing new ideas to come in that arent based in those ideologies.

Audio: Minik and the MeteoriteWhere do the samples in our museums come from? Christine Chen explains how one of the worlds most famous meteorites is connected to the tragic story of a boy named Minik. Click here for a transcript of the recording.

Chen: For the longest time, Id also bought into this idea that all science, including my field of geology, was apolitical and separate from social issues. To find out that some of geologys foundational leaders were involved in these kinds of studies was really surprising to me. Id heard stories about the eugenics movement in biology, and I thought, Okay, well, thats a biology problem. But disciplines were not as siloed back then as they are today, and in fact, the eugenics movement was borne out by the very same people who led the field that Ive been working in.I have to hope that if we know more about the true history of our field, not the censored whitewashed history that we are generally taught, perhaps we will stand a better chance at not perpetuating deeply problematic ideals that dont represent who we want to be today.

Olinger: In general, we love stories and narratives. The most compelling way to teach the history of a field, in the case of science or anything else, is often by using the tales of specific people who exerted a strong influence on the discourse or ideas within that field. And unfortunately, in the case of the geosciences, a lot of the people in 1800s who exerted a strong influence on the direction of the field also were involved in scientific racism.Its important that, moving forward, educators recognize the negative influences that those people had as well and make their students aware of them so that theres a full picture presented and that those ideas dont become implicitly accepted.

Eos: That resonates a lot with the time of reckoning were in now as people work to confront the racism thats systemic throughout society, science, and academia. Why is it so important to teach the context in which geoscience got started?

Pico: The reason its so important to teach this fuller context is to help us see the ways that the tools were being given are reproducing the same harm that imperialists were doing. For example, we learn how to map out territory. Why do we learn that? Its because thats what historical geologists were doing. They were making maps of the land so they could make claims to the land and use it for their purposes.

Olinger: People agree that better science is done when more perspectives are included and a more diverse range of people are engaged in the science process.If we want to make a field thats more welcoming and will be a field that people who have a diverse range of backgrounds want to join, its important that the education process is honest about what the legacy of the field is and to indicate that we want to make a change moving forward.

If I dont go scurry up this really scrambly steep scarp to go look at that rock, I will be less of a legitimate field geologist than if I looked at a nice rock outcrop that happens to be by a road.Chen: For example, as a field-going geologist, I have come across the belief of fieldwork being this domain of the rugged masculine straight white man. This archetype persists today, both subtly and overtly. That picture of the ideal field scientist definitely plays a role in why so many people who do not fit that classic archetype feel excluded, disillusioned, or unsafe or even experience some level of traumatization in the field. And for me, one of the materials that [Olinger] presented was really striking to me.John Tyndall was well known for being an accomplished mountaineer, and his theory of glacial flow mechanics happened to prevail over this other guys theory at the time. And the reason why it prevailed was not because he had better data or better science, but rather because he was seen as more of an accomplished mountaineer.

Even today, outdoorsmanship is conflated with academic prowess and credibility, where the difficulty, remoteness, dangers of fieldwork are tied to the perceived scientific value of the ideas and the expertise of those involved.Ive encountered this in my field training where, if I dont go scurry up this really scrambly steep scarp to go look at that rock, I will be less of a legitimate field geologist than if I looked at a nice rock outcrop that happens to be by a road. This is a very ableist mindset. Ideas about who makes the best field geologists not only affect who can do that science and who can gain legitimacy in these spaces but also affect the actual scientific ideas that then get promulgated and researched.

Eos: What was the catalyst that brought you together to discuss the issues of scientific racism and racism in the geosciences and develop a tool to address it?

Chen: In the aftermath of George Floyds murder this past June, there was a reinvigoration of the Black Lives Matter movement. Within STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics], there was a particular movement called #ShutDownSTEM, which was a day where science departments would take one day to think about the ways in which structural racism permeates our spaces and affects not only the people who do science but also science itself. If you had not engaged with these topics very much before, it was a day where you were supposed to do just that and put a pause on your normal business-as-usual activities.

My very first meeting during #ShutDownSTEM day was with this lovely group of people [the GeoContext team]. We had all this information on things that we wish we had known when we were getting trained as geoscientists, and we asked, Whats next?

Pico: One of the people in our group, Harriet Lau, wanted to put into her lecture slides pictures of people of color and of women who were famous geoscientists and she struggled to find them for historical slides. But she explained to me, This is why its hard.So we thought, why dont we replace those slides with something that explains why the field looks the way it does today?

The modules are very short, about five slides each, and theyre meant to be easy to incorporate into existing lectures.Eos: And from those discussions, you developed GeoContext?

Pico: Yes. We created a set of teaching modules that are meant to be supplementary for geoscience education. They span a range of topics that are generally included in geoscience, whether its an intro geoscience class or many of the standard classes that get taught for majors and graduate students. The modules are very short, about five slides each, and theyre meant to be easy to incorporate into existing lectures. Our hope is that the flexibility allows instructors to choose how to include this information however they want.People dont always have time to look into this on their own.

Eos: Thats one of the most common things that I hear when I talk to professors or teachers about why they arent talking about issues like this in classrooms. They say, I want to but I dont have enough time to do it from scratch or I dont know enough about it to create a slide on my own.

Pico: That is exactly the idea. We got together and figured out how to split topics so that it was manageable and done in a way that would help people not have to do that work.

Eos: What do some of the modules look like?

Wiggins: My module was about links between oceanography and the Atlantic slave trade and specifically related to one figure named Matthew Fontaine Maury. He was most known for being in the Navy, and he has been known as the Pathfinder of the Seas. He spent a lot of time looking at the trade winds and did a lot of work in the Atlantic Ocean. But there are a lot of other things that are less known about him and definitely surprised me. Essentially, his motivation behind work in the ocean was to profit off of enslaved people.He was pro moving slaves to Brazil and having them still be owned by American slave owners. And then the trade winds would optimize the market and make it very efficient for agricultural products produced by enslaved people.

Looking at that cinched for me. Its so surprising and yet not surprising at the same time. Of course, people will conduct work in oceanography to more efficiently trade goods, and of course, at that time, goods meant enslaved people.

Pico: The one I did was on landscape science and geomorphology. You might know John Wesley Powell for talking about rivers, but while he was writing these theories about rivers, he was also writing about the inferiority of Native American languages in the canyonlands of the United States. He actually spent most of his time doing that.We also mention William Morris Davis, whose work is used in geomorphology today. He would say, Warm climates are what makes these races stupid, and thats why Scandinavians are the best, or things like that. Im paraphrasing, but he would make arguments about climate and location of continents to justify a hierarchy of human races. Ultimately, we can trace these ideas to some of the eugenics movements that were used by the Nazi government.

Olinger: My slides are titled Glaciology, Race, and Masculinity. One slide addresses the fact that Indigenous Peoples are faced with a much higher level of hazard associated with glacial processes, including things like sea level rise, glacial lake outburst floods, and water scarcity associated with draining glaciers. Yet theres not a ton of work within glaciology that deals directly with Indigenous Peoples.

I cite a paper in which the authors examine descriptions for different types of snow used by the Smi people, who are an Indigenous People from Scandinavia. They find that, unsurprisingly, these folks who have been working in a glacial environment for a long time have incredibly interesting observations about the material properties of snow that would probably go unnoticed by scientists who havent spent any time in that area. Not only is it our duty to make an inclusive field, but the field is also improved by including other peoples perspectives.

Eos: The content you covered touches on some very heavy topics: slavery, white supremacy, eugenics. How did it feel personally to engage with these topics in the context of geosciences?

As an early-career researcher, you could imagine thinking, Louis Agassiz might be proud that I figured out global ice volumes or This was a continuation of his work, but actually, he wouldnt be proud of me. He didnt want me to exist.Pico: I study the ice age. And when learning about the ice age, Louis Agassiz was someone I revered very much. He really contributed a lot to the field, and it wasnt until the end of my fourth year as a graduate student that I learned about his work [perpetuating] scientific racism. And it felt like the carpet was being pulled out from under me.That, personally, was a feeling of I dont know what Im standing on anymore. As an early-career researcher, you could imagine thinking, Louis Agassiz might be proud that I figured out global ice volumes or This was a continuation of his work, but actually, he wouldnt be proud of me. He didnt want me to exist.

Wiggins: I definitely relate to that experience, though Im thinking about Princeton with Arnold Guyot. Guyots ideas about climate-based superiority of races were part of his ideology thatI just learned about this past summer. I havent been back in Guyot Hall, which is the home of the geoscience department, since then. But now, in some ways, it plagues my memories of the building because its a building that I personally loved, and thats the legacy that I have to think about every time I think of the building now.

Its really important to not memorialize these individuals. Put them in a museum, maybe, but make sure you talk about who they actually were.They did good things, but they also did pretty terrible things, and acknowledging that and not memorializing them is the first step to healing. This is our pathway to take a deeper dive into not only these individuals legacies but also the legacy of the field itself.

When I saw this project [GeoContext], it filled me with so much joy because this is what Ive known that my geosciences education has been missing this whole time.Its not that every single moment has been oh so happy. There have been times in this project that I walked out of my room to my dad and I said, Hey dad, I just want to scream right now.But it really felt, in my own way, that I could give back. Its something that I could use to help change the field of geoscience, coming from someone who hasnt even graduated college yet. There are not a lot of other Black geoscientists out there, and this helps me to make my mark and to be the change that the geoscience field really needs.

Eos: In what ways are you hoping this project grows and shapes the future of the field?

Chen: This first release focuses on the historical roots of various subdisciplines in Earth sciences. Were all hoping this project will expand to focus on issues more in the present day to help people reflect on what we as geoscientists can do now to reduce harm and even redress past harms to marginalized communities like Indigenous groups.

Pico: Were really hoping that this will be a growing resource that can be contributed to by the community. On our website, if people want to contribute, we would be happy to keep growing these resources through contributions. This was our first release, and in our next set, well focus on Indigenous Knowledges and Indigenous interactions.

Chen: If there is one thing that I hope for this project, it is that it will dispel the idea that geoscience, or any science for that matter, is apolitical and independent of human societal concerns. We, the Earth sciences community, have yet to collectively acknowledge and come to terms with our dark past. I hope the project shows how the social and political context of our science has, and continues to have, a huge impact on our ability to practice truly objective and empirical science. Who does the science? How does this impact what science is prioritized, funded, or considered elite? Who benefits or is harmed from the science?

Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@AstroKimCartier), Staff Writer

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Teaching Geoscience History in Context - Eos