It’s not exactly news that China is setting itself up as a new global superpower, is it? While Western civilization chokes on its own gluttony like a latter-day Marlon Brando, China continues to buy up American debt and lock away the world’s natural resources. But now, not content to simply laugh and make jerk-off signs as they pass us on the geopolitical highway, they’ve also developed a state-endorsed genetic-engineering project.

At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation’s intelligence by five to 15 IQ points. Within a couple of generations, competing with the Chinese on an intellectual level will be like challenging Lena Dunham to a getting-naked-on-TV contest.

Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist and lecturer at NYU, is one of the 2,000 braniacs who contributed their DNA. I spoke to him about what this creepy-ass program might mean for the future of Chinese kids.

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July 20, 2011 By Krell

As boys, they were confined to the Fernald State School in Waltham, Mass. during the 1940s into the 1970s, often on the basis of a single faulty intelligence test. With no possible way of being released, they were considered “morons” or “imbeciles”… less than human. They were completely at the mercy of the state run institution. Torture and sexual abuse was rampant.

One example was “Red Cherry Day” where all the boys were required to sit in a circle. Then each boy’s name would be called, one by one. The boy who was called would be required to stand up, go to the middle of the circle, pull down his pants, and then be beaten with a switch until his buttocks were “Cherry Red”.

But perhaps the worst part is the human experimentation at the boys home. In doing research for nutritional study for Quaker Oats, scientists from MIT started serving up oatmeal dosed with high levels of radiation. Those boys that participated in the study were told that they were joining a science club.

Of course the boys thought that they were given special treatment in receiving the oatmeal every day. In fact, if requested they would get to have additional helpings of the oatmeal along with extra milk. But nobody mentioned to the boys that the milk was also dosed with radiation as well.
How could such a horrific condition occur? Doesn’t this sound like something during the concentration camps of Nazi Germany? The link may surprise you.

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Richard Weikart - September 19, 2012

Recently Oxford philosophy professor Julian Savulescu moved his campaign for “moral enhancement” out of the ivory tower and into the mainstream. This month Reader’s Digest is carrying his article, “It’s Our Duty to Have Designer Babies,” in which he promotes the idea that “people have a moral obligation to select ethically better children.” By select he means to screen embryos genetically to determine which will have superior moral traits.

As a historian, I find his suggestions troubling. They seem to parallel the misguided attempts of the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, which promoted the artificial selection of individuals by controlling reproduction. This led not only to compulsory sterilization laws in many U.S. states, but also to the Nazi campaign to kill the disabled, during which physicians murdered more than 200,000 people.

In his article Savulescu tries to assure us that the new eugenics that he is proposing is essentially different from the early eugenics movement. The objectionable feature of the early movement, he claims, was its compulsory nature, while the new eugenics is voluntary.

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Willliam Schambra - 18 September 2012

The professional elites trained in these world-class institutions would have the expertise necessary to guide, shape, and mold the American people.

Psychology and sociology would find the uniform rules of human behavior beneath all of its confusing and superficial diversity so lamentably reflected in America’s small communities.

Political science would teach us how to reorganize public life according to those rules, moving us away from divisive state and local allegiances, toward an inspiring and ennobling great national community, quietly and rationally administered by cosmopolitan elites according to the unassailably objective principles of scientific management.

Among the most valuable of the sciences supported by the first foundations was the emerging study of human biology known as eugenics.

Thanks to the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of biological inheritance at the beginning of the 20th century, we now knew what the root cause of human pathology truly was, namely bad genes.

Nearly every form of human misbehavior or misfortune – from promiscuity to shiftlessness to dipsomania to the all-encompassing “feeble-mindedness” – could be traced back to defective “protoplasm.”

And so America’s major philanthropies eagerly poured their resources into the promising science of eugenics. Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Mrs. E. H. Harriman (as she always described herself) – widow of the railroad magnate – provided the funds for Harvard biologist Charles Davenport to establish the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor in New York in 1911.

The ERO would be the international center for eugenics research and public policy advocacy until it was finally closed in 1939 – when even its philanthropic sponsors could not fail to heed the ominous signals emanating from Germany about the implications of a vigorous eugenic program.

If philanthropy in general was hostile to local community, eugenics was doubly so. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Charles Davenport’s magnum opus, entitled Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, published in 1911 and dedicated to Mrs. E. H. Harriman.

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It seems we may be heading into a new era of eugenics, and in the future, instead of choosing to settle with partners we love, we may be choosing them based on the compatibility of our genes, a leading scientist has warned.

CHRISTINE HSU | JULY 13, 2012

It seems we may be heading into a new era of eugenics, and in the future, instead of choosing to settle with partners we love, we may be choosing them based on the compatibility of our genes, a leading scientist has warned.

Professor Armand Leroi, of Imperial College London, predicts that the ever declining cost of DNA testing means that we may be heading toward a society that is based on genetic superiority

Leroi told the Euroscience Open Forum 2012, in Dublin, that he expects that in five to 10 years, it will become standard practice for young people to pay to access their entire genetic code, according to The Telegraph.

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In the 1920s, leading thinkers—including the greatest economist America ever produced—focused their efforts on eugenics, preserving the Nordic stock, and the problem of “race suicide.”

May/June 2012
by Richard Conniff ’73

On a sweltering Friday in June 1921, a 54-year-old Yale economics professor named Irving Fisher delivered a major speech at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The pain of the recent war in Europe was still fresh, and Fisher was troubled by the quality of those who had died, and the damage to “the potential fatherhood of the race” by the loss of so many young men “medically selected for fighting but thereby prevented from breeding.”

In light of these losses, the issue, it seemed to Fisher, was that graduates of leading universities were failing to do their reproductive duty: the families “of American men of science” averaged just 2.22 children, versus a national average of 4.66. (Or as he put it, perhaps too lucidly, “The average Harvard graduate is the father of three-fourths of a son and the average Vassar graduate the mother of one-half of a daughter.”) This “race suicide” among “the well-to-do classes means that their places will speedily be taken by the unintelligent, uneducated, and inefficient.”

To prevent that, immigration from certain regions needed to be sharply curtailed, and birth control “extended from the white race to the colored” and to other “undesirable” ethnic and economic groups, ideally under the control of a eugenics committee established to “breed out the unfit and breed in the fit.” Otherwise, “the Nordic race … will vanish or lose its dominance.”

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Tom Blackwell - Mar 14, 2012

Canadians suffer from a “collective national amnesia” regarding Tommy Douglas’s support for eugenics, likely because they are reluctant to taint the medicare pioneer’s glowing image with unsavoury ideas, suggests a prominent McGill University physician in a new analysis.

Biographies and other accounts of Mr. Douglas’s life have either ignored or down-played his striking embrace in the mid-1930s of forced sterilization and segregation for people of “sub-normal” intelligence and morality, says Dr. Michael Shevell in a newly published academic paper.

He argues that people should instead make a point of remembering the CCF/NDP leader’s early advocacy of eugenics as a cautionary tale about simplistic medical solutions to social problems — even as they admire his many other, positive accomplishments.

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Socialism’s one-time interest in eugenics is dismissed as an accident of history. But the truth is far more unpalatable

Jonathan Freedland - Feb 20 2012

Does the past matter? When confronted by facts that are uncomfortable, but which relate to people long dead, should we put them aside and, to use a phrase very much of our time, move on? And there’s a separate, but related, question: how should we treat the otherwise admirable thought or writings of people when we discover that those same people also held views we find repugnant?

Those questions are triggered in part by the early responses to Pantheon, my new novel published this week under the pseudonym Sam Bourne. The book is a thriller, set in the Oxford and Yale of 1940, but it rests on several true stories. Among those is one of the grisliest skeletons in the cupboard of the British intellectual elite, a skeleton that rattles especially loudly inside the closet of the left.

It is eugenics, the belief that society’s fate rested on its ability to breed more of the strong and fewer of the weak. So-called positive eugenics meant encouraging those of greater intellectual ability and “moral worth” to have more children, while negative eugenics sought to urge, or even force, those deemed inferior to reproduce less often or not at all. The aim was to increase the overall quality of the national herd, multiplying the thoroughbreds and weeding out the runts.

Such talk repels us now, but in the prewar era it was the common sense of the age. Most alarming, many of its leading advocates were found among the luminaries of the Fabian and socialist left, men and women revered to this day. Thus George Bernard Shaw could insist that “the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man”, even suggesting, in a phrase that chills the blood, that defectives be dealt with by means of a “lethal chamber”.

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• The Original Population Bomb (parts 1 and 2)
• Eugenic Propaganda, Old And New (parts 1 and 2)
• Imperial Eugenics In Kenya

Scott Sexton - September 25, 2011

When first proposed, they seemed like such simple and relatively inexpensive things to do for the survivors of North Carolina’s heinous eugenic-sterilization program.

Build a traveling exhibit detailing its history. Erect a monument to the survivors. Incorporate it into the teaching of state history in public school curriculum. And put up a highway marker in a prominent place.

The state of North Carolina actively pushed sterilization on some 7,600 of its poorest and weakest residents. Local boards slipped into God’s shoes, making recommendations on who was fit to reproduce and who wasn’t.

As the years passed — North Carolina carried on with its eugenics into the 1970s, long after most states recoiled in horror from theirs — the program increasingly targeted poor black women and girls, hundreds of whom are still living.

How hard could it be to do a few small things to honor survivors? Judging by recent events, the answer, sadly, is too hard.

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Mecklenburg’s impoverished had few, if any, rights in the ’50s and ’60s as he oversaw one of the most aggressive efforts to sterilize certain populations

Ann Doss Helms and Tommy Tomlinson - Sep. 26, 2011

Compassionate. Visionary. A champion of women and the poor.

That’s the reputation that Wallace Kuralt built as Mecklenburg County’s welfare director from 1945 to 1972. Today, the building where Charlotte’s poor come for help bears his name - a name made even more prominent when his newscaster son, Charles Kuralt, rose to fame.

But as architect of Mecklenburg’s program of eugenic sterilization - state-ordered surgery to stop the poor and disabled from bearing children - Kuralt helped write one of the most shameful chapters of North Carolina history.

The Charlotte Observer has obtained records sealed by the state that tell the stories of 403 Mecklenburg residents ordered sterilized by the N.C. Eugenics Board at the behest of Kuralt’s welfare department.

It’s a number that dwarfs the total from any other county, in a state that ran one of the nation’s most active efforts to sterilize the mentally ill, mentally retarded and epileptic.

The records crunch people’s lives into a few terse paragraphs.

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Edwin Black - July 15, 2011

America’s pseudo-scientific crusade (during roughly the first half of the century) to create a white, blond, blue-eyed, biologically superior “master race” was a misguided 20th-century quest called eugenics. More than 27 states joined the shameful, decades-long utopian campaign to medically engineer racial supremacy.

But only one state, North Carolina, is now readying a massive plan of financial reparations to its surviving victims. Just how much North Carolina should pay is the subject of a historically wrenching debate, even as the state grapples with its budget deficit.

Eugenics was a fraudulent theory claiming that a better society could be created by eliminating “undesirable” human bloodlines, while promoting the “desirable” types. This dark crusade was waged by blinded progressives and do-gooders seeking utopia. In Greek, the word utopia means “nowhere.”

Race science sprang to life in the convulsive first decade of the 20th century, during which Asians, Eastern and Southern Europeans, Mexicans, Native Americans, blacks, and other ethnic groups flowed into U.S. cities, creating overcrowding. The intellectual, academic, scientific, and financial elite – many of them wealthy livestock breeders – believed better humans could be cultivated using the same techniques as a farmer would to create a better herd of cattle or field of wheat: eliminate the bad stock and proliferate the good.

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North Carolina’s compensation to victims of forced sterilisation is a chance to illuminate a gruesome US tradition of racial ’science’

Edwin Black - 28 June 2011

Twenty-seven American states joined a decades-long pseudo-scientific crusade to create a white, blond, blue-eyed, biologically superior “master race”. Their misguided utopian quest was called eugenics. But only one state, North Carolina, is now readying a massive plan of financial reparations to its surviving victims. Just how much North Carolina should pay is now the subject of a historically wrenching debate.

Eugenics was a fraudulent social theory that a better society could be created by eliminating “undesirable” human blood lines and promoting the desirable types. Race science sprang to life in the socioeconomically convulsive first decade of the 20th century, during which Asians, Eastern Europeans, Mexicans, Native Americans, blacks and other ethnic groups and racial mixtures flowed into US cities, creating overcrowding and class conflict. The intellectual, academic, scientific and financial elite believed better men and women could be cultivated using the same techniques a farmer would employ to create a better herd of cattle or field of wheat – eliminate the bad stock and proliferate the good. They planned to eliminate all those who did not resemble themselves, 10% at a time – that is, as many as 14 million people, at a slice. Their eventual goal was to eliminate as much as 90% of the population from the reproductive future of the United States.

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Regina Wang - 2011/06/06

For more than four decades, North Carolina sterilized people as young as 10 to eliminate traits it considered inferior and hereditary: poor, undereducated, epileptic, mentally unstable and sexually promiscuous.

Later this month, victims of the state’s eugenics law will be asked to share their stories with a governor’s task force and to suggest ways of compensation.

Former Gov. Mike Easley apologized to the 7,600 victims in 2002, but none of them has been compensated in any way.

“I hope the victims feel free to share their stories and thoughts on what the state can do to compensate them for the injustice that was done to them,” task force member Phoebe Zerwick said.

“I think it’s important for us not to decide on a package or a figure on behalf of a group of people,” said Zerwick, a former reporter and editor at the Winston-Salem Journal and now a lecturer at Wake Forest University.

After listening to the victims, the task force will submit a report to state legislators, who will then decide whether and how to compensate them.

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