1. evolvingthoughts
  2. Discovery Institute blames Darwin, not Galton, for eugenics

Discovery Institute blames Darwin, not Galton, for eugenics

By evolvingthoughts on February 11, 2007.

Another stupid piece by DIsco, in which David Klinghofer tries to blame Darwin for eugenics, totally overlooking the fact that the mediate source is animal husbandry, which predates Darwin by several thousand years, and that the immediate source is genetics, not evolution. I think that we should immediately teach the doctrine of signatures (in which natal traits are formed by the parents looking at similar objects, like the "striped and speckled sheep" in Genesis, which were mated before peeled branches) rather than genetics, because of the bad consequences of people misusing that science for prior political aims. After all, if it is due to genetics, it must be false, right? Let's see them play that one out (although I wouldn't put it past them).

Tags
creationism
History
Social evolution

More like this

Creationist genetics
Reading through Good Math, Bad Math, I saw a classic example of creationist foolishness: a fellow who insists that math will vindicate the Bible by proving that π = 3. It reminded me of this old post where a creationist had the thread jumping in her need to prove that the story of Jacob and Laban…
Darwin and the Holocaust - what's the real story?
I won't comment on the execrable link made by that execrable TV show. Some things aren't worth the effort. But those whose minds aren't made up may still have a sneaking suspicion that somehow evolutionary theory was responsible for some part of the Holocaust. After all, that sneaking suspicion is…
The Energizer Bunny of antievolution
I need some β-blockers STAT. I say that not because I'm hypertensive or because I'm having heart palpitations--at least not at the moment. I'm saying it because, after reading the latest brave foray into antievolutionary ignorance by--as much as I hate to admit it--a fellow surgeon named Dr.…
Starbucks gets cozier with the DI
I like Seattle. I grew up near there. But it's got two things that annoy me: Starbucks coffee (OK, but overpriced and a little too pretentious) and the Discovery Institute (unspeakably vile inanity). Unfortunately, the proximity of those two institutions seems to encourage them to ooze into bed…

Perhaps the title should be "Discovery Instute blames Darwin, not Mendel, for eugenics."

Of course, Galton didn't know about Mendel, but it seems that flourishing of eugenics was in the era when Mendel was more in favor than Darwin. Were any of the eugenicists in favor of "random variation" in a population? Did any of them think that their policies would result in macro-evolution?

As is only too common in the supposedly anti-evolutionary arguments, they are really argument against something else - genetics, development, reproduction, biochemistry, atoms, ...

Galton was the founder of the modern eugenics movement. His institute was a eugenics institute, and the biometrics movement he founded went hand in hand with the eugenics movement. Mendel became popular much later, whent he eugenicists were well under way.

The eugenic justification was that without eugenic programs, the "racial health" of the species (or race, usually the British, Germanic, or American "races" as if they were biological realities) would decline because modern society was allowing "bad genetic health" to persist. Of course, in an evolutionary context, anything that survives and spreads more effectively than other variants simply is fitter; there's no evaluation involved. It didn't involve Mendelian variation as such.