Adam Rutherford (A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, Humanimal) earned his undergraduate diploma and Ph.D. from University College London, together with a number of years learning within the college’s Galton Laboratory. This easy sentence hides a deep irony. As readers of his ebook How to Argue With a Racist know, Rutherford is passionately anti-eugenics—whereas Francis Galton, for whom the Galton Laboratory is known as, was the Nineteenth-century scientist who coined the time period eugenics and pioneered its ideology.
Divided into two distinct components, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics first outlines the historical past of eugenics, then lays out the scientific, moral and ethical arguments in opposition to it. The historical past is messy certainly. Galton and his contemporaries had been good scientists, statisticians and polymaths—but additionally white supremacists with repugnant concepts. First hailed as a strategy to promote optimistic attributes in humanity, eugenics rapidly devolved right into a racist motion that used mass sterilization and even homicide to take away individuals with “undesirable” traits resembling alcoholism, Down syndrome and schizophrenia from the human gene pool. Eugenics legal guidelines within the United States impressed Nazi euthanasia legal guidelines, and the Nazi classification of races owes so much to the American mannequin. Most paradoxically, the pseudoscience of eugenics gave delivery to the precise science of genetics.
Rutherford believes this historical past just isn’t over. He fears the politicians, scientists and entrepreneurs who use eugenic concepts for their very own development or revenue, and this concern offers the second half of the ebook its energy. Rutherford has religion in science. It is genetics, he argues, that gives the most effective proof that eugenics has by no means and can by no means work. Our genome is simply too advanced and intertwined for scientists to cleanly pluck detrimental traits from or insert optimistic traits into our organic make-up.
Eugenics just isn’t science, Rutherford explains, however the corruption of science for the aim of controlling people who find themselves weak, weak and poor. And it’s this very corruption, as Control clearly demonstrates, that makes eugenics’ followers unworthy to find out who’s and isn’t worthy of life.
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