Category: Natural selection

Carrel: eugenics asks for the sacrifice of many individuals.

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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

Sydney Webb: The parasites should not be allowed to compete as wage-earners, for it prevents natural selection from working…

Sydney Webb in Industrial Democracy (regarding the minimum wage) – 1920  The problem of the Unemployable is not created by the fixing of a National Minimum by law. The Unemployable we have always with us. With regards to certain sections of the population, this unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but of social …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

Eugenics Quote of the Day: Birth Control is about Weeding out the Unfit; so says Margaret Sanger

“Birth control itself … is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.” So says MARGARET SANGER.

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 …

Continue reading

The Geneticists Manifesto (1939) or Social Biology and Population Improvement, by H.J. Muller

Social Biology and Population Improvement (aka, the Geneticist’s Manifesto) by H.J. Muller [Source #1, Source #2] The Seventh International Congress of Genetics adjourned at Edinburgh only three days before World War II got under way. It is interesting to recall that just before the shooting started a group of geneticists at that Congress-informally formulated what …

Continue reading

Eugenics and Christianity in a Letter to the Eugenics Review

Norman A. Thompson, “Eugenics and Christianity”, published in The Eugenics Review, pages 346-347 (1933) [Source] To the Editor, Eugenics Review Sir, In these latter days of the general liquefaction of ideas, philosophies, and policies, whether founded on dogma or tradition, or on other bases, which may have satisfied our understanding at earlier stages of the …

Continue reading

Eugenics Quote of the Day: ‘Defective (ie, ‘disabled’) people should not be allowed to reproduce for the good of the state.’ RZ Mason, mayor of Appleton, WI

R.Z. Mason, mayor of Appleton, WI, “The Duty of the State in its Treatment of the Deaf and Dumb, the Blind, the Idiotic, the Crippled and Deformed, and the Insane.” [Source] In the progress of modern civilization, the state has come slowly to a recognition of certain duties and obligations to these unfortunate classes.  At …

Continue reading