1. Expelled Overview

Comment #152475 by kehills on March 31, 2008 at 6:00 am

I haven't watched the film, but eugenics? Holocaust? How does one associate them with Darwinism?

Really? You don't see the connection, or haven't heard of it before? That's... sort of refreshing, actually.

Quite literally, eugenics was formed/conceived based on the works of Darwin, by his cousin, Francis Galton. The idea of eugenics itself can be traced back to Plato (ultimate nanny state, really), but Galton's the one who systemitised the idea through his cousin's book. Galton thought that society was undermining natural selection - instead of letting the strong survive and the weak die out, society protected the weak to the detriment of the strong. (It's important to keep in mind that things like class and financial wherewithall were considered genetic at the time.) It's not that he shared Bell's fear of a Deaf America, so much as he thought humanity was regressing towards the lowest common denominator, a regression of means. He believed genius, talent, intelligence, and the overall ability to be successful were all inheritable traits that should be selected for when choosing partners to have children with.

From there it all gets messy again, with the positive and negative eugenicists, and then the biologists rediscover Mendelian inheritance, and then Social Darwinism comes up, and so on. But at its very heart, modern, Galtonian eugenics is directly based upon Darwin's work and discoveries.

2. Expelled Overview

Comment #150927 by kehills on March 27, 2008 at 4:56 pm

Josh,
As several people have noted, Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood) was a eugenics advocate. She also tends to receive knocks for her association with a Nazi anthropologist. What people don't realize, or prefer to ignore, is that in the timeframe we're discussing (the teens and 20s), eugenics was widely celebrated in this country, so far as having Fittest Family awards at country fairs and explanations of how eugenics worked and how people could take part. The Cold Springs Lab runs the Eugenics Image Archive, and has a lot of information about this less than well known period of American history: http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/ . They run this now in part because of the large role their founder, Charles Davenport, played in American eugenics. (Likewise, AG Bell? Big in eugenics - he was afraid we were creating a deaf America.)

On top of that, many people don't like to acknowledge that because the US was a leader in positive eugenics (encouraging the reproduction of the designated genetic fit), Nazi scientists actually came here to learn the theories from our scientists.

Woodrow Wilson was a negative eugenicist - an advocate, like Sanger, of preventing "mentally deficient" people from reproducing. It was his charge that led to most states having a law that allowed compulsory sterilization for people deemed deficient (and being deficient, as Buck v Bell showed, meant nothing more than how your parents and grandparents were perceived - a famous quote from that trial argued that three generations of imbeciles were enough). States continued to sterilize people in mental institutions up through the late 1980s, often without seeking consent of the patient or the patient's guardian.

Anyhow. I could go on but I'll spare y'all. There's a rich and in depth literature about the history of eugenics in America, and how it affects us and our science to this day (much of the argument around eugenics can be heard echoed in IVF, genetic enhancement, transhumanism and cloning debates).