"The Nazis gave it a bad name and I think it is time something was done to make it respectable again." Blatant and Dangerous Lies

In researching one of my short posts the other day, I came across a very good example of the ongoing dishonesty that has become habitual in the popular culture, a result of the concerted PR campaign of the "skeptics" who are identical with the "new atheists".  This short interview with Michael Shermer on the occasion of his latest book is full to the brim with that kind of stuff, and with such a superficial series of soft-ball questions, the "World Science Festival" does little more than set him up to say what is entirely predictable. 

The book Shermer was peddling was most ironically named "The Moral Arc". That irony can be seen in the lack of honesty he exercised as he was pushing it. One of the most serious of the lies Shermer told was in this exchange, on a topic I've become very interested in over the past decade.  

WSF: What about instances where scientists have behaved badly—like the Tuskegee experiment?

Shermer: I wouldn’t even put things like that down as science screwing up.

In the case of, say, eugenics as employed by the Nazis, that wasn’t science, that was pseudoscience. First of all, the Nazi regime was not a scientific regime; it was really a throwback to Romanticism. It was a rejection of Enlightenment secular values and science and reason. It said that blood and soil and race are the dominant things, and our race is the dominant one, and they used and abused science to that end. So you can’t lay the blame on science. I think science is neutral in that regard and can be misused, but the application of scientific process to solving social problems gives you better governments.

The status of eugenics in the 1920s-1940s as science,  in fact it's status as science for the entire period of its development and even till today, couldn't be clearer. The attempt to deny that mainstream scientists invented eugenics, developed it, instituted its racist, even genocidal application and its semi-covert promotion after the Second World War is a massive lie.  

But in order to understand that you have to look at science as it really exists in the real world instead of in self-serving and special definitions in service to an, ironically, romantic view of science of the kind promoted by commercial "skepticism".    

That eugenics was the invention of a scientist whose status as a scientist working in science when he did it can't possibly be clearer.   Francis Galton, the inventor of eugenics was one of the major scientific polymaths of his generation in Britain, his acceptance as a scientist and his work as science couldn't be clearer. Many of his discoveries are widely used in science, today, he hasn't been demoted to the status of a non-scientist.  I would guess, though I haven't really done the calculation, that more of his science is in current use than that of another 19th century polymath I mentioned the other day, Hermann von Helmholtz.   

That he based his eugenics on accepted science, natural selection, is obvious both by his testimony, the testimony of Charles Darwin,  other scientists of his day and up till today is also incontestable.   For anyone who isn't familiar with my blog, I have gone into that question exhaustively, twice and have continued looking into it and the case proving that is massive, based on primary documentation and directly proven, is absolute in the way that historical documentation can achieve.  It is not merely presumable on the basis of circumstantial evidence.   And I do assert that the case is proven because the definitive information required to prove that case is provided in the words of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, those scientific contemporaries and colleagues of both men and the people who knew Charles Darwin better than anyone else in the next generation, his children.   You can read those in the post indexed at that last link. 

The link of that British eugenics to German eugenics is, as well, proven and unambiguous in the person of Darwin and Galton's closest German colleague and collaborator, Ernst Haeckel.   Through Haeckel and the generation of students of science he and his German associates taught, you get directly to those such as Alfred Ploetz who were directly involved with Nazi eugenics.   His ideas were heavily influenced by his membership in the ironically named "Freie wissenschaftliche Vereinigung"  "Free Scientific Society" whose activities centered on the study of the scientific writings of Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel.   And Ploetz was only one figure in German science relevant to the identification of German eugenics as, at that time, accepted as mainstream science.  Everyone I've mentioned, so far, was undeniably held to be a scientist by other scientists in that period and today.  Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel, Alfred Ploetz, and I could go on to list an enormous number of mainstream scientists of that period in the development of eugenics, university science programs and departments which produced research explicitly identified as eugenics and even science textbooks, produced by teachers and professors with science degrees, teaching even explicitly racist eugenics as reliable science. 

I would, if I had more time, go into the extremely important issue of American eugenics' direct contribution to Nazi eugenics, which is also incontrovertible except through lies and the omission of primary source evidence but the direct German line is also indesputable and  both primarily a matter of scientists asserting that eugenics was reliable and established science.  For an example, the high school biology textbook which John Scopes was using at the time of his trial, A Civic Biology, was written by George William Hunter, who, among other things, was enough of a scientist to have taught Zoology at The University of Chicago and a writer of science textbooks which were among the more widely used ones to teach science in the United States.   That is only one of many, many documents identifying eugenics as mainstream science which are available, complete, online. 

The direct line continuing from Alfred Ploetz into Mein Kampf runs through the science textbook Grundriss der Menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene,  Priniciples of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene  by Eugene Fischer, Fritz Lenz and Erwin Baur.   Hitler had been supplied with their textbook while he was in Landesberg prison, during the time he was writing Mein Kampf.   He read lots of books there and credited his reading during that time to providing his "free education at the public expense".   It is only reasonable to acknowledge that his science education was largely dependent on that book by three mainstream scientists. 

- Fischer was a doctor, an anthropologist and a eugenicist, holding academic positions in science at the University of Berlin and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. From what I read, online, after the fall of Nazism he tried to deny the role of his science in the genocidal program of the Nazis.   Essentially what the statement I'm criticizing does for all of the scientists involved with eugenics. 

- Lenz was a student of Alfred Ploetz, a geneticist working as well at the Kaiser Wilhelm Instutute and AFTER THE WAR, despite his role in the Nazi's genocidal regime, as Professor of Genetics at the University of Goettingen.

- Baur was a biologist and a geneticist,  listed several places as doing groundbreaking work in plant virology while he, as well, worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.   He died in 1933 so, alone of those three he can not be said to have had direct knowledge of the applied use of his science by the Nazis.

Their book directly cites science, from Darwin and Galton right up to the time they were writing it, it was, by any honest definition taken as science in the 1920s through the 1930s, its authors still called scientists, today.  It was a book of science, written by scientists which directly informed the Nazis eugenic program, which included mass murder, beginning with the "hygenic" murder of the disabled, continuing in the mass shootings of the Einsatzgruppen, the gas vans and the gas chambers of the death camps.  All of those inspired by the science of eugenics, all of them with the participation of scientists and doctors trained in science. 

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One of the 186 signers of the Humanist fatwa against the evil of newspaper horoscope columns was the famous geneticist and Nobel laureate, Francis Crick*.  In the post-war period and up till today, there is no more emblematic figure constituting a scientist than Crick, half of the famous Watson and Crick, credited with discovering the structure of DNA.   Less well known is that up till his death, Francis Crick believed that eugenics was science, he championed both eugenics and its application on the basis of race, he mounted a campaign of support among elite scientists for the scientific racist, Arthur Jensen.  

For anyone who has read a lot of the primary source material written by scientists on the topic of eugenics from before the Nazis made it all too temporarily disreputable, this letter by Crick to his fellow scientist, Bernard D. Davis, can seem like deja vu. 

22 April 1970

Dear Bernie

I have just read your paper "Threat and Promise in Genetic Engineering" and I feel I must write and tell you how good I think it is. I have thought a little about these problems, but I have never sorted things out as clearly as you have done. I particularly like your point (end of page 1, start of page 2) whether we should deliberately intervene. I also thought your remarks on polygenes were very much to the point and certainly lead one in the direction of eugenics. By a coincidence I have just started to read Karl Pearson's life of Francis Galton but I have not yet got as far as eugenic ideas. I am also very much in sympathy with your remarks (pages 5 and 6) on psychogenetics. But, in fact, I have found myself in agreement with almost everything you have said. The above points I have simply singled out for special mention.

I have a few small comments to make. Your comments at the top of page 14 reveal what I have always known, that you are a much more enthusiastic father than I am! Although I agree to some extent about what you say in a father's pride in his own offspring, I would point out to you that adoption is quite a common practice and the effects of this on the father can be studied experimentally without too much difficulty. Your remarks just before this about the problem of securing agreement on the traits to be selected, I don't think is really a difficult one. The target to aim for, as you imply, is high achievement, although many different types. What is to be avoided is one narrow criterion for selection.

The only positive ideas I have had on these problems myself are the following: Firstly, I think people who have twins, and especially identical twins, should be strongly encouraged, possibly by a financial inducement, to let one of them be adopted. Proper records of both children should be kept. The information which could be accumulated in this way would be invaluable. The cost would not be very great and I think people could easily be persuaded that what they were doing was for the greater good of society. In fact, I can imagine an advertising campaign to this end along the lines of 'donate a twin'. My other suggestion is in an attempt to solve the problem of irresponsible people and especially those who are poorly endowed genetically having large numbers of unnecessary children. Because of their irresponsibility, it seems to me that for them, sterilization is the only answer and I would do this by bribery. It would probably pay society to offer such individuals something like l,000 [British pounds] down and a pension of 5 [British pounds} a week over the age of 60. As you probably know, the bribe in India is a transistor radio and apparently there are plenty of takers.

Finally, let me say that although I agree with you that these are basically long term problems, I also agree that they will be upon us sooner than we realize and as soon as intelligent discussion is started on them the better.

With all good wishes

Yours sincerely

F. H. C. Crick

There is all the difference in the world between people choosing to limit the number of children they have and this kind of targeted - and racist - form of eugenics lite.  It doesn't sound all that dangerous until you consider what scientists trained and acculturated into this view of people as a herd to manage will do when their "voluntary" program fails to produce the result they identify as the goal.   If you read the original writings of the American and Canadian eugenicists before AND AFTER the Second World War, they can couch even the most obvious programs of genocide in the most rational sounding patter, even presenting their intentions of wiping out entire ethnic groups through sterilization as a benefit for those they are cutting off from the future and the surviving lines and society they claimed to be working on behalf of.  The need to put an English face on scientific genocide is something that really has to be done because pretending it's a "German problem" is dangerous.  As I pointed out above, there is nothing more obvious than that the Nazis explicitly cited the existing American eugenics programs, which preceded theirs by decades, as a precedent and justification of their first stage program and developed rapidly into the genocide. 

My point that eugenics, from its inception, through the years before the Nazis applied eugenics in their massive genocide programs and during that moral atrocity and in the post-war period was indisputably the work of  mainstream scientists of the highest repute and fame, even those held up as idols and heroes. If you want more and definitive evidence of what the sainted Crick had in mind, he pointed it out in this 1971 letter to Dr. John T. Edsall at the Department of Health Education and Welfare. 

... I don't think the small amount of money which is needed to start eugenics research will be in way compete with this.  The main difficulty is that people have to start thinking out eugenics in a different way.  The Nazis gave it a bad name and I think it is time something was done to make it respectable again.

As far as I can see, we are in agreement on all this, except perhaps for a slight difference of emphasis.

If that doesn't disturb you I hope it is out of ignorance of one of the major disasters in the history of the human species because the alternative can't but reveal your moral character as someone who would risk that history repeating itself.  Francis Crick and the scientists in the post-war period, certainly those old enough to be familiar with the crimes of the Nazis who envision repeating it don't get the benefit of the doubt on that matter. 

*  Crick is only one of the signatories of the Humanist "skeptics" document who was enthusiastic for eugenics in the post-war period.  As Crick is the one I've looked most at, I'll withhold other names of others for a later date.   Though another, Konrad Lorenz, was certainly aware of Nazi eugenics as it was happening because he was not only a participant, he was a scientific theorist of it.

These [papers relevant to the topic] were "Die angeborenen Formen moglicher Erfahrungen (1943) and "Durch Domestikation Verursachte Storungen" (1940).   In them Lorenz justifies the Nazi efforts to prevent interbreeding of persons of different so-called races (it must be noted that the German concept of race bore little relation to what most anthropologists, and certainly biologists, understand by the term).  Basically, Lorenz's argument was that since displays of waterfowl are species-specific, hybridiation destroys the integrity of the releasor mechanism andn leads to the destruction of the species.   By analogy, humans are believed to possess relasors for ethical and esthetic values which are lost through "hybridization."  

Yet Lorenz was held up in 1976 as an eminent figure in science, one qualified to participate with all those other scientists in the first major ideological campaign of Shermer's "skeptics" movement.