Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize Winner. Man the Unknown, 1939. [Source] A choice must be made among the multitude of civilized human beings. We have mentioned that natural selection has not played its part for a long while. That many inferior individuals have been conserved through the efforts of hygiene and medicine. But we cannot prevent …
Category: laws of heredity
Taussig: The breeding of men, eugenics, and progress. 1911
SOURCE: Frank Taussig, Principles of Economics, Volume II, 1911. Pages 233-237. This movement is steadily extending, and is gradually affecting not only those who are usually thought of as being in a more special sense “native born,” but the descendants of the immigrants as well. The influence of free institutions and of free opportunities is …
Universal Education a Pre-Requisite for Effective Eugenics Policies
Source: G.W. Cooke, discussing ‘Social Darwinism’ in American Journal of Sociology 12 (March 1907), 714-715. Below the image is OCR scanned text. If anyone would like to send a cleaned edition, that would be greatly appreciated. I wish to call attention to the fact that natural selection must work in a different manner among men …
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 …
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 …
Eugenics Must Begin with the Family: Paul Popenoe
From David Popenoe in War Over the Family p 235-236 (regarding his father, Paul Popenoe): In keeping with the decline of hereditarianism in American intellectual life, Paul Popenoe gradually shifted his professional efforts from genetic improvement to family improvement. With the help of some influential financial donors, he started the American Institute of Family Relations (then …
Davenport: Death is Nature’s Great Blessing to the Race. Why Keep Defectives Alive?
Charles Davenport, in The Eugenic Programme And Progress in its Achievement (1914) [italics in original, bold added] The lowest stratum of society has, on the other hand, neither intelligence nor self-control enough to justify the State to leave its matings in their own hands. On the contrary, the defectives and criminalistic are, so far as …
Charity a Hindrance to Natural Selection
In the following foreword from a compilation of 12 eugenic lectures (1914), we see that eugenics is perceived as merely applied evolution. Furthermore, ‘modern man,’ being a sympathetic being, keeps alive those that should die. With luck, principles of breeding already used with animals will be brought to bear on humans. ——————- Foreword by Lewellys …
On the Elimination of Defectives: Hitler, in Mein Kampf
Note the utilitarian appeal to the reduction of suffering, the appeal to the ‘common good’, and the basic belief that all he is doing is applying biological principles. Hitler, in Mein Kampf. [Source] In this field the People’s State will have to repair the damage that arises from the fact that the problem is at …
Francis Galton Coins the Word ‘Eugenics’ as the Science of Better Breeding: Men, Brutes, and Plants. Quote of the Day
A little known fact is that eugenics was seen as the application of principles of heredity, in particular those principles as understood by Darwin. In this excerpt, Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin), coins the word eugenics and explicitly refers to it as a science. The principles of heredity thus applied, he says, are “applicable to men, …
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