Joseph Riggs wrote:
The suggestion prompts me to wonder whether it would have been better or
worse if the Nazis had a slightly better grounding in fact and DNA for their
genetic theories? On the one hand, if they'd known what we know today then
their defeat might have lent more weight to arguments against the at best
slippery slope of human eugenics. On the other hand, if they'd known what we
The science of eugenics is solid as rock well before the rise of the
Nazis. We bred desirable traits into almost every plants and animals
we could get our hands on. Figuring out eugenics on edible plants and
animals was probably the defining aspect of the great ancient
civilizations.
According to wikipedia (knowing not to trust it blindly)
[Plato] recorded these views in his famous dialogue "The Republic." "The best
men must have intercourse with the best women as frequently as possible, and
the opposite is true of the very inferior." Plato proposed that selection be
performed by a fake lottery so people's feelings would not be hurt by any
awareness of selection principles.
(what a great pick-up line at parties, "Hey good-looking, do you know
what the great philosopher Plato said about the best men and women?
...")
On scientific prinicple human eugenics would work absolutely as well
as it worked (and working) on corn, gold fish and race horses. The
only problem is who has the gut to run a true eugenics program on
one's own species? The Nazis never wanted true eugenics which would
in fact aggressive cross-breeding of German stock with all the races
in the world, yes a true Aryan eugenicist should ask his daughter to
make babies with Jews, blacks, Chinese and Aryans and objectively test
the babies on intelligence and physical and kill the bottom 90%. And
when you find someone like Rex:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/20/60minutes/main957718.shtml?CMP=ILC-SearchStories
You would have him breed intensively with thousand of women to try to
extract his musical genius and leave out the mental disability.
Ahhh but what was Nazi eugenics about? Truthfully it's the absolute
opposite of eugenics. They have no interest to improve German blood
with the best of Jewish, African and Asiatic genes. Is it coincidence
that all the eugenicists are themselves awfully smart people, Plato,
Alexander Graham Bell, George Bernard Shaw, and Winston Churchill?
All these self-proclaimed eugenicists are
know now they might have actually been able to do some real damage (as
if killing millions of Jews, gypsies, and other 'undesirables' wasn't
bad enough). China and India have managed to do enough damage already
with just the knowledge of what gender the fetus is (as an aside, I
read a few weeks ago that India was prosecuting it's first case under
a law that forbade abortions based on gender but that had largely been
ignored until now).
As it is, the Nazi theories were so clearly based on utterly outlandish and out
dated fantasies that the idea of Nazi Eugenics has become almost buffoonish.
It also means that no matter how close Watson's ideas are to an updated version
of Nazi Eugenics, he can safely tell himself that he has nothing in common with
them. I don't know how close his thinking might be (I'll take your word for
it), but it is a problematic area.
junior
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