If evolution is seen as the study of unseen development, the camera provided the illusion of quantifiable benchmarks, an irresistible proposition for the advocates of eugenics.

By: Jessica Helfand

In 1872, with the publication of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin went rogue. Only a decade after the anatomist Duchenne de Boulognes produced the first neurology text illustrated by photographs, Darwin claimed to be the first to use photographs in a scientific publication to actually document the expressive spectrum of the face.

Combining speculation about raised eyebrows and flushed skin with vile commentary about mental illness, he famously logged diagrams of facial musculature, along with drawings of sulky chimpanzees and photographs of weeping infants, to create a study that spanned species, temperament, age, and gender. But what really interested him was not so much the specificity of the individual as the universality of the tribe: If expressions could, as de Boulogne had suggested, be physically localized, could they also be culturally generalized?

As a man of science, he set out to analyze the visual difference between types, which is to say races. While Darwins scientific contributions remain ever significant, its worth remembering he was also a man of his era privileged, white, affluent, commanding who generalized as much as, if not more than, he analyzed, especially when it came to objectifying peoples looks. In spite of his influence on evolutionary biology and his role in the scientific study of emotion, Darwins prognostications read today as remarkably prejudicial. (No determined man, he writes in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, probably ever had an habitually gaping mouth.) This urge to label types a loaded and unfortunate term would essentially go viral in the early years of the coming century, with such assumptions reasserting themselves as dogmatic, even axiomatic, fact.

Comparisons can and do glide effortlessly from hypothesis to hyperbole, particularly when images are in play.

Hardly the first to postulate on the graphic evidence of the grimace, Darwin hoped to introduce a system by which facial expressions might be properly evaluated. He shared with many of his generation a predisposition toward history: simply put, the idea that certain facial traits might have a basis in evolution. Empirically, the idea itself is not unreasonable. We are, after all, genetically predisposed to share traits with those in our familial line, occasionally by virtue of our geographic vicinity. At the same time, certain specimens, when classified by visual genre, become the easy targets of discrimination. In so doing, comparisons can and do glide effortlessly from hypothesis to hyperbole, particularly when images are in play.

Almost exactly a century after the arrival of Darwins volume, Paul Ekman, a psychologist at the University of California, published a study in which he determined that there were seven principal facial expressions deemed universal across all cultures: anger, contempt, fear, happiness, interest, sadness, and surprise. His Facial Action Coding System (FACS) supported many of Darwins earlier findings and remains, to date, the gold standard for identifying any movement the face can make. As a methodology for parsing facial expression, Ekmans work provides a practical rubric for understanding these distinctions: Its logical, codified, and clear. But what happens to such comparative practices when supposition trumps proposition, when the science of scrutiny is eclipsed by the lure of a bigger, messier, more global extrapolation? When does the quest for the universal backfire and become a discriminatory practice?

The real seduction, in Darwins era and in our own, lies in the notion that pictures and especially pictures of our faces are remarkably powerful tools of persuasion and do, in so many instances, speak louder than words.

The idea that photography allowed for the demonstration and distribution of objective visual evidence was a striking development for clinicians. Unlike the interpretive transference of a drawing, or the abstract data of a diagram, the camera was clear and direct, a vehicle for proof. The process itself allowed for a kind of massive stockpiling pictures compared to one another, minutiae contrasted, hypotheses often mistakenly corroborated which, while arguably rooted in scientific inquiry, led to a stunning degree of generalization in the name of fact. If evolution is seen as the study of unseen development biological, generational, temporal, and by definition intangible the camera provided the illusion of quantifiable benchmarks, an irresistible proposition for the proponents of theoretical ideas.

Darwins cousin, the noted statistician Francis Galton, saw such generalizations as precisely the point. Long before computer software would make such computational practice commonplace, he introduced not a lateral but a synthetic system for facial comparison: what he termed composite portraiture was, in fact, a neologism for pictorial averaging. Galtons objective was to identify deviation and, in so doing, to reverse-engineer an ideal type, which he did by repeat printing upon a single photographic plate and within the same vicinity to one another thereby creating a force-amalgamated portrait of multiple faces. At once besotted with mechanical certainty and mesmerized by the scope of visual wonder before him, Galton thrilled to the notion of mathematical precision the lockup on the photographic plate, the reckoning of the binomial curve but appeared uninterested in actual details unless they could help reaffirm his suppositions about averages, about types, even about the photomechanical process itself.

That Galton drew upon the language of statistical fact and benefited from the presumed sovereignty of his own exalted social position to become an evangelist for the camera is questionable in itself, but the fact that he viewed his composite photographs as plausible evidence for an unforgiving sociocultural rationale shifts the legacy of his scholarship into far more pernicious territory.

At once driven by claims of biological determinism and supported by the authoritarian heft of British empiricism, Francis Galton pioneered an insidious form of human scrutiny that would come to be known as eugenics. The word itself comes from the Greek word eugenes (noble, well-born, and good in stock), though Galtons own definition is a bit more sinister: For him, it was a science addressing all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race, also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage. The idea of social betterment through better breeding (indeed, the notion of better anything through breeding) led to a horrifying era of social supremacism in which deviation would come to be classified across a broad spectrum of race, religion, health, wealth, and every imaginable kind of human infirmity. Grossly and idiosyncratically defined even a propensity for carpentry or dress-making was considered a genetically inherited trait Galtons remarkably flawed (and deeply racist) ideology soon found favor with a public eager to assert, if nothing else, its own vile claims to vanity.

For Galton, eugenics was a science addressing all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race, also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.

The social climate into which eugenic doctrine inserted itself appealed to precisely this fantasy, beginning with Better Baby and Fitter Family contests, an unfortunate staple of recreational entertainment that emerged across the regional United States during the early years of the 20th century. Widely promoted as a wholesome public health initiative, the idea of parading good-looking children for prizes (a practice that essentially likened kids to livestock) was one of a number of practices predicated on the notion that better breeding outcomes were in everyones best interest. The resulting photos conferred bragging rights on the winning (read white) contestants, but the broader message framing beauty, but especially facial beauty, as a scientifically sanctioned community aspiration implicitly suggests that the inverse was also true: that to be found unfit was to be doomed to social exile and thus restricted, among other things, by fierce reproductive protocols.

In 29 states beginning in 1907 and until the laws were repealed in the 1940s those deemed socially inferior (an inexcusable euphemism for what was then defined as physically inadequate) were, in fact, subject to compulsory sterilization. From asthma to scoliosis, mental disability to moral delinquency, eugenicists denounced difference in light of a presumed cultural superiority, a skewed imperialism that found its most nefarious expression during the Third Reich. To measure difference was to eradicate it, exterminate it, excise it from evolutionary fact. Though ultimately discredited following the atrocities endured during multiple years of Nazi reign, eugenic theory was steeped in this sinister view of genetic governance, manifest destiny run amok.

Later, once detached from Galtons maniacal gaze, the composite portrait would inspire others to play with the optics of the amalgamated image. The 19th-century French photographer Arthur Batut, known for being one of the first aerial photographers (he shot from a kite), may have been drawn to the hints of movement generated by a portraits animated edges. American photographer Nancy Burson has experimented with composite photography to merge black, Asian, and Caucasian faces against population statistics: Introduced in 2000, her Human Race Machine lets you see how you would look as another race. The artist Richard Prince flattened every one of Jerry Seinfelds fifty-seven TV love interests into a 2013 composite he called Jerrys Girls, while in 2017, data scientist Giuseppe Sollazzo created a blended face for the BBC that used a carefully plotted algorithm to combine every face in the U.S. Senate.

In a 1931 radio interview, the German portraitist August Sander claimed he wanted to capture and communicate in photography the physiognomic time exposure of a whole generation.

Galton would have appreciated the speed of the software and the advantages of the algorithm but what of the ethics of the very act of image capture and comparison, of the ethics of pictorial appropriation itself? Theres an implicit generalization to this kind of image production and indeed, seen over time, composite portraiture would become a way to amalgamate and assess an entire culture, even an era. In a 1931 radio interview, the German portraitist August Sander claimed he wanted to capture and communicate in photography the physiognomic time exposure of a whole generation, an observation that reframes the composite as a kind of collected census, or population survey.

The camera, after all, bears witness over time, its outcome an extension of the eye, the mind, the soul of the photographer. Sander was right. (So was Susan Sontag: Humanity, she once wrote, is not one.) With the advent of better, cheaper, faster, and more mobile technologies for capturing our faces, the time exposure of a whole generation was about to become a great deal more achievable.

Jessica Helfand is a designer, artist, and writer. She is a cofounder of Design Observer and the author of numerous books on visual and cultural criticism, including Face: A Visual Odyssey, from which this article is adapted.

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Darwin, Expression, and the Lasting Legacy of Eugenics - The MIT Press Reader

The provost of University College London announced in June this year that its Galton Lecture Theatre, Pearson Lecture Theatre and Pearson Building had all been renamed. They are now known by the perfectly unmemorable names of, respectively, Lecture Theatre 115, Lecture Theatre G22 and the North-West Wing.

What sounds like a dull piece of administrative news is in fact a complex tale of a racist legacy, student politics, academic disputes and an impassioned debate about the history of science and how it is taught. It also goes to the heart of an issue that looks set to become one of great contention in the months and years ahead: by what criteria do we judge who should no longer be commemorated at universities and in society at large?

The UCL announcement was in keeping with one of the recommendations made by an inquiry set up to look at the history of eugenics at the university. Put simply, eugenics is the study of how to improve the genetic quality of a human population. The concept dates back to Plato and beyond, but its modern form was developed, and given its name by Francis Galton, who called eugenics the science of improving inherited stock, not only by judicious matings, but by all the influences which give more suitable strains a better chance.

Honouring the academic tradition of intellectual dispute, the inquiry published a report earlier this year that the majority of its committee refused to sign, in part because it failed to examine the current situation on campus.

Yet the inquiry was prompted by contemporary events, namely a controversial conference that was held on UCL grounds on four separate occasions. The London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) was an invitation-only gathering that, among other things, examined the issue of race and intelligence. It also included presentations on eugenics.

The conference had almost nothing to do with UCL, aside from the fact that the honorary lecturer who organised it was able to use his status to book a room on site. According to the inquiry report, on discovering the presence of LCI, BAME students and staff lobbied for an inquiry. And that inquiry, it turned out, set its sights primarily on Galton.

A 19th-century polymath who made key contributions to a number of disparate fields of study, Galton is perhaps less well known than he ought to be. He is the man who popularised the principle of regression to the mean in statistics; he effectively created the modern weather map by linking areas of similar air pressure; he gave us the phrase nature versus nurture and pioneered the study of twins. He also revolutionised forensic science by showing how fingerprints could be used to identify individuals.

But those achievements lie in the lengthening shadow cast by his commitment to eugenics and his lasting links to UCL. Galton funded a professorial chair in eugenics at the university (it changed its name to the chair in genetics after the second world war) and financed a laboratory that also took his name. In addition he endowed his personal collection and archive to the college.

Even by the standards of his own time, Galton was undoubtedly an egregious racist. Here is a not untypical example of his perspective, taken from a 1904 essay on eugenics: But while most barbarous races disappear, some, like the negro, do not. It may therefore be expected that types of our race will be found to exist which can be highly civilised without losing fertility.

As the inquiry report stated: Through the financial donation of Galton to UCL, racism was allowed to be married to science and within UCL this link between science and racism was embraced. It also noted that some students felt distress at sitting through lectures and exams in rooms celebrating eugenics.

Steve Jones, the former head of the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at UCL, has little truck with such sensitivities. About one student who is alleged to have burst into tears when she discovered she had to go into the Galton Lecture Theatre, he says: Well, my rather brutal response to that is you shouldnt be coming to UCL then.

Against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement, and in an era in which vigilance to micro-aggressions is deemed an essential aspect of academic pastoral care, Jones risks sounding dangerously out of date. He blames the weak provost, Michael Arthur, for capitulating to a woke campaign.

Belief in eugenics was widespread in the early 20th century. The Holocaust destroyed its reputation

UCL used to be known as the godless university because it was set up for people who didnt have faith and for Jews [only members of the Church of England were eligible to go to Oxford and Cambridge ], he says. Now it is spineless.

His friend and former student, the author Adam Rutherford, says Jones is old and angry now and annoyed by the way denaming has become the answer to problems within academia. But Jones is not indifferent to Galtons racism. Far from it. For several decades he has given a lecture on eugenics, looking at its history, its science, and most glaringly its racism, examining the legacies of Galton and his fellow UCL eugenicists Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher. He doesnt shy away from their obnoxious opinions but sets them within the context of their times and against their remarkable contributions to science.

The fact is, he says, belief in eugenics was widespread among the British intelligentsia in the late 19th century and especially in the early decades of the last one all the way up to the Nazis: the Holocaust effectively destroyed its reputation.

[JBS] Haldane, the most famous British biologist of the 20th century he was at UCL and he did genuinely revolutionary work on statistics, genetics, physiology, says Jones, but he nevertheless felt that people of so-called low quality shouldnt be allowed to breed.

Others included Marie Stopes, the campaigner for womens rights, whose birth control clinics, says Jones, were opened in order that people of low quality should be discouraged from having children. George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, the economist John Maynard Keynes, William Beveridge, whose eponymous report formed the basis of the welfare state, and Winston Churchill were also in favour of eugenics it was a belief system that spanned the political spectrum from left to right.

Rutherford, who is an honorary research fellow at UCL, agrees that it would be wrong to remove such eminent figures from prominence purely on account of their now unpalatable views.

I think Galtons a shit, but hes also a shit whos a genius, whose legacy we absolutely rely on, says Rutherford. Weve got to be mature enough at a university to recognise that people can be both brilliant and awful at the same time.

He is neutral on the issue of denaming but thats because hes not the recipient of the pernicious legacies of eugenics. On balance, he thinks it was right to change the buildings names. Nevertheless, he has several reservations about the nature of the inquiry. He believes it used the history of eugenics as a means of indirectly addressing decolonising the curriculum and the absence of black professors, and as a result failed to do justice to either.

Broadly, the content of the report itself wasnt befitting of standards of scholarship associated with UCL, he says. Secondly, they conflated the history of eugenics with scientific racism. It was pointed out by me and others many many times that these are connected but discrete ideas.

Eugenics didnt produce slavery or colonialism both of which predated its inception but it did offer pseudo-scientific justification for the ideology of white supremacy, which had been long propagated by western elites. While racism was manifest in society, eugenics, as Jones points out, was never actually enacted in Britain or its empire.

In some respects, eugenics was the first iteration of what was to become genetics, a limited understanding of biological inheritance that was informed by all of the prejudices to which social class, race and disability were subject 100 or more years ago. It built on Darwins ideas of natural selection, seeking to speed up and improve the process by active human intervention. In other words, it promised to produce more able-bodied white people of a certain class and intelligence.

Many of its assumptions, however, were scientifically as well as morally wrong. For example, as Rutherford notes in his book A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, the Nazis murdered or sterilised around a quarter of a million people with schizophrenia. After a postwar dip in numbers, the incidence of schizophrenia returned to the norm in Germany or, in some areas, much higher than the norm. In reality, eugenics failed to account for the many genetic variations that underpin schizophrenia, nor was its crude conception of race grounded in biological fact.

Rutherford argues that the scientific process disproved key principles of eugenics. Galton founded a field in order to demonstrate racial superiority and the wonderful irony of his legacy is that science has said exactly the opposite of what he wanted. That is the point of science, to remove personal biases from understanding reality.

No, says science writer Angela Saini, science didnt defeat eugenics. Science created eugenics in the first place, it created the scientific racism of its day. These ideas still live on in present-day science, and I think thats the thing that some scientists dont want to accept.

She cites the way some scientists have tried to look for genetic explanations for the disproportionate effect of Covid-19 on the BAME population as an example of present-day scientific racism. Saini wrote about the UCL inquiry in a piece for Nature, the premier science journal, in which she criticised the universitys biologists for ignoring its eugenic past. It was the humanities scholars, she wrote, who forced their workplace to confront a sordid history that some geneticists had been willing to overlook.

Rutherford and Jones were among a number of geneticists who published a letter in Nature pointing out that theyd been teaching and discussing that very history for several decades.

Were part of a conspiracy of silence that manifests itself by writing bestselling books, doing radio programmes and TV programmes, says Rutherford sardonically. We estimate that Steve Jones has lectured to more than 10,000 students over the last 30 years, and Galton, Fisher and Pearson and eugenics have been part of each one of those courses. The week that the report was published, I taught eugenics for medicine and the history of race science three times that week.

Saini remains unapologetic. Everybody wants to be seen as the good guy here. But if everyone is the good guy and everyone was doing their job, then we wouldnt be in a situation where the report was needed.

Its clear that the issues surrounding the inquiry are highly emotive, but possibly the most charged of all, at least for the academics involved, is that of disciplinary expertise. The geneticists feel that the inquiry was loaded with too many participants from the humanities who didnt really understand the science or the scientific history. The non-scientists, for their part, tend to view the science establishment as inward-looking and complacent.

Subhadra Das is UCLs curator for science and medicine. She is in charge of the Galton collection complete with its ghoulish instruments for measuring racial differences. She was part of the inquiry committee and she accepts that the genetics department, and in particular Jones, has worked for many years to expose the eugenicist past of UCL.

What I would like, she says, is an acknowledgment that its not only scientists who get to say what is and isnt anti-racist.

As someone of Bangladeshi heritage, not to mention a part-time standup comedian, Das is fully aware of the ironies of her position looking after the arch-racist Galtons collection. Her approach has been to use Galton as a way of addressing the troubled legacies of science. Initially, she says, she was doubtful about the wisdom of removing Galtons and Pearsons names.

I was concerned that what it meant was that the conversation would disappear, she says.

Shes since changed her mind, and now believes the process of name-changing should go much further. She agrees with Saini, who says that people we commemorate are those we want to emulate whose values we want to cherish. This seems like a high bar that few scientists, or indeed anyone else, would be able to clear. After all, even a giant like Darwin held some views that, by todays standards, are objectionable.

Das argues that there is no way of infusing nuance into a building name or a statue. Ultimately, she believes, naming a building after scientists is anti-science, because its holding people up to really high standards that no one can be held up to.

In any case, whatever its merits, the denaming of buildings is likely to have limited impact on the reality of the world as it is today. Eugenics has been very largely debunked and yet it still exists. It has been argued, for example, that terminations after early prenatal screenings are a form of eugenics.

More apposite is what has been taking place in Xinjiang in China with the targeting of the Muslim Uighur population. A recent report shows that a campaign of forced sterilisation has seen Uighur population growth decline by 84% in the regions with the largest proportion of Uighur people between 2015 and 2018. Though Uighurs account for only 1.8% of Chinas population, Uighur women make up 80% of those fitted with intrauterine devices for long-term contraception in China.

We need to get much much better at talking about this, because its a siren song, and its not going away

It is arguably the greatest human rights issue of the 21st century, and yet on campuses across Britain including UCL that rely increasingly on Chinese investment and students, there has been barely any protest at all.

Saini can see the inconsistency, but puts this down to corporate interest rather than a lack of student concern.

Universities tend to operate like businesses these days, and their brands therefore matter, especially when it comes to attracting lucrative overseas students, she says. So while you will see declarations of support for women and minorities, or statements regarding diversity or decolonisation, in practice you dont see very much in the way of action.

Rutherford says he doesnt know enough about the sterilisation campaign in Xinjiang to comment, but points out that we shouldnt forget Chinas one-child policy or indeed the Iron Fist campaign in 2010, in which 10,000 women were forcibly sterilised in three months for violating it. Both are examples of eugenics, as is sex-specific abortion, or the kind of infanticide that is practised in India.

We need to get much much better at talking about this, says Rutherford, because its a siren song, and its not going away.

In the meantime, universities are going to have to prepare themselves for more name-changing, if the UCL experience is anything to go by. Though unhappy with the denaming, Jones has an idea for the next name that should fall: the oil magnate John D Rockefeller, who funded the eugenics institute in Germany that inspired and conducted eugenics experiments in the Third Reich.

The building in which the UCL medical is housed is called the Rockefeller Building, says Jones. He didnt just approve of eugenics, he promoted its practice. He was not a scientist. He didnt make any scientific progress. But you try unnaming that building and the medical school will go ballistic.

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UCL has a racist legacy, but can it move on? - The Guardian

Stanford Universitys first president, ichthyologist David Starr Jordan, is the complex main character of a new book, "Why Fish Dont Exist: A Story of Loss, Love and the Hidden Order of Life," by Lulu Miller. The book is a wondrous mash-up of biography, memoir, history and even murder mystery. "To the Best of Our Knowledge" producer Shannon Henry Kleiber talked with Miller, who is co-founder of NPRs Invisibilia and contributor to Radiolab, about Jordan, beginning with a tale from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

This transcript was edited for clarity and length.

Shannon Henry Kleiber: Yes, even just the title, "Why Fish Don't Exist," we think, "OK, fish, I know what a fish is," but what does the title mean?

Lulu Miller: Well, I have a question for you. After reading it, do you think fish exist? Answer honestly.

SHK: So I think fish exist in a way that might not be the way we thought they did.

LM: Yeah. I like that. To me, it is an example that just intersected with David's story in a really cool way, because he was a fish collector and ichthyologist, a person who studied the supposedly existent creature of fish. There has been a profound revolution in scientific circles of people who think about how to classify animalsthat pretty convincingly calls into question the existence of fish as a kind of creature. So it challenges the category of fish.

Maybe that just sounds like a fussy, semantic distinction and you wouldnt care if your day job isnt a taxonomist. But for me, when you really think about what that means and if you can do this mental scrunching required to let the category go, then some pretty profound things open up.

SHK: When did you first hear of the story that would become your book?

LM: [A museum tour guide] just kind of offhandedly told the story. He pulled a hammerhead shark out of the tank where it was being stored. And there was a label tied to its eye tube, sewn through the skin. The label had the species name. And he told us the story about how the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco destroyed a whole lot of the fish collection and that the curator in charge of things afterwards invented this technique of tying labels directly to the specimen. And it was a small thing, but I just remember standing there and thinking [it's] so human that an earthquake would wreck your order and scatter the names everywhere. And your response would be, "Well, I'm gonna invent a way to get back at you, chaos!" And in that moment, it just struck me as the silliest thing to believe that you could outsmart chaos itself.

SHK:Wow. In that earthquake, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, 3,000people were killed. It was a 7.9 on the Richter scale. What was gained and lost that day for David Starr Jordan?

LM:The really interesting way to ask it:What was gained and lost? What was lost were decades of work and meticulous ordering. And there were possibly even species that were lost to science because there were a few in there that hadn't yet been identified. But I think what was gained was shortly thereafter, he was so desperate to keep going and fight back against the chaos that kept invading his life, that he invented this new technique of sewing a specimen label directly to the creature itself, literally using a needle to attach the scientific name, to attach man's knowledge to the specimen. And so I think in a weird way, anytime this guy is hit with tragedy or destruction, it's almost always a moment of innovation.

SHK: So, you had pinned an idea of hope and inspiration on Jordan, and then you got to know him better, as people do when you research. And you're a biographer and a reporter and a detective really in a lot of ways in this story. Did he fulfill this idea of hope for you or did he teach you something different?

LM: He's so complicated. In certain ways, he did. He showed me a very different way to react to the sense that as a human, your chances are pretty doomed. He showed me that blind confidence really can get you results.

I think I went into it thinking that hubris as the Greeks instruct, as my dad kind of instructed me growing up was always dangerous and would ultimately lead to humiliation. And I think he shows real potential, for better or for worse, that hubris can do you some concrete good.

But there also turned out to be a profound set of troubling things about him. And what I found is there was some pretty intense both-ness in there.

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And so I think about him as definitely someone who has changed how I see how to live not in one way or the other, but in multiple ways. He's full of lessons.

SHK: I can totally picture you in these manuscript rooms and reading these books that you find, like "The Philosophy of Despair," the black book that you describe so well, and all these different documents and letters and thinking, "Oh, I understand him.I'm seeing this." And then, there's a discovery. And it's beautiful in some ways. And then there's another discovery and you are disappointed. And I felt bad for you.

LM: Well, that's what made it fun, though, because its history; this guy is dead. But he was so vibrant. He was like this muscly snake that just kept moving in my hands. And he's full of charm.

In certain ways, studying him actually felt really similar to making a radio piece, where you have a ton of tape and then you're whittling it down to these gems where someone's really funny or emotional or dark. He is the full spectrum he's charm, he's hilarious, he's dark. Real dark.

SHK: He's an incredible character. He is hero and villain. All in one.

LM: Yes, exactly.

SHK: So what was the most surprising thing to you?

LM: I think for me, hands down it was that his life becomes intertwined with the eugenics movement. Going into this, I had no idea about our country's role in the eugenics movement I remember those early days of researching it and learning about how we were a main player in the eugenics movement, [something that] would ultimately come to define our national identity in opposition to.

SHK: This story you're writing about the historical part is very messy and unexpected and surprising and not easily tied up. And then you go into your personal story, which is also, like so many of us, messy and not easily explained. And it matches in a way.

LM: Yeah, it does. I've always had almost like a parable-shaped hole in my heart, growing up with a very atheist father. And then both of my parents were professors. So ambiguity really reigned in our home nothing means anything. Or if it means something, it could mean many things. There was just no moral instruction. And I think I've always had actually a craving for more.

I think a lot of people grow up with moral instruction and then want more ambiguity. But I'm one of these weirdos who actually wants more dogma. I don't know why it turned out this way, but I do. And that's part of what has always drawn me to storytelling.

As I've slowly, clumsily tried to become a better reporter and learned the art of reporting, I realize that story can actually be very dangerous in reporting the sense of story, a clear moral. I have tried to ignore my cravings for moral clarity and black and white and actually really study the both-ness.

SHK: The way you bring things up, these different stories and characters, is about curiosity and you go in these different directions, and then we move on to the next thing. Did it make you more curious as you worked on this?

LM:Yeah, it totally did. Especially these days with Google, if you have a question, it's so easy to go there and just get Wikipedia as your first primer and sometimes your last primer. I think this reminded me that the world as we know it is far less known than we think it is. It's so easy to think that we have a handle on everything now that science knows, that we have it all mostly figured out. And maybe there's one new little bacteria that will be discovered, but basically, we've got it down. And it just was so far from that.

We're just so deep at all times, in the midst of these revolutions and paradigm shifts. And we're not done. We haven't arrived anywhere. We're at a clumsy, approximate, best guess of our understanding of the world. And there is so much more waiting in the wings.

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We Call Them Fish. Evolution Says They're Something Else. - Wisconsin Public Radio News

Only a few days into Alexis McGill Johnson's installation as the permanent president of Planned Parenthood on June 26, the organization announced it was removing the name of its founder, Margaret Sanger, from its Manhattan clinic.

Planned Parenthood cited its decision due to Sanger's well documented "racist legacy" and her support for the philosophy of Eugenics (a form of racial profiling for purposes of birth and pregnancy termination).

It reminds one of the City of Dearborn's decision to remove the statue of Orville Hubbard from the grounds of City Hall.

But there is a difference. Whereas Dearborn clearly renounces racism, it has in recent years opted for progressive leadership and even Hubbard's children and grandchildren do not subscribe to his racist strain, Planned Parenthood retains the spirit of Eugenics. It is more than fair to ascribe the sentiments of the so-called pro-choice movement in America to Planned Parenthood, the country's number one agent of abortion. A by no means marginal sentiment of pro-choice voices are fond of the argument that it's preferable to end a pregnancy than have a baby on welfare.

That these voices resort to cold practicality in the face of a moral issue is telling.

Moreover, a purge of anything related to Margaret Sanger cannot cleanse Planned Parenthood of its legacy of Eugenics.

Younger people might believe this was a long time ago, but many of us are old enough to remember the Planned Parenthood presidency of Alan Frank Guttmacher, who led the organization from 1962 until his death in 1974.

In terms of history, this is recent.

Not only did Guttmacher advocate Eugenics, he even served as Vice President of the American Eugenics Society while head of Planned Parenthood. Indeed, it was noted that Guttmacher was more resolute than was Sanger in the advocacy of Eugenics (and abortion).

Alas, it is incumbent on me not to ignore younger readers and accept their demand for analysis of a more current situation. Planned Parenthood of today attempts to minimize its central theme of abortion.

The organization is fond to emphasize that abortion accounts for only 3 percent of its services, citing the undeniable programs it offers in cancer screening and additional medical attention more legitimate than abortion.

As the old saying goes, statistics don't lie but people lie with statistics. Truth be told, though abortion services account for only between three and four percent of Planned Parenthood's services, the percentage of Planned Parenthood patients receiving abortion is between 13 and 14 percent.

That is because most abortion recipients take advantage of the other services offered by Planned Parenthood, thereby increasing the percentage of non-abortion services and doctoring the statistics.

What about the current apparatus of Planned Parenthood?

Its defenders insist abortion is a medical issue and not a political issue. But this assertion is ironic.

Look no further than Alexis McGill Johnson, a trained political scientist whose presidency of Planned Parenthood came in the wake of the ouster of Leana Wen, a trained physician allowed only eight months to serve as president.

Planned Parenthood cannot be denied credit for its many services which do indeed preserve life. But as ironic as it may seem, Planned Parenthood is a lot like the National Rifle Association (NRA), despite the opposing political camps. The NRA does a great job promoting gun safety and responsible firearms ownership.

On the other hand, its agenda is dominated by its resistance to sensible gun laws intended to curb the proliferation of weapons in society.

In a similar pattern, Planned Parenthood undermines its abundance of worthy activity by allowing its agenda to be dominated by the pro-abortion voices in society.

The objections can be heard already: It's not pro-abortion, it's pro-choice.

This is true to an extent. But the pro-choice argument (and movement) often crosses the line into the pro-abortion camp.

This is the undeniable and inescapable identity of Planned Parenthood.

John O'Neill is an Allen Park free-lance writer.

Go here to read the rest:

Planned Parenthood must do more than remove Sanger's name - Dearborn Press and Guide

To the editor:

I read Sam Balzacs letter to you of Aug. 5 with interest. In it, he decries the very presence of Heartbeat International in Saranac Lake as an attack on womens rights. His position is an archetypical example of everything wrong with the agenda of the radical left. Under the guise of enlightenment and tolerance, its objectives are more properly characterized as coercive and even Orwellian.

First, Planned Parenthood has been suffered to exist in this community for many years. It is jointly responsible for the liquidation of 50 million nascent lives in the U.S. since Roe vs. Wade in 1973. Its founder, Margaret Sanger, was a proponent of eugenics bent on weeding out the most helpless and marginalized among us, those she deemed undeserving of subsistence or procreation. This in itself speaks volumes about the contempt she and her progeny have for the sanctity for human life.

Contrast this legacy noir with the mission statement of Heartbeat International, which is to reach and rescue as many lives as possible, around the world, through an effective network of life-affirming pregnancy help, to renew communities for life. And yet, in some twisted way, Mr. Balzac confuses this with an attack on womens rights.

In this specific context, it appears very clear to many of us and I believe, at least tacitly, even those of Mr. Balzacs ilk that two things are going on here:

1. This euphemistic crusade, couched in terms of womens rights and choices, is actually a front, on an inconceivably massive scale, for the enabling of systemic societal indulgence, with little or no consequences.

2. For whatever reason, with discretion, they are intent on insuring that as many abortions as humanly possible are actually carried out. Why else would anyone object so vehemently to the very existence of an organization that would dare to offer an alternative in this case life?

Austin Aaronson

Saranac Lake

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