Report Suggests Solar Energy Capacity Will Rival Nuclear Power by the End of 2017 – Futurism

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In Brief New data from GTM Research suggests that rapid adoption of solar power could mean that its global gigawatt capacity rivals that of nuclear power by the end of 2017. While nuclear currently far exceeds solar in terms of energy generation, some predict solar could be the world's largest source of energy by 2050. Sunny Forecast

Solar energy has been on the rise, and based on new data from GTM Research, it could rival nuclear energy in terms of global capacity by the end of 2017.

The data, which is available in the most recent edition of Global Solar Demand Monitor, indicates that solar power will reach a capacity of roughly 390 gigawatts this year. Meanwhile, the latest figures from the Nuclear Energy Institute suggest that the world is currently home to 391.5 gigawatts of nuclear plants.

Solar growth is slowing slightly following a massive jump from 50.3 gigawatts added in 2015 to 77.8 gigawatts added in 2016, 81.1 gigawatts will likely be added in 2017. However, GTM Research expects that growth will continue at a steady rate, with total global capacity reaching 871 gigawatts by 2022.

Capacity is just one piece of the puzzle, though. Nuclear energy is still well ahead of solar in terms of electricity generated, outputting 2,476,671 gigawatt-hours compared to solars 375,000. That being said, the International Energy Agency projects that solar could feasibly become the worlds largest source of energy by 2050 due to its falling cost and increasing convenience.

Solar energy can help us reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, which we desperately need to do as our net emission of 37 gigatonnes of CO per year are wreaking havoc on the planet, causing global warming, extreme weather events, and millions of deaths.

Building solar panels has become much more cost-effective in recent years, which has fostered large-scale solar initiatives all over the world. Now, with Teslas solar roof panels set to provide homeowners with an inexpensive, aesthetically pleasing, and convenient way to take advantage of solar on an individual basis, the technology seems more poised than ever before for energy domination.

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Bitcoin Cash Price Rises While Bitcoin and Ethereum Drop – Futurism – Futurism

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In Brief The top three cryptocurrencies have gone through some changes in the last day, with Bitcoin and Ethereum dropping in price and Bitcoin Cash sharply falling, only to see another meteoric rise.

Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum experienced a few changes since Monday, with some rising to new heights and others dipping down.

As reported by Business Insider, both Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two biggest cryptocurrencies, have seen a single-digit percentage drop, while Bitcoin Cash has seen a double-digit rise.

Bitcoin dropped 2.2 percent against the US dollar as of Tuesday morning, and is now valued at $4,004.67. Ethereum, which recently announced its Metropolis update, saw a slightly larger drop than Bitcoin, dropping 3 percent to $310.32. This drop continued the currencys struggles to hit $350, and its unclear how the Metropolis update will further affect Ether token prices.

Although Bitcoin Cash only split from Bitcoin very recently,at the beginning of August, it quickly became the third-biggest cryptocurrencyin the world. Compared to the top two, Bitcoin Cash rose by 15.6 percent, to $696.39. As impressive as this may be, Business Insider notes the young currency managed to top $1,000 last weekend, but skepticism about its staying power caused it to fall sharply.

Expect prices to fluctuate, as they often tend to do, especially when regarding Bitcoin. Trusted trader masterluc predicts the top digital currency will hit $15,000 by the end of 2017.

Disclosure: Several members of the Futurism team, including the editors of this piece, are personal investors in a number of cryptocurrency markets. Their personal investment perspectives have no impact on editorial content.

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Bitcoin Cash Price Rises While Bitcoin and Ethereum Drop - Futurism - Futurism

Here’s Why Bitcoin Rose More than $1000 in Two Months – Futurism

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In BriefBitcoin is the world's most popular cryptocurrency, and itsvalue continues to reach new heights. Here are a few reasons thisrelatively unknown digital coin was able to make the climb fromobscurity to the mainstream consciousness. Outstanding Performance

So far, 2017 has been an eventful year for Bitcoin.

The platform recentlyendured a hard fork that saw it split in two and come out seemingly unscathed. Meanwhile, the cryptocurrency has risen from relative obscurity to become a popular topic of discussion in the mainstream, with everyone from Bloomberg to Forbes covering it regularly. The year isnt even over, and bitcoin has reached numerous milestonesalready, both in terms of its own history and that ofcryptocurrency in general.

Overall, Bitcoin seems to be steadily trending upward, with even greater heights predicted for the platforms future. So, how did a cryptocoin originally associated with the internets darkest corners become a popular contender for the future of financial and other transactions?

Longevity seems to play a factor. After years of trading, the coin has proven itself as here to stay, leading to years of value increases first a steady rise from 2012 through 2016, and then a more dramatic surge that is still ongoing today.

A cryptocurrency researcher who goes by the Twitter handle Jack Sparrow shared a comparative overview of just how fast bitcoins value has risen.

After it was created in 2009, bitcoin needed roughly seven years to reach a $2,000 valuation. However, the crypto saw the same level of increase from $2,000 to $4,000 in a matter of just 85 days.

The numbers are backed up, of course, by confidence fromlarger institutions. Big financial firms like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Fidelity Investments are now invested in the crypto, and nations such asChina, Japan, and, more recently, Australiahave started considering more permanent roles for cryptocurrencies in their respective economies as well.

All of this large-scale support is giving smaller organizations and individual investors confidencein the crypto.

The growing popularity of blockchain enterprise use has also contributed to the successes of Bitcoin and other platforms. As more institutions in the financial industry and beyondlook for ways to utilizethe decentralized and secure digital ledger, the cryptocurrencies that spring from these blockchains also get a boost.

Still, even with Bitcoins seemingly unstoppable successes, experts advise caution. As with any hot item, investing in bitcoin can be risky. Some, such as billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban and veteran investor Peter Schiff, even warn that the current cryptocoin craze is simply a bubble. However, while Schiff claims cryptocurrencies will never be money, many others thinkotherwise.

Are we witnessing the beginnings ofa truly cashless future? Only time will tell, and as with any revolution, Bitcoinhas many hurdles to overcome before it can truly transform our society. Right now, though, the crypto is clearly on the rise.

Disclosure: Several members of the Futurism team, including the editors of this piece, are personal investors in a number of cryptocurrency markets. Their personal investment perspectives have no impact on editorial content.

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Cyborg Bacteria Could Be the Key to Commercially Viable Artificial Photosynthesis – Futurism

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In BriefIn an effort to improve the efficiency of naturalphotosynthesis, a researcher at the University of California,Berkeley, has created cyborg bacteria. These bacteria were trainedto grow and cover their bodies with tiny semiconductor nanocrystalsthat act as efficient solar panels for harvesting sunlight. Cyborg Bacteria

Although most life on Earth relies upon photosynthesis as its source of energy, the process has a weak link: chlorophyll. Plants and other organisms use the green pigment to harvest sunlight during photosynthesis, but it is rather inefficient. To that end, scientists have been searching for ways to upgrade natural photosynthesis sohumans would be able to capture and use energy from the Sun more efficiently.

Now, Kelsey K. Sakimoto, a researcher at Peidong Yangs lab at the University of California, Berkeley, has come up with a new alternative to natural photosynthesis: cyborg bacteria that were trained to cover themselves in solar panels that are much more efficient than chlorophyll at converting sunlight into useful compounds.

Rather than rely on inefficient chlorophyll to harvest sunlight, Ive taught bacteria how to grow and cover their bodies with tiny semiconductor nanocrystals, Sakimotosaid in a press release. These nanocrystals are much more efficient than chlorophyll and can be grown at a fraction of the cost of manufactured solar panels.

To produce his cyborg bacteria, Sakimoto fed them the amino acid cysteine and the element cadmium. The bacteria then synthesized cadmium sulfide (CdS) nanoparticles, which efficiently absorb light, functioning as solar panels on the bacterias surfaces. The new hybrid organism, called M. thermoacetica-CdS, produces useful acetic acid from light energy, water, and CO2 at a rate that outperforms any sources of natural photosynthesis.

Today, Sakimoto is presenting his work at the 254th National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

Humanity is facing an ever-growing need for alternatives to fossil fuels as we face down the consequences of greenhouse gas emissionsand a rapidly increasing population that requires energy to sustain.

Artificial photosynthesisisnot a new concept, and a system that requires only sunlight and simple organic chemicals to generate renewable energy cheaply and cleanly is understandably highly desirable.

While some limited progress has been made in this area, until now, no proposed solution has been nearly efficient enough to warrant commercial use.

Sakiomotos bacteria, however, operate at an efficiency of more than 80 percent and are both self-replicating and self-regenerating, making this a zero-waste technology with multiple uses. Once covered with these tiny solar panels, the bacteria can synthesize food, fuels, and plastics, all using solar energy, he explained. These bacteria outperform natural photosynthesis.

While he does acknowledge that more research is needed, Sakiomotois hopefully that his cyborg bacteria could prove to be a viable alternative to fossil fuels, helping the world produce energy more cheaply and cleanly.

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Cyborg Bacteria Could Be the Key to Commercially Viable Artificial Photosynthesis - Futurism

Designer babies not the most urgent concern of genetic medicine … – Toronto Star

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In this photo provided by Oregon Health & Science University, taken through a microscope, human embryos grow in a laboratory for a few days after researchers used gene editing technology to successfully repair a heart disease-causing genetic mutation. The work, a scientific first led by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University, marks a step toward one day preventing babies from inheriting diseases that run in the family. ( Oregon Health & Science University via AP)

By Johnny Kung

Mon., Aug. 21, 2017

Recently, an international team of scientists successfully corrected a disease-causing gene in human embryos, using a gene editing technique called CRISPR. This has led to much excitement about the prospects of curing debilitating diseases in entire family lineages.

At the same time, the possibility of changing embryos genes has renewed fear about designer babies. The hype in both directions should be tempered by the fact that both these scenarios are some ways off a lot more work will need to be done to improve the techniques safety and efficacy before it can be applied in the clinic.

And because a lot of diseases, as well as other physical and behavioural characteristics, are controlled by the complex interaction of many genes with each other and with the environment, in many cases simple genetic fixes may never be possible.

But while the technology is still in early stages, now is the time to have frank, open and societywide conversations about how gene editing should be moving forward and genetic medicine more broadly, including the use of advanced genetic testing and sequencing to diagnose disease, personalize medical treatments, screening babies, etc.

We must raise broad awareness of the health benefits as well as the personal, social and ethical implications of genetics. This is important for individuals both to understand their options when making decisions about their own health care, and to participate as informed citizens in democratic deliberations about whether and how genetic technologies should be developed and applied.

In the U.S., affordability and insurance coverage strongly influence access to genetic medicine. In Canada, the reality of strapped budgets means access is far from equal either. But our public health-care system means it is at least conceivable that these technologies will eventually be available to a higher proportion of people who need them.

For example, OHIP currently pays for genetic testing and counselling for a number of diseases, such as http://www.mountsinai.on.ca/care/mkbc/medical-services/genetic-testingBRCA testingEND for breast and ovarian cancer, for patients who satisfy certain eligibility criteria. It also covers a kind of genetic screening tests called non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) for eligible pregnant women. Precisely because of this potential for widespread adoption, there is all the greater need for broad-based conversations about genetics.

Crucially, to ensure that the largest possible cross section of society will benefit from, and not be harmed by, advances in genetic technologies, these conversations must include the voices of all communities.

This is especially true for those who, for well-justified historical reasons, may harbour deep distrust of the biomedical establishment. In the U.S., for much of the 20th century, the eugenics movement had resulted in a range of sterilization programs, discriminatory policies and scientific abuses (such as the infamous Tuskegee syphilis trials) that disproportionately targeted the poor and, especially, racial minorities such as African Americans.

While the eugenics movement might have been less established in Canada, where it did occur (e.g., the sterilization program in Alberta or the Indian hospitals in B.C.) it had most heavily affected Indigenous communities. In both countries, this shameful history has led to lower trust and usage of the health-care system by the affected communities.

As genetic medicine advances, many scientists and health researchers are pointing out the importance of having the diversity of human populations represented in genetic studies in order to gain medical insights that can benefit everyone. If we fail to fully engage these under-represented communities and ensure that genetics is not just another way to exploit and discriminate against them, then we risk worsening this historical and ongoing injustice.

New genetic technologies, such as gene editing, also bring issues of disability rights into sharper focus. While designer babies may not be an immediate concern, even the possibility of selecting and changing our offsprings characteristics raises thorny questions.

For example, what conditions count as medically necessarily to treat how about deafness, dwarfism, autism, or intersex conditions? Ultimately, it is about what kinds of people get to live, and who gets to make those decisions. Many disability rights advocates (e.g., the Down syndrome community) are already voicing concerns about what these emerging technologies mean for how their communities are seen and valued today.

We must make sure that the conversations around genetics are not only about generalized notions of safety or effectiveness, or concerns of playing God. These conversations must also encompass questions of access and justice, and acknowledge that the benefits and harms of genetic technologies, like any new technologies, are not distributed equally.

And these conversations must involve all communities (be they of different racial or ethnic background, gender or sexuality, and physical or cognitive abilities) in a way that ensures their voices are respected and heard.

This is a task that will involve concerted efforts from scientists, funders and industry, to build trust with these communities and to genuinely listen and respond to their concerns. And it will need to be done in collaboration with many partners, including schools, community and faith groups, and the art/entertainment industry.

The ability to understand and, perhaps one day, change our genetics has huge potential to improve human well-being. Lets make sure that everyone will enjoy these benefits, and that no communities are left behind, or worse yet, harmed in the process.

Johnny Kung is the director of new initiatives for the Personal Genetics Education Project (www.pged.org ) at Harvard Medical Schools Department of Genetics.

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Researcher Seeks to Unravel the Brain’s Genetic Tapestry to Tackle Rare Disorder – University of Virginia

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In 2013, University of Virginia researcher Michael McConnell published research that would forever change how scientists study brain cells.

McConnell and a team of nationwide collaborators discovered a genetic mosaic in the brains neurons, proving that brain cells are not exact replicas of each other, and that each individual neuron contains a slightly different genetic makeup.

McConnell, an assistant professor in the School of Medicines Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, has been using this new information to investigate how variations in individual neurons impact neuropsychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and epilepsy. With a recent $50,000 grant from the Bow Foundation, McConnell will expand his research to explore the cause of a rare genetic disorder known as GNAO1 so named for the faulty protein-coding gene that is its likely source.

GNAO1 causes seizures, movement disorders and developmental delays. Currently, only 50 people worldwide are known to have the disease. The Bow Foundation seeks to increase awareness so that other probable victims of the disorder can be properly diagnosed and to raise funds for further research and treatment.

UVA Today recently sat down with McConnell to find out more about how GNAO1 fits into his broader research and what his continued work means for all neuropsychiatric disorders.

Q. Can you explain the general goals of your lab?

A. My lab has two general directions. One is brain somatic mosaicism, which is a finding that different neurons in the brain have different genomes from one another. We usually think every cell in a single persons body has the same blueprint for how they develop and what they become. It turns out that blueprint changes a little bit in the neurons from neuron to neuron. So you have slightly different versions of the same blueprint and we want to know what that means.

The second area of our work focuses on a new technology called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs. The technology permits us to make stem cell from skin cells. We can do this with patients, and use the stem cells to make specific cell types with same genetic mutations that are in the patients. That lets us create and study the persons brain cells in a dish. So now, if that person has a neurological disease, we can in a dish study that persons disease and identify drugs that alter the disease. Its a very personalized medicine approach to that disease.

Q. Does cell-level genomic variety exist in other areas of the body outside the central nervous system?

A. Every cell in your body has mutations of one kind or another, but brain cells are there for your whole life, so the differences have a bigger impact there. A skin cell is gone in a month. An intestinal cell is gone in a week. Any changes in those cells will rarely have an opportunity to cause a problem unless they cause a tumor.

Q. How does your research intersect with the goals of the Bow Foundation?

A. Let me back up to a little bit of history on that. When I got to UVA four years ago, I started talking quite a lot with Howard Goodkin and Mark Beenhakker. Mark is an assistant professor in pharmacology. Howard is a pediatric neurologist and works with children with epilepsy. I had this interest in epilepsy and UVA has a historic and current strength in epilepsy research.

We started talking about how to use iPSCs the technology that we use to study mosaicism to help Howards patients. As we talked about it and I learned more about epilepsy, we quickly realized that there are a substantial number of patients with epilepsy or seizure disorders where we cant do a genetic test to figure out what drug to use on those patients.

Clinical guidance, like Howards expertise, allows him to make a pretty good diagnosis and know what drugs to try first and second and third. But around 30 percent of children that come in with epilepsy never find the drug that works, and theyre in for a lifetime of trial-and-error. We realized that we could use iPSC-derived neurons to test drugs in the dish instead of going through all of the trial-and-error with patients. Thats the bigger project that weve been moving toward.

The Bow Foundation was formed by patient advocates after this rare genetic mutation in GNAO1 was identified. GNAO1 is a subunit of a G protein-coupled receptor; some mutations in this receptor can lead to epilepsy while others lead to movement disorders.

Were still trying to learn about these patients, and the biggest thing the Bow Foundation is doing is trying to address that by creating a patient registry. At the same time, the foundation has provided funds for us to start making and testing iPSCs and launch this approach to personalized medicine for epilepsy.

In the GNAO1 patients, we expect to be able to study their neurons in a dish and understand why they behave differently, why the electrical activity in their brain is different or why they develop differently.

Q. What other more widespread disorders, in addition to schizophrenia and epilepsy, are likely to benefit from your research?

A. Im part of a broader project called the Brain Somatic Mosaicism Network that is conducting research on diseases that span the neuropsychiatric field. Our lab covers schizophrenia, but other nodes within that network are researching autism, bipolar disorder, Tourette syndrome and other psychiatric diseases where the genetic cause is difficult to identify. Thats the underlying theme.

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No SegWit Bump? Bitcoin Price Shrugs Off Upgrade with Sideways Trading – CoinDesk

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"SegWit is old news for the market."

So says crypto analyst Petar Zivkovski, and there's evidence to suggest traders largely agree. Despite just completing perhaps its most significant technical upgrade ever, the price of bitcoin is down just under 1% over the last 24 hours of trading.

To Zivkovski, this shows that bitcoin's upgrade, no matter how impactful, was for traders a classic "buy the rumor" event. He speculates much of the price activity in recent months was due to the upgrade prior to it being clear SegWit would be activated (thereby increasing and redefining network capacity), he notes bitcoin was trading below $2,000.

But before the network adopts the top-level payment networks and other next-generation features enabled by SegWit, Zivkovski expects a run of profit-taking.

Others are less certain here. Arthur Hayes, CEO of bitcoin derivatives exchange BitMEX, said that while the price will likely decline slightly in coming days, he expects it to "zoom higher" in the aftermath of the activation.

"My upside price target is $4,500 then $5,000," he told CoinDesk.

Elsewhere, comments hint that traders are just beginning to understand how cryptographic assets broadly respond to issues related to their technology. Charles Hayter, founder of exchange service CryptoCompare, for instance, chose to view it as the latest data point in an ongoing experiment on the matter.

Though he said it's likely to provide a "positive catalyst" long term, he hinted at an uncertain outlook in the coming days, remarking:

"With litecoin we saw a fall after the enaction of SegWit, but with bitcoin cash we saw a price rise on 8MB blocks being mined its half a dozen of one and half a dozen of the other for bitcoin."

Among analysts there was also a feeling that prices could be locked into the current range until November, when another technical change is anticipated for the network.

Given the controversy around the plan, and the possibility that it could result in the creation of a third major bitcoin asset, Hayes put forward this idea, arguing that while the price could creepabove $5,000, it's not likely to go much higher.

Elsewhere, developer and trader Jacob Eliosoff agreed that uncertainty is likely ahead as the market looks to price in those coming changes.

"I predict will be a huge mess and will do at least temporary damage to the price around the split itself," he said.

Level bubble image via Shutterstock

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is an independent media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. Have breaking news or a story tip to send to our journalists? Contact us at [emailprotected].

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SEC halts trading of secretive bitcoin stock – New York Post

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Now thats a pretty penny-stock.

US regulators on Thursday halted trading in a Canadian bitcoin company that had surged more than 6,000 percent this year.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said it has concerns that the company, First Bitcoin Capital, wasnt telling the whole truth about what it owns and how its structured.

First Bitcoin, run by Simon Rubin, a secretive digital currency entrepreneur, was halted by the SEC before it opened for trading.

The SEC froze trading on the stock at $1.79. It was trading for less than 3 cents on Dec. 31.

The Commission temporarily suspended trading in the securities of BITCF because of concerns regarding the accuracy and adequacy of publicly available information about the company, including, among other things, the value of BITCFs assets and its capital structure, the regulator said in a statement.

Its unclear what accounted for the recent surge in the companys price, which reached a high of $2.70 on Aug. 14.

The company had no income as of the third quarter of 2016, according to an unaudited financial report at the time the last one available.

Not much is known about First Bitcoin. Rubin, the CEO and chairman, is described in a bare-bones company bio as a serial entrepreneur with a background in programming and web design.

Rubin is the only officer listed without a photo.

The company, in a statement, said the SEC action was likely the case of a misunderstanding or a needed clarification.

[I]t would have been better for the SEC to ask us for [some] information before taking such drastic action, it said.

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Bitcoin, Ether extend gains, even as digital currencies take a regulatory hit – MarketWatch

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Bitcoin rose modestly on Thursday as the most prominent digital currency recovers from recent sharp declines that briefly put it into correction territory.

Moves for the cyber monetary unit come as Securities and Exchange Commission temporarily suspended trading in the shares of First Bitcoin Capital Corp. BITCF, +4.68% because of concerns about the accuracy and adequacy of public information on the Canadian company.

Still, a single bitcoin BTCUSD, +2.27% rose 2.3% to $4,287.64, advancing for a third straight day, according to Coindesk.com data, and sending its total market value to about $70 billion, according to digital-currency research site Coinmarketcap.com.

Despite recent advances, the digital currency, is still about 5% below its record set on Aug. 17, though year to date, it is up more than 300%.

Bitcoin prices have been volatile, largely due to issues surrounding the need to increase transaction sizes in the blockchain network. Traditional bitcoin participants agreed on a new protocol known as Segregated Witness, or SegWit., which they believe solves bitcoins scaling issue.

The adoption of SegWit hasnt been smooth, with a minority of users rejecting it, leading to the split of bitcoin that created Bitcoin Cash.

On Thursday, the price of Bitcoin Cash fell 1.6% to 649.32, bringing its market cap to $10.7 billion.

Ether tokens, the chief rival to bitcoin, which runs on the Ethereum network, was little changed on Thursday at $323.74. Ether on Wednesday rose 0.4% to $325, its highest level since June 23. While it remains below an all-time intraday high above $400 hit on June 12, it has more than doubled from a recent intraday low hit in mid-July. For 2017, it is up about 4,000%, bringing its market cap to $30.6 billion.

Read: This bitcoin $25,000 call is more proof of the cybercurrency bubble

The recent advances in bitcoin, along with the recovery in Ether, brought the total market capitalization of all cryprtocurrencies above $150 billion. The basket of cybercurrencies tracked by Coinmarketcap.com first broke above $100 billion in early June, meaning the space has risen by half in a little more than two months.

Meanwhile, shares of Firtst Bitcoin Capital Corp traded at $1.79 before its halt. The stock traded at $0.05 at the start of the year and gained more than 6,000% year to date.

First Bitcoin Capital Corp. is a Canadian corporation that invests in companies that mine bitcoin and operates exchanges and digital wallets, according to their website. The suspension was effective Thursday 9:30 Eastern Tim until noon Sept. 7.

In other news, A regulatory arm of Canada on Thursday signaled a warning about so-called initial coin offerings, or ICOs, which have spiked in popularity. The Canadian Securities Administrator, although acknowledging the benefits of raising funds by digital tokens, it said there are big risks.

However, they can also raise investor protection concerns, due to issues around volatility, transparency, valuation, custody and liquidity, as well as the use of unregulated cryptocurrency exchanges.Also, investors may be harmed by unethical practices or illegal schemes, and may not understand the properties of the investment products that they are purchasing, the CSA said, adding that it was monitoring developments in ICOs.

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The Effect of Darwinism on Morality and Christianity | The …

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Download The Effect of Darwinism on Morality and Christianity PDF

It sometimes is claimed that one can be both a Darwinist and a Christian (Miller). Others argue that religion and Darwinism are incompatible because they are separate fields that should not be intermixed (Gould). In fact, the Darwinism worldview leads directly to certain clear moral and religious teachings about the origin, purpose, and ultimate meaning of life that are diametrically opposed to the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic faiths. The problem is that Darwinists,

Some scientists are more open and forthright than Miller and Gould, some even concluding that "there is something dishonestly selfserving" in the tactic claiming that "science and religion are two separate fields" (Dawkins, p. 62). Most evolutionists fully understand what is at stake in the creation/evolution controversy. Futuyma admits that anyone who "believes in Genesis as a literal description of history" holds a "worldview that is entirely incompatible with the idea of evolution . . ." (pp. 12-13). Futuyma then claims that Darwinists insist on "material, mechanistic causes" for life but the "believer in Genesis" can look to God for explanations.

Historians have documented meticulously the fact that Darwinism has had a devastating impact, not only on Christianity, but also on theism. Many scientists also have admitted that the acceptance of Darwinism has convinced large numbers of people that the Genesis account of creation is erroneous, and that this has caused the whole house of theistic cards to tumble:

As a result of the widespread acceptance of Darwinism, the Christian moral basis of society was undermined. Furthermore Darwin himself was "keenly aware of the political, social, and religious implications of his new idea. . . . Religion, especially, appeared to have much to lose . . ." (Raymo, p. 138).

Numerous scientists have noted that one result of the general acceptance of Darwinism was acceptance of the belief that humans "are accidental, contingent, ephemeral parts of creation, rather than lords over it" and humans are not "the raison d'tre of the universe" as all theistic religions teach (Raymo, p. 163).

The Darwinism belief that humans (and all living things) are nothing more than an accident of history, "cosmically inconsequential bundles of stardust, adrift in an infinite and purposeless universe" is a belief that is now "widely embraced within the scientific community" (Raymo, p. 160). Darwinism was a major factor in causing many eminent scientists to conclude, in the words of Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, that the "more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless" (p. 154). Darwinism teaches "that our lives are brief and inconsequential in the cosmic scheme of things" (Raymo, p. 110), and that life has no ultimate purpose because there is no heaven, hell, or afterlife and "nothing we know about life requires the existence of a disembodied vital force or immaterial spirits, or a special creation of species" (Raymo, p. 42). Raymo concludes:

One of the most eminent evolutionists ever, Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, taught that, "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind" (p. 345).

Raymo concludes that Darwin's theory was "not what we want to hear" because it is difficult for humans who have long thought of themselves as "the central and immortal apex of creationthe apple of God's eyeto accept that" we are, "unexceptional, contingent, and ephemeral in the cosmological scheme of things" (p. 129).

Raymo adds that since Darwinism has demolished the belief that the universe and human beings have an ultimate purpose, our educational system must inculcate young people in "cold and clammy truths like descent from reptilian or amoebic ancestors," Raymo then suggests that although it,

Cruel or otherwise, Raymo states that Darwinism "is a fact by every criterion of science" and that our "school kids do not need intellectual security blankets" (p. 144). The implications of Darwinism "perhaps the most revolutionary idea in the history of human thought" are clear.

Acclaimed Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins has written extensively about the implications of Darwinism. In a speech titled "A Scientist's Case Against God," Dawkins argued that Darwinism "has shown higher purpose to be an illusion" and that the Universe consists of "selfish genes;" consequently, "some people are going to get hurt, others are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason for it" (Easterbrook, p. 892).

Dawkins believes that people who believe life was created for a purpose not only are mistaken, but are ignorant: "Only the scientifically illiterate" believe we exist for a higher purpose. The scientifically literate know there is no reason "why" we exist, we "just do" as an accident of history. Dawkins also teaches that no evidence exists to support theism, and that "nowadays the better educated admit it" (Easterbrook, p. 892).

The central message of Richard Dawkins' voluminous writings is that the universe has precisely the properties we should expect if it has "no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pointless indifference" (Easterbrook, p. 892). Dawkins even admitted that his best-selling book, The Selfish Gene, was an attempt to get rid of what he regarded as an "outright wrong idea" that had achieved a grip in popular sciencenamely, the erroneous "assumption that individuals act for the good of the species," which he believes is "an error that needed exploding, and the best way to demonstrate what's wrong with it . . . was to explain evolution from the point of view of the gene" (Easterbrook, p. 892). Dawkins added that the reason why The Selfish Gene was a best seller could be because it teaches the "truth" about why humans exist, namely humans,

Dawkins obviously is proud of the depressing effect his writings have on people. Raymo even claims that the dominant view among modern Darwinists is that our minds are "merely a computer made of meat" (pp. 187-188), and that "almost all scientists" believe the idea that a human soul exists is a "bankrupt notion"; and consequently, the conclusion that our minds are "merely a computer made of meat" is considered by Darwinists "almost a truism" (pp. 192-193, emphasis his).

In Futuyma's words, "if the world and its creatures developed purely by material, physical forces, it could not have been designed and has no purpose or goal" (pp. 12-13). Furthermore, he notes that the creationist,

Is this pessimistic, antitheistic, and nihilistic view of humans widespread? One researcher claimed that "ninety-nine percent of the scientists whom I met in my career . . . support the view expressed by Dawkins [that anyone] . . . who denies evolution is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked" (Rrsch, p. F3). This oft' made claim is totally false: an estimated 10,000 scientists in the USA and about 100,000 creation scientists in the world reject Darwinism, and hold instead to a creation worldview (Bergman). A question every concerned parent and grandparent should ask is: "Do we want our children taught that life has no ultimate purpose, and that our minds are merely a computer made of meat?" The fact is:

Why do so many people believe the pessimistic, nihilistic, and depressive Darwinist view? One reason is they are convinced that science has proven Darwinism to be true. Sadly, however, many scientists are unaware of the large body of evidence supporting creationism. And numerous scientists recognize that, at best, the view common among elite scientists is unscientific. Shallis argues that:

Darwinists have indoctrinated our society for over 100 years in a worldview that has proven to be tragically destructive. And they often have done this by a type of deceit that began before the Piltdown hoax and continues today in many leading biology textbooks (Wells).

Acknowledgments:

Bert Thompson, Ph.D., and Clifford L. Lillo for their insight.

References

* Jerry Bergman, Ph.D., is on the Biology faculty at Northwest State College in Ohio.

Cite this article: Jerry Bergman, Ph.D. 2001. The Effect of Darwinism on Morality and Christianity. Acts & Facts. 30 (6).

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Modern synthesis – Wikipedia

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The modern synthesis[a] was the early 20th-century synthesis reconciling Charles Darwin's and Gregor Mendel's ideas in a joint mathematical framework that established evolution as biology's central paradigm.[2][3]Julian Huxley invented the term in his 1942 book, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis.

The 19th century ideas of natural selection by Darwin and Mendelian genetics were put together with population genetics, between around 1918 and 1932. The modern synthesis also addressed the relationship between the broad-scale changes of macroevolution seen by palaeontologists and small-scale microevolution of local populations of living organisms.

Further syntheses came later, including evolutionary developmental biology's integration of embryology with genetics and evolution, starting in 1977, and Massimo Pigliucci's proposed extended evolutionary synthesis of 2007.

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) was successful in convincing most biologists that evolution had occurred, but was less successful in convincing them that natural selection was its primary mechanism. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, variations of Lamarckism, orthogenesis ('progressive' evolution), and saltationism (evolution by jumps) were discussed as alternatives.[4] Also, Darwin did not offer a precise explanation of how new species arise. As part of the disagreement about whether natural selection alone was sufficient to explain speciation, George Romanes coined the term neo-Darwinism to refer to the version of evolution advocated by Alfred Russel Wallace and August Weismann. which depended heavily natural selection.[1] Weismann and Wallace rejected the Lamarckian idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics, something that Darwin had not ruled out.[5]

Weismann's idea, set out in his 1892 book Das Keimplasma: eine Theorie der Vererbung (The Germ Plasm: a theory of inheritance),[6] was that the relationship between the hereditary material, which he called the germ plasm (German, Keimplasma), and the rest of the body (the soma) was a one-way relationship: the germ-plasm formed the body, but the body did not influence the germ-plasm, except indirectly in its participation in a population subject to natural selection. Weismann was translated into English, and though he was influential, it took many years for the full significance of his work to be appreciated.[7] Later, after the completion of the modern synthesis, the term neo-Darwinism came to be associated with its core concept: evolution, driven by natural selection acting on variation produced by genetic mutation, and genetic recombination (chromosomal crossovers).[1]

Between around 1890 and 1930, there was a widespread belief among biologists that Darwinian evolution was in deep trouble, principally because experiments had failed to show that progressive evolution could gradually modify species by making many changes to small inherited variations. This eclipse of Darwinism (in Julian Huxley's phrase) was challenged when population genetics showed that Mendelian genetics could indeed support exactly that model of evolution, and was replaced as a general belief by the promotion of the idea of a modern synthesis by Huxley and others in the 1940s.[8]

Gregor Mendel's work was re-discovered by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns in 1900. News of this reached William Bateson in England, who reported on the paper during a presentation to the Royal Horticultural Society in May 1900.[9] It showed that the contributions of each parent retained their integrity rather than blending with the contribution of the other parent. This reinforced a division of thought, which was already present in the 1890s.[10] The two schools were:

A traditional view is that the biometricians and the Mendelians rejected natural selection and argued for their separate theories for 20 years, the debate only resolved by the development of population genetics, giving a date of 1918 for the start of the supposed synthesis after a period of eclipse.[12][13]

A more recent view, advocated by the historians Arlin Stoltzfus and Kele Cable, is that Bateson, de Vries, Morgan and Reginald Punnett had by 1918 formed a synthesis of Mendelism and mutationism. The understanding achieved by these geneticists spanned the action of natural selection on alleles (alternative forms of a gene), the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, the evolution of continuously-varying traits (like height), and the probability that a new mutation will become fixed. In this view, the early geneticists accepted natural selection but rejected Darwin's non-Mendelian ideas about variation and heredity, and the synthesis began soon after 1900.[14] The traditional claim that Mendelians rejected the idea of continuous variation is false; as early as 1902, Bateson and Saunders wrote that "If there were even so few as, say, four or five pairs of possible allelomorphs, the various homo- and hetero-zygous combinations might, on seriation, give so near an approach to a continuous curve, that the purity of the elements would be unsuspected".[15]

Thomas Hunt Morgan began his career in genetics as a saltationist, and started out trying to demonstrate that mutations could produce new species in fruit flies. However, the experimental work at his lab with the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, which helped establish the link between Mendelian genetics and the chromosomal theory of inheritance, demonstrated that rather than creating new species in a single step, mutations increased the genetic variation in the population.[16]

In 1918, R. A. Fisher wrote the paper "The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance,"[17] which showed mathematically how continuous variation could result from a number of discrete genetic loci. In this and subsequent papers culminating in his 1930 book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection,[18] Fisher showed how Mendelian genetics was consistent with the idea of evolution driven by natural selection.[19] During the 1920s, a series of papers by Haldane applied mathematical analysis to real-world examples of natural selection such as the evolution of industrial melanism in peppered moths.[19] Haldane established that natural selection could work in the real world at a faster rate than even Fisher had assumed.[20] Fisher also analysed sexual selection in his book, but his work was largely ignored, and Darwin's case for such selection misunderstood, so it formed no substantial part of the modern synthesis.[21]

Sewall Wright focused on combinations of genes that interacted as complexes, and the effects of inbreeding on small relatively isolated populations, which could exhibit genetic drift. In a 1932 paper, he introduced the concept of an adaptive landscape in which phenomena such as cross breeding and genetic drift in small populations could push them away from adaptive peaks, which would in turn allow natural selection to push them towards new adaptive peaks.[19][22] Wright's model would appeal to field naturalists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr who were becoming aware of the importance of geographical isolation in real world populations.[20] The work of Fisher, Haldane and Wright helped to found the discipline of theoretical population genetics.[23][24][25]

In his 1930 book Embryos and Ancestors, the evolutionary embryologist Gavin de Beer anticipated evolutionary developmental biology by showing that evolution could occur by heterochrony, such as in the retention of juvenile features in the adult. This, he argued, could cause apparently sudden changes in the fossil record as embryos fossilise poorly.[26] The traditional view is that developmental biology played little part in the modern synthesis,[27] but Stephen Gould argues that de Beer made a significant contribution.[28]

Theodosius Dobzhansky, an emigrant from the Soviet Union to the United States, who had been a postdoctoral worker in Morgan's fruit fly lab, was one of the first to apply genetics to natural populations. He worked mostly with Drosophila pseudoobscura. He says pointedly: "Russia has a variety of climates from the Arctic to sub-tropical... Exclusively laboratory workers who neither possess nor wish to have any knowledge of living beings in nature were and are in a minority."[29] Not surprisingly, there were other Russian geneticists with similar ideas, though for some time their work was known to only a few in the West. His 1937 work Genetics and the Origin of Species[30] was a key step in bridging the gap between population geneticists and field naturalists. It presented the conclusions reached by Fisher, Haldane, and especially Wright in their highly mathematical papers in a form that was easily accessible to others. It also emphasized that real world populations had far more genetic variability than the early population geneticists had assumed in their models, and that genetically distinct sub-populations were important. Dobzhansky argued that natural selection worked to maintain genetic diversity as well as driving change. Dobzhansky had been influenced by his exposure in the 1920s to the work of a Russian geneticist Sergei Chetverikov who had looked at the role of recessive genes in maintaining a reservoir of genetic variability in a population before his work was shut down by the rise of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union.[19][20]

E. B. Ford's work, starting in 1924, complemented that of Dobzhansky. It was as a result of Ford's work, as well as his own, that Dobzhansky changed the emphasis in the third edition of his famous text from drift to selection.[31] Ford was an experimental naturalist who wanted to test natural selection in nature. He virtually invented the field of research known as ecological genetics. His work on natural selection in wild populations of butterflies and moths was the first to show that predictions made by R. A. Fisher were correct. In 1940, he was the first to describe and define genetic polymorphism, and to predict that human blood group polymorphisms might be maintained in the population by providing some protection against disease.[32]

Ernst Mayr's key contribution to the synthesis was Systematics and the Origin of Species, published in 1942.[33] Mayr emphasized the importance of allopatric speciation, where geographically isolated sub-populations diverge so far that reproductive isolation occurs. He was skeptical of the reality of sympatric speciation believing that geographical isolation was a prerequisite for building up intrinsic (reproductive) isolating mechanisms. Mayr also introduced the biological species concept that defined a species as a group of interbreeding or potentially interbreeding populations that were reproductively isolated from all other populations.[19][20][34] Before he left Germany for the United States in 1930, Mayr had been influenced by the work of German biologist Bernhard Rensch. In the 1920s Rensch, who like Mayr did field work in Indonesia, analyzed the geographic distribution of polytypic species and complexes of closely related species paying particular attention to how variations between different populations correlated with local environmental factors such as differences in climate. In 1947, Rensch published Neuere Probleme der Abstammungslehre. Die transspezifische Evolution (1959 English translation of 2nd edition: Evolution Above the Species Level).[35] This looked at how the same evolutionary mechanisms involved in speciation might be extended to explain the origins of the differences between the higher level taxa. His writings contributed to the rapid acceptance of the synthesis in Germany.[36][37]

George Gaylord Simpson was responsible for showing that the modern synthesis was compatible with paleontology in his book Tempo and Mode in Evolution published in 1944. Simpson's work was crucial because so many paleontologists had disagreed, in some cases vigorously, with the idea that natural selection was the main mechanism of evolution. It showed that the trends of linear progression (in for example the evolution of the horse) that earlier paleontologists had used as support for neo-Lamarckism and orthogenesis did not hold up under careful examination. Instead the fossil record was consistent with the irregular, branching, and non-directional pattern predicted by the modern synthesis.[19][20]

The botanist G. Ledyard Stebbins extended the synthesis to encompass botany including the important effects on speciation of hybridization and polyploidy in plants in his 1950 book Variation and Evolution in Plants.[19][38]

The modern synthesis of the early 20th century is claimed to have bridged the gap between evolution, experimental genetics, ecology, and paleontology. However, different advocates of the synthesis such as Dobzhansky, Huxley, and Mayr made different claims for it.[39][40][41]

By 1937, Dobzhansky was able to argue in his Genetics and the Origin of Species that mutations were the main source of evolutionary changes and variability, along with chromosome rearrangements, effects of genes on their neighbours during development, and polyploidy. Next, genetic drift (he used the term in 1941), selection, migration, and geographical isolation could change gene frequencies. Thirdly, mechanisms like ecological or sexual isolation and hybrid sterility could fix the results of the earlier processes.[42]

By 1942, Julian Huxley's Evolution: The Modern Synthesis introduced a name for the synthesis and intentionally set out to promote a "synthetic point of view" on the evolutionary process. He imagined a wide synthesis of many sciences: genetics, developmental physiology, ecology, systematics, palaeontology, cytology, and mathematical analysis of biology, and assumed that evolution would proceed differently in different groups of organisms according to how their genetic material was organised and their strategies for reproduction, leading to progressive but varying evolutionary trends.[43]

However, the book was not what it seemed. In the view of the philosopher of science Michael Ruse, and in Huxley's own opinion, Huxley was "a generalist, a synthesizer of ideas, rather than a specialist".[44] Ruse observes that Huxley wrote as if he were just adding empirical evidence to the mathematical framework established by Fisher and the population geneticists, but that this was not so. Huxley avoided mathematics, for instance not even mentioning Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection. Instead, Huxley used a mass of examples to demonstrate that natural selection is powerful, and that it works on Mendelian genes. The book was successful in its goal of persuading readers of the reality of evolution, effectively illustrating island biogeography, speciation, competition and so on. Huxley further showed that the appearance of orthogenetic trends - predictable directions for evolution - in the fossil record were readily explained as allometric growth (since parts are interconnected). All the same, Huxley did not reject orthogenesis out of hand, but maintained a belief in progress all his life, with Homo sapiens as the end point, and he had since 1912 been influenced by the vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson, though in public he maintained an atheistic position on evolution.[44]

Also in 1942, Mayr's Systematics and the Origin of Species asserted the importance of and set out to explain population variation in evolutionary processes including speciation. He analysed in particular the effects of polytypic species, geographic variation, and isolation by geographic and other means.[45]

The modern synthesis largely ignored embryonic development to explain the form of organisms, since population genetics appeared to be an adequate explanation of how forms evolved.[46][47] In 1977, recombinant DNA technology enabled biologists to start to explore the genetic control of development. The growth of evolutionary developmental biology from 1978, when Edward B. Lewis discovered homeotic genes, showed that many so-called toolkit genes act to regulate development, influencing the expression of other genes. It also revealed that some of the regulatory genes are extremely ancient, so that animals as different as insects and mammals share control mechanisms; for example, the Pax6 gene is involved in forming the eyes of mice and of fruit flies. Such deep homology provided strong evidence for evolution and indicated the paths that evolution had taken.[48]

In 2007, more than half a century after the modern synthesis, Massimo Pigliucci called for an extended evolutionary synthesis to incorporate aspects of biology that had not been included or did not exist in the mid-20th century.[49][50] It revisits the relative importance of different factors, challenges assumptions made in the modern synthesis, and adds new factors[50][51] such as multilevel selection, transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, niche construction, and evolvability.[52][53][54]

Looking back at the conflicting accounts of the modern synthesis, the historian Betty Smocovitis notes in her 1996 book Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology that both historians and philosophers of biology have attempted to grasp its scientific meaning, but have found it a moving target; the only thing they agreed on was that it was a historical event.[55] In her words "by the late 1980s the notoriety of the evolutionary synthesis was recognized . . . So notorious did 'the synthesis' become, that few serious historically minded analysts would touch the subject, let alone know where to begin to sort through the interpretive mess left behind by the numerous critics and commentators".[56]

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Modern synthesis - Wikipedia

Darwinism and the Nazi race Holocaust – creation.com

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by Jerry Bergman

Leading Nazis, and early 1900 influential German biologists, revealed in their writings that Darwins theory and publications had a major influence upon Nazi race policies. Hitler believed that the human gene pool could be improved by using selective breeding similar to how farmers breed superior cattle strains. In the formulation of their racial policies, Hitlers government relied heavily upon Darwinism, especially the elaborations by Spencer and Haeckel. As a result, a central policy of Hitlers administration was the development and implementation of policies designed to protect the superior race. This required at the very least preventing the inferior races from mixing with those judged superior, in order to reduce contamination of the latters gene pool. The superior race belief was based on the theory of group inequality within each species, a major presumption and requirement of Darwins original survival of the fittest theory. This philosophy culminated in the final solution, the extermination of approximately six million Jews and four million other people who belonged to what German scientists judged as inferior races.

Of the many factors that produced the Nazi holocaust and World War II, one of the most important was Darwins notion that evolutionary progress occurs mainly as a result of the elimination of the weak in the struggle for survival. Although it is no easy task to assess the conflicting motives of Hitler and his supporters, Darwinism-inspired eugenics clearly played a critical role. Darwinism justified and encouraged the Nazi views on both race and war. If the Nazi party had fully embraced and consistently acted on the belief that all humans were descendants of Adam and Eve and equal before the creator God, as taught in both the Old Testament and New Testament Scriptures, the holocaust would never have occurred.

Expunging of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the divine origin of humans from mainline German (liberal) theology and its schools, and replacing it with Darwinism, openly contributed to the acceptance of Social Darwinism that culminated in the tragedy of the holocaust.1 Darwins theory, as modified by Haeckel,2,3,4,5,6 Chamberlain7 and others, clearly contributed to the death of over nine million people in concentration camps, and about 40 million other humans in a war that cost about six trillion dollars. Furthermore, the primary reason that Nazism reached to the extent of the holocaust was the widespread acceptance of Social Darwinism by the scientific and academic community.1,8,9,10

The very heart of Darwinism is the belief that evolution proceeds by the differential survival of the fittest or superior individuals. This requires differences among a species, which in time become great enough so that those individuals that possess advantageous featuresthe fittestare more apt to survive. Although the process of raciation may begin with slight differences, differential survival rates in time produce distinct races by a process called speciation, meaning the development of a new species.

The egalitarian ideal that all people are created equal, which now dominates Western ideology, has not been universal among nations and cultures.11 A major force that has argued against this view was the Social Darwinian eugenics movement, especially its crude survival of the fittest worldview.10,12 As Ludmerer noted, the idea that the hereditary quality of the race can be improved by selective breeding is as old as Platos Republic but:

Nazi governmental policy was openly influenced by Darwinism, the Zeitgeist of both science and educated society of the time.10 This can be evaluated by an examination of extant documents, writings, and artefacts produced by Germanys twentieth century Nazi movement and its many scientist supporters. Keith concluded the Nazi treatment of Jews and other races, then believed inferior, was largely a result of their belief that Darwinism provided profound insight that could be used to significantly improve humankind.14 Tenenbaum noted that the political philosophy of Germany was built on the belief that critical for evolutionary progress were:

The theory of evolution is based on individuals acquiring unique traits that enable those possessing the new traits to better survive adverse conditions compared to those who dont possess them. Superior individuals will be more likely to survive and pass on these traits to their offspring so such traits will increase in number, while the weaker individuals will eventually die off. If every member of a species were fully equal, natural selection would have nothing to select from, and evolution would cease for that species.

These differences gradually produce new groups, some of which have an advantage in terms of survival. These new groups became the superior, or the more evolved races. When a trait eventually spreads throughout the entire race because of the survival advantage it confers on those that possess it, a higher, more evolved form of animal will result. Hitler and the Nazi party claimed that one of their major goals was to apply this accepted science to society. And the core idea of Darwinism was not evolution, but selection. Evolution describes the results of selection.16 Hitler stressed that to produce a better society we [the Nazis] must understand, and cooperate with science.

As the one race above all others, Aryans believed that their evolutionary superiority gave them not only the right, but the duty to subjugate all other peoples. Race was a major plank of the Nazi philosophy; Tenenbaum concluded that they incorporated Darwinism:

In the 1933 Nuremberg party rally, Hitler proclaimed that higher race subjects to itself a lower race a right which we see in nature and which can be regarded as the sole conceivable right, because it was founded on science.15

Hitler believed humans were animals to whom the genetics laws, learned from livestock breeding, could be applied. The Nazis believed that instead of permitting natural forces and chance to control evolution, they must direct the process to advance the human race. The first step to achieve this goal was to isolate the inferior races in order to prevent them from further contaminating the Aryan gene pool. The widespread public support for this policy was a result of the belief, common in the educated classes, in the conclusion that certain races were genetically inferior as was scientifically proven by Darwinism. The Nazis believed that they were simply applying facts, proven by science, to produce a superior race of humans as part of their plan for a better world: The business of the corporate state was eugenics or artificial selectionpolitics as applied biology.18,19

As early as 1925, Hitler outlined his conclusion in Chapter 4 of Mein Kampf that Darwinism was the only basis for a successful Germany and which the title of his most famous workin English My Strugglealluded to. As Clark concluded, Adolf Hitler:

And Hickman adds that it is no coincidence that Hitler:

Furthermore, the belief that evolution can be directed by scientists to produce a superior race was the central leitmotif of Nazism and many other sources existed from which Nazism drew:

The Nazi view on Darwinian evolution and race was consequently a major part of the fatal combination of ideas and events which produced the holocaust and World War II:

Terms such as superior race, lower human types, pollution of the race, and the word evolution itself (Entwicklung) were often used by Hitler and other Nazi leaders. His race views were not from fringe science as often claimed but rather Hitlers views were:

The philosophy that humans can control and even use Darwinism to produce a higher level of human is repeatedly mentioned in the writings and speeches of prominent Nazis.25 Accomplishing the Darwinian goal for the world required ruthlessly eliminating the less fit by open barbarian behavior:

Hitler once even stated that we Nazis are barbarians! We want to be barbarians. It is an honorable title [for, by it,] we shall rejuvenate the world .26 Hitler, as an evolutionist, consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution.27 Keith adds that:

The German eugenic leadership was originally less anti-Semitic than even the British leadership. Most early German eugenicists believed that German Jews were Aryans, and consequently the eugenicist movement was supported by many Jewish professors and doctors both in Germany and abroad. The Jews were only slowly incorporated into the German eugenic theory and then laws.

The Darwinian racists views also slowly entered into many spheres of German society which they had previously not affected.9 The Pan German League, dedicated to maintaining German Racial Purity, was originally not overtly anti-Semitic and assimilated Jews were allowed full membership. Many German eugenicists believed that although blacks or Gypsies were racially inferior, their racial theories did not fit Jews since many Jews had achieved significant success in Germany. Schleunes adds that by 1903, the influence of race ideas permeated the Leagues program to the degree that by 1912, the League declared itself based upon racial principles and soon excluded Jews from membership.29

In spite of the scientific prominence of these racial views, they had a limited effect upon most Jews until the 1930s. Most German Jews were proud of being Germans and considered themselves Germans first and Jews second. Many Jews modified the German intelligentsias racial views by including themselves in it. Their assimilation into German life was to the extent that most felt its anti-Semitism did not represent a serious threat to their security. Most Jews also were convinced that Germany was now a safe harbour for them.30 Many still firmly held to the Genesis creation model and rejected the views upon which racism was based, including Darwinism. What happened in Germany later was obviously not well received by Jewish geneticists, even Jewish eugenicists and certain other groups:

Nazi policies resulted less from a hatred toward Jewish or other peoples than from the idealistic goal of preventing pollution of the superior race. Hitler elaborated his Darwinian views by comparing the strong killing the weak to a cat devouring a mouse, concluding that ultimately the Jews must be eliminated because they cause:

Hitler then argued that for this reason, governments must understand and apply the laws of Nature, especially the survival of the fittest law which originally produced the human races and is the source of their improvement. The government must therefore aid in the elimination, or at least quarantine, of the inferior races. Hitler argued:

Hitler was especially determined to prevent Aryans from breeding with non-Aryans, a concern that eventually resulted in the final solution. Once the inferior races were exterminated, Hitler believed that future generations would be eternally grateful for the improvement that his programs brought to humanity:

Individuals are not only far less important than the race, but the Nazis concluded that certain races were not human, but were animals:

As a result, the Darwinist movement was one of the most powerful forces in the nineteenthtwentieth centuries German intellectual history [and] may be fully understood as a prelude to the doctrine of national socialism [Nazism].35 Why did evolution catch hold in Germany faster, and take a firmer hold there than any other place in the world?

Schleunes noted, rather poignantly, that the reason the publication of Darwins 1859 work had an immediate impact in Germany, and their Jewish policy, was because:

The Darwinian revolution and the works of its chief German spokesman and most eminent scientist, Professor Haeckel, gave the racists something that they were confident was powerful verification of their race beliefs.37 The support of the science establishment resulted in racist thought having a much wider circulation than otherwise possible, and enormous satisfaction that ones prejudices were actually expressions of scientific truth.36

And what greater authority than science could racists have for their views? Konrad Lorenz, one of the most eminent animal-behavior scientists then, and often credited as being the founder of his field, stated that:

Lorenzs works were important in developing the Nazi program designed to eradicate the parasitic growth of inferior races. The governments programs to insure the German Volk maintained their superiority made racism almost unassailable. Although King claimed that the holocaust pretended to have a scientific genetic basis,39 the position of the government and university elite of the time was so entrenched that few contemporary scientists seriously questioned it. The anti-Semitic attitudes of the German people were only partly to blame in causing the holocaustonly when Darwinism was added to the preexisting attitudes did a lethal combination result.

The first step in an eugenic program was to determine which groups were genetically superior; a judgment that was heavily influenced by culture. The ideal traits were:

Although superficial observations enable most people to make a broad classification of race, when explored in depth, race status is by no means easy to determine, as the Nazis soon found out. Many of the groups that they felt were inferior, such as the Slovaks, Jews, Gypsies, and others, were not easily distinguishable from the pure Aryan race. In grouping persons into races to select the best, the Nazis measured a wide variety of physical traits including brain case sizes. The Nazis relied heavily upon the work of Hans F.K. Gnther, professor of racial science at the University of Jena. Although F.K. Gnther s personal relationships with the party were stormy at times, his racial ideas were accepted. They received wide support throughout the German government, and were an important influence in German policy.41 Gnther recognized that, although a race may not be pure, its members share certain dominant characteristics, thus paving the way for stereotyping.41

Gnther concluded that all Aryans share an ideal Nordic type which contrasted with the Jews, whom he concluded were a mixture of races. Gnther stressed a persons genealogical lineage, anthropological measurement of skulls and evaluations of physical appearance, were all used to determine their race. Even though physical appearance was stressed, the body is the showplace of the soul and the soul is primary.42 Select females with the necessary superior race traits were even placed in special homes and kept pregnant as long as they remained in the program. Nonetheless, research on the offspring of the experiment concluded that, as is now known, IQ regressed toward the population mean and the IQs of the offspring were generally lower than that of the parents.

Darwinism not only influenced the Nazi attitude toward Jews, but other cultural and ethnic groups as well. Even mental patients were included later, in part because it was then believed that heredity had a major influence on mental illness (or they possibly had some Jewish or other non-Aryan blood in them), and consequently had to be destroyed. Poliakov notes that many intellectuals in the early 1900s accepted telegony, the idea that bad blood would contaminate a race line forever, or that bad blood drives out good, just as bad money displaces good money.43 Only extermination would permanently eliminate inferior genetic lines, and thereby further evolution.

Darwin even compiled a long list of cases where he concluded bad blood polluted a whole gene line, causing it to bear impure progeny forever. Numerous respected biologists, including Ernst Ruedin of the University of Munich and many of his colleagues such as Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton, and Eugene Kahn, later a professor of psychiatry at Yale, actively advocated this hereditary argument. These scientists were also the chief architects of the German compulsory sterilization laws designed to prevent those with defective or inferior genes from contaminating the Aryan gene pool. Later, when the genetically inferior were also judged as useless dredges, massive killings became justified. The groups judged inferior were gradually expanded to include a wide variety of races and national groups. Later, it even included less healthy older people, epileptics, both severe and mild mental defectives, deaf-mutes, and even some persons with certain terminal illnesses.1,44

The groups judged inferior were later expanded to include persons who had negroid or mongoloid features, Gypsies, and those who did not pass a set of ingeniously designed overtly racist phrenology tests now known to be worthless.45 After Jesse Owen won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, Hitler chastised the Americans for even permitting blacks to enter the contests.46

Some evolutionists even advocated the view that women were evolutionarily inferior to men. Dr Robert Wartenberg, later a prominent neurology professor in California, tried to prove womens inferiority by arguing that they could not survive unless they were protected by men. He concluded that because the weaker women were not eliminated as rapidly due to this protection, a slower rate of evolution resulted and for this reason natural selection was less operative on women than men. How the weak were to be selected for elimination was not clear, nor were the criteria used to determine weak. Women in Nazi Germany were openly prohibited from entering certain professions and were required by law to conform to a traditional female role.47

Darwinism not only offered the Germans a meaningful interpretation of their recent military past, but also a justification for future aggression: German military success in the Bismarkian wars fit neatly into Darwin categories in the struggle for survival, [demonstrating] the fitness of Germany. 48 War was a positive force not only because it eliminated weaker races, but also because it weeded out the weaker members of the superior races. Hitler not only unabashedly intended to produce a superior race, but he openly relied heavily upon Darwinian thought in both his extermination and war policies.25 Nazi Germany, partly for this reason, openly glorified war because it was an important means of eliminating the less fit of the highest race, a step necessary to upgrade the race. Clark concludes, quoting extensively from Mein Kampf, that:

German greatness, Hitler stressed, came about primarily because they were jingoists, and thereby had been eliminating their weaker members for centuries.50 Although Germans were no stranger to war, this new justification gave powerful support to their policies. The view that eradication of the weaker races was a major source of evolution was well expressed by Wiggam:

In other words, war is positive in the long run because only by lethal conflicts can humans evolve. Hitler even claimed as truth the contradiction that human civilization as we know it would not exist if it were not for constant war. And many of the leading scientists of his day openly advocated this view: Haeckel was especially fond of praising the ancient Spartans, whom he saw as a successful and superior people as a consequence of their socially approved biological selection. By killing all but the perfectly healthy and strong children the Spartans were continually in excellent strength and vigor. 52 Germany should follow this Spartan custom, as infanticide of the deformed and sickly was a practice of advantage to both the infants destroyed and to the community. It was, after all, only traditional dogma and hardly scientific truth that all lives were of equal worth or should be preserved.18,53

However, the common assumption that European civilization evolved far more than others, primarily because of its constant warmongering in contrast to other nations, is false. War is actually typical of virtually all peoples, except certain small island groups who have abundant food, or peoples in very cold areas.54 Historically, many tribes in Africa were continually involved in wars, as were most countries in Asia and America.

Much of the opposition to the eugenic movement came from German Christians. Although Hitler was baptized a Catholic, he was never excommunicated, and evidently considered himself a good Roman Catholic as a young man, and at times used religious language. He clearly had strong, even vociferous, anti-Christian feelings as an adult, as did probably most Nazi party leaders. As a consummate politician, though, he openly tried to exploit the church.55 Hitler once revealed his attitude toward Christianity when he bluntly stated that religion is an:

His beliefs as revealed in this quote are abundantly clear: the younger people who were the hope of Germany were absolutely indifferent in matters of religion. As Keith noted, the Nazi party viewed Darwinism and Christianity as polar opposites. Milner said of Germanys father of evolution, Ernst Haeckel, that in his Natural History of Creation he argued that the church with its morality of love and charity is an effete fraud, a perversion of the natural order.57 A major reason why Haeckel concluded this was because Christianity:

The opposition to religion was a prominent feature of German science, and thus later German political theory, from its very beginning. As Stein summarized Haeckel in a lecture titled On evolution: Darwins Theory:

Martin Bormann, Hitlers closest associate for years and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, was equally blunt: the church was opposed to evolution and for this reason must be condemned, but the Nazis were on the side of science and evolution. Furthermore, Nazi and Christian concepts are incompatible because Christianity is built:

Bormann also claimed that the Christian churches have long been aware that:

As Humber notes, Hitler believed that Blacks were monstrosities halfway between man and ape and therefore he disapproved of German Christians:

A literature review shows that German racism would have had a difficult time existing if the historical creation position, void of race curse theories, had been widely accepted. One of these biblical theories was the claim that Genesis teaches that two types of men were originally created; Adam and Eve, the superior race line, and the beasts of the earth, the inferior black race line.62,63 Few people, though, accepted this idea.

Relatively few scientific studies exist which directly deal with Darwinism and Nazismand many evolutionists avoid the subject because evolution is inescapably selectionist. One of the best reviews of Darwinism and Nazism documents clearly that Nazism felt confident that their programs of extermination was firmly based on evolution science.64 Recently, a number of popular articles have covered this topic in a surprisingly candid and honest way.65 The source of the worst of Nazism was in Darwinism and we must first understand history to prevent its repeat. Paraphrasing the words of Hitler, those who ignore the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it.66 Admittedly, some persons who did not accept evolution espoused non-evolution theories which accommodated or even espoused racism. Nonetheless, these persons were few and the theories that were developed seem to be mostly in response to preconceived ideas or to justify existing social systems.

From our modern perspective, many persons have concluded that World War II and its results ensued from the ideology of an evil madman and his equally evil administration. Hitler, though, did not see himself as evil, but as humanitys benefactor. He felt that many years hence, the world would be extremely grateful to him and his programs which lifted the human race to genetically higher levels of evolution by stopping race pollution by preventing mixed marriages with inferior races.

Hitlers efforts to put members of these inferior races in concentration camps was not so much an effort to punish but, as his apologists repeatedly stated, was a protective safeguard similar to quarantining sick people to prevent contamination of the rest of the community. In Haass words, the Nazis believed that killing Jews and others was in fact a scientific and rational way of serving an objectively greater good.68 Or, as Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, adds, such a struggle, legitimized by the latest scientific views, justifies the racists conceptions of superior and inferior people and nations and validated the conflict between them.69 Many in Germany recognized the harm of Darwinism, and Nordenskild claimed the Prussian Minister of Education, even for a time in 1875 banned, its teaching:

An interesting question is, would the Nazi holocaust have occurred if this ban had remained in effect? Haeckel was at the center of this fight and garnered much support from:

A biologist writing the above today would certainly drop as they deserve because Haeckel is today acknowledged as an unscrupulous forger who played no small role in the horrible events that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s.

The well documented influence of Darwinism on the holocaust has been greatly downplayed by the mass media. Current writers often gloss over, totally ignore, or even distort the close connection between Darwinism and the Nazi race theory and the policies it produced, but as Stein admonishes:

He adds that there is also little doubt that this contemporary self-protecting attitude is based on a:

Darwin was not just responding to his culture as often alleged. In Hulls words we have all heard, time and time again, that the reason Darwins theory was so sexist, and racist is that Darwins society exhibited these same characteristics. Hull answers this change by noting that Darwin was not so callow that he simply read the characteristics of his society into nature.72

Nazism is often used as a warning example of the danger of religious zeal, yet only occasionally is the key role of the eugenics of Francis Galton, based on the theory of natural selection espoused by his cousin, Charles Darwin, mentioned. Eugenics is still alive in the world today. As late as 1955, a Canadian professor of zoology, notes that possibly the most significant fact is that he [Darwin] finally freed humanity from a great measure of church proscription and won his fellow men a freedom of thought that had been unknown for centuries. 73 He then argues that reducing the churches influence in society allowed the discovery of, not only the means of evolution, but the knowledge that man had the means and that we can either direct evolution or let it take place on its own or, worse, stop it by counteracting the forces which propel it, causing devolution.

Rowan argued that man has, tragically, chosen the latter selection is still as vital to human progress as it has ever been. The great Darwinian principle remains. Then he added, When man acquired intellect, he started on an entirely new path without precedent in the animal world, the course of which now depends, not on further physical changes, but on intellectual and equally intellectual selection.74 Unfortunately, he concludes, humans are saving the intellectually inferior and have failed to order their affairs according to the laws of biology.74 This discussion, although tactful, is clear: those whom evolutionists judge as less fit need to be eliminated, or at the least our efforts in saving them, should be limited and we should let nature do its work. Not to do so will result in the eventual doom of the human race.

Firmly convinced that Darwinian evolution was true, Hitler saw himself as the modern saviour of mankind. Society, he felt, would some day regard him as a great scientific socialist, the benefactor of all humankind. By breeding a superior race, the world would look upon him as the man who pulled humanity up to a higher level of evolutionary development. If Darwinism is true, Hitler was our saviour and we have crucified him. As a result, the human race will grievously suffer. If Darwinism is not true, what Hitler attempted to do must be ranked with the most heinous crimes of history and Darwin as the father of one of the most destructive philosophies of history. An assessment by Youngson concluded that the application of Darwinism to society, called eugenics, produced one of the most tragic scientific blunders of all time:

I wish to thank Wayne Frair, Ph.D., John Woodmorappe, M.A. and Paul Humber, M.A. for their insight and comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Oil industry given Darwinism lesson on adapting to survive in North Sea – Energy Voice

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The North Sea oil industry has been given a lesson on Charles Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection.

Executives, geologists, operators, investors and developers were schooled on the subject at the Oil and Gas Authoritys Technology Forum in Aberdeen.

The booked out event drew more than 180 people, who were told that technology was critical to unlocking every last drop of oil held in the UK continental shelf (UKCS).

It comes ahead of the November deadline for the 30th licensing round, focussed on mature areas of the UKCS some of which were last offered for licensing more than 40 years ago.

The November deadline is expected to bring about the most significant offshore round in recent decades.

And Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) operations director Gunther Newcombe said adapting technology to fit the remaining North Sea resources would be seen as a major factor in who is awarded what acreage.

He set the scene to the plenary session, when he said: Do we have a lot of potential remaining in the UKCS still remaining? Absolutely yes.

Another good backdrop to this is that production is up, hopefully 1.7million barrels of oil equivalent per day by the end of this year and also production efficiency is up to 73%.

Weve got 14 or so new developments coming on stream this year so its quite a vibrant UKCS here that we have in the 30th round.

Theres still plenty of yet-tofind- potential out there.

And technology will be one of the key drivers to unlocking that potential.

One of the things that the OGA wants to do is really drive technology into, not just exploration, but right through development and into production. And we will certainly be looking more and more at companies to engage with technology and apply and adapt technology in the UKCS.

The 30th round has more than 800 blocks on offer , equating to roughly six times the size of Wales.

In that space there is 140 discoveries on offer with around 2.3billion barrels of resource discovered in those areas.

And Newcombe said the OGA expects technology to be included in the applications for the round.

He said: Part of the marking system for the licensing round will be about what technology you are going to offer, adapt and deploy.

Seismic technology and imaging of the subsurface are obviously critical to reducing risk. Trying to get that well cost down is also incredible important.

Geosteering is critically important. We are seen a lot of development in the Southern North Sea in that area in particular.

And also adapting other technologies in the area of wells.

So its about getting the cost in the right place and seeing your reservoirs and seeing your tracks.

He added: You need to tie back these things obviously so if youve got infrastructure there efficient tiebacks is important, looking at in a different way.

For example hot taps to having different types of pipeline like spool pipelines for instance to try and get some of these tiebacks hooked up.

Many of the discoveries are in the standalone environment so we need to look at in a different way rather than having these gold plated structures. Are there smaller things that we could use and adapt for smaller pools? Again, being versatile and being to able to adapt technology to the resource is really important.

More than 35 exhibitors from SMEs to major service providers including PGS, Baker Hughes, a GE company, Amplus and Western Geco, showcased at the event in Aberdeen yesterday.

Chris Pearson, OGTC Small Pools Solution Centre Manager, added: This is another first for the OGA and OGTC. We are working collaboratively with an innovative and supportive group of companies to make the license round a success.

The showcase event highlighted how technology solutions can significantly lower the entire life-cycle cost for UKCS field developments. We can be both incremental and disruptive in our approach to how we deploy the solutions. This approach can make this stable and mature basin an attractive investment opportunity.

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‘Radical’ new biography of Darwin is unreliable and inaccurate – New Scientist

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Charles Darwin wrote many letters during his voyage of discovery on HMS Beagle

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

By John van Wyhe

Charles Darwin: Victorian mythmaker, by A. N. Wilson, John Murray

A. N. Wilson is a prolific author who has written more than 45 books, including many biographies of subjects ranging from Queen Victoria to Hitler. His latest, a biography of Charles Darwin, begins with the startling sentence: Darwin was wrong. Wilson argues that Darwin offered to the emergent Victorian middle classes a consolation myth there was something inexorable, natural about their superiority to the working class.

This book provides an appallingly inaccurate rendition of Darwins theory and its scientific context. According to Wilson, Darwin told his contemporaries that their land-grabs in Africa, their hunger for stock-market wealth in the face of widespread urban poverty, their rigid class system and their everlasting wars were not things to be ashamed of, but actually part of the processes of nature. The theory is not science, Wilson concludes, just another offering in a bazaar of ersatz religions.

Wilson maintains that Darwins theory is wrong and not the basis of current knowledge. He believes Darwinism was about extreme gradualism over geological time. But Darwinian gradualism simply means that one animal cannot all of a sudden give birth to a completely different species. The current view of life on Earth is precisely one of changing lineages branching from common ancestors. This, and not the speed of change, is the core of Darwins theory.

The other component of Darwinism, according to Wilson, is that evolutionary progress happens by conflict. Here is the common misunderstanding that the de facto struggle that occurs because some animals live and some die means conscious fighting. And Darwins theory is not about progress, it is about change.

Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection, as any competent reference work describes, is about the differential survival of individual living things based on tiny differences between them. This differential survival (or selection) in effect filters living things to become adapted to a changing world. DNA evidence indicates that all living things are related genealogically on a vast ever-branching tree of life. This is Darwinism. Wilson instead erroneously describes variations in species, not individuals, and he mocks a Darwinian scenario in which the short-necked ancestors of todays giraffes were supposedly panting to reach those leaves, but without success. This is not Darwinism, this is Lamarckism.

Wilsons book contains numerous and serious factual errors such as if Darwin were correct, there would be hundreds, thousands of examples of transitional fossils. There are. Darwins first grandchild did not die in childbirth as Wilson states. A fragment of Wallaces letter to Darwin from when Wallace was living in Ternate does not survive. Darwin believed that his own theory made it impossible to believe in the Bible. Not so. The first 50 pages of Darwins evolution notebook are not missing, they were located and published by 1967. (Wilson copied this claim from a conspiracy-laden essay, Darwin, Coleridge, and the Theory of Unconscious Creation, published by Loren Eiseley in 1965, two years before Darwins pages were published.)

Wilson claims Darwin never persuaded the scientific community in Britain during his lifetime that one species could evolve into another. In fact, Darwin was world famous for having done so. There are very, very many more. Footnotes lead to incorrect references and many dates are quite wrong. Its hard to see how any care for either historical or scientific accuracy could result in such a book.

Throughout, Wilson bashes Darwin for supposed arrogance, dishonesty and incompetence and trots out a long line of old anti-Darwin myths: for example, that Darwin stole ideas from Edward Blyth, whom Wilson mistakes for an evolutionist. (This too is borrowed from Eiseley.) Wilson invents and condemns a towering ambition Darwin had to be a universal genius. And eugenics and Nazi race laws are also blamed (incorrectly) on Darwin.

The book claims to be a radical reappraisal of one of the great Victorians, a book which isnt afraid to challenge the Darwinian orthodoxy. The result is one of the most unreliable, inaccurate and tendentious anti-Darwin books of recent times.

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'Radical' new biography of Darwin is unreliable and inaccurate - New Scientist

About the Correction I Received: – HuffPost

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To the person who sent me the correction,

I respect you and your views. I also want to emphasize that I wrote this letter because of my genuine concern for you; I do not mean to degrade or ridicule your message in any way.

Before I continue, I suggest you make friends with a homosexual, an immigrant, a Muslim. I want you to get to know the other side that you claim exists.

It is true that two major parties of different social, fiscal, and political ideals compete in the US government. It is also true that in the past year, our political parties have experienced further polarization. It is true that it created a huge divide in our diverse, multicultural nation.

However, it is also true that the censure of white supremacists, KKK, and Nazis in Charlottesville should not be considered a partisan issue. The fact that both Republicans and Democrats had to shame President Trump into condemning these acts shows that he isnt capable of the most basic moral duties of a nations leader. Moreover, it tells me that his self-proclaimed mission of making America great completely excludes a large portion of not only the current American population, but people who were very much a part of our history. If you truly think that your life is being set aside for the likes of homosexuals, immigrants, and Muslims because of your race and your American name, you have not seen what real oppression looks like. I want you to look in our star-spangled history and see liberty, freedom, and global excellence. I want you then to see under the surface(the side Trump doesnt want you to see), the side of history bloodied with slavery, imperialism, Jim Crowe, social darwinism, lynchings, sexism, anti-semitism, and so on. If our president somehow convinced you that people like me are plotting against you, I regretfully say that you have been duped by his hate tactics.

I speak as an immigrant and as a woman of color. I want America to be great too. We all are right there with you. Still, I will stand by my earlier statement that Donald Trump does not want America to be great; he wants the Trump Corporation and its allies to get tax breaks. So yes, I will continue to say that Trump is one of the biggest threats to our nation.

If you want to see America become great again, please dont believe trolls who target former President Obamas religion and private life based on his race(yes, hes really a christian). Please dont make assumptions based on my status in this country. Please stop dehumanizing our struggles. Please understand that ignorance and hate hurt the core values of this nation.

If we all want America to be great, there is no political party, no class, no sexuality, no race.

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About the Correction I Received: - HuffPost

The Multiverse Is Science’s Assisted Suicide – Discovery Institute

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In 2015,Wiredtold us that physicistswere desperate to be wrongabout the Higgs boson. They yearned to push the Standard (Big Bang) Model of the universe in new directions. But the unmindful particle acted just like the model said it would act, obeyed every theorized rule.

In the silence that followed, asking for evidence for these physicists proposed infinity of universes (the multiverse) felt like assaulting a victims feelings. At theGuardian,Stuart Clark laterinformed usthat Brexit and Trump are nothing compared to the alternate universes some astronomers are contemplating. Really? Regional political upsets vie with a multiverse?

Astronomers, Clark tells us, pin their hopes on the Cold Spot, a cool patch of space from the early universe: We cant entirely rule out that the Spot is caused by an unlikely fluctuation explained by the standard theory. But if that isnt the answer, then there are more exotic explanations. Indeed. There are more exotic explanations for almost anything.

Eugene LiminsistedatThe Conversationin 2015 that parallel universes are science: Whether we will ever be able to prove their existence is hard to predict. But given the massive implications of such afindingit should definitely be worth the search. Very well, but some people research ghosts on the same basis. What makes the multiverse quest science but the ghost hunt anti-science, once evidence no longer matters as much as it used to?

Cosmologists sense the problem and strive to rescue their multiverse from the nagging demands for evidence. Pop science media offer a window into major trends.

One is cosmic Darwinism. Lee Smolin has advocateda cosmic versionof Darwinian natural selection in which the most common universes will be those most suitable for producing black holes, as our universe does. Is Darwinism the cause? In The Logic and Beauty of Cosmological Natural Selection (Scientific American,2014), Lawrence Rifkinadmittedthat the main problem with the hypothesis is lack of direct evidence:

But keep in mind that from a direct evidence perspective, cosmological natural selection is no worse off at this point than proposed scientific alternatives. There is no direct evidence that universes are created by quantum fluctuations in a quantum vacuum, that we live in a multiverse, that there is a theory of everything, or that string theory, cyclic universes or- brane cosmology even exist.

Then why should we not set all such speculations aside? There is no obvious need for hurry.

Darwinism, as in natural selection acting on random mutations, is a theory developed by Darwin and his followers to account for complex, specified information in life forms on this planet. Whether it iscorrect or notwhen used as intended, if it is applied to an undetected multiverse, it becomes philosophy (metaphysics).

An anecdote suffices. As Michael Egnor has observed here, philosopher Joseph P. Carter told us in theNew York Timesthat the universedoes not careabout purpose. Evolutionary psychologist Michael E. Price disputes that view atPsychology Today,insisting that in a multiverse natural selection can create purpose. His position is denied by most of natural selections advocates in biology. But, riffing on Smolin, Price explains that life is more likely than black holes (or anything else) to be a mechanism of universe replication. If this kind of ungrounded assertion is the best naturalism can do for us now, why do we encourage it?

Physicist Ethan SiegelcounselsatForbesthat we must not doubt the Multiverses existence without considering the very good, scientific reasons that motivate it. But very good scientific reasons are precisely what we lack, unless the term scientific reasons now includes immunity toexperimental and observational tests.Similarly, physicist Brian Coxtold usin 2016 that the idea of multiverses is not too big a leap from cosmic inflation. But he is dealing with leaps of the imagination, not of physics discoveries.

Earlier this year, skeptical mathematicianPeter Woitfretted withscience writerJohn HorganatScientific American,The problem with such things as string-theory multiverse theories is that the multiverse did it is not just untestable, but an excuse for failure. Commenting elsewhere on Zeeya MeralisA Big Bang in a Little Room(2017),he notedthat she contemplates the possibility that string theory and inflation may be conspiring against us in such a way that we may never find evidence for them, and just have to trust in them as an act of faith. He woulddescribe it asa scientifically worthless idea.

With a clash of world views, where to begin?Woitand Horgan assume that post-modern science is a quest to understand reality, just as traditional science has been. It is not.

For many people today, post-modern science is more of a quest to expressan identity asbelieverin science,irrespective of evidence. Cosmologist Paul Steinhardtgot a sense of thisin2014,when he reported that some proponents of early rapid cosmic inflation already insist that the theory is equally valid whether or not gravitational waves are detected. It fulfilled their needs. In 2017, cosmologist George Ellis, long a foe ofpost-modern cosmology,summed it up: Scientific theories have since the seventeenth century been held tight by an experimental leash. In the last twenty years or so, both string theory and theories of the multiverse have slipped the leash.

We have so much more data now. But it provides no evidence for a multiverse. Thats nothing unusual historically (thinkphlogistonandetherfor great ideas that did not work). We used to just adjust. But today, increasing numbers of science-minded people demand a post-modern science that adapts to their needs. After all, we evolved to survive and pass on our genes, not to understand reality.

As a result, many cosmologists and science writers speak as if the multiverse merely awaits routine administrative clearance to morph into textbook science, absent evidence. Characteristically, they see themselves as fighting aconservative(fuddy-duddy) establishment whichclings toa role for mere evidence.

Fine tuningof our planet and our universe for life sets limits onmerebelief by challenging us to calculate probabilities. The multiverse is deeply attractive by comparison because it dissipates evidence. Itconjures unimaginablyinfinite, unproven, and incalculable probabilities. AsNew Scientistputs it,We merely inhabit one out of the infinite selection. That feels so right just now.

The multiverse has only ever existed, so far as we know, in the mind of man. Its most promising research programs,stringtheoryandearly rapid cosmic inflation theory,have bounced along on enthusiasm alone, prompting ever more arcane speculations for which there may never be any possibility of evidence.

But like so many other empty ideas, the multiverse has consequences. If we accept it, we abandon the view that science deals with the observed facts of nature. We adopt the view that it tells us what we want to believe about ourselves. In other words, the multiverse is sciences assisted suicide.

Image: Infinity Room, by Helsinki Art Museum, The Broad [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Early Review of AN Wilson’s Anti-Darwin Biography Could Have Been Predicted – Discovery Institute

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We havent yet seen a copy of A.N. Wilsons forthcoming anti-Darwin book, which isnt out in the United States until December 12. See David Klinghoffers post, Ouch: A Slashing New Anti-Darwin Biography from Darwins Own Publisher. However, if all you knew was that the biographer and literary critic has written a book titled Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker, and a preview op-ed titled Its time Charles Darwin was exposed for the fraud he was, the response would be predictable.

The book could be good, or it could be bad. Were agnostic. But Darwinists defend their man ferociously, and the offense is worse coming not from a creationist but someone who, given class loyalties, ought to be on their side. A creationist they would simply ignore. Its the class treachery angle that really stings them.

Thus we have an early review for New Scientist, Radical new biography of Darwin is unreliable and inaccurate, by historian of science John van Wyhe who edits the website Darwin Online.

Excerpts from the review:

This book provides an appallingly inaccurate rendition of Darwins theory and its scientific context. According to Wilson, Darwin told his contemporaries that their land-grabs in Africa, their hunger for stock-market wealth in the face of widespread urban poverty, their rigid class system and their everlasting wars were not things to be ashamed of, but actually part of the processes of nature. The theory is not science, Wilson concludes, just another offering in a bazaar of ersatz religions.

Wilsons book contains numerous and serious factual errors such as if Darwin were correct, there would be hundreds, thousands of examples of transitional fossils. There are. Darwins first grandchild did not die in childbirth as Wilson states. A fragment of Wallaces letter to Darwin from when Wallace was living in Ternate does not survive. Darwin believed that his own theory made it impossible to believe in the Bible. Not so. The first 50 pages of Darwins evolution notebook are not missing, they were located and published by 1967. (Wilson copied this claim from a conspiracy-laden essay, Darwin, Coleridge, and the Theory of Unconscious Creation, published by Loren Eiseley in 1965, two years before Darwins pages were published.)

Throughout, Wilson bashes Darwin for supposed arrogance, dishonesty and incompetence and trots out a long line of old anti-Darwin myths: for example, that Darwin stole ideas fromEdward Blyth, whom Wilson mistakes for an evolutionist. (This too is borrowed from Eiseley.) Wilson invents and condemns a towering ambition Darwin had to be a universal genius. And eugenics and Nazi race laws are also blamed (incorrectly) on Darwin.

Wilsons competence or incompetence on Darwin remains to be seen with our own eyes.

Having said that, John van Wyhe is a Darwinian partisan so some of what he says is surely to be anticipated. His claims of thousands of transitional fossils supporting Darwins theory (contra Wilson) and that Darwins theory does not rely upon slow, gradual change are simply incorrect, as Jonathan Wells and Stephen Meyer have thoroughly explained. The Cambrian explosion really is a problem for Darwinism.

The reviewer is too quick to dismiss the influence of Darwinian theory on Nazi ideology (see Richard Weikarts books) and its social implications (see John Wests Darwin Day in America). Van Wyhe is also wrong to criticize Wilson for claiming that Darwins theory made it impossible to believe in the Bible. In his Autobiography,Darwin states his emerging belief in the unreliability of Bible and his rejection of design in nature clearly enough.

Yet van Wyhes criticisms of some factual errors, if accurate, make Wilsons book problematic. Some of the issues attributed to the book are more than just Darwinian talking points, e.g., incorrect dates, bad references, and other basic errors of fact which are, again, if correct, serious matters.

We noticed that, contrary to what Wilson wrote in the previously referenced newspaper article, Cuvier was not an evolutionist. And van Wyhe is correct in describing the giraffe stretching his neck as the iconic illustration of classic Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics, not Darwinism, as he says Wilson suggests.

Also, it is true that the early notebooks of Darwin were discovered in the mid 1960s and published in 1965. They are not missing, as van Wyhe claims Wilson asserts.

The key is exactly what does Wilson say and how does he say it. We know well by now to be cautious of Darwins defenders. They are often cagey and misleading. So at this point, who knows?

Photo credit: Patche99z (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Early Review of AN Wilson's Anti-Darwin Biography Could Have Been Predicted - Discovery Institute

Eugenics – RationalWiki

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We must, if we are to be consistent, and if we're to have a real pedigree herd, mate the best of our men with the best of our women as often as possible, and the inferior men with the inferior women as seldom as possible, and bring up only the offspring of the best.

Eugenics is the purported study of applying the principles of natural selection and selective breeding through altering human reproduction with the goal of changing the relative frequency of traits in a human population. It was the most dangerous form of biological determinism in modern history.

Eugenics was first developed in the 19th century, a misguided outgrowth of an intellectual milieu influenced by the popularity of early evolutionary theory and which included a spate of works on genetic disorders (many of which are incurable horrors), "scientific racism" and the Social Darwinism of the likes of Herbert Spencer. The term "eugenics" was coined by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, in his 1883 book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. Galton was responsible for many of the early works of eugenics, including attempts to connect genetics with a most prized trait known as intelligence.[1] In order to collect and analyze the data, Galton more or less created the field of statistics, and the major advances in this field that weren't from Galton were from his protege (and biographer) Karl Pearson.

In the United States, it was the biologist Charles Davenport who laid the groundwork for the establishment of eugenics programs.[2] Eugenics gained traction as it was championed in the nascent Progressive Era of the late 19th century into the early 20th century, finding prominent political proponents in presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. However, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Winston Churchill were also fans of eugenics.[3][4][5]

Some eugenics-based ideas were implemented both in the United States and in Europe. In the U.S., this strongly influenced immigration policy, as in the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which showed a preference for Northern Europeans, as they were believed to be somehow superior to Asians and South and Eastern Europeans. It was heavily influenced by racist theorists such as Madison Grant, who promoted immigration reform and forced sterilization.

The first U.S. state to implement eugenics was Indiana, in 1907, in which those housed in penal and mental institutions could be forcibly sterilized.[6] The first European country to implement forced sterilization was Denmark, in 1929.[7]California was the third U.S. state to implement eugenics, in 1909. California would go on to become responsible for a third of all of the forced sterilizations conducted in the United States (~20,000 out of ~60,000).

North Carolina had a eugenics policy from 1929 through 1977. In 2012 a gubernatorial committee proposed a settlement of USD$50,000 to each of the remaining living survivors victims of this policy.[8]

The Supreme Court gave legal backing to forced sterilization using eugenic ideas in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, a eugenics proponent, wrote in the decision, "Three generations of imbeciles is enough."[9] The Buck v. Bell decision encouraged more states to enact eugenics legislation. 23 states had such legislation prior to Buck v. Bell and 32 after. 18 states never had eugenics legislation.[10]

Israel, of all fucking places, is not immune from this either. Ethiopian Jews were injected with birth control initiatives intended to (at least temporarily) stop them from breeding. How widespread this was is still under investigation.[11]

One way eugenics was popularized was through "Better Baby" contests. These contests were sponsored by hospitals to determine the most "fit" baby, who all happened to be WASPs, naturally. This was spun off into "Fitter Family" contests, which would be held at state fairs, carnivals, and churches to allow entire families to compete.[12][13]

Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he approved of the eugenics policy going on in America at the time, to the point where one could say he was inspired by the idea. When he came to power, Nazi Germany saw the most sweeping application of a eugenics program, which is unsurprising, given the Nazis' maniacal obsession with racial purity, or "racial hygiene" as they called it. The "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" was implemented within half a year of his rise to power, and resulted in the forced sterilization of up to 400,000 people that were diagnosed with hereditary mental or physical disabilities.[14]

After the outbreak of the war, this policy was carried to another extreme: people bearing hereditary defects were designated as "unfit to live," and the eugenics program moved from sterilization to extermination. Within the scope of "Action T4," an estimated 200,000 children and adults were systematically killed in order to avoid having to bear the costs of institutional care.[15] The groups targeted by action T4 were the incurably ill, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught, and elderly people.[16] Achieving racial purity through eugenics on a grand scale can also be seen as an important motivation behind the Holocaust, which saw the murder of millions of "undesirables," such as Jews, gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, and the disabled.

Some Christian churches, particularly the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Episcopalians, embraced the eugenics movement. The Methodist Church would host Fitter Family contests and Methodist Bishops endorsed one of the first eugenics books circulated to the US churches. The professor of Christian ethics and founder of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, Rev. Harry F. War, writing in Eugenics, the magazine of the American Eugenic Society, said eugenics and Christianity were both compatible because both pursued the challenge of removing the causes that produce the weak.[13]

However, other Christian churches were strongly opposed to eugenics, particularly the Catholic Church and conservative Protestants. Catholics disliked eugenic laws that allowed for sterilization; Protestants viewed eugenics as a threat to a reliance on God to cure social ills.[17]

Because of eugenics' association with Nazi Germany, a common bullshitting tactic is to declare some historical figure that endorsed eugenics a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer (see, e.g., Margaret Sanger). This is ahistorical as not every eugenics proponent supported the measures of Nazi Germany (or were even around to see it). Indeed, if this were the case, that would make Teddy and Silent Cal Nazis as well.

Galton divided eugenic practice into "positive" and "negative eugenics." The positive variety consisted of political and economic incentives (such as tax breaks and sex education) for the "fit" to reproduce and the negative type consisted of disincentives such as birth control or forced sterilization. "Dysgenics" refers to the deterioration of the human stock -- many eugenicists concentrated on "improvement" of the human race by reversing alleged dysgenic forces. There is also a split between "liberal eugenics" and "authoritarian eugenics."[18] Liberal eugenics promotes consensual eugenic practice while authoritarian eugenics promotes state-mandated and enforced programs. Proponents personally emphasized different aspects of eugenics, positive, negative, dysgenic forces, etc. Thus, they often disagreed on matters of policy, much less were they all Nazis.

Whilst eugenics is based, in theory, in the perfectly valid science of genetics and the practice of animal husbandry, historically its application has always been far from scientific. Whereas it is (relatively) easy, for example, to breed cattle for higher milk yield, defining what is meant by a "better" human being is a very difficult question. At this point eugenics stops being scientific and starts being normative and political, and a rather nasty type of politics at that. To say nothing of the fact that there is very little room for experimentation. Eugenics drew heavily from various racist and racialist tracts of the period.

The most obvious flaw with application of eugenics is that its proponents have tended to conflate phenotypical (read: superficial) traits with genotypical traits. Any species that looks fit on the outside may carry recessive traits that don't exhibit themselves but will be passed on and vice versa. The development of the field of epigenetics, i.e. heritable environmental factors in genetic expression that occur without change to underlying DNA structures, poses further problems for eugenics.

There is no reason to believe that a selective breeding plan to encourage certain physical traits in humans could not achieve the same results that plant and animal breeders have achieved for centuries (who were without specific knowledge of the genes they were selecting in and out), but the odds are that the purebred humans with distinguishing features would be less healthy than the offspring of unconstrained mating would be, for the same reason that kennel-club purebred dogs are often less healthy than mutts. This concept of "purity" is flawed in that it creates many of the same problems as inbreeding a loss of biodiversity can in fact lead to increased susceptibility to a common concentrated weakness. A classic example of concentration is haemophilia, which became the plague of the European royal families. (Ironically, a common element in eugenicist works was that "inferior races" would produce an overall correlation with genetic disorders.) Furthermore, changes in the environment can cause traits that were once advantageous to become liabilities virtually overnight. An example of this would be deer populations. For millions of years, natural selection favored those with large antlers as fitter specimens among the males of the species, as they could use those antlers to protect themselves and to fight other males for access to females. However, upon the rise of sport hunting, bucks with large antlers suddenly found themselves targeted specifically for them, as they made great trophies with which to establish the human hunter's prowess. The size of antlers among deer populations plunged down fast.

The extreme reductionism of eugenics often crossed into what is now comical territory. Nearly every social behavior, including things such as "pauperism" and the vaguely defined "feeble-mindedness," could be traced back to a single genetic disorder according to eugenicists, while we now know that the bulk of the 19th century disorders were the result of poor sanitation, nutrition, and healthcare.[19] Many works of eugenics recall the similar trend evident in phrenology (indeed, there was some overlap between eugenics and phrenology).[20]

While eugenics gained widespread support in the early 20th century (even within the scientific community) of a number of nations, there was also strong opposition during this period.[21] The biologist Raymond Pearl, for example, once a supporter of the movement, turned against it in the late 1920s.[22] The geneticist Lancelot Hogben argued that eugenics relied on a false dichotomy of "nature vs. nurture" and that it infected science with political value judgments;[23] Hogben was asked by William Beveridge (the then-director of the London School of Economics) to create a "Chair of Social Biology" department on campus, gave him the finger and prevented any of his eugenic ideas from being taken seriously in the formation of the British welfare state.[24]Clarence Darrow famously denounced it as a "cult."[25] The Carnegie Institute, which initially funded the Eugenics Record Office, withdrew its funding after a review of its research, leading to its closing in 1939 (before the Holocaust even became public record).[26]

The alt-right has attempted to rehabilitate eugenics. Their preferred presidential candidate Donald Trump is, according to his biographer, a big believer in it. [27]8chan founder Frederick "Hotwheels" Brennan is another noteworthy eugenics supporter, having written an article for Trump-supporting blog The Daily Stormer advocating in its favor. Other recent advocates for eugenics include Anders Behring Breivik and the publication Radix Journal (which also supports abortion for eugenic reasons rather than choice-related ones).

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Untold history: How Rufus von KleinSmid supported the eugenics movement at USC – Daily Trojan Online

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The Von KleinSmid Center for International Relations stands tall with its distinct globed tower high above campus. Under the structures grand arches, more than 100 international flags drape over its walkways, representing the home countries of international students at the University.

The image of the building emblematic of the University itself is one of diversity and inclusion, but the Von KleinSmid Center is named after a president who carries a highly acclaimed, yet controversial legacy regarding just that. During his term as a University administrator, Von KleinSmid involved himself in the field of eugenics, a growing social science movement popularized in the early 20th century that encouraged reproduction of desirable traits, generally among whites, while discouraging reproduction in people with negative traits, particularly the poor, ethnic minorities and those deemed intellectually inferior.

Von KleinSmid accomplished much that is familiar to the Trojan legacy, such as creating significant scholarship programs, expanding campus land and increasing the Universitys population.

His presidency, which spanned from 1921 to 1947, occurred during a period of great political, social and technological change throughout the Great Depression and World War II.

When the eugenics movement began taking root in the 1920s, USC was not exempt from the elite educational institutions that supported it.

[The field] was mainstream enough to be embraced by a wide array of scientists and experts and reformers who saw it as a way to solve social problems, like immigration and industrialization, that was shaping modern America, said Alexandra Stern, a professor at the University of Michigan whose research specializes in the history of eugenics, society and justice.

Von KleinSmids scholarship went hand-in-hand with those of other senior-level administrators from schools like the California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, UC Berkeley and UCLA, according to Stern. Von KleinSmid published Eugenics and the State, and the publication was presented to the Cincinnati Academy of Medicine in 1913 eight years before the start of his term as USCs president. It called for states to preserve their society through segregation of inferior groups and forced sterilization.

A third method of handling the problem is suggested, namely, sterilization, Von KleinSmid wrote. We must all agree that those who, in the nature of the case, can do little else than pass on to their offsprings the defects which make themselves burdens to society, have no ethical right to parenthood.

Von KleinSmid was a proponent of sterilization as an aspect of the eugenics movement since its inception.

Clearly, [Von KleinSmid] was [involved] since the emergence of the eugenics movement, specifically with the push for sterilization, Stern said.

While serving as president, Von KleinSmid, alongside other USC administrators and professors, donated to or were members of regional and national eugenic groups. These groups invested in research and education to influence sterilization policies in California, since the states first law which allowed sterilization in 1909.

Its safe to say that USC leaders played an active role in the eugenics movement, Stern said of the period during Von KleinSmids presidency.

Stern also acknowledged that eugenics was especially popular among upper intellectual circles, as it transitioned from a fringe scientific movement to a mainstream field.

During his presidency, Von KleinSmid co-founded the Human Betterment Foundation in 1928, a Pasadena-based think thank that promoted compulsory sterilization internationally as a mechanism for improving civilization. According to Kirsten Spicer in A Nation of Imbeciles, a 2015 paper published in the Chapman Historical Review, members of the HBF influenced Nazi Germanys eugenics-based ideology through connections with top German intellectuals and officials.

However, Von KleinSmids ties to the HBF were not the only USC-related connection to eugenics. According to documents from the Human Betterment Foundation, two USC sociology professors, Emory Bogardus and Kingsley Davis, were registered members, while other staff members and administrators were linked to the American Eugenics Society, a national eugenics group.

According to Stern, some sociology and social work students at USC were also trained with a eugenics-inspired framework in their curriculum, which was popularized in the 1920s to 1940s as the national movement grew.

USC trained people in social work programs to conduct studies thatoperated in the eugenics framework with inferior and superior demographics, Stern said. She also said the faculty who supported this curriculum were interested in social issues of the time, like immigration and the creation of a healthier, fitter society.

When asked for comment, USC Provost Michael Quick responded by emphasizing the Universitys need to continually press on toward a more inclusive environment and to engage in thoughtful discussion on these issues.

However, the movement and the HBFs popularity among intellectuals declined in the 1930s with increased opposition to Germanys racist and religious policies, according to Spicer.

Still president during this tumultuous, historical time, Von KleinSmid denounced Germanys policies upon returning from a trip to Europe.

The edicts against the Jews in Germany are as terrible as they can be, Von KleinSmid said in a memo sent from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. This non-Aryan persecution affects even the higher institutions of learning and the program is rigorous almost beyond expression. The memo noted that his statement was surprising, due to the HBFs ties with German officials.

However, the eugenicist agenda lingered until 1979, when California repealed its sterilization law. From 1909 until 1979, California performed approximately 20,000 forced sterilizations on its citizens. Madrigal v. Quilligan, a controversial lawsuit, arose out of 10 sterilizations of Latina women at the Los Angeles County/University of Southern California Hospital in the early 1970s.

Although administrative officials did not play a part in the doctoral decisions that unwillfully sterilized the Latina women represented, these events harken back to the ideologies of the time. The Madrigal case ruled in favor of the doctors at the hospital.

Von KleinSmids contributions to the Universitys history is multifaceted and complex: It is one full of accomplishments, but also of controversial ideologies that conflict with USCs present message of diversity and inclusion.

Under Von KleinSmid, there was a lot of growth, which included the establishment of additional professional schools and colleges and the expansion of the student body and the physical campus that is USC today, said Claude Zachary, the University Archivist.

According to documents from the University archives, during Von KleinSmids administration, USC expanded from eight colleges to 26, with the creation of a school for international relations and development of the first cinematic arts school in the U.S.

The University became nationally accredited and expanded its international outreach, with international students comprising 10 percent of the student body. Von KleinSmid also developed a scholarship program for foreign students who were to return to their homes after their studies and implement their skills to better their countries.

Despite his accomplishments as an internationalist, there was historical evidence of Von KleinSmids hostility toward Japanese Americans. In a book titled From Concentration Camp to Campus: Japanese American Students and World War II, Von KleinSmid was described as openly hostile to Japanese American students and denied their requested transcripts in the aftermath of the war.

In 1946, Von KleinSmid stepped down as president to become chancellor of USC, a role that he would take on until his death in 1955. Two decades later, the Von KleinSmid Center for International and Public Affairs was constructed and dedicated to the former president.

Von KleinSmid was a prominent intellectual figure who held a variety of viewpoints across his lifetime. Von KleinSmids leadership helped shape USCs present-day image through various educational and structural developments, and while he is remembered as an internationalist and an influential educator, his history as a eugenicist and a co-founder of the Human Betterment Foundation still exists to reflect contentious ideologies.

With every generation, there is a need to recommit to the ideals of what it means to live in a democracy, what it means to enact equality and what it means to be an engaged citizen, Quick said in an email to the Daily Trojan. Such actions bring us a little closer to the ideals we all envision, as the standards for what is acceptable and what is no longer tolerable evolve USC must grapple with these issues as well, but we should do so in a way that all universities should with an examination of the facts, with thoughtful reflection and with rigorous debate. And, most importantly, with a commitment to fundamental values we stand against hate and racism; we stand for inclusion, respect and the appreciation of differences.

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Untold history: How Rufus von KleinSmid supported the eugenics movement at USC - Daily Trojan Online

The disturbing, eugenics-like reality unfolding in Iceland – Quartz

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Recently, a CBS news crew traveled to Iceland, producing a report titled Inside the country where Down syndrome is disappearing. As much as it sounds like it, the headline is not clickbait or hyperbole: In Iceland, nearly every women who undergoes prenatal testing and whose fetus receives a diagnosis of Down syndrome decides to end her pregnancy. Each year, according to their sources, only a child or two is born with Down syndrome in Iceland.

Up to 85% of pregnant women in Iceland choose to take prenatal testing. The specific test in question, which CBS calls the combination test, takes into account ultrasound images, a blood draw, and a mothers age to determine the likelihood that a fetus has Down syndrome. (Older mothers are more likely to have babies with Down syndrome because chromosomal errors are more likely as women age.)

In essence, pregnant women in Icelandand presumably their partnersare saying that life with disability is not worth living. It is one thing to decide that a child who will never walk, talk, feed herself, or engage with caregivers may not have a good quality of life. But children with Down syndrome do not fit this description. If a woman doesnt want to have a child with Down syndrome, their bar for what qualifies as a life worth living is set quite high. Are babies who are born deaf destined to lead a worthwhile life? What about babies with cleft palates, which can be corrected but leave a visible scar?

Heres the interesting thing: Down syndrome, or Trisomy 21 as it is also called, is actually one of the less severe chromosomal conditions. Unlike many other trisomies (genetic conditions in which a person has three copies of a chromosome instead of the standard two), its compatible with life.

People with Down syndrome have an extra copy of their 21st chromosome, which causes intellectual delays and readily identifiable facial features such as almond-shaped eyes. But the way that Down syndrome expresses itself in an individual can be highly variable. About half of babies born with Down syndrome have heart defects that require surgical correction. Some children with Down syndrome grow up to be adults who go to college and get married; others never live independently.

Can she live a full life without without ever solving a quadratic equation? Without reading Dostoyevsky? Im pretty sure she can.I have interviewed Amy Julia Becker many times over the years. Becker wrote a book about her daughter, Penny, who has Down syndrome. In A Good and Perfect Gift, Becker, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Princeton, chronicles her shift in thinking about intelligence. Pre-Penny, she had assumed that being smart is a prerequisite for being happy and fulfilled. Post-Penny, she changed her mind. Can she live a full life without without ever solving a quadratic equation? Without reading Dostoyevsky? Im pretty sure she can. Can I live a full life without learning to cherish and welcome those in this world who are different from me? Im pretty sure I cant.

Deciding what sorts of lives are worth living brings us disturbingly close to the bygone era of eugenics, when only the right sorts of people were supposed to procreate.

In 1927, a US Supreme Court decision upheld the right of the state of Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck, whose daughter, Vivian, was deemed to be feeble-minded. Paul Lombardo, a professor of law at Georgia State University who is an expert on eugenics, believes that Vivian was in fact of normal intelligence. Eventuallyand fortunatelyeugenics fell out of favor, and several US states have issued apologies to people who were forcibly sterilized over the years. Yet the bias against people with disabilities is still very much evident.

When I interviewed Lombardo for my book, The Gene Machine: How Genetic Technologies Are Changing the Way We Have KidsAnd the Kids We Have, he noted that theres a long list of physical and mental disabilities that people find discomfiting. At the top of that list? Intellectual disabilities.In other words, Down syndrome and other similar conditions that result in people not being able to pursue a PhD or do quantum physics are often seen as bigger impediments to a life worth living than physical impairments. But is that our choice to make for them?

Deciding that people with Down syndrome dont live worthwhile lives can snowball into a groupthink situation. It will become less and less acceptable to raise a child with Down syndrome, and that will translate into fewer support services available to parents who decide to buck the trend. The lack of support will further encourage women to terminate their pregnancies, leading to even fewer babies born with the condition in the future. If we continue to follow this path, the disappearance of Down syndrome will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And to what end?

You can follow Bonnie on Twitter. Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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The disturbing, eugenics-like reality unfolding in Iceland - Quartz