What has science donnnnnnnnnnnnne?
It's a curious sort of thing, to cautiously defend a subject that most people, even the educated, agree on as being a pretty bad idea.
But there I was, spontaneously an apologist of eugenics. How the hell did that happen?
I guess part of it involves the beef that people might have with directed breeding. If you're suddenly implementing a program that selectively sterilizes or discriminates in providing fertility aids, chances are that you're going to have more than a few questioning the reasons behind it all. Eugenics, as a practice, has a lot of shit to work through to make any kind of logical sense.
For one, it's got a bad rap. Galton comes along and says- "Hey, guys, we're kind of running out of space what with all the orphanages going up, here. Maybe the instead well-educated and successful people should be pumping out more toddlers, and the, ah, Jerry Springer demographic might stop being told that pulling out and praying is the best way to go about preventing shotgun weddings? Y'know, kinda focus on having kids when you can support them. I ain't going to SAY anything or force anybody to do it, but can't we try to prevent England from turning into a shithole because nobody learned the secrets of heavy petting?" [Too late, but regardless]
Galton releases this in book format to a mostly Christian world, and gets more than a bit of a shit storm. Even those fabulous people he's trying to proliferate don't think that much of it: kids are a pain in the neck, and unlike as they do for the lower classes, popping out a whole line of Little Lord Fauntleroys won't provide extra hands, keep money in the bank, or maybe serve as a cheap source of emergency food. They instead cost a shitload of cash to maintain, educate, and certainly can't be certain not to take up too much time, preventing mommy and daddy from going to a textile party and talking about the latest lithographs of Queen Victoria.
Galton gets woefully upset by this, and goes off to find all sorts of bell curves for population until he meets some guy called Pearson, who likes this whole 'breed for better' kinda thing. Galton dies, but Pearson continues a legacy, and starts promoting the most racial forms of Aryan propagation that a still-Liberal English society will allow. He turns out to be a bit of an ideological dousche, but manages to do a fair bit more good than harm, having founded a research center that identifies a whole bunch of genetic diseases while having to pass on a lot of the whiter-than-thou shit. Nobody says much about sterilizing the 'lessers', and Churchill mumbles bitterly into his next dry martini about wasted opportunities to prevent England turning from a pure nation of fat, drunken gits to a nation of people who are sober but no fun at parties whatsoever. However, through his covert influence, sobriety, to this very day, has left the Britons of the world unscathed and thankfully sloshed.
Oh, but the stupid shit still goes down in the good ol' US of A. What later becomes the centre for the Human Genome project starts off trying to tackle the biggest problem facing America: the negroes, whose prodigious skills in jazz and professional sports threaten to control the country, thus putting an end to proud traditions of polka and missing the hoop. They go on to claim that Negroes are imbeciles at best, rating just below Hispanics, and far below whites. Hilariously, the majority of white IQ scores were literally at the cut-off point to be declared 'mentally deficient'. Probably because they correctly identified the correct cut-off point for muttonchops or how many stars a confederate flag has.
But that whole negro problem was clearly something much more prevalent in the Land of the Free, as Galton himself had some very different conclusions to his multicultural research. While studying in Africa, he noted that if there were more black women in Europe, white chicks would explode from envy. Rezpek.
Francis 'West Side' Galton also pretty irritated by all that theological dick-waving, noting that some of the best and biggest dicks were still cut off because they were circumcized (I'm paraphrasing here).
Aaaanyways-
All this would have been fine and dandy if a certain somebody (I'm looking at you, you silly little Austrian Anti-Semite, you) hadn't dug up everything vaguely related to how something might be innately better than others by sheer virtue of being, and distorted it into a shitstorm of pseudoscientifically grounded quackery. Then the little guy goes off to kill a few million of those people not lucky enough to be born on the A-list. Fuck.
So, looks like eugenics is a pretty bad idea overall: It's giving folks excuses to go around and neuter, if not eradicate, those who wear racially inferior brands of shoes.
But that kind of nonsense is dysgenics, the negative eugenics. "The purer folk are too lazy to get off their asses and start doggystyling it into a better tomorrow, we'll just have to even things out by preventing those lesser races from getting any. If I'm not having sex, they're not."
All that said, I'd still prefer to be an apologist to being a supporter. There's only so far we can go before ending up in the sack with somebody who exemplifies the best of Einstein-meets-Miss-Congeniality, but just happens to have shared a good nine months in the womb with you. We don't need more dalmations and thoroughbreds. Breed smarter, not harder.
And stop picking on Galton. Just because he thought you could save the world by fucking, doesn't make him SUCH a bad guy (if largely by virtue of his realizing everybody could benefit from a little brown shuga, oh yeah).
But there I was, spontaneously an apologist of eugenics. How the hell did that happen?
I guess part of it involves the beef that people might have with directed breeding. If you're suddenly implementing a program that selectively sterilizes or discriminates in providing fertility aids, chances are that you're going to have more than a few questioning the reasons behind it all. Eugenics, as a practice, has a lot of shit to work through to make any kind of logical sense.
For one, it's got a bad rap. Galton comes along and says- "Hey, guys, we're kind of running out of space what with all the orphanages going up, here. Maybe the instead well-educated and successful people should be pumping out more toddlers, and the, ah, Jerry Springer demographic might stop being told that pulling out and praying is the best way to go about preventing shotgun weddings? Y'know, kinda focus on having kids when you can support them. I ain't going to SAY anything or force anybody to do it, but can't we try to prevent England from turning into a shithole because nobody learned the secrets of heavy petting?" [Too late, but regardless]
Galton releases this in book format to a mostly Christian world, and gets more than a bit of a shit storm. Even those fabulous people he's trying to proliferate don't think that much of it: kids are a pain in the neck, and unlike as they do for the lower classes, popping out a whole line of Little Lord Fauntleroys won't provide extra hands, keep money in the bank, or maybe serve as a cheap source of emergency food. They instead cost a shitload of cash to maintain, educate, and certainly can't be certain not to take up too much time, preventing mommy and daddy from going to a textile party and talking about the latest lithographs of Queen Victoria.
Galton gets woefully upset by this, and goes off to find all sorts of bell curves for population until he meets some guy called Pearson, who likes this whole 'breed for better' kinda thing. Galton dies, but Pearson continues a legacy, and starts promoting the most racial forms of Aryan propagation that a still-Liberal English society will allow. He turns out to be a bit of an ideological dousche, but manages to do a fair bit more good than harm, having founded a research center that identifies a whole bunch of genetic diseases while having to pass on a lot of the whiter-than-thou shit. Nobody says much about sterilizing the 'lessers', and Churchill mumbles bitterly into his next dry martini about wasted opportunities to prevent England turning from a pure nation of fat, drunken gits to a nation of people who are sober but no fun at parties whatsoever. However, through his covert influence, sobriety, to this very day, has left the Britons of the world unscathed and thankfully sloshed.
Oh, but the stupid shit still goes down in the good ol' US of A. What later becomes the centre for the Human Genome project starts off trying to tackle the biggest problem facing America: the negroes, whose prodigious skills in jazz and professional sports threaten to control the country, thus putting an end to proud traditions of polka and missing the hoop. They go on to claim that Negroes are imbeciles at best, rating just below Hispanics, and far below whites. Hilariously, the majority of white IQ scores were literally at the cut-off point to be declared 'mentally deficient'. Probably because they correctly identified the correct cut-off point for muttonchops or how many stars a confederate flag has.
But that whole negro problem was clearly something much more prevalent in the Land of the Free, as Galton himself had some very different conclusions to his multicultural research. While studying in Africa, he noted that if there were more black women in Europe, white chicks would explode from envy. Rezpek.
Francis 'West Side' Galton also pretty irritated by all that theological dick-waving, noting that some of the best and biggest dicks were still cut off because they were circumcized (I'm paraphrasing here).
Aaaanyways-
All this would have been fine and dandy if a certain somebody (I'm looking at you, you silly little Austrian Anti-Semite, you) hadn't dug up everything vaguely related to how something might be innately better than others by sheer virtue of being, and distorted it into a shitstorm of pseudoscientifically grounded quackery. Then the little guy goes off to kill a few million of those people not lucky enough to be born on the A-list. Fuck.
So, looks like eugenics is a pretty bad idea overall: It's giving folks excuses to go around and neuter, if not eradicate, those who wear racially inferior brands of shoes.
But that kind of nonsense is dysgenics, the negative eugenics. "The purer folk are too lazy to get off their asses and start doggystyling it into a better tomorrow, we'll just have to even things out by preventing those lesser races from getting any. If I'm not having sex, they're not."
All that said, I'd still prefer to be an apologist to being a supporter. There's only so far we can go before ending up in the sack with somebody who exemplifies the best of Einstein-meets-Miss-Congeniality, but just happens to have shared a good nine months in the womb with you. We don't need more dalmations and thoroughbreds. Breed smarter, not harder.
And stop picking on Galton. Just because he thought you could save the world by fucking, doesn't make him SUCH a bad guy (if largely by virtue of his realizing everybody could benefit from a little brown shuga, oh yeah).