Category Archives: Eugenics

Do the supporters of abortion know who founded Planned Parenthood? Margaret Sanger (founder) was a racist, supported eugenics, selective breeding, eliminate lesser humans and hatred for children. Two quotes from Ms.Sanger: But in my view, I believe that there should be no more babies. The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.

Ms. Sanger wrote many books but the one that stands out is entitled Motherhood In Bondage.Sixty three million babies have been aborted since the onset of Roe v. Wade. Do the pro abortion advocates really know what they are protesting for. It is sad to realize that they are not well informed.

Linda L. Eberhardt, Scotts Valley

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Letter | Pro abortion camp not well informed about past - Santa Cruz Sentinel

We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected. With those chilling words an illegitimately obtained Supreme Court majority tore up the lives of Americans & the Constitution in the Dobbs opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito. The votes for this opinion were only available because Merrick Garland was wrongly blockaded at the end of the Obama administration and Amy Coney Barrett hypocritically jammed through at the end of the Trump one.

Indeed, with this decision, we must ask if the Trump administration has really ended or simply migrated down Pennsylvania Avenue and taken up occupancy in the third branch.

The Alito opinion comes in the midst of congressional hearings exposing the sickness of Trumps style of governanceTrumpery, as we term it in a new book. The Dobbs opinion also exemplifies Trumpery, and its features provide a useful framework for understanding just how bad the opinion is. The Court should be known from here on out as the Trump Court.

Perhaps the single most defining characteristic of Trumpery is its disdain for the rule of law. The Alito opinion in the Dobbs case has that in spades. A central tenet of Supreme Court jurisprudence is stare decisis, the idea that once the Supreme Court has ruled on something, it is settled law and is entitled to permanence, even if later courts may disagree with it. That is particularly true where you have a decades long established precedent like Roe.

By upending one of the core legal principles governing the Supreme Courts functioning, the Alito opinion undermines the rule of lawand the courts legitimacy. It is akin to Trumps incessant assault on the laws and norms of the presidency that we have heard so much and so powerfully about in the Jan. 6 hearings. As we are being painfully reminded in the Jan. 6 hearings, that assault over time undermined and weakened the executive branch and Americans faith in it. Alito and the five justices who joined with him are sending the Supreme Court down that same slippery slope.

And they are transmitting a dangerous message: If Roe can be tossed out, then any Supreme Court precedent is in jeopardy. There goes stare decisis. In his concurrence Justice Clarence Thomas says the quiet part out loud: in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Courts substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Americans right to contraception, to make consensual choices in the bedroom and to same-sex marriage are all up for grabs. How long before states are also free to re-criminalize premarital sex and interracial relationships?

This madness is driven by the second core tenet of Trumpery: elevation of personal interests over public policy ones. Alito is himself reportedly opposed to abortion in his personal life, as are some of the other members of the majority. With this decision, they have allowed their personal agendas to seep into their abandonment of stare decisis and their official policymaking.

Sound familiar? Not just Trump but many in his administration used and abused government as a tool for their personal ends. Judges are supposed to adjudicate legal issues on the merits, independent of their personal ideologies. Alito and those joining the opinion have done the exact opposite here.

The third trait of Trumpery is also glaringly evident in the opinion: shamelessness. Alito feels no embarrassment at his naked attack on stare decisis, his pursuit of his personal agenda, or his dishonesty. Nor do he and his Dobbs colleagues see the need for baby steps, save for Roberts, who said he would have proceeded more slowly but who still joined the judgment. The majority opinions bold in declaring Roe and Casey dead. Like Trumps openly professed desire to overturn the election, Alito and his cronies overthrow of a half-century of precedent is unashamed and even brazen.

Fourth, Trumpery divides our society. Like the former presidents policies on immigration and building his wall, or his declaration that the white supremacist rioters in Charlottesville, Virginia, included fine people, Dobbs is a burning torch thrown into the tinderbox of our politics and society. Once the court proceeded with great caution to avoid popular turmoil. Not here. The result will foment widespread unrest.

Bringing to mind Melania Trumps infamous slogan, Alito and crews attitude is I really dont care, do you? The opinion states, We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the publics reaction to our work. That is just wrong. Avoiding the kind of political turmoil and escalation we are now facing is part of why we have stare decisisjudges should care about upsetting long-settled expectations and the societal ruptures that causes. Disregard for (and even intentionally exacerbating) social divisions was a specialty of the former president, who did everything possible to gratify his base. Tragically, this opinion smacks of a similar approach, consequences be damned.

That will do great harm not just to the social fabric, but to our system of government itself. The assault on democracy is the fifth foundational aspect of Trumpery. This decision will decimate the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. It was already on shaky ground, with its current composition owed to two presidents, George W. Bush and Trump, who did not win the popular vote during their initial victorious campaigns to the White House. To make matters worse, the shape of the court was, as we noted above, manipulated by the GOP Senate blockade during President Barack Obamas last year in office of his pick for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, purportedly because it was an election year. Then when a Supreme Court seat became vacant even later in the last months of Trumps administration, a Republican majority in the Senate abandoned any pretense of consistency to rush through Justice Amy Coney Barrett. This decision will devastate whatever remaining bipartisan legitimacy the court enjoyed had.

The sixth core characteristic of Trumpery is dishonesty, perhaps the single most overriding theme of the Jan. 6 hearings. The Dobbs opinion is rife with disinformation. For example, Alito justifies his reasoning on Roe with the fact that abortion is an unenumerated rightamong the civil and human rights that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution. These rights, Alito contends, should only receive federal protections if they are deeply rooted in U.S. history and culture. Abortion is not, according to Alito.

But the truth is the court has many timesincluding recentlyinstituted or upheld protections for unenumerated rights that dont have the long history Alito is describing. That includes protecting interracial and same-sex marriage. To apply this reasoning to other unenumerated rights but not to abortion is contradictory and disingenuous, to say the least. They may be next on the chopping block.

On the factual side, Alito cites fellow Justice Clarence Thomas in saying that abortion amounts to eugenics targeted at Black people. The truth is much more complicated, and ignores that outlawing abortion will disproportionately hurt women of color. To take only one other example of many, Alito also references Justice Amy Coney Barretts contention that safe haven lawswhich protect from penalization parents who give up their childobviate the need for abortions. But whether those laws lead to better outcomes for mothers is inconclusive, and experts disagree on their efficacy in general.

That brings us to the seventh and final of the seven deadly sins of this opinion and Trumpery alike: disdain for ethics. The Dobbs opinionand what Justice Thomas chillingly signals it may auguris cruel to women, to all Americans and to the rule of law itself.

Fortunately, all is not lost. The Supreme Court may have taken away Americans right to choice over their bodies, but they have not yet stolen our power to vote. With this deeply unethical screed, Alito and the rest of the Trump Court majority have given many millions of angry Americans a reason to turn out in November. Voters should give us state elected officials who will pass laws to protect choice. And the electorate should send to Washington a Congress that will pass a federal right-to-choice billand one that addresses the wrongly manipulated composition of the court by increasing its membership.

Congress has that unquestioned power under the Constitution. It has changed the numbers of justices before. And it should do so again.

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From now on, we should call it the Trump Court - Brookings Institution

Humans remain fascinated with dinosaurs: It's why scientists recently announced discoveries, to acclaim, about dinosaurs being warm-bloodedor maintaining a delicate co-existence with exotic plants. And it is why as the blockbuster"Jurassic World: Dominion" rampages through theaters, a quieter adventure is being told on bookshelves throughout America.Reuters senior reporter David K. Randall resurrects the world of early 20th-century robber barons and western adventurers in his new book,"The Monster's Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World."

If the story has a hero, it is Barnum Brown, who made history by unearthing the first Tyrannosaurus rex fossils in the wilderness of Montana. The hero's foil is Henry Fairfield Osborn, an upper crust eugenicist who competed with Brown to fill the American Museum of Natural History with dinosaur bones. It is a rip-roaring tale, albeit one with many sober moments of contemplation. For instance, it is difficult to read this book and not notice how class, gender, race and other social constructs determine the fates of these men and others in the tale. Randall's skill as a writer is undeniable. "The Monster's Bones" reads like a novel, complete with real-life scientific, political and social issues at stake.

At the center of all this human-fueled chicanery are the stars of the show the dinosaurs themselves.

In the interview segment below, Salon spoke with Randall about why a bunch of fossils can fuel so much drama and serve as the focal point of human dreams, from museums to movies, all of these years later.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and context.

I was wondering if you'd be willing to elaborate a little on what you would say was the feeling in the air to people like Osborn or Brown when they were engaged in their endeavors? What was the ideology, the philosophy, the sentiment of the time?

One thing I was struck by was the idea that science was for the first time kind of being seen as a social aspect. There's a social aspect of science as well. It wasn't just people doing experiments and finding out the laws of nature. It was more so, how did these laws of nature affect human beings and affect society? So with, Osborn, his idea was that dinosaurs were a way to bring in people to the Natural History Museum. In many ways that was almost the lure for the trap. If you bring people in the door, then you can also expose them to some of his white supremacist theories in eugenics, in a kind of subtle way.

Brown on the other hand was kind of the opposite. He was the idealistic part of the Gilded Age. Where he says we have these resources and we have this idea that the history of the Earth is much longer and stranger than anyone thought possible. So now let's go out and explore it. Let's kind of attempt to master the Earth and its history in some ways. And by doing that, he would go into essentially the blank spots in the map and see what was there. One thing I was really struck by was that, he was a college student and he writes this letter saying, essentially saying I can find dinosaurs for you.

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I want to briefly digress from discussing your book. We will return, but your book discusses using dinosaurs for evil purposes. Now, I must mention the current blockbuster stomping through the cineplexes throughout the world, "Jurassic World: Dominion."

Well, one thing I was struck by and I haven't seen the full movie yet, I've only seen a trailer but with "Jurassic Park," the first one, the 1993 version, dinosaurs really kind of fill in this sense of what are our cultural worries right now. The new "Jurassic World" seems like the idea that dinosaurs live among us and there's this world where they're not just in a park, they're free range, essentially. They're moving throughout the world. In some ways, it seems like that kind of fills in for our concerns about climate change. We have through science, we've changed the earth, and now we have to deal with this monster, and we don't know how to put the genie back into the bottle, essentially.

Reuters senior reporter David K. Randall resurrects the world of early 20th-century robber barons and western adventurers in his new book,"The Monster's Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World."

If you go back to the 1990s, "Jurassic Park" was the beginning of this sense of what technology could do. The Human Genome Project was in its early stages. Then pretty soon they were cloning sheeps like Dolly. It was this new computer age and dinosaurs really seemed to fill in this very tidy metaphor of what science can do, and also fears of science. I think dinosaurs overall, taking a step away from the "Jurassic" franchise, I think dinosaurs are overall this blank slate that we project our fears onto.

I want to return to your book because you said that the dinosaurs are a blank slate that we project our fears onto. You could also say that they are a blank slate onto which people project their ambitions. Is that not in many ways the theme of the book?

I think that's a very fair point.

I think for someone like Brown, for sure, this was a way to get out of his life, or the life that was kind of handed down to him, as someone living on a farm in Kansas, which is the last thing he wanted to do. The dinosaurs were a path to a bigger life. And you saw that for many people in the book, the history of paleontology is filled with people who were looking for dinosaurs as a way to do something bigger I think once they were put into museums, the public reaction to them was the first time you realized that this Earth is strange and that natural history is strange. And there were these creatures that were much larger than you and had teeth the size of your hand. It makes perhaps feel diminished in a different way.

But it also makes people feel inspired. I'm thinking of little children who love T. Rexes and Brontosauruses, and it's because they're fearsome. Have you ever thought of that? Why do little children, you would think that if T Rexes represent the apex of human fear, that children mm-hmm would view them with dread, like they view the concept of death with dread? In "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" the horrible scene where the dinosaur dies because the volcano explodes and everyone in the audience gets teary-eyed. People care about dinosaurs and feel inspired by them. And I feel like in "The Monster's Bones" that sentiment is captured as well.

I think that's a good point.

I think "Jurassic Park" is interesting that people want to be a part of it until the safety mechanisms break down and then they're face to face with the T. Rex and suddenly that becomes a much different story. I think that kids like dinosaurs so much because in some ways it's an alien right in front of you that you are told that this is how the world works, and this is how everything has been. And then suddenly you see essentially what were real-life monsters walking around. And this, I think , dinosaurs represent the era of possibility at this age, of this sense of possibility too, that life as it is right now is not how it always has been, or perhaps will always will be, that once upon a time, there were these enormous creatures walking the Earth, and that has changed. So whatever circumstances you may be in right now, you can kind of lean on that to say, you know, life does change.

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The real world behind "Jurassic World": How the story of dinosaurs reflects the story of humans - Salon

More than half the UK backs the idea of rewriting the DNA of human embryos to prevent severe or life-threatening diseases, according to a survey.

Commissioned by the Progress Educational Trust (PET), a fertility and genomics charity, the Ipsos poll found that 53% of people support the use of human genome editing to prevent children from developing serious conditions such as cystic fibrosis.

There was less enthusiasm for use of the procedure to prevent milder conditions such as asthma, with only 36% in favour, and to create designer babies, with only a fifth expressing support, but views on the technology differed dramatically with age.

Younger generations were far more in favour of designer babies than older people, with 38% of 16- to 24-year-olds and 31% of 25- to 34-year-olds supporting the use of gene editing to allow parents to choose features such as their childs height and eye and hair colour.

In the UK and many other countries it is illegal to perform genome editing on embryos that are intended for pregnancies, but the restrictions could be lifted if research shows the procedure can safely prevent severe diseases.

Genome editing has been hailed as a potential gamechanger for dealing with a raft of heritable diseases ranging from cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy to Tay-Sachs, a rare condition that progressively destroys the nervous system. In principle, the faulty genes that cause the diseases can be rewritten in IVF embryos, allowing those embryos to develop into healthy babies.

Despite enormous progress in the field, work is still needed to perfect genome editing and ensure it does not cause unintended changes to DNA. Because the edits would be performed in embryos, the altered DNA would affect every cell in the childs body, and could be passed on to future generations.

In 2018 a Chinese researcher, He Jiankui, provoked global condemnation when he announced he had tried to edit the genomes of two baby girls in the hope of making them immune to HIV. He was later jailed for violating medical regulations. The furore led to an international commission, convened by the Royal Society and others, which concluded that genome editing was far from ready for the clinic.

In a report on the surveys findings, PET says that if genome editing is put to medical use, it must be done in a scientifically and ethically rigorous way.

The authors say it is striking that younger people are more willing to countenance human genome editing for preferred characteristics such as eye and hair colour. It is worth paying attention to these views, but we should continue to prioritise medical needs in the first instance, they write.

John Harris, emeritus professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester, said he supported the maximum possible choice for parents in choosing the physical traits of their children if the traits in themselves are not harmful.

I dont think its wrong in principle to engineer either harmless or better than original traits in our children if we can, he said. If its not wrong to wish for a bonnie brown-eyed girl, how does it become wrong to implement that if you have the power? We are too ready to shout eugenics when people want to exercise innocent preferences.

According to the survey of a nationally representative 2,233 UK adults, two-thirds believe the NHS should offer fertility treatment for people who are infertile and want to conceive, but the report notes that access to free IVF is still a postcode lottery. Support is greatest for childless heterosexual couples, at 49%, while only 19% are in favour of the NHS providing fertility treatment for single people or transgender people.

Its disappointing that despite gender discrimination being illegal in the UK, attitudes to family structures remain traditional, said Prof Alison Murdoch, the president of the British Fertility Society. The better news, though, is that most people seem to have no objection to IVF a major change from 40 years ago. IVF is now a routine procedure, so why doesnt the NHS give everyone a chance?

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Half in UK back genome editing to prevent severe diseases - The Guardian

Nazism was applied biology, stated Hitler deputy Rudolf Hess. During the Third Reich, a politically extreme, antisemitic variation of eugenics determined the course of state policy. Hitlers regime touted the Nordic race as its eugenic ideal and attempted to mold Germany into a cohesive national community that excluded anyone deemed hereditarily less valuable or racially foreign.

Public health measures to control reproduction and marriage aimed at strengthening the national body by eliminating biologically threatening genes from the population. Many German physicians and scientists who had supported racial hygiene ideas before 1933 embraced the new regimes emphasis on biology and heredity, the new career opportunities, and the additional funding for research.

Hitlers dictatorship, backed by sweeping police powers, silenced critics of Nazi eugenics and supporters of individual rights. After all educational and cultural institutions and the media came under Nazi control, racial eugenics permeated German society and institutions. Jews, considered alien, were purged from universities, scientific research institutes, hospitals, and public health care. Persons in high positions who were viewed as politically unreliable met a similar fate.

Echoing ongoing eugenic fears, the Nazis trumpeted population experts warnings of national death and aimed to reverse the trend of falling birthrates. The Marital Health Law of October 1935 banned unions between the hereditarily healthy and persons deemed genetically unfit. Getting married and having children became a national duty for the racially fit. In a speech on September 8, 1934, Hitler proclaimed: In my state, the mother is the most important citizen.

Eugenicists had expressed concerns about the effects of alcohol, tobacco, and syphilis. The Nazi regime sponsored research, undertook public education campaigns, and enacted laws that together aimed at eliminating genetic poisons linked to birth defects and genetic damage to later generations. In 1936 the Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion was established to step up efforts to prevent acts that obstructed reproduction. In a 1937 speech linking homosexuality to a falling birthrate, German police chief Heinrich Himmler stated: A people of good race which has too few children has a one-way ticket to the grave.

On July 14, 1933, the Nazi dictatorship fulfilled the long-held dreams of eugenics proponents by enacting the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases (Hereditary Health Law), based on a voluntary sterilization law drafted by Prussian health officials in 1932. The new Nazi law was coauthored by Falk Ruttke, a lawyer, Arthur Gtt, a physician and director of public health affairs, and Ernst Rdin, a psychiatrist and early leader of the German racial hygiene movement. Individuals who were subject to the law were those men and women who suffered from any of nine conditions assumed to be hereditary: feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorder, genetic epilepsy, Huntingtons chorea (a fatal form of dementia), genetic blindness, genetic deafness, severe physical deformity, and chronic alcoholism.

Special hereditary health courts lent an aura of due process to the sterilization measure, but the decision to sterilize was generally routine. Nearly all better-known geneticists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists sat on such courts at one time or another, mandating the sterilizations of an estimated 400,000 Germans. Vasectomy was the usual sterilization method for men, and for women, tubal ligation, an invasive procedure that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of women.

International reaction to the Nazi sterilization law varied. In the United States, some newspaper editors noted the mass scale of the policy and feared that Hitlerites would apply the law to Jews and political opponents. In contrast, American eugenicists viewed the law as the logical development of earlier thinking by Germanys best specialists and not as the hasty improvisation of the Hitler regime.

In the 1930s, leading American and British geneticists increasingly criticized established eugenic organizations for freely mingling prejudices with a dated and simplistic understanding of human heredity. At the same time, sterilization gained support beyond eugenic circles as a means of reducing costs for institutional care and poor relief. Sterilization rates climbed in some American states during the Great Depression, and new laws were passed in Finland, Norway, and Sweden during the same period. In Great Britain, Catholic opposition blocked a proposed law. Nowhere did the numbers of persons sterilized come close to the mass scale of the Nazi program.

The sterilization of ethnic minorities defined as racially foreign was not mandated under the 1933 law. Instead, the Blood Protection Law, announced in Nuremberg on September 15, 1935, criminalized marriage or sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. Soon after, Nazi leaders took biological segregation a step further, privately discussing the complete emigration of all Jews as a goal. After the incorporation of Austria in March 1938 (the Anschluss), SS officer Adolf Eichmann coordinated the forced emigration of tens of thousands of Austrian Jews. The Nazi-organized attacks on German and Austrian Jews and Jewish property of November 910, 1938Kristallnachtconvinced many Jews remaining in the Reich that leaving was their only option for survival.

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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The Biological State: Nazi Racial Hygiene, 19331939

Eugenics, the science of selectively choosing human genetics, is most synonymous with the modern world and the horrors of Hitlers final solution, in which millions of Jews and other undesirable groups were gassed or lethally injected at concentration camps during World War II. However, eugenic practices can also be traced back to the ancient times, where they were first pondered by Plato and Aristotle and even put into practice by the Spartans. Centuries later, and following the publication of Charles Darwins groundbreaking theory of evolution in 1859, eugenics would experience a revival in popularity most notably in the United States, and it would go on to influence the Nazi Holocaust.

The ancient Greeks were the first philosophers to propose theories surrounding eugenics. In his legendary work the Republic, Plato contemplated a system of judicious matings which would ensure that the most desirable qualities and traits would remain inside the Athenian elite classes. He argued that men, at 25, and women, at 20, were at the ideal ages to produce offspring and to ensure the steady proliferation of the aristocracy.

Plato believed that marriage should be abolished, and that nobles with the most intelligence and best physical forms, should be the only men and women allowed to reproduce. He proposed that the creme-de-la-creme of Athenian high society should meet and intermingle at specially arranged festivals, in which prospective mates would temporarily marry and live together for the duration of one month. Accompanied by poetry, dancing, and music, the couples would be brought together for the sole purpose of procreation before having their unions legally broken off and readopting celibacy until the next festival. Although parent-child relations were forbidden, sister-brother unions were allowed. The number of marriages was to be determined by the ruler, who could increase or decrease the occurrence of short-term marriages in accordance with population sizes. On the other hand, the lower classes had no limit on the number of children, and could reproduce without restrictions.

Plato believed that marriage should be abolished, and that nobles with the most intelligence and best physical forms, should be the only men and women allowed to reproduce. ( Zzvet /Adobe Stock)

The first opportunities for marriage would be given to superior stock in a lottery system that was rigged to favor the most intellectually capable and attractive. Woman of esteemed beauty and grace and men who had performed well in battle would be the preferred candidates, with youths deemed inferior purposely having bad luck in the draw and always left without a mate. Unofficial relationships between women aged 20 to 40 and men aged 25 to 55, the child-bearing ages, were deemed illegal since they commenced outside the jurisdiction of lawmakers. Relationships between lovers who were past the legal ages however, were permitted.

Once a baby was born, Plato advised that it should be taken to a special nursery to be raised by matrons, and that family life, with all its distractions, should be prohibited. If the baby was defective, it was to be, in Platos words hidden away . Although infanticide was not overtly referenced by the Greek sage, it was ominously indicated.

The Greek savant Aristotle, a contemporary of Plato, offered some criticisms. He contended that the community of wives and children would better suit the lower classes, who would be more obedient to rule and less likely to rebel if their family ties were weaker. In addition, he foresaw problems in the event that inferior children, who were to be given to the lower classes, found out their true noble origins. In his opinion, the guardian classes instead should adopt monogamous pairings, with women ideally being married off at 18 and men at 37. Pregnant women were further advised to walk to the Temple of Ilithyia every day for exercise, to eat healthily, and to remain calm.

Finally, he saw danger in the untapped breeding of the lower classes which he believed would lead to an increase in criminality, and saw in their potential numerical superiority a threat to the ruling elite, who would be outnumbered if a rebellion were to take place. As a result, he held that laws should be sanctioned to prohibit uninhibited population growth. Women birthing too many children were also to be the subject of abortion, and any disabled or deformed progeny were to be immediately killed.

In Platos later work, the Laws, perhaps in reaction to Aristotles riposte, the scholar would change his mind on several aspects of his theory. Realizing the impracticality of the marriage festival, he instead favored monogamous relationships, which were to be authorized by wise judges. Men of 25 or over were to submit their marriage proposals to the state, and if accepted they were obliged to marry their spouse before the age of 30. Any man over the age of 35 from the highest class who was not married would have to pay an annual penalty of 100 drachmas. Newlyweds were expected to produce the finest children, and were each appointed a matron for 10 years to oversee the delivery of healthy babies. To ensure this, expectant mothers were to pray at the Temple of Ilithyia for 20 minutes each day and to perform sacred rites to appease the Goddess of Matrimony.

One of the most famous instances of ancient eugenics came from the Spartans. They were an ancient Greek people who fought the Persians in the 4th century BC, and who used eugenics principals to mold their citizenry into the strongest warriors, the most astute statesmen, and the most spiritually-pure priests.

For the warriors, weaker members of the spartan aristocracy were removed from the gene pool and barred from breeding through a variety of means. Intense physical competition, which aimed to test the martial and physical prowess of Spartan youth was a common way to identify weaklings in the pack, who would be stigmatized and stripped of their rights once recognized as inferior. If a Spartan male was considered unfit for procreation, his sisters would also suffer, and were similarly banned from having children.

A spartan woman giving a shield to her son (by 1826) by Jean-Jacques-Franois Le Barbier. (Public Domain )

In contrast, the most courageous Spartan soldiers occupied privileged positions in society, and were even allowed to engage in reproduction with the wives of other Spartan nobles. Deformed children were promptly disposed of shortly after birth, and even children considered ugly or awkward looking would meet the same fate, as the Spartans were obsessed with maintaining fine physical form and beauty within their noble ranks. As a result, marriage to foreigners was illegal, as Spartans deplored the mixing of outsider blood with their own.

Plutarch, a principal source on Spartan society, outlined this Spartan hereditary law, which:

forbade a descendant of Herakles from producing children from an alien women and ordered that anyone leaving Sparta in order to settle amongst other peoples should be put to death.

However, the Spartan selection process proved overly exclusive and precipitated a dangerous population crisis in the 3rd century BC. Between 480 BC and the mid 3rd century BC the number of Spartan males fell from 8000 to 1000. Realizing the existential threat, King Agis IV and later Kleomenes III sought to rectify the problem, and although they reluctantly broadened the requirements for candidates allowed to become part of the high nobility, their solutions remained infused with eugenics thinking.

Agis IVs plan was to supplement the Spartan aristocracy with the most superior members of the periodikoi, the lower classes, and xenoi, foreigners, in order to revive the falling population. The most handsome men and most bewitching women of these traditionally marginalized populations were granted a place in the Spartan hierarchy. Agis solution garnered great support, and enjoyed divine approval from Pasiphae, a Spartan deity, as well as by Lykourgos, the original Spartan lawmaker who was also considered to be a god.

Warrior-statesman Leonidas, who himself was married to a Persian and had a half-foreign child, became Agis greatest critic, and rather hypocritically disapproved of his leaders plan to allow foreigners into the citizen body, citing the expulsion of foreigners in the 4th century by Lykourgos as evidence that the gods disliked his plan. Agis retorted, arguing that Lykourgos never had a problem with the physical forms of foreigners, and only their behavior:

For he had expelled them not because he was hostile to their physical bodies but because he feared their lifestyles and ways.

Following their confrontation, Leonidas was arrested by Agis staunch ally Lysandros on the grounds of having a foreign spouse. However, Leonidas was able to re-gain his power, having Agis executed in 241 BC, and forcing his winsome widow to marry his son Kleomenes III, who continued Agis policies. Kleomenes went on to recruit 4000 members of the periodikoi class, selecting them not on their intelligence or wealth but solely on their good looks. More accepting than his father Leonidas, Kleomenes had a more moderate stance on the enrollment of foreigners, only permitting the most powerful to become member of the Spartan ruling order.

Inspired by Mendels experiments with genetically modified peas in 1865, which established the basic principles of hereditariness, and Charles Darwins revolutionary theory of evolution, the term eugenics was first coined by Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, in 1884, deriving its meaning from the Greek word eugenes which meant good in birth. Although Galton had read the works of Plato and had even derived the term from the Greek language, he didn't think much of the ancient Greeks theories, writing in a letter that he had read:

Platos Republic and Laws for eugenic passages; but they dont amount to much beyond the purification of the city by sending all the degenerates to from what is termed a colony!

Thus, the idea of modern eugenics, first attributed to Galton in his seminal work Inquiries into Human Fertility and Its Development , which disseminated the idea that intelligence was hereditarily acquired and that the higher races of humanity were destined to rule, shared very little continuity with the doctrines of the ancient Greeks.

After Galtons landmark publication, interest around eugenics exploded around the turn of the century, and in 1904 the first eugenics journal, the Archive for Racial and Social Biology would be founded by German biologist Alfred Ploetz, focusing prominently on the superiority of the Nordic and Aryan races and the notion of racial hygiene. With the establishment of the Society for Racial Hygiene in Germany, the Eugenics Education Society in Britain, and the American Breeders Association, eugenics was becoming a truly global phenomenon in the first decade of the 20th century.

A set of photographs depicting anthropometry (the measurement of humans) at The Second International Exhibition of Eugenics held in 1921. ( Public Domain )

Eugenics was most enthusiastically received in the United States, and in 1910 the Eugenics Record Office was founded by Charles Davenport with funding from noted businessmen John Harvey Kellogg. The institution trained survey workers to collect information on US families, who were judged on such attributes such as feeblemindedness, criminality, and alcoholism. The latest developments in eugenics were compiled in a journal called Eugenical News which was nationally distributed.

In 1912, the first International Eugenics Congress took place in London, attracting over 400 of the most celebrated scientists and figures of the day, including Winston Churchill and Alexander Graham Bell. Through its influence, by the end World War One eugenics societies sprung up around the world, in countries such as Argentina, Mexico, Italy, France, and Hungary.

In the USA, the 1920s saw the emergence of Fitter Family Contests, sponsored by the Eugenics Record Office. Families would compete to be the most genetically perfect specimens in competitions held across the USA. Following a series of physiological and psychological tests and the submittal of health records, families deemed the most genetically exceptional, and who were most often white, would be awarded with medals and accolades for their unequaled eugenical worth.

Left: "Winners of a Fitter Family contest stand outside the Eugenics Building at the Kansas Free Fair in Topeka, KS. ( Fair Use ) Right: A Better Baby Contest at the 1931 Indiana State Fair. ( Fair Use )

At the Second International Eugenics Congress in 1922, this time taking place in New York and attracting representatives from Central and Latin America, immigration became the central topic of debate. Henry Laughlin, the countrys foremost authority on eugenics, put forward the idea that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were genetically inferior due to their higher rates of mental disability and criminality, and represented a threat to the Nordic races. This spurred President Calvin Coolidge to pass the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 which set a quota on the number of immigrants from the southern and eastern parts of Europe allowed to enter the United States, with no limits set on northern European settlers.

In 1927, the case of Buck versus Bell dominated the newspaper headlines in Virginia, as 18-year-old patient Carrie Buck fought against the states mandate to have her sterilized. In 1924, Virginia had passed the Eugenical Sterilization Act, which allowed for the forced sterilization of those considered mentally disabled. This was not a new phenomenon. In 1907, Indiana had passed the first sterilization act in reaction to the intellectual discussions of the late 1800s, which blamed criminality and mental defects on poor genetic inheritance. By the 1930s, 27 states in America would institute similar sterilization laws.

Buck, who had been institutionalized into a mental facility because of her feeblemindedness, would go on to lose the case, as would many other unfortunate victims around the USA and the wider world. In Indiana until 1974, around 2500 people were forcibly sterilized, and in California between 1909 to 1979 there were nearly 20,000 cases of sterilizations. Oregon was the last state to repeal its sterilization laws in 1983, after victimizing 2648 people. Outside of the US, sterilization laws were passed in countries such as Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, and Norway. In Sweden, between 1935 and 1976, 60,000 Swedish women deemed mentally ill were reportedly sterilized against their will.

As early as 1922, William Bateson, founder of genetics, had declined an invitation to the Second International Eugenics Congress, stating that: the real question is whether we ought not to keep genetics (and eugenics) separate. By the 1930s, the Third International Eugenics Congress would attract less than 100 attendees as eugenic ideas fell out of favor with American and European intellectuals. Critics pointed to problematic experimental methods, understudied economic and environmental factors, and overly-simplistic approaches of Mendels theories seen through a dubious lens of classist and racist biases.

In addition, the worrying policies of Nazi Germany in the 1930s persuaded many to distance themselves from eugenics. Adolf Hitler and Nazi scientists had been inspired by the Americans to forcibly sterilize Jews and minorities in Germany with the passing of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring in 1933, a fact that sat uncomfortably with many US proponents of the theory. In 1939, at the eve of World War II, the Eugenics Record Office was finally shut down and funding was cut off. Following the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, eugenics became a taboo subject in the second half of the 20th century. Now, America and the Wests flirtation with such a dangerous ideology remains a shameful reminder of the devastating consequences of a bad idea.

Top Image: The selection of the infant Spartans (1840) by Giuseppe Diotti. The origins of eugenics are traced back to ancient Greece. Source: Public Domain

By Jake Leigh-Howarth

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The Shocking Ancient Greek Origins of the Eugenics Movement - Ancient Origins

Harvard University has held onto the remains of thousands of Indigenous people despite a 1990 federal law requiring bodies to be returned to their descendants, the school's newspaper, The Crimson, reported, citing a leaked report draft.

Since the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was passed, the university has returned 3,000 of the 10,000 bodies it once held. It also holds the remains of 19 individuals belonging to people of African descent.

The draft report, written by the Steering Committee on Human Remains in Harvard Museum Collections which was formed last year, discussed a push to increase the speed at which bodies are returned to descendants of the deceased or the appropriate affinity groups.

"They were obtained under the violent and inhumane regimes of slavery and colonialism; they represent the University's engagement and complicity in these categorically immoral systems," the draft report, which details more than a dozen recommendations for handling the remains,says, per The Crimson. "Moreover, we know that skeletal remains were utilized to promote spurious and racist ideas of difference to confirm existing social hierarchies and structures."

Most remains are held in the institution's Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnography.

"Our collection of these particular human remains is a striking representation of structural and institutional racism and its long half-life," the draft reads, according to The Crimson.

In a statement to Insider, the University said: "It is deeply frustrating that the Harvard Crimson chose to release an initial and incomplete draft report of the Committee on Human Remains."

"Releasing this draft is irresponsible reporting and robs the Committee of finalizing its report and associated actions, and puts in jeopardy the thoughtful engagement of the Harvard community in its release," the statement continued. "Further, it shares an outdated version with the Harvard community that does not reflect weeks of additional information and Committee work."

The leak comes just over a month after a faculty committee published a 134-page report highlighting Harvard's role in advancing "race theory" and eugenics during the 19th and 20th centuries.

The April report, titled "Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery" and conducted by the faculty Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, also highlighted that thousands of remains lingered on campus, but did not acknowledge the 1990 law.

"One aspect of the original mission of Harvard College was to educate (and convert) Native students alongside white classmates," the report reads, adding that the school also attempted to "civilize," enslave, and Christianize Indigenous people.

It then recommended the establishment of a steering committee and that the university engages descendants of enslaved individuals "through dialogue, programming, information sharing, relationship building, and educational support."

"For too long, these remains have been separated from their individuality, their history, and their communities," the draft report also reads.

Professor Evelynn Hammonds, the chair of the Steering Committee on Human Remains in Harvard Museum Collections, did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

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Harvard University is still holding on to the remains of 7,000 indigenous people - Insider

People who hold to the Great Replacement Theorythat Jews and Liberals are stirring up People of Color to overthrow White people fill us with so much scorn that, in demonizing them for demonizing us, we become part of the problem. In our increasingly diverse and multi-cultural America, can we find the trust we need to work together?

One of the pleasures of retirement is having an hour to sit down with the New York Times and a cup of coffee first thing in the morning. Sadly, the apocalyptically bad news we have been treated to lately leaves me shaken with horror at the evil loose in the world rather than well-informed and ready to start my day.

I know, I know, even the Good Grey Lady adheres to the journalistic precept that if it bleeds, it leads. Nevertheless, I find it hard to deal with my feelings after she greets me every single day with headlines screaming MURDER! MAYHEM! PANDEMIC! SPECIES EXTINCTION! MONKEYPOX!

As my fellow New York Times readers can attest, the murder and mayhem motif often pervades an entire issue of the paper.

That is why on May 16, the Monday after an especially horrific weekend massacre of Black shoppers by an 18-year-old under the influence of Replacement Theory, my gloom was (ever so slightly) lifted by two other articles in the issue, one about Scorn and the other about Trust.

Replacement theory is an illogical medley of eugenics, race hatred, and White supremacy that has been pervasive in America from slavery times to the present.

After the First World War, Black veterans (many still in uniform) were brutally tortured and lynched simply for having served in the army. Whites feared that having been trained to fight, they would unite to overthrow White civilization.

Between the wars, all attempts at anti-lynching legislation were fiercely resisted by Congress, with President Roosevelt consistently withholding his support because he needed to placate White southern Democrats. It wasnt until this year, on March 29, that the Emmet Till Antilynching Act, named for a 14-year-old brutally murdered in 1955, was finally signed into law.

American aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, an America Firster and Nazi sympathizer, was an enthusiastic supporter of the eugenics theory that considers genetics an indicator of human worth, with the White race inherently superior to all others.

Hitler was encouraged by the idea that Race mingling and immigration were undermining the Aryan race; he used eugenics as an anti-Semitic dog-whistle to persuade German citizens that Jews were plotting to replace them.

Replacement theory feeds on the long-held philosophy of Western dualism which accepts an existential polarity in all phenomena. The statement underpinning the notion of replacement if People of Color gain something, Whites will automatically lose it is a fallacy because it derives from a win/lose dualism rather than win/win assumption.

Its corollary that power always means power/over and never power/with arouses fear among Whites that, if you let Black and Brown people win elections, they will inevitably treat White people with the same kind of viciousness that White people have historically inflicted on them.

You can understand why, having listened to Republican Senators and Representatives and neo-fascist pundits like Tucker Carlson raving about Replacement Theory, I want to heap my (elite, liberal) scorn upon them all.

When I read Anglican Priest Tish Harrison Warrens editorial that America has a Scorn Problem in the same issue, I realized that my loathing for Republicans and their allies was part of the problem.

Rev. Warren writes about a toxic form of polarization characterized by a basic abhorrence for their opponents an othering in which a group conceives of its opponents as wholly alien in every way. Shes right: if I consider Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson abhorrent as a human being, I am complicit in the polarization, and hence deterioration of American democracy: Too often we find people with different opinions not just wrong, but bad, with the result that this hatred toward our opponents and the accompanying habit of moralism is destroying us as a people.

Though my feelings about Tucker Carlson arise from my most deeply held moral values, in scorning him and his values, am I knocking myself off my own higher moral ground?

One of my basic principles is to honor the dignity and worth of every individual, which has to include Republican Party members and the people they stir up.

To honor anyone, I must understand them: in this case, I need to figure out what are they so angry about? The angry people I know are often reacting to some kind of unconscious fear or grief. Or, as Black American writer James Baldwin puts it in The Fire Next Time, I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

I am so intensively introspective (I have kept a diary since I was 8 years old and have benefited from 30 years of talk therapy) that it is hard for me to accept the fact that most people entirely avoid probing the sources of their emotions; they feel vague emanations of resentment and anguish, but they do not know why these emotions set them off.

As psychoanalyst Carl Jung puts it, If we remember that there are many people who understand nothing at all about themselves, we shall be less surprised at the realization that there are also people who are utterly unaware of their actual conflicts. (quoted from New Paths in Psychology)

What are adherents to American neo-fascism, White Supremacy, and conspiracy theories like QAnon and Replacement so afraid of?

With the historical shift in the American White population from majority to minority, White people fear a loss of power which they are convinced will lead to racial subjugation (see my Impakter article on The Tyranny of Merit).

What are they grieving? They are grieving not only power and supremacy but normativity, the security of knowing that it is your norms and values, not anybody elses, that determine civic and cultural life. Amid such existential polarization, how can we enact our commonality?

Had I not come across a third article in my paper, my morning read might have left me completely demoralized. Damien Cave, in his analysis of Australian vs. American Covid death rates, suggests that our American problem is one of trust: simply put, we dont trust each other, our science, or our institutions.

When the pandemic began,76 percent of Australianssaid they trusted the health care system (compared witharound 34 percentof Americans), and 93 percent of Australiansreportedbeing able to get support in times of crisis from people living outside their household.

Former President Donald Trump and his party insisted that science could not be trusted: forget about covid, forget about masks and vaccinations -inject your intestines with bleach and you would be just fine.

Worst of all, Trump cast aside a detailed plan for just such a pandemic that had been painstakingly assembled by the Obama administration because President Obama was a bi-racial liberal with an elitist education, which made everything he did and said a lie.

Although I have no doubt that the profit-based and poorly organized health system in the United States contributed significantly to the different effects Covid had on our population, Damien argues that it is their belief in the common good that saved so many Australians and that its lack in America sent over one million Americans to their unnecessary deaths.

When Australians are asked why they accepted the countrys many lockdowns, its once-closed international and state borders, its quarantine rules, and then its vaccine mandates for certain professions or restaurants and large events, they tend to voice a version of the same response: Its not just about me. (italics mine)

Australians ability to act on each others behalf is admirable, but our diversity puts America in a somewhat different position. While we are a fully multi-cultural people, Australia has a larger (and stable) component ( 76%) that identifies as White or European; moreover, it is only beginning to experience now the impact of immigration they have long resisted. Until recently their relatively homogenous culture and disregard for its aboriginal legacy has no doubt made it easier for Australians to hold values in common than for Americans that have a far more diverse society.

According to the 2020 census, the United States is now 57.3% White, with the rest Hispanic, Black, Asian, and Native American. The trend is towards even greater minority population, likely to outnumber Whites in the next decade.

The good news amid this pronounced population shift is that our civic culture our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Rule of Law, provides a basis for consensus in diversity.

Perennially endangered by our narrow-minded tribalism and hyper-individualism, we have historically contracted for a pluralistic, big-tent democracy. Nonetheless, there is no question that the scorn we need to transcend and the trust we need to develop will be a much more complex and difficult achievement than in a country like Australia.

In our scorn-ridden nation riven by partisan and tribal enmity, how can we possibly effect a common good? The first thing is to recognize that, not just morally but tactically, scorn doesnt work: it merely leads to more divisiveness, less consensus, and paralytic inaction.

The non-violent strategy developed by Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King remains an effective tool for social change. Though known as passive resistance, non-violence is a tough-minded strategy that requires courage, persistence, and tactical wiliness.

In the Civil Rights Movement, the non-violence practiced by huge marches of men, women, and children attacked by police with fire hoses and dogs had a tremendous appeal to the conscience of the rest of the country, as we watched the whole thing on television.

In our present situation, verbal non-violence (which we could also term verbal non-scorning) is effective in conversing with people you (violently) disagree with. Respectful and open-minded bipartisan dialogue is a key tactic in an environmental organization I work with, the Citizens Climate Lobby. (see my Impakter article, Making Political Sausage).

One of the most delightful moments in my life as a political activist was watching our Conservative Republican Congressman open up during more than two years of conversation until, eventually, he did what we (respectfully) asked.

This shift from scorn to trust is extremely difficult to achieve and requires lots of practice, which is why organizations like Braver Angels have devised ways to get people who would ordinarily express nothing but scorn towards each other into debates and discussions based on respect for their mutual humanity. Here is what they teach:

A few days after the May 16 issue of the New York Times, there was a front-page article about an out-and-out diversity miracle.

In Scarred by a Racist Past, a Georgia County Booms, Jonathan Weisman describes Forsyth County, which has a long history of lynching and intimidating Blacks: The people who drove Forsyths Black residents from their homes and farms had no name for their hatred, no Great Replacement or White Genocide theories, but the notion that other races were plotting to replace the white inhabitants took murderous form more than a century ago.

Miracle of miracles, when the diverse populations of nearby Fulton County finally overflowed into Forsyth in the 1990s, bringing not only Blacks but also Asians, Asian Indians, Hispanics (and, lately, Ukrainians), the economy boomed, leaving White Forsyth real estate saleswoman Maria Zaragoza declaring that diversity can never be bad in my book.

Diversity is inevitable, economically viable, and, if you just open your mind to how interesting other people are, profoundly moving and, actually, enjoyable. Best of all, promoting diversity engages us in promoting our basic American values lets go for it!

Editors Note: The opinions expressed here by Impakter.com columnists are their own, not those of Impakter.com In the Featured Photo:Civil Rights march on Washington, Sept. 2, 2003 Credit:U.S. National Archives

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Political Polarization in America: The Way Forward? - Impakter

Rather than guessing their ethnicity, it mostly just leads you to guess why they think that their ethnicity is one of the more intriguing parts of them as aperson in lieu of, say, ahobby, asense of humour, or sartorial flair.

Having asked my friends whether they had noticed it, they confirmed Iwasnt mistaken. They usually didnt match, they added, because they felt it was aclue into that persons dating preferences, i.e. that only white people would find this quiz an interesting game to play, and so thats probably their main audience. It makes me wonder what their racial politics are.

Then Iwonder how Iwould even arrive at an answer without crudely looking at his features and trying to compare it to other people Iknow. Still wondering, Ithink about how such adry question came to be one of the most popular prompts on the app. Because at the end of the day, all Ireally want to be thinking about is: is this guy hot? Please dont trigger my discourse brain, Im here to have fun. Next.

On aprofile with limited space, where aman could tell viewers about himself and show off his personality, he has instead opted for agame of eugenics. Of course, the man in question is usually ethnically ambiguous or white-passing otherwise the prompt is kind of useless.

But for the sake of nuance, its worth unpacking the various things that are possibly at play here.

Its been discussed how online influencers often lean into ethnic smudging, building an aesthetic that borrows from different cultures into an amalgamation of perceived desirable qualities, from extreme contouring to augmented eyes and lips (and legs and hips and body body, as Kandi from The Real Housewives Of Atlanta would sing). Perhaps this is spilling over into men on dating apps thinking that being racially hard-to-place is now seen as abonus elsewhere.

Meanwhile, articles have unpicked the racial hierarchies on apps like Grindr, where users explicitly write no chocolate, no rice, no spice to deter matches from particular ethnic groups, or Hinge, which allows you to have someones race or ethnicity as a dealbreaker, meaning you can make sure your digital path never crosses unwanted groups.

On the flipside, theres also alot of exoticisation and fetishisation of ethnic minorities that happens on dating apps. Maybe this prompt is the potential suitor deciding to go ahead and exoticise themselves first before they get an inevitable no but where are you from? message.

However, please ask us something else. Literally anything else.

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What gives me the ick? Men that ask guess my ethnicity on dating - The Face

Whenever I work on a new edition of my human genetics textbook and reach the section on eugenics, which flourished in the United States in the 20th century well into the 1930s, Im relieved that its history. But in the summer of 2017, as I wrapped up the 12th edition, the eugenics coverage took on a frightening new reality with the attack in Charlottesville, where white supremacists bellowed Jews will not replace us! A president noted at the time, there are very fine people on both sides.

Its now 2022. Ive just finished revamping the section in my textbook on eugenics for the 14th edition. And once again, eugenics is in the headlines, with the attack on Black shoppers at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.

As another president once said, here we go again.

The ever-present white nationalism/supremacy echoes the century-old idea that a self-appointed group that perceives itself as superior can improve a human population through selective breeding or actions taken against individuals judged to be inferior. Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, an historian but also a eugenicist and Klansman, laid out his ideas in the 1920 book The Threat Against White World Supremacy: The Rising Tide of Color. Tack onto that todays fear of white replacement.

Its easy to see why white nationalism and white supremacy are used interchangeably.Merriam-Webster defines a white nationalist as one of a group of militant whites who espouse white supremacy and advocate enforced racial segregation. A white supremacist is a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races.

So, the supremacists take the scope farther, but Ill use the terms synonymously. Its all hate.

Sir Francis Galtoncoined the term eugenics, meaning good in birth, in 1883. He defined it as the science of improvement of the human race germplasm through better breeding. In 1930, Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, another pale Brit, embellished Galtons ideas by suggesting that governments reward high-income families when they have children, to encourage the passing on of the prized genes.

American botanist Luther Burbank entered the discussion in 1906 with his book The Training of the Human Plant. Burbank appreciated the value of diversity at the start of a eugenics program, even acknowledging the importance of immigration to seed that diversity. But he confuses populations, races, and species:

I have constantly been impressed with the similarity between the organization and development of plant and human life. I have come to find in the crossing of species and in selection, wisely directed, a great and powerful instrument for the transformation of the vegetable kingdom along lines that lead constantly upward. The crossing of species is to me paramount. Upon it, wisely directed and accompanied by a rigid selection of the best and as rigid an exclusion of the poorest, rests the hope of all progress. The mere crossing of species, unaccompanied by selection, wise supervision, intelligent care, and the utmost patience, is not likely to result in marked good, and may result in vast harm. let me lay emphasis on the opportunity now presented in the United States for observing and, if we are wise, aiding in what I think it fair to say is the grandest opportunity ever presented of developing the finest race the world has ever known out of the vast mingling of races brought here by immigration.

The eugenic movement in the US was officially legitimized in 1910 when Charles Davenport established the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. His team compiled data from all manner of institutions that warehoused the feebleminded, criminal, promiscuous, or socially dependent. He attributed their diagnoses to single genes, well before anyone knew what a gene even was.

Interest in eugenics persisted. One notorious case took place, ironically, in Charlottesville, 95 years ago. Seventeen-year-old Carrie Buck was tried for having a mother who lived in an asylum for the feebleminded and for having a similarly impaired daughter following rape. Carrie was herself deemed feebleminded, despite being a B student. Her case led Sir Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. to famously rule, three generations of imbeciles are enough. Carrie became the first person sterilized to prevent future births of socially inadequate offspring.

And then came the Nazis, with their own version of controlled breeding that took negative as well as positive turns.

The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, aka the Sterilization law, established Genetic Health Courts in 1933 to prevent people with any of several vague conditions, only a few of which are actually inherited, from having children. Two years later, the Lebensborn program placed the offspring of single women impregnated by the SS into Aryan households, and did the same for blond, blue-eyed orphans.

But the Nazis were picky. Acceptable whites came from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Unacceptable were those from Jewish, ethnic Pole, Slavic, or Roma ancestry. Nor were people of African ancestry included among the cherished, but they were not exterminated en masse.

The underlying assumption of the Nazis: Aryan genetic material is the best. The mechanism of perpetuating it: selective breeding. The Nazi science focused on selection, ignoring mutation, which happens in any DNA. Nazi thinking also steadfastly ignored the upped odds of recessive disease that come with endogamy marrying within a group.

The state of our knowledge of genetics today makes white supremacist ideology even more offensive than early eugenic thinking. I learned a lot five years ago when I read a white supremacist manifesto and published an article about it a day before it disappeared from the Internet. So, the rest of this post is mostly reprinted from August 2017.

In mid-August 2017, in the wake of the tragic rally in Charlottesville, STAT News and other high-profile media reported on a meeting in Montreal where two sociologists described reactions of white supremacists to genetic ancestry testing results that indicated that they werent as pure as theyd thought. I awaited the full report, the media coverage being short on detail.

I spent the final weekend that August reading the tome from Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan, sociologists from UCLA. That sucked me into Stormfront, the online community source for their many intriguing quotes.

The Southern Poverty Law Center credits Stormfront with being the first major hate site on the Internet. The organization was the brainchild of former Alabama Klan boss and long-time white supremacist Don Black in 1995.

My analysis, Memo To White Nationalists From A Geneticist: Why White Purity Is A Terrible Idea, was published online at Science Trends. It is now plagiarized here. I pulled the most alarming quotes from the Stormfronters, analyzed when they were accurate and not, pointed out the flaws and assumptions of DNA ancestry testing and interpretation, and reviewed the genetics behind skin color.

The scientific sophistication of some of the posts impressed as well as deeply disturbed me, and so I planned to write another article, using a different set of Stormfront remarks. A few days later, I clicked on Stormfront to find some new quotes.

Denied!

On Wikipedia I discovered:

Stormfront was a white nationalist, white supremacist and neo-Nazi Internet forum In August 2017, Stormfronts registrar seized its domain name due to complaints that it promoted hatred and that some of its members were linked to murder.

And so Stormfront vanished on August 29, 2017.

My Memo to White Nationalists From a Geneticist appeared August 28, 2017.

Coincidence? Of course it was. But at the time Id hoped that maybe my article helped in some small way to bury Stormfront, the meeting ground of hate.

Alas, Stormfront returned about a month later. Wikipediaattributes the return to Internet service provides Tucows, Network Solutions, and Cloudflare.

I hope that I never have to update this post again.

Ricki Lewis, PH.D is a writer for PLOS and author of the book The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It. You can check out Rickiswebsiteand follow Ricki on Twitter@rickilewis

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I write about the history of genetics. Buffalo racially-motivated massacre refocuses attention on the dark side of the 100-year old eugenics movement...