OH, THIS ONE IS EASY.
The exact quote in its fuller context is from Marilynne Robinson's review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, alas behind a paywall at Harpers but I had quoted from it long ago so here it is:
Dawkins deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil “in the name of. . . an insane and unscientific eugenics theory.” But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point. Science quite appropriately acknowledges that error should be assumed, and at best it proceeds by a continuous process of criticism meant to isolate and identify error. So bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion. That both of them can do damage on a huge scale is clear. The prestige of both is a great part of the problem, and in the modern period the credibility of anything called science is enormous. As the history of eugenics proves, science at the highest levels is no reliable corrective to the influence of cultural prejudice but is in fact profoundly vulnerable to it.
I can add that since then Richard Dawkins made a number of statements that brought him from being one of the grooviest new atheists during the new atheism fad of the 00's who a number of the women of more questionable taste in guys on some of the lefty blog comment threads drooled over to having the cooties. One of those was a defense of men who randomly hit on women who don't welcome it, and doubting that a little pedophile abuse by public school masters of the little boys they had sit on their laps did them any harm. Another was bemoaning that Hitler had made eugenics taboo for a short while. He was still doing a two-step on the issue as late as five years ago.
For a start I'd say the success in producing biologically superior cows, horses, pigs, dogs and roses by selective breeding by humans is extremely ambiguous, conflating human determined ECONOMIC UTILITY with biological superiority. If that were true you'd expect that when a strain of such are free to breed freely as feral animals, they'd keep the same type that the original organisms had but that is rarely the case after several generations. It would seem that what human beings define as biological superiority, nature begs to differ on.
It also assumes that human beings are capable of determining which humans possess desirable traits and which should be prevented from leaving offspring. To which I would give any number of examples of such selectively bred lines of humans in royal and other aristocratic lineages from the time of the interbreeding Pharaohs of Egypt to the Hapsburg lines of royalty, to he Windsors to such lineages as the Bush family which gave us George W. Bush and his sibs. And against that I would post every estimable person who came from parents and grandparents who scientists explicitly said were degenerate from the time of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton and Ernst Haeckel down to today. I've noted before that when the Nobel laureate William Bradford Shockley was promoting his racist eugenics and his loony idea of setting up a Nobel Laureate stud farm the geneticist Richard Lewontin, noting the average age of those who Shockley proposed breed a generation of super geniuses guaranteed that their sperm would have an elevated number of likely dysgenic mutated genes in it and so risked producing children with birth defects. Something that the physics genius didn't seem to have considered. I don't know how well documented Julian Huxley's adventures in sperm donation at an advanced age have been but the rumors have been around for a long time.
I think that far from ignoring ideology, Dawkins was promoting his ideology, his especially dodgy one of Darwinian fundamentalism, what his entire professional career, including his two-faced promotion of eugenics while pretending to oppose it, has been based in. Eugenics was invented and became wildly successful WITHIN SCIENCE on the inspiration of the theory of natural selection. We have the best evidence of that, the attribution of eugenics by its inventors, Galton, Haeckel, Schallemyer, etc to their reading of On the Origin of Species. Natural selection is not supported in the rigorous application of scientific method which, by the way, can't be done to support the theory of natural selection because no experiment or observation has, so far, observed a new species arising through natural selection, natural selection, itself, being unmeasurable and invisible and not discernible in nature through the time it takes for a new species to arise. The entire history of human science, of human culture is a day compared to the ages those processes took.
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