Category: Karl Pearson

Karl Pearson on ‘race-suicide’ (1907)

Quoted by Collin Wells in 1907: As Karl Pearson has recently said: The great problem is whether limitation has not begun at the wrong end. If a nation is to be strong, there must be wastage; the reckless and diseased must not be in a condition to multiply like the strong and able. At present …

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Galton: It will never come to lethal chambers!

After Francis Galton’s address to the American Sociological Society, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims” a certain Benjamin Kidd responds thusly: For Mr. Pearson, I think, proposed to give the kind of people who now scribble on our railway carriages no more than a short shrift and the nearest lamp-post. I hope we shall not …

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“Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims” by Francis Galton

One of the earliest, more definitive beginnings of the Eugenics movement, was this address given by Francis Galton.  Eugenics got its bad rap by its association with the Nazis.  Its important to observe that its most ardent proponents were Americans. “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims” by Francis Galton. Read before the Sociological Society at a …

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Eugenics as a Religion and Social Darwinism, Collin Wells

Source: Dr. Collin Wells, “Social Darwinism” a paper presented in 1907, found in The American Journal of Sociology, pages 706-709 Finally, what is the evolutionary value of certain ideals? Let us take individualism, the ideal of democracy, which has tacitly figured in many of the phenomena to which I have already referred. Let us go …

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Scientific American: “The Science of Breeding Better Men” 1911

Editorial from a 1911 edition of Scientific American [Source]: Sci-Am’s Editor’s note: This editorial was written and published in 1911. Although our editors of a century ago pondered some lofty aspirations for the orderly future of humans, it was only three decades later that the brutal reality of a Nazi social order suffused with a …

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Eugenics, Progressives, and Miscegenation: Popenoe’s “Applied Eugenics”

It is very common to hear people speak as though it was Republican/conservatives/Christians that opposed intermarriage between black and whites (miscegenation), and that this attitude represented rank bigotry and amounted to open racism.  This is a white-washing of history.  The truth is that progressives and secularists thoroughly embraced anti-miscegenation.  The reader can be assured that …

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Leon Cole on the Social Body and Our Duty to Future Generations

From The Relation of Philanthropy and Medicine to Race Betterment by Leon J. Cole, University of Wisconsin, at the First Conference for Race Betterment (1914) Among those who have in their treatment of this subject emphasized the importance of the natural selection viewpoint may be mentioned especially Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton, and Karl Pearson, the …

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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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