Eugenics

Aside from its ability to explain differentiation in the Galapagos finches, the idea of natural selection also carries implications for the future of any species. Defined neutrally, eugenics is the study of human betterment through means of gene manipulation and control, and the movement’s scientific reputation was forever tarred and feathered when Ernst Rüdin began incorporating eugenic rhetoric into Nazi propaganda and racial policy. 

Though it has been publicly banned in America since 1979, the science was especially popular in the first half of the twentieth century where millions of forced sterilizations took place across the globe. In the twentieth century around 60,000 such sterilizations took place in the United States, with a third of those occurring under the State of California eugenics program, which lasted from 1909 to 1979. There was even a public push to familiarize the science within the religious arena, and in the 1930’s the American Eugenics Society ran a sermon contest to encourage pastors to defend eugenics to their congregations. All denominations except the Catholics responded.

The movement itself was said to begin with Francis Galton (1822-1911), a cousin of Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Galton makes his opinion known that humanity should be eugenically regimented in Hereditary Genius. Charles’ son Leonard Darwin (1850–1943) was Chairman of the British Eugenics Society between 1911-1928, and vice-President of the 1912 and 1921 International Eugenics Congresses, the first of which was an offshoot of an earlier meeting by the predominantly German-controlled International Society for Racial Hygiene. The first International Eugenics Congress was held in London in 1912, and attendees included Winston Churchill (1874-1965) and Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922). Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945) received a Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, and along with Bell the two sat on the board of the Eugenic Records Office.

The 1927 U.S. Supreme Court trial of Buck v. Bell represents the only trial in which a state eugenics law was challenged and upheld. In 1924 the state of Virginia passed legislation authorizing compulsory sterilization of mentally retarded individuals. The state wanted to sterilize a woman named Carrie Buck, who had given birth to an out-of-wedlock daughter. Buck, her mother and her child were all accused of being ‘feeble-minded.’ The court ruled against Buck’s right to bodily integrity in the interest of preserving the integrity of the human gene pool. Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes closed saying, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Buck’s daughter was taken from her upon delivery and she allegedly never saw her again. Buck turned out to be an average student and her daughter was on the honor roll.

This background information about the movement is included to show the connection between Darwinism, eugenics, the Nazis, and Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood organization, but establishing direct lines of culpability between ideas and actions is speculative. One of Sanger’s ideas was to create what she described as a human "race of thoroughbreds." Planned Parenthood’s board of directors included Dr. Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950), a Nazi supporter who felt social progress demanded neo-aristocracy and authored unashamedly racist tomes including The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy. In April of 1933, Dr. Ernst Rüdin (1874-1952), Hitler’s director of genetic sterilization and co-founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene, contributed an article to Birth Control Review, Sanger’s monthly periodical. Rüdin collaborated with Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) on Germany’s sterilization law that same year, an edict that called for the sterilization of all Jews and colored German children. For signs of this influence in America, note that John Scopes’ textbook, A Civic Biology, introduces the science of eugenics as that of “…being well-born,” dividing the human race into five classes and commenting further that “…the highest type of all, the Caucasians, were represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe in America.”

Arguments connecting the science of eugenics and Nazism or Darwinism are not without warrant, but this is by no means to say that Darwinism caused the Holocaust! Anti-Semitism predates Darwin and Hitler, and drawing a direct line of culpability between Darwinism and the Holocaust is illogical and no different than blaming atheism for school shootings, or theism for clinic bombings. In all cases, extremism is the impetus responsible for the extreme behavior, not the subject the fantasist extremely distorts.