20131018

EUGENICS

Eugenics was said to mean of being well born. "Humanity’s new-found ability to engineer genetic traits could well lead to the creation of a new species, as different from homo-sapiens as we are to the higher apes...With the arrival of human genetic engineering, humanity approaches a crossroads in its own technological history." 

Julian Huxley made the comment in 1936, "Man is such a mobile organism that migration and intercrossing between different groups has been occurring on a large scale since before the dawn of history. Accordingly, nothing approximating to a pure race now exists, with the possible exception of a few remote and primitive tribes. At the present day there exists no important human group which can properly be called a race, and the use of the term not only has no useful application but actually leads to confusion, both scientific and political." 

Evolution, it was explained, "depends on mutations, or changes in the genes, though most mutations are harmful and are eliminated by the process of natural selection. Centrifugal force, like radiation, induces mutations." 

"All religions are doomed by the cultural evolution of man," it was mentioned. Aldous Huxley offered, "Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe. People will accept certain theological statements about life and the world, will elect to perform certain rites and to follow certain rules of conduct, not because they imagine the statements to be divinely inspired but simply because they have discovered experimentally that to live in a certain ethical restraints, and as if certain metaphysical doctrines were true, is to live nobly and with style." 

It had been said, "Man has become adept at learning not only more sound things than any other creature on the face of this earth, but by the same means, mire unsound things than any other creature." "...If humans," it was argued, "maintained throughout life the same resistance to stress, injury and disease that they have at age 10, our average lifespan would be around 700 years." 

Julian Huxley believed, "In one or 2 centuries we shall have an entirely different outlook on restricting the number in families from that which we hold now. We shall tell the man who can’t provide for himself and his family that he cannot have state aid unless he agrees not to have any more children. No matter what our ideas on personal liberty today we are going to see the necessity of over riding the rights of the individual in the matter of birth. 

"The immediate problem is the differential fertility of different social classes or economic strata. Statistics prove to us that the highest social class in (Britain) now produces 190 children to 100 families, while the lowest class produces 337 children to the 100 families. A hundred years ago," Julian made the point in 1926, "there was little or no difference in the effective fertility of the different classes. The change took place about the seventies or eighties, probably as a result of the introduction of definite birth control methods. There was a real though not very large difference between the offspring at the extreme ends of the social strata in favor of those on the higher social level, but late years the situation has greatly changed. Unless the present inequality is adjusted society and civilization will suffer...If the rate of increase in the western nations during the 19th century continues there will, in less than a thousand years, hardly be standing room in the habitable parts of the globe...Putting the size of the average family at 4 or 5 for biological and other reasons, means that the upper classes should somehow be proded into having larger families than at present. The problem is urgent when the slums are producing larger families than the middle and upper class homes. The poorer classes must therefore be enlightened on artificial methods of birth control."

Blog Archive