Sir Francis Galton: Natural Selection of Humans
Toward the end of class today, the name Galton came up Britt was mentioning the origin of eugenics. Sir Francis Galton was, as brought up in class, actually a half-cousin of Darwin, the man behind natural selection. Galton produced numerous scientific papers and was even knighted for his work and discoveries. Among the topics Galton worked with are inheritance of intelligence, nature vs. nurture, differential psychology and psychometrics (measuring peoples’ brainpower), and behavior genetics. Essentially, Galton’s work was centered about finding statistical and mathematical ways to distinguish a hierarchy of humans. Therefore, it is no surprise that he proposed providing incentives for people who had eugenically favorable marriages. In fact, he called those marriages, which produced imperfect children “dysgenic.” Galton also studied facial characteristic by a method that he called “composite photography” which focused on determining human traits just by viewing facial features. In something that we would refer to today as racial profiling, Galton tried to identify a set of criminal faces. Near the end of his life, in an attempt to reach a wider audience, Galton wrote a novel called Kantsaywhere, which was a Utopia where families bred eugenic progeny.
Today, when anyone mentions racial purity or a “perfect” race, thoughts of Nazi Germany usually come to mind. Racial purity has strongly negative connotations today, but if the Nazi regime had not happened, would this be so? When I learned today that the government had the power to sterilize unfit child-bearers, I was very surprised and had never heard of that. The only incident I really heard about racial purity is the Nazi attempt around World War II. Looking at Galton’s theories and Darwinian natural selection, eugenics seems almost like a smart idea that will benefit humankind. Perhaps if the Nazis had not attempted to extinguish minority races, the common population would not have such negative connotations. Other instances of eugenic promotion are much less known.
Evolution provides the means by which all organisms survive. The creatures in today’s world have evolved to overcome weaknesses due to flaws in their system. While disrupted by some, humans have evolved from apes and have developed many functional qualities to improve life. Then why is it that natural selection of humans is looked down upon? My personal view is that eugenic determination for human children is unnatural. But then again, mating in humans is not random and in fact constrained by several factors. What about genetically inherited diseases? Should a man and a woman with a strong likelihood to pass on a horrible disease be allowed to have children? Is it right to have a child that you know will have a miserable experience? Where do we draw the line?
Today, when anyone mentions racial purity or a “perfect” race, thoughts of Nazi Germany usually come to mind. Racial purity has strongly negative connotations today, but if the Nazi regime had not happened, would this be so? When I learned today that the government had the power to sterilize unfit child-bearers, I was very surprised and had never heard of that. The only incident I really heard about racial purity is the Nazi attempt around World War II. Looking at Galton’s theories and Darwinian natural selection, eugenics seems almost like a smart idea that will benefit humankind. Perhaps if the Nazis had not attempted to extinguish minority races, the common population would not have such negative connotations. Other instances of eugenic promotion are much less known.
Evolution provides the means by which all organisms survive. The creatures in today’s world have evolved to overcome weaknesses due to flaws in their system. While disrupted by some, humans have evolved from apes and have developed many functional qualities to improve life. Then why is it that natural selection of humans is looked down upon? My personal view is that eugenic determination for human children is unnatural. But then again, mating in humans is not random and in fact constrained by several factors. What about genetically inherited diseases? Should a man and a woman with a strong likelihood to pass on a horrible disease be allowed to have children? Is it right to have a child that you know will have a miserable experience? Where do we draw the line?
posted by Anonymous at 4:37 PM
3 Comments:
I think that the point about natural selection is that it is just that, natural. It is uneccessary to prevent two individuas from having children in an effort to eliminate the deadly genes they carry because that will happen through natural evolution. The most famous example of this occured in Africa. Sickle cell anemia is a dangerous genetic condition, and malaria is a deadly disease that attacks the blood cells. Individuals in Africa suffered from both afflictions. However, those who had part sickle cell, part normal blood were safe from both of these. Thus, today there are far more mixed blood individuals in certain parts of Africa than anywhere else. The selection is natural, the forced breeding or elimination of human genes simply crosses ethical boundaries and should be questioned.
I agree with Caleb and to further his point, the main distinction between natural evolution and the Nazi form of eugencics is that in the latter, the decision of what traits are undesirable are placed into the hands of man with all of their biases. So what traits they themselves see undesirable are the genes that will be attacked for extinction as opposed to the genes that are actually impractical or harmful in nature.
Second, eugenics is a two-part mechnism in where not only are people with desirable traits encouraged to breed but also people with undesirable traits are discourage or forced not to breed through sterilization which is unethical and unnatural because the government or science is given the power to undertake these duties. The U.S. Supreme Court case that Britt cited in class, Buck v.s Bell concerned a woman who allegedly suffered from mental retardation and she was the thrid generation in her family with that defect. The Supreme Court ruled that is was constitutional for the state to sterilize people that they deemed "imbeciles" because there were "too many of their kind" for the state to take care of by means of well fare or supported institutional living. I hope that most of us would agree today that that decision is one of the worst in U.S. history. Being so, the prohibitory facet of eugenics should rightfully carry a negative connotation in that aspect. Just let nature play out without human interference in that aspect as Caleb suggested.
By they way, years after the decision and her sterilization the woman proved to actually be of average intellegence by means of an IQ test.
Jordan, I liked how you read up a bit more about Galton and his study of facial characteristics among criminals. Last year in my writing 20 class (Crime Scene Imagination), we looked at criminal profiling and how certain photographers tried to identify certain facial features that were common among criminals. Do criminals have 'a look'? Can you really spot someone and say they look dangerous? This is a really interesting topic. If you're interested in criminal profiling you should read "The Alienist" by Caleb Carr. It's a good novel.
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