Update to This Morning's Post

Someone is quibbling about the textbook used by the class taught by the famous John Scopes of the "monkey trial" mentioned in the post below, A Civic 
Biology.   Passing by the temptation to go in depth into implications of the title "Civic," it is impossible to not see the author and publisher thought they were providing high school students with information that should inform their activities as citizens, especially in regard to their role as voters in a republic.   The author made that purpose explicit in the introduction.

With this end in view the following pages have been written. This book shows boys and girls living in an urban community how they may best live within their own environment and how they may coöperate with the civic authorities for the betterment of their environment. A logical course is built up around the topics which appeal to the average normal boy or girl, topics given in a logical sequence so as to work out the solution of problems bearing on the ultimate problem of the entire course, that of preparation for citizenship in the largest sense.

Because of that, the passages promoting racism, class prejudice, etc. are especially worth considering in regard to the topic of this morning's post.   For many of the students who would have used the textbook in one of the few science courses they are likely to have taken, what it said was certainly what science meant to them.   The same is true for everyone, scientists included, everyone's "science" is limited to what is presented to them as representing science.  Science only exists in the minds of people, it doesn't have any independent existence.

Eugenics.—When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, syphilis, that dread disease which cripples and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent children, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science of being well born is called eugenics.

The Jukes.[*]—Studies have been made on a number of different families in this country, in which mental and moral defects were present in one or both of the original parents. The "Jukes" family is a notorious example. The first mother is known as "Margaret, the mother of criminals." In seventy-five years the progeny of the original generation has cost the state of New York over a million and a quarter of dollars, besides giving over to the care of prisons and asylums considerably over a hundred feeble-minded, alcoholic, immoral, or criminal persons. Another case recently studied is the "Kallikak" family.[35] This family has been traced back to the War of the Revolution, when a young soldier named Martin Kallikak seduced a feeble-minded girl. She had a feeble-minded son from whom there have been to the present time 480 descendants. Of these 33 were sexually immoral, 24 confirmed drunkards, 3 epileptics, and 143 feeble-minded. The man who started this terrible line of immorality and feeble-mindedness later married a normal Quaker girl. From this couple a line of 496 descendants have come, with no cases of feeble-mindedness. The evidence and the moral speak for themselves!

Parasitism and its Cost to Society.—Hundreds of families such as those described above exist to-day, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.

The Remedy.—If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country.

Blood Tells.—Eugenics show us, on the other hand, in a study of the families in which are brilliant men and women, the fact that the descendants have received the good inheritance from their ancestors. The following, taken from Davenport's Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, illustrates how one family has been famous in American History.

Davenport is, of course, Charles Davenport, biologist, professor of Zoology, the first director of the Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory, a major figure in American and world eugenics, scientific racism, a promoter of eugenics, including in Germany during the period when it was not government policy and after it was made law by the Nazis.  He had extensive ties with German organizations and the government in the Nazi period, well into its eugenics program, even after the start of the war when the genocide was underway.

If you wanted to force me to continue to produce evidence that eugenics, even in its most homicidal forms was part of mainstream science you couldn't have found a better way to do it.  I will write more on this tomorrow because it is the perfect example of why it is absolutely necessary to admit and to always keep in mind what the limits of science are and the consequences of mistaking ideological materialism for an aspect of scientific method.

*  The stories of the "Jukes" and the "Kallikak" families are examples of inventing evidence and passing it off successfully as science.  More recent research has pretty well debunked it, though it is still cited as if it were actual fact.  The creation of fictional science by scientists, which becomes an actual AND EFFECTIVE part of science as it really exists in the world is notably not prevented by either the methods nor the practices of scientists.  The claim that scientists don't do that kind of thing is both false and dangerous to the acceptance of valid science.