1. Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda

Comment #179129 by psaturn on May 12, 2008 at 6:11 pm

riandouglas

The point is quite simple...Eugenics were proposed by the inheritor of Darwin: his cousin and his son. His cousin founded the Eugenics Society and it seemed to be quite racist..

Darwin's son, Major Leonard Darwin, also ran the Eugenics society until 1928 and he made the transition from positive eugenics to negative eugenics.

People repeatedly disavow Eugenics as being part of Darwinian thinking but his family did not seem to think so...

2. Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda

Comment #178691 by psaturn on May 11, 2008 at 11:45 pm

Dear Professor Hawkins, you are right that Darwin did not propose Eugenics but rather his family:

[quote] Eugenics, the belief that certain "genetic" traits are good and others bad, is associated in the public mind mostly with the extreme eugenics policies of Adolf Hitler, which ultimately led to the Holocaust. The study of eugenics did not begin with Hitler or his German scientists, but rather was first promoted by Sir Francis Galton, in England. Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, who expanded on Darwin's theories and applied them to the human population. In an article entitled "Hereditary Character and Talent" (published in two parts in MacMillan's Magazine, vol. 11, November 1864 and April 1865, pp. 157-166, 318-327), Galton expressed his frustration that no one was breeding a better human:
"If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create! We might introduce prophets and high priests of civilization into the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins. Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties."

Galton in the same article described Africans and Native Americans in derogatory terms making it clear which racial group he thought was superior. Francis Galton, the founder of the Eugenics Society, spoke hopefully about persuading people with desirable genes to marry and have large families. Galton's successor at the helm of the Eugenics Society was Major Leonard Darwin (1850-1943), a son of Charles Darwin. Leonard Darwin, who ran the Eugenics Society until 1928, made the transition from positive to negative eugenics, and promoted plans for lowering the birthrate of the unfit.
Built into the idea of natural selection is a competition between the strong and the weak, between the fit and the unfit. The eugenicists believed that this mechanism was thwarted in the human race by charity, by people and churches who fed the poor and the weak so that they survived, thrived, and reproduced. [/quote]