Encyclopedia of Evolution.pdf - Online Reading Center

ity—beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful
minds … And the method that nature has followed
hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness
was prevented from propagating weakness … is
death … The men of the New Republic … will have
an ideal that will make the killing worth the while.
The worst political and historical fruit of eugenics was
National Socialism in Germany. Soon after coming to power
in 1933, the Nazis began both positive and negative eugenics.
They encouraged “Aryans,” through incentive and propaganda,
to produce children, and they passed mandatory
sterilization laws. By 1936 they had sterilized 225,000 people.
Harry Laughlin’s work was admired in Germany, and he
received an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University
in 1936. He translated Germany’s sterilization law into English
and publicized it in the United States. (Laughlin’s health
later deteriorated. He suffered from late-onset epilepsy, a disease
he had claimed was evidence of genetic degeneracy.) The
Nazis also prohibited marriage or extramarital intercourse
between Germans and Jews. By 1939 the Nazis began to reason
that it was too much trouble to sterilize inmates in institutions—why
waste food? So they began to euthanize (kill)
those whose lives they considered to be “not worth living.”
The world is only too familiar with what happened next, as
the Nazis expanded eugenics and euthanasia to encompass
entire races such as the Jews, Poles, Slavs, and Gypsies. Hitler
used religious arguments against Jews. He once forced a clergyman
to preach to Jews, “You are being killed because you
killed the Christ,” prior to their execution. But Hitler also
used evolution as propaganda. One of his films equated Jews
with rats and called for the survival of the fittest, by which he
meant himself and others who had the guns.
Opposition to Eugenics
Some scientists stood up against eugenics. Perhaps the most
prominent British scientist of the late 19th century (see Wallace,
Alfred Russel) denounced eugenics as “the meddlesome
interference of an arrogant, scientific priestcraft.”
Geneticist Reginald Punnett, who invented the Punnett square
method of quantifying the inheritance of genetic traits, showed
that eugenics would not work. Punnett explained that even
with the strongest negative eugenics carried out against individuals
who were homozygous for the inferior gene, it would
take 22 generations (almost 500 years) to reduce the incidence
of feeblemindedness from 1 percent to 0.1 percent in a population,
according to his calculations. R. A. Fisher pointed out,
in response, that this calculation made the assumption of random
mating, which would not be correct in the case of feeblemindedness.
Fisher concluded that, in order to effect positive
eugenics, it would be necessary to identify not only those who
were homozygous but those who were carriers as well.
Darwin’s closest ally (see Huxley, Thomas Henry),
wrote,
Of the more thoroughgoing of the multitudinous
attempts to apply the principles of cosmic evolution
eugenics
… to social and political problems … a considerable
proportion appear to me to be based upon the
notion that human society is competent to furnish,
from its own resources, an administrator … The
pigeons, in short, are to be their own [breeder]. A
despotic government … is to be endowed with the
preternatural intelligence and … preternatural ruthlessness
required for the purpose of carrying out the
principle of improvement by selection … a collective
despotism, a mob got to believe in its own divine
right by demagogic missionaries, would be capable
of more thorough work in this [eugenic] direction
than any single tyrant, puffed up with the same illusion,
has ever achieved.
Huxley may have foreseen that eugenics could turn into a
nightmare, which is what Hitler did. One of the founders of
modern evolutionary theory (see Dobzhansky, Theodosius),
wrote,
The eugenical Jeremiahs keep constantly before our
eyes the nightmare of human populations accumulating
recessive genes that produce pathological
effects … These prophets of doom seem to be
unaware of the fact that wild species in the state of
nature fare in this respect no better than man does
with all the artificiality of his surroundings, and
yet life has not come to an end on this planet. The
eschatological cries proclaiming the failure of natural
selection to operate in human populations have
more to do with political beliefs than with scientific
findings.
Politicians and writers, in both England and the United
States, stood up against eugenics. In England the writer G. K.
Chesterton wrote a book against eugenics. Chesterton wrote
that “eugenicists had discovered how to combine the hardening
of the heart with the softening of the head.” In America,
William Jennings Bryan, the antievolutionary prosecutor at
the Scopes Trial, is often dismissed as a hopelessly outdated
anti-scientist. Popular portrayals of Bryan, such as in the
movie Inherit The Wind, usually fail to point out that one of
his principal reasons for opposing evolution was that it was
associated (by many scientists, and in popular social movements)
with eugenics. Bryan spent his life battling for the
rights of the “common man,” and he saw eugenics as being
the doorway to despotism and oppression.
After World War II, eugenics fell into extreme disrepute.
It is safe to say that no competent scientist espouses
it today. As a matter of fact, it is used by some critics as a
label for scientists who accept any manner of genetic influence
on human behavior. Even though sociobiology is a
scientific theory very different from eugenics, its proponents
(such as Wilson, Edward O.) have been unfairly denounced
as eugenicists who wish to direct the world back to the days
of scientifically sponsored racism. It is also safe to say that
no competent scientist espouses complete genetic determinism