This morning I went looking for the previously available online images and transcripts of letters to and from Charles Davenport which I consulted in preparing my posts on the topic of eugenics and, oddly, none of them seem to be available anymore. Not from the Dolan DNA Learning Center at Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory, not from various British sources where such things could be found as recently as two years ago. Not on my computer, not on the computer of one of my siblings which I also tried.
If you google "Charles Davenport Francis Galton letter" you can see some barely legible images of them (as of this morning) but I can't get links to the legible ones I used to work with. Since beginning this research I've noticed I wasn't the only one who was finding those links, a number of mainstream authors were exposing the record that previously had only been of interest to fundamentalists opposed to the teaching of evolution. If that has anything to do with why I can't present you with a link to the image of the letters which you could read for yourself, I can't say. I can say that the letters exist, they have been read, they do constitute absolute proof of the direct link from the first generation of eugenicists to the American, Canadian and other eugenics programs, including racists such as Davenport who were involved with Nazi eugenics, they aren't going away and their existence and their content isn't deniable except by lying or lying about them. They shouldn't be disappeared online. Neither are such published sources as the autobiography of Francis Galton, the biography of him by his student, the eminent geneticist and cold blooded eugenicist Karl Pearson, etc. While those were ignored or unread, they lay out the same lines of connection that the letters prove.
Whether or not it is liked by those who propped up the post-war misinformation campaign that Michael Shermer was spouting in the interview I linked to yesterday morning, the links from the Holocaust to Darwin's inner circle are clear and obvious and fully documented by the men, almost all of them scientists, who comprised those multiple and very short chains, going back from Nazis such as Ploetz through those such as Leonard Darwin and Charles Davenport, to the generation of Ernst Haeckel and Francis Galton who provides the link to Charles Darwin as his inspiration, publishing the letter Charles Darwin wrote to him expressing his enthusiasm for Galton's first book developing eugenics, Hereditary Genius, a book Charles Darwin cited, as reliable science many times in his second major work on the topic of evolution, The Descent of Man.
The post-war iron curtain erected to separate the Holocaust from the fictional Charles Darwin which was also created at that time, can only be sustained by lies disproved by his words and the words of people who knew him as intimately as his own children and his closest scientific colleagues. Those words are out, the Darwin Industry should try to live with that and not attempt to continue with the lie.
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In my second post I put up yesterday, I noted that the American biologist Charles Davenport was a direct link between American eugenics and the Nazi eugenics program, which is inseparable from the mass murders of the Holocaust.
That link is undeniable because Davenport left the damning evidence in abundance, as did a large number of other American, British, etc. scientists who were involved in or enthusiastic about eugenics. I have noted before that in correspondence between Davenport and Leonard Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin and the head of the British Eugenics Society discuss their attempts to promote eugenics in Germany at a time it was widely opposed - in the 1920s - Leonard Darwin doubting they'd succeed because of the "conservatism" of the German scientists.
If that were not enough to prove the case, Davenport provides a direct link directly into Darwin's inner circle through his correspondence with Francis Galton.
My dear Galton: Your postcard of Oct. 14, just received I thank you for for taking the trouble to reply - You must think me a nuisance to add thus even a letter to your correspondence. But I must tell you of recent events here.
I want to tell you how much I have enjoyed reading your autobiography. You have quite put yourself into it; and that makes it much more valuable than any "Life" by another hand. It would please you to realize how universal is the recognition in this Country, of your position as the founder of the science of Eugenics. And, I think, as the years go by, humanity will more and more appreciate its debt to you. In this country we run "Charity" mad. Now, a revulsion of feeling is coming about, and people are turning to your teaching. With best wishes for continued strength and health & expression of my professional esteem, Yours faithfully, Chas B. Davenport (Eugenics Records Office, #2094)
Just as Francis Crick in 1970 was finding eugenic inspiration from Karl Pearson's biography of Galton, the founder of eugenic, Charles Davenport was finding inspiration from Galton's autobiography as he was beginning the campaign of eugenics in America, sixty years earlier. And Charles Davenport was, actually, a participant in Nazi eugenics, during the Nazi regime. He was on the editorial board of two German magazines founded during those years to promote the Nazi's eugenics practices, Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde und ihre Nachbargebiete and the Zeitschrift für menschliche Vererbungs- und Konstitutionslehre. The name of the second one is especially chilling in its English translation, The Journal for Human Heredity and Constitutional Doctrine. He had, before the Nazis took power, promoted eugenics in Germany as elsewhere. I found that information in the book Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism by Stefan Kühl. the passage dealing with that is, I think, too willing to still allow the distinction between science and politics that Davenport used to mask his support for the Nazis.
With the topic of eugenics, which was from the beginning a call by scientists to apply their theories to the human population using the force of law, that distinction is a convenient but utterly transparent lie. As early as 1873 George Darwin*, with the support of his father, wrote "On Benefical Restriction to Liberty of Marriage," calling for the legal dissolution of marriages on the basis of mental illness, involuntarily, obviously, as his modest proposal included making it impossible for those who regained their mental health to resume those marriages. Not to mention other pretty horrible ideas. He noted other eugenicists, such as Greg asserted the "necessity of coercion" even earlier than that. Again, this was already eugenics, ten years before Galton gave his new science its name. Eugenics, from the beginning was scientists (even those such as George Darwin, an astronomer not arguably professionally competent in that area) insisting on becoming part of the political and legal processes in order to coerce people to have children only as they approved, insisting their right to determine who should and who should not have children. As natural selection, the foundation and motivation for eugenics, is founded on the political-economic theories of Malthus, it is ridiculous to pretend that it and its derivations are separable from politics. That alone makes its casual acceptance as a basis for activity in human life ripe for disaster.
* George Darwin had read Galtons' Hereditary Genius before his father and in his congratulatory letter to Galton, Charles Darwin noted his son's enthusiasm for it. As I noted in one of my posts, Francis Darwin, in his early biography- letter collection his and George's father, Charles Darwin, noted that George Darwin's articles were "eugenics".
Update: While I am entirely opposed to teaching creationism in public schools as science, it's a pathetically poor excuse to pretend this evidence doesn't exist if creationists were the ones who first noticed what it means. If we're supposed to favor teaching evolution BECAUSE IT'S TRUE, BECAUSE IT'S WHAT REALLY HAPPENED, then the same standard makes exposing the documentary and historical record of these scientists just as much of a virtue for the very same reason. Lying about that record is as much a denial of reality as insisting that the diversity of life came about on the first six days of a little over six thousand years. See my posts mentioning Paul Feyerabend several days ago about low standards of scholarship acceptably practiced among those who wrap themselves in the mantle of "the enlightenment".
Interesting how much of the eugenicist arguments (and law) rested on definitions of intelligence, and how quick the laws were to discriminate or take over the lives of others based on defined ability to reason, which is considered synonymous with "intelligence."
ReplyDeleteAnd so those we would destroy we first mark as unreasonable and even incapable of reason. Since man is a reasoning creature, that's the line between human and "sub-human," or even non-human. It's an age old distinction in Western culture, but it means whatever isn't human is expendable and discardable; and it was also thoroughly scientific.
Still is today.
Today I read articles from Scientific American about how we may be "victims" of our neurons or our genes or something we can't control, and so are we "responsible" for our actions? That's basically the argument of the eugenics laws that sterilized Carrie Buck: she isn't responsible for her actions, so society has to be; and the responsible thing is forced sterilization. All that's missing in the current formulations is the social interest, but we have that now because society has an interest in locking up as many scofflaws as it can capture, and a further interest in criminalizing as much behavior as can come under our common consideration (we don't incarcerate on a whim; we do it by statutes).
So we haven't really come very far from using science to justify social policy and to define "undesirables" as those we must lock away or otherwise exclude.
I haven't done it yet myself, but it would benefit a lot of these "scientists" to read Foucault on these issues. All useful knowledge is not bounded by the tenets of physics or chemistry or biology.
Anyway, the idea of "progress" is a laughable one, especially among a culture that is as ahistorical as Americans generally are. We have not slipped the surly bonds of history by crossing the Atlantic to the "New World:" all we've done is convince ourselves we're fresh and clear and not like "Them." We need, in other words, and for a start, a good does of humility; and then a good dunking in history: two things the church was, traditionally, very good at teaching. We abandoned the former because it tied us too much to "original sin", we abandoned the latter because we established so many Protestant denominations each claiming to have reached back to the "original" church, so what need of history had we now? We have set aside those ancient and heavy chains, we are a new creation!
Old wine in old wineskins. And science is as much a part of this culture as religion; aye, there's the irony: that science has no better claim to truth than religion does, is no less culturally determined than religion is, is no further from humanity and human interests than the church ever was.
The difference is, the church claims, and struggles, to serve God and the revelation of God. Science serves discovery, which can be dangerous (there is more than a grain of truth in the stereotype of the mad scientist), and "truth" as defined by empiricism; which is a very limited idea of truth, indeed, as well as an extremely malleable one.
And a truth determined only by reason; there is no room for "holy fools" in holy science. When reason is the only sure way to know what is true, people lacking sufficiently in reason are suddenly, on very scientific principles, not just a stumbling block; they are a millstone.
It's only reasonable to remove the useless and heavy millstone, isn't it?
At least it's not in the name of science anymore: http://www.salon.com/2015/03/30/its_time_to_end_the_era_of_coerced_sterilization/
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