After reading Darwin’s Origin, Adam Sedgwick, Darwin’s professor of natural science when he attended the University of Cambridge, wrote Darwin to express deep concerns about the theory: There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly. Tis the …
Category: Charles Darwin
Charles Galton Darwin: “Unconscious Selection”
From Charles Galton Darwin’s The Next One Million Years: [civilization has the tendency] to eliminate its ablest people. This has happened in the past, and is certainly happening now, and if it is always to happen, it signifies a recurrent degeneration of all civilizations, only to be renewed by the incursion of barbarians who have …
Excerpt: Darwin’s Dilemma as told by Bertrand Russell, from Designing Babies
From Designing Babies: The Brave New World of Reproductive Technology by Roger Gosden. W.H. Freeman and Company, New York. 1999. Page 3-4 According to Darwin’s theory, natural selection decides which individuals are fit to survive and breed. So powerful was this idea that it quickly engaged not only fellow biologists but also intellectuals who were …
Julian Huxley: The History of Population Control–Malthus and Darwin and Birth Control
Today, one can hear people talking endlessly about ‘birth control’ without remembering that just a few decades ago, it was synonymous with ‘population control’ (see this excerpt from the same book quoted below) and that the population control advocates themselves saw themselves as merely applying the laws Malthus discovered and Darwin proved–the very same outlook …
Guy Irving Burch: Darwin, Eugenics, and War
Guy Irving Burch was a staunch eugenicist and early advocate for population control on both environment grounds and eugenic grounds. He rests his arguments explicitly on Darwin and Malthus, as this introduction to chapter 4 of his Human Breeding and Survival: Population Roads to Peace or War illustrates (pg 40). ————————- Chapter Four Freedom from …
Eugenics is Darwinism and Evolution Applied
In the essay on the definition of eugenics hosted on this site, it is shown that eugenics was merely seen as Darwinism intelligently applied to the human race. On this page, further corroboration of this will be provided in the words of the eugenicists themselves. Emphasis is added. —————————– R.Z. Mason, mayor of Appleton, WI, …
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