Category Archives: Eugenics

Statistics dataset

The Iris flower data set or Fisher's Iris data set is a multivariate data set used and made famous by the British statistician and biologist Ronald Fisher in his 1936 paper The use of multiple measurements in taxonomic problems as an example of linear discriminant analysis.[1] It is sometimes called Anderson's Iris data set because Edgar Anderson collected the data to quantify the morphologic variation of Iris flowers of three related species.[2] Two of the three species were collected in the Gasp Peninsula "all from the same pasture, and picked on the same day and measured at the same time by the same person with the same apparatus".[3]

The data set consists of 50 samples from each of three species of Iris (Iris setosa, Iris virginica and Iris versicolor). Four features were measured from each sample: the length and the width of the sepals and petals, in centimeters. Based on the combination of these four features, Fisher developed a linear discriminant model to distinguish the species from each other. Fisher's paper was published in the Annals of Eugenics and includes discussion of the contained techniques' applications to the field of phrenology.[1]

Originally used as an example data set on which Fisher's linear discriminant analysis was applied, it became a typical test case for many statistical classification techniques in machine learning such as support vector machines.[5]

The use of this data set in cluster analysis however is not common, since the data set only contains two clusters with rather obvious separation. One of the clusters contains Iris setosa, while the other cluster contains both Iris virginica and Iris versicolor and is not separable without the species information Fisher used. This makes the data set a good example to explain the difference between supervised and unsupervised techniques in data mining: Fisher's linear discriminant model can only be obtained when the object species are known: class labels and clusters are not necessarily the same.[6]

Nevertheless, all three species of Iris are separable in the projection on the nonlinear and branching principal component.[7] The data set is approximated by the closest tree with some penalty for the excessive number of nodes, bending and stretching. Then the so-called "metro map" is constructed.[4] The data points are projected into the closest node. For each node the pie diagram of the projected points is prepared. The area of the pie is proportional to the number of the projected points. It is clear from the diagram (left) that the absolute majority of the samples of the different Iris species belong to the different nodes. Only a small fraction of Iris-virginica is mixed with Iris-versicolor (the mixed blue-green nodes in the diagram). Therefore, the three species of Iris (Iris setosa, Iris virginica and Iris versicolor) are separable by the unsupervising procedures of nonlinear principal component analysis. To discriminate them, it is sufficient just to select the corresponding nodes on the principal tree.

The dataset contains a set of 150 records under five attributes - sepal length, sepal width, petal length, petal width and species.

The iris data set is widely used as a beginner's dataset for machine learning purposes. The dataset is included in R base and Python in the machine learning library scikit-learn, so that users can access it without having to find a source for it.

Several versions of the dataset have been published.[8]

The example R code shown below reproduce the scatterplot displayed at the top of this article:

This code gives:

Follow this link:

Iris flower data set - Wikipedia

Canadas policies are a death sentence for disabled people. The country must reckon with its modern eugenics  Toronto Star

See more here:

Canadas policies are a death sentence for disabled people. The country must reckon with its modern eugenics - Toronto Star

Politicians often flatter their audiences, but at a rally in Bemidji, Minn., last month, President Trump found an unusual thing to praise about the nearly all-white crowd: its genetics. You have good genes, he insisted. A lot of it is about the genes, isnt it, dont you believe? The racehorse theory. You have good genes in Minnesota.

In case it was not clear from the sea of white faces that he was making a point about race, Trump later said the quiet part out loud. Every family in Minnesota needs to know about Sleepy Joe Bidens extreme plan to flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia, from other places all over the planet, he declared.

Trumps ugly endorsement of race-based eugenics got national attention, but in a presidency filled with outrages, our focus quickly moved to the next. Besides, this wasnt the first time wed heard about these views. A Frontlinedocumentary reported in 2016 that Trump believed the racehorse theory of human development that he referred to in Minnesota that superior men and women will have superior children. That same year, the Huffington Post released a video collecting Trumps statements on human genetics, including his declarations that Im a gene believer and Im proud to have that German blood.

On eugenics, as in so many areas, the scariest thing about Trumps views is not the fact that he holds them, but that there is no shortage of Americans who share them. The United States has a long, dark history with eugenics. Starting in 1907, a majority of states passed laws authorizing the sterilization of people deemed to have undesirable genes, for reasons as varied as feeblemindedness and alcoholism. The Supreme Court upheld these laws by an 8-1 vote, in the infamous 1927 case Buck vs. Bell, and as many as 70,000 Americans were sterilized for eugenic reasons in the 20th century.

Americas passion for eugenics waned after World War II, when Nazism discredited the idea of dividing people based on the quality of their genes. But in recent years, public support for eugenics has made a comeback. Steve King, a Republican congressman from Iowa, tweeted in 2017, We cant restore our civilization with somebody elses babies. The comment struck many as a claim that American children were genetically superior, though King later insisted he was concerned with the culture, not the blood of foreign babies.

Eugenics has also had a resurgence in England, where the movement was first launched in the 1880s by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. In February, Andrew Sabisky, an advisor to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, resigned after it was revealed that he had reportedly written blog posts suggesting that there are genetic differences in intelligence among races, and that compulsory contraception could be used to prevent the rise of a permanent underclass. Richard Dawkins, one of Britains most prominent scientists, added fuel to the fire by tweeting that although eugenics could be criticized on moral or ideological grounds, of course it would work in practice. Eugenics works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses, he said. Why on earth wouldnt it work for humans?

There is reason to believe the eugenics movement will continue to grow. Americas first embrace of it came at a time when immigration levels were high, and it was closely tied to fears that genetically inferior foreigners were hurting the nations gene pool. Eugenicists persuaded Congress to pass the Immigration Act of 1924, which sharply reduced the number of Italian, Jewish and Asian people allowed in.

Today, the percentage of Americans who were born outside the United States is the highest it has been since 1910, and fear of immigrants is again an animating force in politics. As our nation continues to become more diverse, the sort of xenophobia that fueled Trumps and Kings comments is likely to produce more talk of better genes and babies.

It is critically important to push back against these toxic ideas. One way to do this is by ensuring that people who promote eugenics are denounced and kept out of positions of power. It is encouraging that Sabisky was forced out and that King was defeated for reelection in his Republican primary in June. Hopefully, Trump will be the next to go.

Education, including an honest reckoning with our own tragic eugenics history, is another form of resistance. It is starting to happen: Stanford University just announced that it is removing the name of its first president, David Starr Jordan, a leading eugenicist, from campus buildings, and that it will actively work to better explain his legacy. We need more of this kind of self-scrutiny from universities like Harvard, Yale and many others that promoted eugenics and pseudo race science, as well as institutions like the American Museum of Natural History, which in 1921 hosted the Second International Eugenics Congress, at which eugenicists advocated for eliminating the unfit.

Trumps appalling remarks in Minnesota show how serious the situation is now. Seventy-five years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, a United States president not only spoke about good genes in racialized terms he believed that his observations would help him to win in the relatively liberal state of Minnesota. It is crucial that everyone who understands the horrors of eugenics works to defeat these views before they become any more popular.

Adam Cohen, a former member of the New York Times editorial board, is the author of Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck and, this year, Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Courts Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America.

The rest is here:

Op-Ed: Eugenics is making a comeback. Stop it in its tracks - Los ...

The Statue of Liberty, which stands on Ellis Island in New York Harbor, was the America's busiest immigrant inspection station from 1892 until 1954. Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images hide caption

The Statue of Liberty, which stands on Ellis Island in New York Harbor, was the America's busiest immigrant inspection station from 1892 until 1954.

Nearly 100 years ago, Congress passed a restrictive law that cut the overall number of immigrants coming to the United States and put severe limits on those who were let in.

Journalist Daniel Okrent says that the eugenics movement a junk science that stemmed from the belief that certain races and ethnicities were morally and genetically superior to others informed the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted entrance to the U.S.

"Eugenics was used as a primary weapon in the effort to keep Southern and Eastern Europeans out of the country," Okrent says. "[The eugenics movement] made it a palatable act, because it was based on science or presumed science."

Okrent notes the 1924 law drastically cut the number of Jews, Italians, Greeks and Eastern Europeans that could enter the country. Even during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and dying, access remained limited. The limits remained in place until 1965, when the Immigration and Nationality Act ended immigration restrictions based on nationality, ethnicity and race.

Okrent sees echos of the 1924 act in President Trump's hard-line stance regarding immigration: "The [current] rhetoric of criminality, the attribution of criminality not to individual criminals but to hundreds of thousands of people of various nationalities that's very similar to the notion of moral deficiency that was hurled by the eugenicists at the Southern and Eastern Europeans of the 1910s and '20s."

Okrent's new book is The Guarded Gate.

The Guarded Gate

Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America

by Daniel Okrent

On what immigration was like at the turn of the 20th century, before the Immigration Act of 1924

Ellis Island opens in 1892 and within a few years it becomes one of the busiest port spots anywhere in the U.S. Ellis Island was a teeming hive of activity as hundreds of thousands in some years more than a million immigrants came pouring through. [It] was a very, very busy place and a very alienating place for a lot of people, because of the examination that people had to go through, particularly for tuberculosis, trachoma and other diseases. But once through the line, and then onto the ferry boat that took people to Manhattan, it was really a wonderful place to have been.

On the Immigration Act of 1924, and the quotas set up to restrict immigration

First, there is an overall quota. At various times it was 300,000 people, then it got chopped down to ... 162,000 people. ... The second part is where did these people come from? And it was decided that, well, let's continue to reflect the population of America as it has become, so we will decide where people can come from based on how many people of their same nationality were already here. ...

If 10 percent of the current American population came from country A, then 10 percent of that year's immigrants could come from country A. Except and this is probably the most malign and dishonest thing that came out of this entire movement they didn't do this on the basis of the 1920 census, which had been conducted just four years before, or the 1910, or even the 1900. But those numbers were based on the population in 1890, before the large immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe had begun. So to any question about whether there was any racist or anti-Semitic or anti-Italian intent, this established there clearly was. ...

... in the year before the first of the quota laws went to effect, more than 220,000 Italians came into the U.S. And the year after, under the quota, it was fewer than 4,000 ...

Daniel Okrent

So if you take the Italians, in the year before the first of the quota laws went to effect, more than 220,000 Italians came into the U.S. And the year after, under the quota, it was fewer than 4,000 and similar numbers stretched across Eastern and Southern Europe. Suddenly the door has slammed in the faces of those people who had been coming in the largest numbers, based not only on bogus science, but based on a manipulation of American history itself.

On how eugenics began

The origin of eugenics was in England in the latter half of the 19th century. It really comes out of Darwin in a way, out of some very good science. Darwin upsets the entire balance of the scientific world with his discovery and the propagation of the ideas of evolution. And then, once you establish that we are not all derived from the same people from Adam and Eve which was the prevailing view at the time, then we learned that we are not all the same. We are not all brothers, if you wish to take that particular position. And the early eugenicists believed that and thought that we could control the nature of the population of a nation the U.K. at first, or the U.S. by selective breeding. Let's have only the "good" breed with the "good," and let's not let the less-than-good breed.

On how eugenicists believed morality was an inherited trait

You find some very well-established scientists, [Henry] Fairfield Osborn, the head of the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years, he outright declared that it is not just intelligence, it is also morality that is inherited, and criminality is inherited. It's really stunning to think that people who are very, very well-credentialed in the natural sciences could believe these things. But if you begin your belief by thinking that certain peoples are inferior to other peoples, it's very easy to adapt your science to suit your own prejudice.

On the evaluations to determine which ethnic groups were the smartest

There were any number of tests in various places, almost all of them of equal unreliability to determine whether people were of sufficient intelligence. One of the most famous ones was the so-called "Alpha Test" that was given to nearly 2 million soldiers in World War I by Robert M. Yerkes, who is now memorialized in the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta, a federal facility.

Yerkes gave tests that included questions that were almost [like] Jeopardy questions, although in reverse. A question like: "Is Bud Fisher a (choose one): outfielder; cartoonist or novelist?" If you've just been in the country for five years and you don't speak English terribly well, how are you possibly going to answer a question like that? But it was taken seriously as a measure of intelligence.

On how Trump's hard-line position on immigration echoes the anti-immigration and eugenicist sentiments of the early 1900s

When you choose your immigrants, when you choose your next door neighbors on the basis of their ethnicity or their race rather than the nature of the individual him- or herself, you're engaged in, in this case, official legal discrimination.

Daniel Okrent

I think that one could say that today's Central Americans and today's Muslims ... are the equivalent of 1924's Jews and Italians, or ... the Jews and Italians then were treated and regarded as these Latin American and Muslim nationalities are today. When you choose your immigrants, when you choose your next door neighbors on the basis of their ethnicity or their race rather than the nature of the individual him- or herself, you're engaged in, in this case, official legal discrimination.

Sam Briger and Mooj Zadie produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.

Originally posted here:

Eugenics, Anti-Immigration Laws Of The Past Still Resonate Today ...

Timeline select a year for more details

Francis Galton (pictured), Charles Darwins cousin, derived the term eugenics from the Greek word eugenes, meaning good in birth or good in stock. Galton first used the term in an 1883 book, Inquiries into Human Fertility and Its Development. Francis Galton (pictured), Charles Darwins cousin, derived the term eugenics from the Greek word eugenes, meaning good in birth or good in stock. Galton first used the term in an 1883 book, Inquiries into Human Fertility and Its Development.

We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea.

Galton believed that eugenics could control human evolution and development. In his writings, he argued that abstract social traits, such as intelligence, were a result of heredity. In his book, he claimed that only higher races could be successful. Galtons writings reflected prejudiced notions about race, class, gender and the overwhelming power of heredity.

Read the rest here:

Eugenics: Its Origin and Development (1883 - Present) - Genome.gov

ince the start of eugenics in the 19th century, it has been one of the most debated ideologies within modern history, at least from an ethical perspective. The idea of human sterilization was invented by British explorerFrancis Galton who was inspired by Charles Darwins theory of natural selection. Due to the rise of hereditary diseases, natural selection in his eyes seemed like the best medical practice in combating these diseases and a way to remove these diseases for future generations.

During the same period of time, people around the world started to combat racism and fight for human equality as one racial prejudice seen among minorities was the higher chance of diseases or hereditary diseases being spread although medicine within the 19th century didnt permit an accurate check of hereditary diseases within ones organism.

The world of medicine (especially western) has its own section of racial prejudice where it seems to treat patients of different color differently, as if they are a totally different species, presenting (in the eyes of the western doctors at the time) more vulnerability towards hereditary diseases whilst having a higher resilience to pain, as presented in some of my works: The Myth of Black People Not Feeling Pain Is Still Believed to This Day

The biggest efforts for the eugenics program took place in America and mostly pointed toward African American and Hispanic citizens as well as mainly towards the female population. In my eyes, taking away a womans ability to give birth is pretty much like taking away her femininity and the most beautiful gift that God has given to women.

The 20th century was a long-lasting fight for the African American citizens of the United States as well as other minority groups that were seen as different due to their physical appearance. Racial prejudice and the fight for equality had become the tensest during the 1960s, especially with Martin Luther Kings movement within the United States.

Sterilization within the United States publicity began around the 1910s, and aimed to be applied by all the States of America. Although it was very much supported by the government, this program was very much influenced by racial groups such as theNeo-Malthusianswho believed that the world is overpopulated and that is what will lead to its ecological collapse.

By 1913 many norther states were already allowed by law to perform eugenics sterilization purely based on eugenic motives (avoidance of hereditary diseases).By 1913, many states had or were on their way to having eugenic sterilization laws. (Source: Boston Medical Library)

Within the eugenics program, their idea was that poverty is created due to overpopulation, and since most African Americans at the time were part of the lower class, it should be them to be sterilized above everyone else. The focus was not just on poverty, but on the finest genes and having the finest baby be born. The white population within America really made a big thing out of it by even having contests such as the Fitter Family contest or Better Baby contests.

The idea was not so much focused on creating or having the perfect race, but more like developing and reproducing the perfect white human.

At first, the group focused more on educating people below the poverty line aboutcontraceptives and sexual education. Seeing that it wasnt working, the people within the group being quite powerful, influenced the government towards a eugenics program (amongst many other external influencers).

The population was really easy to influence and indoctrinate with the idea behind the eugenics program, especially with the rise of all diseases and epidemics within the US during the 20th century. Another issue was that the population didnt really understand with exactitude in what conditions hereditary disease can be transmitted. This gave them another reason to become more racially inclined in the late 1940s and approve on an ethical level of the eugenics program when it came to people of a different color.Hereditary Genius 1869 by Francis Galton (Source: The British Library)

People did not care about the history of eugenics, such as the use of eugenics by the Nazis to remove the Jewish population within Germany in the late 1930s, early 1940s, something which also focused on the correlation between eugenics and racism. The idea of human sterilization started by Francis Galton has racism at its pillars, as with the idea of eugenics,he wanted to create the perfect race, this argument is presented by him in his bookHereditary Geniuspublished in 1869.

Since 1933 and up to 1974, between 100,000 and 150,000 black women have taken part within the eugenics program, most of them being forced and threatened by doctors and other racist groups. A small number were actually persuaded to deliberately take part in the program with small incentives or via other persuasive means. This is very much an argued number as many of the women that took part were forced and done off the record.

What is even more interesting is that the eugenics program continued even after forcing people into the eugenics program became illegal within the United States in 1974. This just adds up to the long list of human rights that have been taken from women of color within America, but the main focus should be on how the world was ok with eugenics in the first place.

Forceful sterilizationstill endures today within America, mainly in female prisons. A survey taken in 2011 by the state of California showed thatbetween 1997 and 2010 approximately 1,400 women within California prisons were forcedinto the eugenics program.

Having the ability to give life is the most human ability in my opinion, just like everything in this world has the right to reproduce and retain its legacy, so we should all. Sadly, knowing that forceful eugenics still takes place in some parts of the world and seeing the world wanting to take away a womans ability to give birth just makes me want to lose hope in humanity.

More here:

150000 Black Women Were Forced Into the Eugenics Program - History of Yesterday

Democrats love to talk about abortion and systemic racism, just not in the same conversation.

The National Right to Life Center estimates that by the end of 2021, 63.5 million abortions had been performed in the United States since the Supreme Courts 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Nearly 40% of women who seek abortions are African American, which is astounding, considering this demographic made up just 13.6% of the population at the time of the 2020 census. This likely means that over 20 million black babies have been aborted during the past 50 years.

20 million equates to 6% of the total U.S. population. Its also approximately 45% of the current black American population of 45 million. And, had these children been born, blacks would represent about 20% of the total population. Clearly, abortion has had an enormous effect on blacks in America.

THE FIVE STATES THAT WILL HAVE ABORTION MEASURES ON THE BALLOT IN NOVEMBER

In August 2019, then-New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet assembled his troops to introduce the controversial 1619 Project, their deliberate attempt to "reframe Americas history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."

The editors of the "paper of record" had decided that systemic racism should become the central issue in the upcoming presidential campaign. Baquet told his staff, "Race in the next year and I think, to be frank, what I hope you come away from this discussion with race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story."

Following George Floyds death in May 2020, systemic racism exploded into the national debate. Suddenly, every institution, the U.S. justice system, our history, our Founding Fathers, and of course, every Republican, was declared racist. Woke corporations forced employees to attend diversity training sessions to learn how to be "less white." And demands for equity became ubiquitous.

Planned Parenthood was also forced to recognize its own racist roots. The group admitted that Margaret Sanger, the organizations founder, was a racist with "harmful connections to the eugenics movement." Sanger established a predecessor organization, "The Negro Project," in 1939. In turn, Planned Parenthood removed Sangers name from its Manhattan health clinic and renamed nearby "Margaret Sanger Square." In a later, more formal declaration that it called "a reckoning," Planned Parenthood acknowledged that Sanger was a white supremacist. The group also confirmed that Sanger delivered a speech to "a womens auxiliary branch of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey, in 1926."

The statement said Sanger "believed in eugenics an inherently racist and ableist ideology that labeled certain people unfit to have children." It added that Sangers actions had "undermined reproductive freedom and caused irreparable damage to the health and lives of generations of Black people, Latino people, Indigenous people, immigrants, people with disabilities, people with low incomes, and many others."

The racial disparities between abortion rates for black and white women in America cannot be denied. In his concurrence in the 2019 abortion case Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote: "There are areas of New York City in which black children are more likely to be aborted than they are to be born alive and are up to eight times more likely to be aborted than white children in the same area." Unfortunately, renaming a clinic in New York City and disavowing the organizations founder are woefully insufficient to compensate for the evils put in motion by this repellent woman and perpetuated by her successors.

So, yes, lets talk about abortion and systemic racism in the same conversation.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor tothe Washington Examiner andthe Western Journal.Her articles have appeared atMSN,RedState,Newsmax, theFederalist, andRealClearPolitics. Follow her onTwitterorLinkedIn.

Go here to read the rest:

20 million black babies have been aborted since Roe v. Wade. Where is the equity in that? - Washington Examiner

Photo: areallart (Shutterstock)

After the FDA changed the definition of healthy (for food labeling purposes), it turned out that many popular breakfast cereals dont meet the criteria. CNBC points out that Raisin Bran, Honey Nut Cheerios, and Corn Flakes have too much added sugar to qualify. If you were surprised, buckle in, because the idea of wanting breakfast cereals to be healthy has a long and bizarre history.

Commercially manufactured breakfast cereals have their roots in 19th-century health spas, or sanitaria, and the (frankly super messed-up) theories of health and disease promoted by their founders.

John Harvey Kellogg is one name you might know; he ran the Battle Creek sanitarium in Michigan. Bland foods were a cornerstone of health, according to his teachings; anything sweet, spicy, or meaty was supposed to excite the passions and weaken your nervous system. Kellogg believed that frequent enemas were also necessary for health, that masturbation was so harmful that children should be prevented from doing it through any means necessary, including mechanical devices and even surgery (you can thank him for the popularity of non-religious circumcision), and was a huge proponent of eugenics, to the point of starting a Race Betterment Foundation and writing books and articles on race degeneracy.

I dont see anything particularly healthy about the above, but Kellogg was obsessed with these ideas about bland foods, enemas, and NoFap being keys to good health. And those bland foods were the original source of breakfast cereals as we know them today. (Flat breads and crackers may have been so popular because yeast leavening was seen as too similar to the process of making alcoholic beverages; these guys also shunned liquor.)

G/O Media may get a commission

up to $200 off

Price-matched Roombas

Roombas: Price Matched! Prime Day is but a distant memory, however, Crutchfield is price-matching iRobot Roombas until October 16. You can save up to $200 and save yourself hella time by letting a smart little robot vacuum clean for you. Here are some choice vacuums below.

From the sanitaria and sanitarium-adjacent movements of the time, we get:

Im afraid to google any more cereal brands now, to be honest.

Who wants a bland breakfast cereal? Almost nobody, it turns out. One of the first things Will Kellogg did when he began selling Corn Flakes was to add malt, sugar, and salt. Graham flour products were originally unsweetenednothing like the cookie-like graham crackers we have today.

It didnt take cereal-preneurs long to figure out that they could sell more of their product if it actually tasted good. According to this timeline from the New York Times, it was around the 1950's that sugary cereals really took off. Corn Flakes werent sweet enough; we also needed Frosted Flakes.

In the 1970's, the escalation continued. Popular childrens cereals were packed with sugar, cocoa, and multiple hues of food coloring. (You could still, of course, buy Grape Nuts from the shelf right above them.) As a kid in the 1980's, I remember being told I couldnt have the rainbow-colored Rainbow Brite cereal because my mom was weirded out by it having so much dye. I read Calvin & Hobbes cartoons in which the title character chows down on the fictional Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs.

Granola came back onto this scene in the 1970s as part of a backlash against the sugared-up commercial cereals. The sugary cereals tried to cultivate their healthy image a bit more, too: Sugar Pops became Sugar Corn Pops in 1978 and Corn Pops in 1984. Cereals with added vitamins trumpeted these on the label. (The history of fortifying cereals with vitamins is a long one. Sometimes the vitamins were added to make the cereals seem healthier; sometimes the additions were required by law.)

This brings us approximately back to the present. Cereals like Corn Flakes and Raisin Bran may seem healthier than their cousins Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops, but they still fall into the category of sweet tasty stuff to eat in the morning. Its been said that American breakfasts are basically desserts, and that seems roughly accurate (outside of the bacon-and-eggs food group, that is).

So are Corn Flakes and their ilk healthy? I mean, I bristle at the whole concept, but I wouldnt exactly go looking for health food in the cereal aisle if you asked me for a place to start. Theyre not bad, though: Some have fiber, and most have added vitamins and minerals. We serve them with milk, which has at least a little bit of protein, vitamins, and other healthful stuff.

I think the more important question is if we have any reason to expect cereals to be healthy. The idea that a specific breakfast food gets our day off to a good start is more than a hundred years old at this point, and it never had a solid scientific basis to begin with. Eating cereal for breakfast is a lot like eating a muffin: tasty and well-accepted, but the nutrition label doesnt exactly hold up to many health claims.

Here is the original post:

What Is a 'Healthy' Cereal, Anyway? - Lifehacker

When the HGP began in 1990, there was widespread concern that genomics would lead to a new era of eugenics. Many bioethicists were aware of how past eugenic movements used genetic information to ostracize historically marginalized groups and believed that people would use the outcomes of the HGP and subsequent developments in genomics to further marginalize and stigmatize certain groups. People were also concerned that the HGP would usher in a new era of behavior genetics, where genes would be used to explain certain behaviors. Many discussions about the HGP revolved around whether employers or insurance companies could use genomic information to discriminate against specific individuals.

In response to these and other concerns, the National Center for Human Genome Research (now the National Human Genome Research Institute, or NHGRI) founded the Ethical, Legal and Societal Implications (ELSI) Research Program. For more than three decades, the NHGRI ELSI Research Program has funded research on all aspects of the social and ethical implications of genomics, including the legacies of eugenics and scientific racism in the context of new and emerging genetic and genomic technologies.

Building on a long tradition of these legacies, NHGRI is committed to taking proactive steps to provide leadership in the field of genomics in addressing structural racism and anything that would foster eugenics-based ideas. Together with efforts of the National Institute of Health, including the UNITE Initiative, NHGRI will continue to combat the legacies of eugenics and scientific racism and their present-day manifestations to develop an inclusive and welcoming genomics community.

In addition, the NHGRI History of Genomics Program is committed to interrogating the legacies of eugenics and scientific racism to further develop ethical and equitable uses of genomics.

Only by understanding and fully engaging with the history of eugenics and scientific racism will genomics serve to facilitate an inclusive and humane future.

Read more from the original source:

Eugenics and Scientific Racism - Genome.gov

Origin of eugenicsFirst recorded in 188085; see origin at eugenic, -icshistorical usage of eugenics

Modern eugenics was popularized by Sir Francis Galton in the late 1800s. In many cases, its methods have been entwined with prejudice. Selecting for desirable traits requires establishing what counts as desirable, and for some scientists of the late 1800s and early 1900s, people with disabilities, people in lower economic classes, and people belonging to any ethnic or racial minority group were automatically considered to be undesirable. In the United States, forced or coerced sterilizations were conducted throughout the first half of the 20th century, often targeting people with physical or mental disabilities, people who had committed crimes, Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people, and other vulnerable groups. In Germany, eugenics was a crucial part of the Nazi Party's ideology. Because of this history of racism, ableism, classism, and other types of discrimination, eugenics is generally not studied or practiced within the scientific community today. The rise of genetic engineering, however, has brought new concerns to the conversation surrounding eugenics.

Read the rest here:

Eugenics Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com