Category Archives: Eugenics

Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced his resignation as president of Stanford University on July 19. Hired in 2016, he presided over major challenges at Stanford University, not the least of which was the COVID-19 pandemic.

Numerous controversies erupted during his tenure, from an investigation into the handling of sexual assault complaints, to the school's involvement in the national college-admissions scandal known as Operation Varsity Blues, to the removal of the name of the university's first president, David Starr Jordan, from campus buildings and streets owing to his promotion of eugenics.

On the flip side, Tessier-Lavigne in 2017 hired the university's second female provost, Persis Drell, who announced in May that she'd be stepping down this fall. And the university in 2021 launched its first new school in seven decades, to be dedicated to environmental sciences and examining climate and sustainability issues.

Here's a look at the university's milestones under Tessier-Lavigne. (To advance slides on desktop or laptop, hover your cursor at the far right and click.)

Originally posted here:

What happened during Marc Tessier-Lavigne's tenure as Stanford ... - Palo Alto Online

Abortion giant Planned Parenthood has been accused of promoting promiscuity in order to boost its business.

The organisation tweeted an image of a sign claiming: Virginity is a social construct, adding: The idea of virginity comes from outdated lets be real, patriarchal ways of thinking that hurts everyone.

But multiple Twitter users criticised the post. One claimed: We know you need promiscuity to make money. Its gross, while another blasted it for implying: Morality costs us business.

In June, a Planned Parenthood group was banned from schools in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, after promoting an A to Z of explicit sex acts.

Planned Parenthood Regina had delivered a sex education lesson to 14 and 15-year-olds in Lumsden High School where a pupil picked up Sex: From A-Z, which was available for free on a side table.

The deck of 26 cards, which includes explicit language, pushed children to be sex positive about each sexual term. The letter C referred to cathodillia, which it described as being attracted to ones television set.

Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, best remembered as a leading advocate of the eugenics movement and for promoting sterilisation of people she deemed to have undesirable traits or economic circumstances.

But from inception, the abortion giant has also promoted sex education which informed children and young people of their sexual rights and increasingly encouraged pre-marital sexual activity.

Planned Parenthood handing out sex-swap drugs like candy

Planned Parenthood tells US Congress: Men can get pregnant

Planned Parenthood distances itself from eugenicist and racist founder

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Planned Parenthood: 'Virginity is a social construct' - The Christian Institute

The first article below is from a creationist website, Creation Evolution Headlines, and its author is a young-earth creationist. Oddly, though, its own headline and its discussion isnt too far from what some progressive evolutionists maintain: evolutionary biology is racist, which explains the paucity of minorities in the field. The first paper, then, is not that different in its theses from the second and third papers below, although both were published in academic journa, Social Psychology in Education and in Evolution: Education and Outreach; and both papers include at least one evolutionary biologist as an author. Click headlines to read any of them.

(The pdf for the article below can be found here.

In both papers religion is mentioned: African Americans are more religious than whites, and that makes them resistant to studying evolution. This may well be true, but I dont know what to do about it. Heres one anecdote Ive told before. I was invited to lecture on evolution to a black magnet school (a high school) on Chicagos South Side. At the end of my talk, a girl stood up and asked me if I was saying that Noahs Flood and (as I recall) the Garden of Eden didnt really exist. I had to tell the truth and say, Yes, thats what I think. It caused a ruckus, and I could clearly see that the students became resistant to my message. (After the talk, the principal took me aside and said I really should have mentioned all the innovations that Africans had made, like inventing the airplane.)

But heres from the paper:

In contrast to scientists, African Americans are significantly more religious than most every other American ethnic group. They also overwhelmingly self-identify as Protestant Christians.Thus, African Americans may be more likely than Whites to experience a major dissatisfaction with their pro-evolution courses and faculty. This perception could well affect their feelings about evolution classes and professors. In effect, African-American undergraduates appear to be more aware than Whites of the foundation of evolutionary theory which is

methodological (and de facto metaphysical) naturalism. Their religious inclinations will therefore be in conflict with the culture within the [evolutionary] community and it will be difficult for them to feel a sense of belonging in that community. The same with their moral objections to evolution, moral objections that are well founded in the African-American experience. The demands of methodological naturalism thus become an impediment to the greater participation of people of color in ecology and evolutionary biology.

Evidence exists that religiosity functions as a challenge to inclusion within evolutionary biology. Religiosity is negatively associated with exposure to evolutionary theory, knowledge about evolution, and acceptance of evolution. In a sample of African-American college students, Bailey found that themorereligious the students were, theless knowledge they had about evolution. Moreover, religiosity is also associated with having moral objections to the theory of evolution. Thus, a cultural mismatch exists between the religious beliefs of students, and those of evolutionary faculty who are unable to properly deal with religious differences and moral objections to evolution. This may create a challenge that leads to a lower sense of belonging in fields of study that are entrenched in evolutionary thinking.

But if its methodological naturalism that religious people object to, they should object not just to evolutionary biology, but to ALL science. For methodological naturalism is simply the proposition that the laws of the universe are all that occurs in the sciences: there is no divine intervention. (This, by the way, is not ana prioridecision of scientists to exclude God, its a method used because invoking God to explain natural phenomena never gets us anywhere. You all know the story of Laplace and Napoleon: I had no need of that hypothesis. Nor do we need The God Hypothesis now; its only an impediment to understanding.)

Its not just evolutionary theory thats founded on methodological naturalism, but all of science.If metaphysical naturalism makes you uncomfortable, then you have no business doing science at all.

More problematic is religiosity, since for some believers evolution poses no problem for their faith, but for others its an insuperable problem. Yet most Americans reject the naturalistic view of evolution: in fact, a 2019 Gallup poll (data below), a poll taken every few years, shows, that 40% Americans are young-earth creationists, another 33% are theistic evolutions (who believe that God helped evolution along, especially creating humans), while a mere 22%a bit more than 1 in 5 of us, accept the naturalistic view of evolution as we teach it in college.

73% of Americans, then, think that God had some hand in evolution. Thats nearly 4 out of 5, and those objections are obviously religious ones. The biggest impediment to accepting evolution, as I wrote about in my Presidential paper in the journal Evolution, is religion. (As you can imagine, I had trouble getting this palpably true thesis published.) I know of no anti-evolution organization that is, at bottom, not based on religion, and theres a negative correlation among U.S. statesand among countries in the world between religiosity and acceptance of evolution.

With respect to minorities in particular, the solution that Bergman offers to the inequities in evolutionary biology is for us to learn to talk about religion and evolution:

OBrien et al. [JAC: the paper below] concluded that

cultural differences in religiosity as well as the moral objections to evolution cannot be ignored in efforts to increase URMs sense of belonging in EEB educational contexts (or other science fields that are rooted in evolution). A large proportion of the U.S. population is religious and disbelieves in evolution. African Americans and Latinos/as are more religious than the U.S. population as a whole and scientists in particular (Pew Research 2009a, b). One method to improve religious students feelings of belonging in EEB contexts might be teach EEB faculty to navigate conversations around religion.

Based on the studies below, and experiences of my colleagues, yes, black students or URMs (underrepresented minorities) are more wary of taking evolution classes because of their greater faith. What do do about that? Well, I have talked to students who had religious objections to evolution, but only in my office, not in class. And really, one has to be a therapist to deal with this issue. I can tell the students that many people find evolution compatible with their faith but, as you see from the figure above, most dont. And if they ask me my own opinion, I will tell them that I dont think religion is compatible with evolution, but, fortunately, I rarely got asked that by students.

Finally, the issue of eugenics comes up, as it does even in scientific societies. The mantra goes that evolutionary biology was founded on eugenics (no, it wasnt), and that the discipline is still deeply imbued with eugenics (no, it isnt). True, there was a period about ninety years ago when some evolutionists proposed eugenic schemes, but these schemes were not adopted wholesale by governments (and not at all in the UK), and those countries who did adopt them werent hugely influenced by evolutionary biology (if you want to blame any field for eugenics, blame genetics, but thats hyperbole as well).

The quote below, reproduced in the paper above3 comes from the paper of Joseph Graves, Jr. (below):

During the same period in which African Americans were fighting for a legal end to Jim Crow, evolutionary biology became a coherent disciple. This occurred between 1936 and 1947 (Mayr1982), with the founding of the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) occurring in 1946 (Smocovitis1994). This was right after the end of WWII in which racial theories had been utilized to justify the slaughter of millions of people in both the European and Pacific theaters of the war. What is not as well realized is that these theories had their origin in the West and prominent evolutionary biologists and geneticists contributed to their rise (Graves2005a).

First of all, evolutionary biology is not the sole source of bigotry (although in the past it has buttressed it), and the claim that evolution had something to do with the mass slaughters of WWII is either gross hyperbole or wrong. In every war, each side dehumanizes the enemy, and that began well before 1859. The slaughter of Americans by the Japanese and vice versa had nothing to do with evolutionary biology. Nor did the mass slaughters of Russians by Germans and vice versa, as well as Hitlers Holocaust. And if you think evolutionary biology led to the Holocaust, read my colleague Robert Richards paper, Was Hitler a Darwinian?, free online. The answer is a firm No!

To blame past eugenics, or to bring up the Tuskegee experiment (a horrible and unethical study, though not an outgrowth of evolutionary biology) for racial inequities in evolution doesnt comport with with any data I know of, nor with my own experimence. Has a single student ever said that if evolution had been involved with eugenics in the past, theyd be busy studying evolution now, sometimes with the goal of becoming an evolutionary biologist?

Click below to read the OBrien et al. paper, and you can find the pdf here;

One of the factors these authors invoke as inhibiting minority participation in evolution is religiosity, and Ill quote from this paper again:

Thus, challenges to inclusion that are likely the results of access to resources (e.g., knowledge, feeling comfortable outdoors) and challenges that are likely the result of real or perceived cultural mismatches between students and EEB faculty (e.g., religion) were both related to feelings of belonging. Moreover, the relationship between challenges to inclusion and sense of belonging remained after statistically controlling for ethnicity.

In addition, cultural differences in religiosity as well as the moral objections to evolution cannot be ignored in efforts to increase URMs sense of belonging in EEB educational contexts (or other science fields that are rooted in evolution). A large proportion of the U.S. population is religious and disbelieves in evolution. African-Americans and Latinos/as are more religious than the U.S. population as a whole and scientists in particular (Pew Research 2009a, b). One method to improve religious students feelings of belonging in EEB contexts might be teach EEB faculty to navigate conversations around religion (e.g., Graves 2019).

Feelings of belonging are a hard one, for one has to figure out how to rectify that. Mentors would help, though, as Graves points out below, there are very few black evolutionary biologists. If you need a mentor of your own race to succeed, there are two ways to fix that. First, departments could practice affirmative action in hiring faculty (were doing that as hard as we can given the restrictions on the practice, though its now become illegal). The reason it hasnt worked that well is that there arent many minority evolutionary biologists looking for jobs. (One reason, I think, it that its not a very lucrative field, but thats just my take). The underqualification in STEM that leads to this inequity has only one fix thats permanent: provide people with equal opportunity from birth. (There are other fixes that arent as good, like expanding outreach, and Im in favor of them, but in the end the problem we need to solve is one that starts at birth, and there is precious little money or will to fix that.) The ultimate goal to me is equal opportunity, not equal outcomes, but the former is a lot harder to ensure. And of course given cultural differences and preferences, equal opportunity need not lead to equal outcomes.

Finally, Joseph Graves, an African American evolutionist, weighs in with this paper (click to read, pdf here).

His thesis is thatcurrent racism(i.e., ongoing structural racism) is what keeps minorities out of evolution.

The central premise of this commentary is that racism in America as it is manifested in higher education (specifically evolutionary biology) creates a culturally non-inclusive environment that systematically disadvantages persons of non-European descent. The form of this disadvantage differs by the sociocultural positioning of individuals. Thus to change the patterns of underrepresentation within the discipline requires that the dominant social group (persons of European descent socially-defined as white) to address and act on how their position of privilege is subordinating others.

Id agree with him insofar as the qualifications of minority scientists were eroded by the history of slavery and racism, but I cant agree that racism is pervasive in evolutionary biology right now. There are simply too many efforts to find and recruit minority and faculty students to support the view that the field is riddled with systemic racism.

And then theres religion, with Graves indicting my own views:

Darwins agnosticism on the existence of God is a well-known feature of his life (Desmond and Moore1991). Jerry Coynes position on the incompatibility of evolution and religion is one that I shared earlier in my career (Coyne2012). However I have since recanted. Such views certainly stand as an impediment to the successful recruitment of greater numbers of African American students to careers in evolutionary biology.

I question whether my position or views like mine have kept students out of evolutionary biology. Can you find one student who says, I would have become an evolutionary biologist, but Jerry Coyne convinced me that science and religion are incompatible, so I didnt major in science or take an evolution course? I doubt there are more than a handful of students in America who have even read Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible.The recruitment of minority students into evolution may be because of religious belief thats hard to overcome, but I doubt its because of the argument I made. That argument was not that religious people couldnt accept evolution, or that scientists couldnt be religious. Rather, it was that if you practice both science and religion, you are engaged in contradictory exercises: both fields are based on factual claims (religion, of course, is based on more than that), but only science has a way of determining whether those factual claims are true. This is a more sophisticated argument than simply saying, Evolution makes a hash out of Christianity.

Im not denying, though, that religion is an impediment for black students to enter evolutionary biology; I have had colleagues teaching at various schools who told me they were explicitly told this by minority students. Graves, however, thinks it can be overcome with complex discussion:

However, this [religious belief] need not stand as impediment to the recruitment and retention of African Americans (or other highly religious) individuals into science. I have found that most of my highly religious Christian students have never really discussed the foundation of their theological views. As a confirmed Episcopalian, these are conversations I have learned how to conduct in ways that do not automatically shut down critical reasoning. Indeed, there is variation within Christian denominations with regards to their willingness to accept evolution as compatible with their faith. In general, doctrinally conservative Christians reject evolution (Berkman and Plutzer 2010). For example, the Southern Baptist Convention (formed as the Pro-segregation Baptist Church in the 1920s) and the National Baptist Convention (predominately African American membership) both reject evolution as compatible with their faith; on the other hand, the Catholic Church accepts evolution as compatible with their faith (Martin2010). Notably there is variation within the individuals who subscribe to major denominations concerning their acceptance of evolution. For example, for Doctrinally Conservative Protestants, surveyed from 1994 to 2004, those who felt that: humans developed from earlier species of animals 76% felt that this statement was definitely false or probably false, while 24% felt it was probably true or true. Similar values were recorded for Black Protestants, 66% and 35% respectively, for mainline Protestant denominations, the values were 45% and 55%; while for Roman Catholics, the values were 42% and 58% (Berkman and Plutzer2010). Thus while a given churchs official position is to accept or reject evolutionary science, individuals within denominations tend to make up their own minds concerning evolution. I have found that exposing my highly religious students to the fact that that there is variation within Christian thought concerning evolution helps them be able to engage it critically while not feeling that they are abandoning their faith.

Yes, thats one way to do it, and its a lot easier if, like Graves, youre religious. Another, which a colleague mentioned to me yesterday, is to say, You dont have to change your religious beliefs to take an evolution course. All you need to do is study the contents of the course and answer the questions. (This works for required evolution courses.) Although this may seem callous, to me it involves less dissimulation, for, to be truthful, most Christians do believe something thats incompatible with the theory of evolution, even if that belief is just that God helped the evolution of only one species along H. sapiens.

All of these authors (save Bergman) are well meaning, and Im with their goal: everyone deserves a chance to study evolution. But the solutions involving religion, eugenics, affirmative action, and the like seem like Band-Aids on the wound.

There is only one workable solution, and thats ensuring equal opportunity for all Americans. I wont go into the problems with that solution, which may be insuperable, but should we be discussing that solution before we get to eugenics and religion?

More here:

Is evolutionary biology racist? Why Evolution Is True - Why Evolution Is True

IF YOU have read the seemingly endless work of US dissident Noam Chomsky youll know he regularly cites 20th century US intellectuals to highlight the elitist, anti-democratic thinking of the so-called liberal centre.

The public are ignorant and meddlesome outsiders who should be spectators, not participants in action, while the responsible men govern. Therefore, the bewildered herd must be put in their place by necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications.

These quotes, Chomsky notes in the 2021 book The Precipice, are from influential progressive US thinkers like Walter Lippmann, Harold Laswell and Reinhold Niebuhr.

John Carey, then professor of English at the University of Oxford, mapped out similar levels of contempt for the general population in his 1992 study The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939.

In the book he names and shames canonised British and Irish writers like Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and DH Lawrence for their often visceral revulsion of the public and popular culture. WB Yeats joined the Eugenics Society, while Aldous Huxley and Shaw were sympathetic, Carey notes.

He notes a dehumanising diary entry written by Woolf in Brighton in 1941 about people she had observed in Fullers (presumably the same pub which still serves punters today): They ate and ate. Something parasitic about them. Where does the money come from to feed these fat white slugs?

Are similar hateful attitudes common among the liberal centre today? The discourse around Jeremy Corbyns tenure as leader of the Labour Party, which created the largest political party in Europe, demonstrates fear of popular participation in politics is very much alive and kicking.

Heres what Financial Times political columnist Janan Ganesh sneeringly tweeted (and then deleted) in 2016: You can do analysis of Corbyn and his movement (I have done it) but the essence of the whole thing is that they are just thick as pigshit.

The late novelist Martin Amis was similarly disdainful about Corbyn when he was interviewed in the Guardian Weekend magazine in 2017: Two E grades at A-level. Thats it. He certainly has no autodidact streak. I mean, is he a reader?

Lip service is usually given to supporting democracy, but its worth attending to deeds, not words. Remember, for example, that the vast majority of Labour Party MPs either cheered on or stayed silent when thousands of people were purged from the party, or barred from becoming members, in an attempt to rig the 2016 leadership contest between Corbyn and his establishment-friendly challenger, Owen Smith.

Chomsky understands what happened: As in the case of [Bernie] Sanders, I suspect the prime reason for the bitter hatred of Corbyn on the part of a very wide spectrum of the British establishment is his effort to turn the Labour Party into a participatory organisation that would not leave electoral politics in the hands of the Labour bureaucracy and would proceed beyond the narrow realm of electoral politics to a broader and constant activism and engagement in public affairs.

This goes way beyond the Labour Party, of course. Heres Ganesh again, echoing Lippmann and Laswell in his weekly Financial Times column last year: Key to the smooth running of democracy is the indifference of much of the population, much of the time. Voters are crucial as an eye on things, as a righter of the ship of state when it lists. That requires a measure of knowledge. Round-the-clock absorption is something else. It causes politics to take place in too loud a setting, laws to be made in too hot a smithy.

The monarchy provides a useful litmus test for peoples views on democracy. And unsurprisingly, many liberals prefer the hierarchical, imperialist, racist, hereditary institution over an elected head of state.

Remainiac Ian Dunt, writing in the i newspaper last year, maintained the monarchy works fine, before arguing: It doesnt really matter how we decide the head of state role all that matters is that it is arbitrary. It must not, under any circumstances, be democratic.

Similarly, national treasure Stephen Fry, commenting on the coronation of King Charles, told the BBC the beauty of a King is that it is for everyone, before warning imagine the alternative that is what other countries and republics have you vote for your head of state. The horror!

Writing in 2017, Abi Wilkinson noted a few of the core beliefs of this type of elite liberalism: Politics is about nothing more than the effective administration of the current system, which means the best politicians are those with the most experience wielding power and that nobody could possibly do a better job than the professionals.

Labour Party leader Keir Starmers repeated refusal to commit to increased funding of public services, and his reversal on poverty-increasing policies like the two-child benefit cap, is the embodiment of this technocratic, managerial style of politics.

Wilkinson doesnt mention it but this is very much the politics of The West Wing, the influential US television series that ran from 1999 to 2006.

Written by Aaron Sorkin, the show followed the working lives of serious, Ivy League-educated White House staffers under liberal President Bartlett. Politics is presented less as clashing values and interests and more about simply getting smart people in the room together. Social movements, when they do appear on screen, are often depicted as an uninformed irritant to the adults Trying To Get Things Done.

And when I say influential, I mean influential among youve guessed it the liberal political elite. Many members of the Obama administration were fans, as were the Blair, Brown and Cameron camps in Britain, according to Mark Lawson writing in the Guardian.

All this broadly fits with research conducted by the political economist David Adler, who concluded in the New York Times in 2018 that across Europe and North America, centrists [compared to those on the far left and far right] are the least supportive of democracy, the least committed to its institutions and the most supportive of authoritarianism.

The deliberate exclusion of the general public from policymaking is particularly palpable when it comes to foreign affairs.

The [British] governments preference is to see both [military] strategy and defence policy as areas to be settled between it and the armed forces, and so far as possible within the corridors of power, top British military historian Hew Strachan and Ruth Harris concluded in a 2020 RAND report.

This elite stitch-up is not new, of course. British government has long been fearful of public opinion, and even public engagement, in matters to do with defence of the realm, they explain.

Why? Because the government believes the public is reluctant to support the cost of defence and is unpersuaded of the utility of military force. This hesitancy is a consequence, in part, of the large-scale opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, something the elite became enormously concerned about when Parliament voted against military action on Syria in 2013.

Mark Curtis, arguably the most incisive critic of British foreign policy, agrees, arguing in his 2004 book Unpeople: Britains Secret Human Rights Abuses that the public is feared by the government: A perennial truth that emerges from the declassified files is the publics ability to mount protests and demonstrations that divert the government from its course.

The key problem, as Chomsky, Curtis and other wise people have noted, is that addressing the many political, social and economic crises we face today in particular the escalating climate crisis will require huge social movements to lead an unprecedented mobilisation of the general public to apply overwhelming pressure on our rulers and divert them from their dangerous course.

Rather than being reliable allies in this ongoing struggle, liberals fear of popular participation in the political sphere is a key barrier to the radical change we so desperately need.

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

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Beware the anti-democratic liberal centre - Morning Star Online

By Milan Perera, Arts Critic Columnist

Presenting complex topics of science to the general public is no mean feat. There has been a long line of brilliant scientific minds who took up the mission to bring science to the masses; Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Richard Dawkins, Martin Rees and the list goes on. A young scientist who has earned his stripes into this hallowed hall of science writers is the University College London (UCL) based geneticist Adam Rutherford who has been writing on the intricacies of genetics.

His latest title on paperback (February 2023), Control, takes the readers on a less travelled path to demonstrate how science was weaponised by totalitarian regimes, and how it was utilised to legitimise racism.

For Rutherford, this is no abstract project as he is an alumni and a lecturer of an institution widely considered as the crucible of what is loosely known as eugenics. In 1993, Rutherford arrived at the Galton Laboratory, named after the founding father of eugenics for his undergraduate studies.

Francis Galton (1822- 1911) was a colossus of science who exerted an enormous influence on various branches of science from social Darwinism, behavioural science and meteorology. Rutherfords treatment of the subject is both compelling and engaging where he does not drown the average reader with a tsunami of jargons.

So, what is eugenics? Eugenics, a concept that gained prominence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was believed to be a scientific approach to improving the genetic quality of the human population. However, history has revealed that eugenics was not just a scientific endeavour, but a deeply flawed and morally reprehensible ideology that was used to justify racism and discrimination.

The term eugenics was coined by the above mentioned Sir Francis Galton, in 1883. Galton believed that by selective breeding and controlling reproduction, it was possible to improve the genetic makeup of the human population, leading to the development of a superior race. This concept was based on the flawed idea that certain traits, such as intelligence and moral character, were hereditary and could be passed down from one generation to another.

The eugenics movement gained traction in various countries, including the United States, Canada, and Germany, and was supported by influential scientists, policymakers, and intellectuals. Proponents of eugenics argued that by promoting reproduction among those deemed fit and restricting or preventing reproduction among those considered unfit, the human race could be improved.

One of the most disturbing aspects of eugenics was its role in legitimising racism. The ideology of eugenics was often used to justify discrimination against certain racial and ethnic groups, particularly those considered inferior or undesirable. Pseudo-scientific theories were propagated to support the idea that certain races or ethnicities were genetically inferior, and thus should be prevented from reproducing in order to protect the purity of the superior race.

In the United States, for example, eugenics was used to justify policies such as forced sterilisation of people deemed unfit to reproduce, including those who were poor, disabled, or from marginalised communities. These policies disproportionately targeted people of colour and were based on the false belief that some racial groups were inherently inferior and needed to be controlled or eliminated for the betterment of society.

But, above all, the most chilling manifestation of eugenics was unleashed by the Nazis during World War II that led to the Holocaust which claimed the lives of six million Jews. The Nazis, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, not only embraced the concept of eugenics but used it as a central pillar to legitimise their racist and discriminatory ideologies. The Nazis developed their own version of eugenics, which they referred to as racial hygiene, and used it to justify their policies of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the pursuit of a so-called master race.

The Nazi regime believed in the superiority of the Aryan race, which they considered to be a pure and superior race of people of Germanic origin. They sought to protect and promote this race by eliminating what they considered to be inferior races, such as Jews, Romani people, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and other marginalised groups. They used eugenic principles to justify their genocidal policies and to promote the idea of racial purity.

The legacy of the Nazis' misuse of eugenics to legitimise racism is a dark and painful reminder of the dangers of pseudoscience and unethical applications of scientific concepts. It serves as a stark warning of the need for ethical conduct in scientific research and the importance of vigilance against ideologies that seek to use science to justify discrimination, racism, and other forms of oppression.

In today's world, inclusivity and diversity should be at the forefront of scientific research. It is essential to recognise the inherent value and dignity of ALL human beings, regardless of race, ethnicity, or any other characteristic. Diversity in scientific research promotes innovation, fosters a broader understanding of complex issues, and ensures that the benefits of scientific advancements are accessible to all.

Featured image: Epigram/Milan Perera

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Unveiling the dark past: eugenics and its role in legitimising racism - Epigram

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has no shortage of memorable and imposing villains. The Black Panther films, for instance, have delivered two complex antagonists who make audiences and the heroes ask serious questions about oppression and power. Meanwhile, more straightforward villains like Thanos have grounded reasons for their villainy, although their solutions to problems are cataclysmic, with The Mad Titan wiping away half of all living beings in the universe for several years.

The Guardians of the Galaxy have also had their fair share of villains with grand plans of annihilation and conquest, with their latest foe being one of the MCU's most horrifying to date. The High Evolutionary is the main antagonist in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and he is the man behind Rocket being more than just a typical raccoon from Earth. Why he created Rocket is part of the High Evolutionary's grander plans, which are rooted in a dark practice that makes him one of the MCU's most horrifying villains to date.

RELATED: Every MCU Easter Egg in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Rocket and his three friends are all the products of animal experimentation at the hands of the High Evolutionary, who is aspiring to create the perfect race of beings by forcing test subjects through a form of hyper-evolution. The High Evolutionary is doing this because he sees himself as a God who can deem what is and is not acceptable in his perfect universe. To achieve this, he is trying to create living beings without any intellectual or physical flaws. When a "flaw" is present, the High Evolutionary disposes of his test subject as soon as possible, only keeping the experiments that can further his quest for perfection.

This practice is eerily similar to eugenics, the advocacy of selective breeding done in the name of "improving" a population. Eugenics has a long, dark history connected to racism and antisemitism, as those who have infamously practiced it believe certain people are worthy of existing while others are not because of their genetics. There are some differences between the textbook definition of eugenics and what the High Evolutionary practices, but the similarities are shocking and make the High Evolutionary feel like a surprisingly realistic threat despite the unrealistic setting of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

Along with that, how the High Evolutionary practiced his experiments highlights what a monster he is. While he preaches that he is a savior who will create a paradise, the High Evolutionary does not care for any of his subjects. If any of them exhibit any sort of imperfection, he does not hesitate to dispose of them. Even for his underlings who believe they are working toward the same cause, the High Evolutionary has no qualms about eliminating them if they so much as pose a minor threat. His blatant disregard for life, his lack of loyalty and the joy he feels in regard to the pain he inflicts on others makes him one of the most sadistic and dangerous villains the MCU has to offer, and that's not all.

RELATED: GOTG 3 Star Bradley Cooper Would Happily Follow James Gunn to DC

Conducting these horrific experiments on living beings is already bad, but what takes Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3's High Evolutionary to another level is who his subjects are. The High Evolutionary experiments on innocent children of all species -- animal and alien in this case. He's taken the most innocent, helpless and naive of all beings and twisted them into his own image of messed-up perfection, with many of them suffering for years and eventually perishing at his hands, as is the case for Rocket's friends.

As Nebula points out, what the High Evolutionary does to Rocket as a child is far worse than anything Thanos did to her. Along with that, all of his friends have mechanical enhancements and prosthetics as a result of the unethical experiments the High Evolutionary conducts on them. He also lies to them about having a future away from this nightmare, even though he knows that he will not let any of them survive once they've served their purpose.

RELATED: James Gunn and Marvel Have Discussed the GOTG's Future

It is unclear how the High Evolutionary obtains these animals and kids in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, but it's safe to assume he is ripping them away from their homeworlds and families. Even for those who escape his grasp, like Rocket, it's next to impossible for them to ever return to their families or a state of normalcy as they've been altered so much physically, emotionally and mentally that they may not recall where home is, and they may no longer grasp who or what they are.

The High Evolutionary strips these kids of their agency, autonomy, history, childhood and identity, and many of them he doesn't keep around to experience the "paradise" he is creating. He targets the most innocent of beings, all in the name of a horrific practice that is a vanity project meant to feed his god complex, and there's a daunting body count as a result. For these reasons, he's one of the most horrifying villains of the MCU.

To see how vile the High Evolutionary is, check out Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, now in theaters.

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Guardians of the Galaxy 3 Has the MCU's Scariest Villain - CBR - Comic Book Resources

Progressive watchdog Media Matters is out with a new report on disinformation spewing from a right-wing media outlet targeting Hispanic Americans.

In recent years, the rise of foreign-language media outlets peddling false and misleading information to Americans has concerned federal officials, including Democrats who have watched Republicans make inroads with Hispanic voters with the help of conservative disinformation networks.

Media Matters latest report sheds light on some of the abortion-related stories coming from one of those networks, Americano Media. The networks CEO and founder has said he wants it to become Fox News in Spanish, which tells you about the reach and political influence Americano is striving for. And with deep-pocketed investors, the network may have the means to do it unless more U.S. institutions commit to the fight against misinformation.

Many Americans probably have no idea that this fount of conspiratorial drivel even exists. According to Media Matters:

A common narrative that hosts on Americano push is the idea that Democrats and elites support a Satanic agenda. Narratives invoking Satanism as a talking point are especially common on Americanos radio shows when hosts discuss abortion, liken the procedure to a Satanic ritual, and argue that anyone who supports reproductive rights is aligned with Satanism. This narrative is also common among English-language right-wing media outlets and figures.

The report cites Americano hosts who have likened abortion to a satanic ritual, claimed Democrats support murdering children in the womb and falsely categorized abortion as a form of eugenics.

As Media Matters reported previously, this rhetoric aligns with other right-wing conspiracy theories frequently espoused by Americano Media hosts, including the racist replacement theory alleging that Democrats have a sinister motive for supporting the arrival of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

I consider Americano Media as part of the conservative movements multipronged effort to resolve their electoral problems with nonwhite voters. Where voter suppression efforts dont do the trick, the thinking seems to go, maybe voter misinformation will work instead whether that means using ostensibly Black-owned, English-language media channels to push conspiratorial claims, or using foreign-language platforms like Americano Media to do the same.

Ja'han Jones is The ReidOut Blog writer.

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Fox News in Spanish bombards viewers with right-wing propaganda - MSNBC

More than to any of the other women I discovered in my family archive, I am drawn to my great-aunt Iris. Like her, I am the mother of daughters. Like her, I like to read and write. Like her, I grow food (a comparatively tiny amount). Her ideal church, she tells her father Omer Kem, would be a community gathering place where everybody is welcome and a free exchange of ideas is allowed.

This would be my ideal church too. And Iris was close to her father, as I am close to mine. It was only when I began to read Iris letters in earnest that I found myself yearning for these relatives I had never met.

Hers is the voice that most clearly articulates the passions of motherhood and daughterhood, that most poignantly expresses what kinship means, what belonging is. But then, in the 1920s and 30s, as her writing and thinking matures, Iris is the one family member, besides my great-grandfather Omer himself, who directly reveals the kinds of distortions kinship with and belonging to a white property-owning family in America can foster.

Though in Omer and Iris Americathe America of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesthe distribution of birth control materials and information was criminalized, this hadnt always been the case. Some women, white married middle- and upper-class women, had always had access to these materials.

But in the mid-nineteenth century, as poor rural people, immigrants, Black people, and many unmarried women flocked to cities, such materials were marketed to them also: Everywhere one lookedcontraceptive information, ads, and other materials were visible. The industrialization and mass migrations of the postbellum years brought many more married and unmarried women into contact with the commercialization of contraception and the freedom from patriarchal control that it allows.

The inevitable backlash against all these frankly displayed signs of sex was codified in 1873, when purity crusader and guilty masturbator Anthony Comstock, though not a legislator, wrote a national anti-obscenity bill to criminalize the circulation and sale of such obscene information and materials (drugs, gels, diaphragms, condoms).

In 1873 teenaged Omer was digging ditches in the Indiana mud, though his first wife, Nan, was already pregnant with their first baby, a boy named Edwin, who died before turning one. Over the next seven years, Nan would endure four more pregnancies, just about as many as one can have in that amount of time. She was either nursing or pregnant or both right up until her death at twenty-nine. It seems that in those years, obscene materials, legal or not, had not been available to a poor rural woman like her.

The year of Comstocks crackdown, 1873, was a pivotal year for other reasons as well. Just eight years after the war, and following a panic on the banks, the country faced its first Great Depression. The panic of 1873, wrote Du Bois, altered the face of society by leading to a four-year depression, followed by a consolidation of wealth in the hands of the few and a shift in the labor movement away from interracial class solidarity toward craft-based unionism.

In the northern cities, the streets were flush with the jobless poor, while in the Midwest, miners and factory workers faced wage reduction or sat idle. In the South, meanwhile, Reconstruction was attacked by Redemption, with its swelling waves of anti-Black terror. In Colfax, Louisiana, for example, where Black men had briefly made up the majority of the electorate and state assembly, a group of white paramilitary terrorists attacked the Black state militia with guns and cannons, killing (or later executing) up to 150 Black men.

What Comstocks crackdown on obscenity might have had to do with this inflection point in racial capitalism is something Ive not seen explored, and I cant explore it here either. But without a doubt, Reconstruction, immigration, and urbanization inspired great fears in white people in the South and North, fears having to do with racial contamination and the status of white workers. And racial anxieties, as can be observed in present-day America, seem always to inspire concurrent anxieties about the sexual lives of women.

The dawn of the new century brought a crackdown on free speech from another direction as well. After Leon Czolgosz assassinated President McKinley in 1901, anarchists, socialists, and especially members of the radical wing of the labor movement, the IWW, found themselves frequently thrown in jail for speaking their views in public.

In response, these same groups waged an intensive defense of the First Amendment in the streetsstaging protests, filling jail cells, publishing diatribes. The early birth control movement, led by Margaret Sanger, but which included free-speech, free-love anarchists like Emma Goldman, aligned itself with this truly valiant struggle for freedom, a struggle that led to the arrest and torture of hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

In the early twentieth century, the worker-led free-speech movement and the woman-led birth control movement emerged almost as one, responding to and resisting the same oppressive and reactionary forces waging war against their voices, their bodies, and their hopes for more just futures.

And yet, as is now commonly known and often decried, in around 1920, Sanger shifted the movement away from its radical roots. Under her leadership, the movement began to align itself instead with the growing eugenics movement and its anti-immigrant, racist, ablest, and classist ideology.

That year Sanger organized the first American Birth Control Conference in New York to purposely follow directly after the Second International Conference of Eugenics, hosted by eugenicists Fairfield Osborn and Madison Grant, author of the stupendously fascistic The Passing of the Great Race. Alongside her own first voicings of eugenic ideas, Sanger also made space in the Birth Control Review for leading voices in the eugenics movement, some of whom, like Paul Popenoe, Havelock Ellis, and Guy Irving Burch, advanced venomously racist and nativist beliefs and policies.

If I had hoped that the birth control movements anarchic origins had been as attractive to my ancestors as they were to me, I would be disappointed. By the time father and daughter were avidly discussing the project of birth control in the 1920s, it was fully grafted to the eugenics movement. Indeed, had it still been associated with anarchism or socialism, they would never have embraced it.

*

Iriss advocacy for birth control can best be found in two speeches she gave to the Olathe Womens Club in 1924 and 1925, just around the time that Sanger was establishing the countrys first long-term birth control clinic, Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, in New York City. In the first of these speeches, Birth Control as I See It, Iriss opening sentence is telling: My purpose in coming before you today to discuss this question is not because I believe you, as individuals, are in particular need of birth control. Rather, she goes on to explain, birth control is a matter for other womenpoor women, immigrant women, urban womena way of doing away with misery and crime through controlling the birthrate of the poor.

Iris gathers professional support by naming a series of male doctors, including some from her town, Montrose, Colorado, who support legalizing contraception, reliable persons all. Iriss final point pertains directly to the West, the frontier that once functioned as a safety valve for what many called surplus populations: There are no more vast unoccupied territories to send our young men to, she observes.

While once we might have been able to send them off to colonies, like Britain had done, these colonies are also rapidly filling up, as was the rest of the non-Western world: China is terribly overcrowded, so is Japan, India is even more so. Whats more, Iris goes on, in these countries, people are not dying of famine and disease like they used to. These countries are now learning how to take care of their babies and cure their sick. India is saving thousands who died before. Faced with all this excessive unwanted life, there is only one answer: birth control.

A year later, in another speech to the same body of women, Iris goes beyond this neo-Malthusian argument. Pioneer Life in Olathe as Seen by the Coreys is a mostly nostalgic talk in which she traces the early experiences of settler families in Colorados Uncompahgre valley. When she was a child, she tells her listeners, she and her siblings would play Indian: Our play was always most realistic because we found so many evidences of former Indian occupation (here she complicates her earlier depiction of vast unoccupied territories).

As an adult, Iris did some researchmostly talking to old-timersto better understand the pattern of dispossession she and her family took part in: The whites in Colorado became incensed at the Ute Indians, and being covetous of the fertile lands they occupied, brought about their removal.

As the speech continues, Iris emphasizes her gender-based empathy with Ute women: This must have been a sad Journey, as sad as the departure of the Arcadians. This had been their home and they were certainly exiles. Chipeta, Chief Ourays wife, must have been near heartbroken at leaving her home.

And yet despite this sad journey, this heartbreak, Ute removal makes a space that is quickly filled: The morning after the departure of the Utes, came the rush of settlers to occupy the land, she acknowledges. These first settlers include Iriss in-laws, the Coreys, and then, sixteen years later, her family, the Kems. After admitting to this opportunistic land theft, Iris shifts gears to describe some of the difficult challenges the early settlers faced.

For twenty-two paragraphs, she details their clothing, their food production, and their struggles to develop transportation and education. And then, at the very end of her speech, Iris takes a rather abrupt turn, as if shes just then remembered that she is speaking to women, that she has a message particular to them:

Those women suffered hardships and achieved many things, but we women of today have hard things to do and much to conquer if we would leave the world a better place than when we came into it. We have the vote, which our pioneer mothers didnt have, and with it we can do much if we will. Assisting at the birth of new babies can safely be left to the doctors of today, but who dare say that it shouldnt be in the hands of women to say what kind of babies shall be born and when they shall be born. May women soon awake to their opportunities and use them for the betterment of the race.

In his mind-opening book The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (2018), Greg Grandin argues that the frontier didnt close with the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 or with white settlement in Oklahoma. Rather, the expansionist imperative kept America moving far beyond its physical borders into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Ballooning imperialist projects echo and reignite the logic of early Americas wars of western expansion. From the Spanish American War in 1898 to early twentieth-century occupations in Latin America and the Caribbean, from the First World War, the Korean War, and Vietnam to the so-called war on terrorall this functions much the way the western frontier did: uniting (certain) Americans under a shared aggressive ideology.

The spread of democracy justifies all these wars, just as the spread of civilization justified Indian genocide and the annexation of Mexico. But while aggression is spun as progress, Grandin argues, the promise of boundlessness keeps us forever distracted from the racism and inequality that has always given the lie to the mission.

Grandins argument is powerful, and everyone should read his book. But there is yet another frontier in America that he doesnt mention, one that can never close: the white womans reproductive body. Iriss narrative of the pioneer womans journey is one of progress, despite the sad story of Indian dispossession and genocide that made that progress possible.

Through white womens struggles, lands have been cultivated, children educated, and democracy expanded. And now, says Iris, there are other lands to conquer. No modest proposal, Iris tasks we women with the role of curating the human race itself.

White women, she suggests, are uniquely and newly positioned to be the arbitersthrough the voteof the awesome power of reproduction. For Iriss generation, women are no longer just breeders; they are now also deciders. And as white women decide what kind of babies shall be born and when they shall be born, we make the world, the whole wide world, better.

Toward the end of her earlier speech, Irish unleashes the truly supremacist nature of her passion. If we can make laws to exclude undesirable people from the shores of our country, she reasons, can we not make laws excluding the undesirable among the unborn? Who are these undesirables? They are the many children of impoverished mothers, the poor little disgusting mites who have just growed and whose influence is a menace to all other children.

It was just a joke, of course, an attempt to spice her warnings, as many in my family often do, with a laugh. And yet humor is often the repository for undercurrents of anxiety and violence, especially of the racist category. Iris joke is not funny, but it does beg a question, one we can direct both to 1924 and to 2022. As reproductive justice is so unevenly distributed across race, citizenship, and class, who, really, is being menaced, and by whom?

______________________________

Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American Westby Julie Carr is available via the University of Nebraska Press.

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The Reproductive Movement Must Reclaim Its Radical Roots and Be ... - Literary Hub

Three appeals court judges with a history of supporting restrictions on abortion will hear arguments May 17 on whether a widely used abortion drug should remain available

By

KEVIN McGILL Associated Press

May 16, 2023, 12:04 AM ET

5 min read

NEW ORLEANS -- Three conservative appeals court judges, each with a history of supporting restrictions on abortion, will hear arguments May 17 on whether a widely used abortion drug should remain available.

The case involves a regulatory issue whether the Food and Drug Administration's approval of mifepristone, and subsequent actions making it easier to obtain, must be rolled back. The appellate hearing follows an April ruling by a federal judge in Texas, who ordered a hold on federal approval of mifepristone in a decision that overruled decades of scientific approval. His ruling was stayed pending appeal. The case was allotted to a panel made up of Jennifer Walker Elrod, James Ho and Cory Wilson.

The three judges of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wont rule immediately. Their decision, whatever it is, is also unlikely to have an immediate effect pending an expected appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Here's a look at who the judges are and their track records.

JENNIFER WALKER ELROD

Nominated to the court in 2007 by Republican President George W. Bush, Elrod was among several 5th Circuit judges allowing Texas to temporarily ban abortions as the coronavirus pandemic took hold in early 2020.

Elrod also was co-author of the opinion when the full 5th Circuit upheld in 2021 a Texas law outlawing an abortion method commonly used to end second-trimester pregnancies.

That same year, she wrote for a panel that refused to order Louisiana to issue a long-stalled license for a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in New Orleans, saying there is no free-standing federal right to receive an abortion-clinic license."

In the Texas case involving pandemic restrictions, she was part of a panel allowing what amounted to a ban on abortions including medication abortions by classifying them as non-essential procedures legally postponed under an order by Gov. Greg Abbott. The 2020 order was in effect for about a month.

Elrod was in favor of decisions upholding Texas and Louisiana laws requiring doctors at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals a move abortion rights advocates said would force some clinics to close.

When the full court narrowly refused to let Louisiana officials cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood facilities in the state, Elrod wrote the dissent.

Elrod also boasts a high profile in 5th Circuit decisions on regulatory issues. One, if upheld by the Supreme Court, could limit the authority of the Securities and Exchange Commission to impose hefty fees and fines. Another, eventually struck by the Supreme Court, held that the individual mandate in former President Barack Obama's signature health care law had been rendered unconstitutional by congressional action.

JAMES HO

A former Texas solicitor general, Ho is the first Asian-American to serve on the 5th Circuit and is a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He was nominated to the 5th Circuit in 2017 by Republican President Donald Trump. His opposition to abortion and abortion rights was clear early in his tenure, including referring to abortion as a moral tragedy in one 2018 opinion.

In 2019, he wrote a 15-page grudging concurrence in a ruling that said a Mississippi abortion ban had to be struck down under then-existing court precedent. Nothing in the text or original understanding of the Constitution establishes a right to an abortion, he wrote.

He went on to cite the racial history of abortion advocacy as a tool of the eugenics movement." He harshly criticized a lower court for declining to consider arguments that a fetus can feel pain, and for displaying an alarming disrespect for the millions of Americans who believe ... that abortion is the immoral, tragic, and violent taking of innocent human life.

That opinion was written in the case the Supreme Court ultimately used to overturn Roe v. Wade.

CORY WILSON

Nominated to the federal appeals court in 2020 by Trump, Wilson is a former Mississippi appeals court judge who had a strong anti-abortion record when he served in the Mississippi House from January 2016 to February 2019 as a Republican. Abortion rights supporters opposed his confirmation to the federal appeals court. They noted he had expressed support for complete and immediate reversal" of the Roe v. Wade decision in a questionnaire from Mississippi Right to Life's political action committee.

Wilson voted for anti-abortion measures in 2016, including one to stop Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood facilities in the state a measure rejected in court. In 2018 he voted for the Mississippi law that ultimately led to the demise of Roe v. Wade in 2022. The law prohibited most abortions after 15 weeks.

At the 5th Circuit, Wilson joined Elrod, Ho and a majority of the full court in 2021 in upholding a Texas law outlawing an abortion method commonly used to end second-trimester pregnancies. He had voted for a similar law in the Mississippi Legislature.

___

Associated Press reporter Emily Wagster Pettus in Jackson, Mississippi, contributed to this report.

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Contents

Eugenics is the practice or advocacy of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits. It aims to reduce human suffering by breeding out disease, disabilities and so-called undesirable characteristics from the human population. Early supporters of eugenics believed people inherited mental illness, criminal tendencies and even poverty, and that these conditions could be bred out of the gene pool.

Historically, eugenics encouraged people of so-called healthy, superior stock to reproduce and discouraged reproduction of the physically or mentally challengedor anyone who fell outside the social norm. Eugenics was popular in America during much of the first half of the twentieth century, yet it earned its negative association mainly from Adolf Hitler and his obsessive attempts to create an advanced Aryan race.

Modern eugenics, more often called human genetic engineering, has come a long wayscientifically and ethicallyand offers hope for treating many devastating genetic illnesses. Even so, it remains controversial.

Eugenics literally means good creation. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato may have been the first person to promote the idea, although the term eugenics didnt come on the scene until British scholar Sir Francis Galton coined it in 1883 in his book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.

In one of Platos best-known literary works, The Republic, he wrote about creating a superior society by procreating high-class people together and discouraging coupling between the lower classes. He also suggested a variety of mating rules to help create an optimal society.

For instance, men should only have relations with a woman when arranged by their ruler, and incestuous relationships between parents and children were forbiddenbut not between brother and sister. While Platos ideas may be considered a form of ancient eugenics, he received little credit from Galton.

In the late 19th century, Galtonwhose cousin was Charles Darwinhoped to better humankind through the propagation of the British elite. His plan never really took hold in his own country, but in America it was more widely embraced.

Eugenics made its first official appearance in American history through marriage laws. In 1896, Connecticut made it illegal for people with epilepsy or who were feeble-minded to marry. In 1903, the American Breeders Association was created to study eugenics.

John Harvey Kellogg, of Kelloggs cereal fame, organized the Race Betterment Foundation in 1911 and established a pedigree registry. The foundation hosted national conferences on eugenics in 1914, 1915 and 1928.

As the concept of eugenics took hold, prominent citizens, scientists and socialists championed the cause and established the Eugenics Record Office. The office tracked families and their genetic traits, claiming most people considered unfit were immigrants, minorities or poor.

The Eugenics Record Office also maintained there was clear evidence that supposed negative family traits were caused by bad genes, not racism, economics or the social views of the time.

Eugenics in America took a dark turn in the early 20th century, led by California. From 1909 to 1979, around 20,000 sterilizations occurred in California state mental institutions under the guise of protecting society from the offspring of people with mental illness.

Many sterilizations were forced and performed on minorities. Thirty-three states would eventually allow involuntary sterilization on whomever lawmakers deemed unworthy to procreate.

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that forced sterilization of the handicapped does not violate the U.S. Constitution. In the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, three generations of imbeciles are enough. In 1942, the ruling was overturned, but not before thousands of people underwent the procedure.

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In the 1930s, the acting governor of Puerto Rico, Rafael Menendez Ramos, implemented sterilization programs for Puerto Rican women. Ramos claimed the action was needed to battle rampant poverty and economic strife; however, it may have also been a way to prevent the so-called superior Aryan gene pool from becoming tainted with Latino blood.

According to a 1976 Government Accountability Office investigation, between 25 and 50 percent of Native Americans were sterilized between 1970 and 1976. Its thought some sterilizations happened without consent during other surgical procedures such as an appendectomy.

In some cases, health care for living children was denied unless their mothers agreed to sterilization.

As horrific as forced sterilization in America was, nothing compared to Adolf Hitlers eugenic experiments before and during World War II. And Hitler didnt come up with the concept of a superior Aryan race all on his own. In fact, he referred to American eugenics in his 1934 book, Mein Kampf.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler declared non-Aryan races such as Jews and Romani as inferior. He believed Germans should do everything possible, including genocide, to make sure their gene pool stayed pure. And in 1933, the Nazis created the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, which resulted in thousands of forced sterilizations.

By 1940, Hitlers master-race mania took a terrible turn as hundreds of thousands of Germans with mental or physical disabilities were killed by gas or lethal injection.

During World War II, concentration camp prisoners endured horrific medical tests under the guise of helping Hitler create the perfect race. Josef Mengele, an SS doctor at Auschwitz, oversaw many experiments on both adult and child twins.

He used chemical eyedrops to try and create blue eyes, injected prisoners with devastating diseases and performed surgery without anesthesia. Many of his patients died or suffered permanent disability, and his gruesome experiments earned him the nickname Angel of Death.

In all, its estimated eleven million people died during the Holocaust, most of them because they didnt fit Hitlers definition of a superior race.

Thanks to the atrocities of Hitler and the Nazis, eugenics lost momentum in after World War II, although forced sterilizations still happened. But as medical technology advanced, a new form of eugenics came on the scene.

Modern eugenics, better known as human genetic engineering, changes or removes genes to prevent disease, cure disease or improve your body in some significant way. The potential health benefits of human gene therapy are impressive since many devastating or life-threatening illnesses could be cured.

But modern genetic engineering also comes with a potential cost: As technology advances, people could routinely weed-out what they consider undesirable traits in their offspring. Genetic testing already allows parents to identify some diseases in their child in utero, which may cause them to terminate the pregnancy.

This is controversial, since what exactly constitutes negative traits is open to interpretation, and many people feel that all humans have the right to be born regardless of disease, or that the laws of nature shouldnt be tampered with.

Much of Americas historical eugenics efforts such as forced sterilizations have gone unpunished, although some states offered reparations to victims or their survivors. For the most part, though, its a largely unknown stain on Americas history. And no amount of money can ever repair the devastation of Hitlers eugenics programs.

As scientists embark on a new eugenics frontier, past failings can serve as a warning to approach modern genetic research with care and compassion.

Controlling Heredity: American Breeders Association. University of Missouri.Forced Sterilization of Native Americans: Late Twentieth Century Physician Cooperation with National Eugenic Policies. The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity.Greek Theories on Eugenics. Journal of Medical Ethics.Josef Mengele. Holocaust Encyclopedia.Latina Women: Forced Sterilization. University of Michigan.Modern Eugenics: Building a Better Person? Helix.Nazi Medical Experiments. Holocaust Encyclopedia.Plato. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.Unwanted Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States. PBS.

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