2 PERVERSIONS OF SCIENCERead more at location 330
Note: definizione di razza e di razzismo il razzista studia e realizza un ordinata gerarchia immutabile delle razze. in un certo senso il razzista nn è ignorante come invece chi nutre pregiudizi, bisogna tracciare una separazione ra qs 2 tipi il razzista non ragiona in termini statistici ma in termini individuali una storia della ricerca sulle razze: linneo blumenbach gobineau (cominciano le ambiguità) svienza e razzismo. il movimento eugenetico il problema con l eugenetica: nn sappiamo quali tratti beneficino la società nel suo insieme Edit
The central premise of racism, which distinguishes it from ethnic prejudice, is the notion of an ordered hierarchy of races in which some are superior to others.Read more at location 348
recognized four races, based principally on geography and skin color. He named them Homo americanus (Native Americans), Homo europaeus (Europeans), Homo asiaticus (East Asians) and Homo afer (Africans).Read more at location 362
In a 1795 treatise called On the Natural Variety of Mankind, the anthropologist Johann Blumenbach described five races based on skull type.Read more at location 364
The more dubious turn taken in the 19th century was exemplified by Joseph-Arthur Comte de Gobineau’s book An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races,Read more at location 374
The superior race, Gobineau wrote, was that of the Indo-Europeans, or Aryans, and their continuance in the Greek, Roman and European empires.Read more at location 380
Gobineau greatly admired Jews, whom he described as “a people that succeeded in everything it undertook, a free, strong, and intelligent people,Read more at location 381
Gobineau’s ambitious theory of history was built on sand. There is no factual basis for his notions of racial purity or racial degenerationRead more at location 383
To Gobineau’s assertion of inequality between races was then added the divisive idea that the various human populations represented not just different races but also different species. A leading proponent of this belief was the Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton.Read more at location 386
He was troubled by the fact that black and white people were depicted in Egyptian art from 3000 BC yet the world itself had been created only in 4004 BC, according to the widely accepted chronology drawn up by Archbishop Ussher from information derived from the Old Testament and elsewhere. This was not enough time for different races to emerge, so the races must have been created separately,Read more at location 389
Morton amassed a large collection of skulls from all over the world, measuring the volume occupied by the brain and other details that in his view established the distinctness of the four principal races.Read more at location 393
Europeans are the earth’s “fairest inhabitants,” he wrote. Next were Mongolians, meaning East Asians, deemed “ingenious, imitative and highly susceptible of cultivation.” Third place was assigned to Americans, meaning Native Americans, whose mental faculties appeared to Morton as locked in a “continual childhood,” and fourth were Negroes, or Africans, who Morton said “have little invention, but strong powers of imitation,Read more at location 395
Morton was an academic and did not promote any practical consequences of his ideas. But his followers had no hesitation in spelling out their interpretation that the races had been created separately, that blacks were inferior to whites and that the slavery of the American South was therefore justified.Read more at location 399
The Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould, a widely read essayist, accused Morton of having mismeasured the cranial volumes of African and Caucasian skulls in order to support the view that brain size is related to intelligence.Read more at location 402
But in a surprising recent twist, the bias now turns out to have been Gould’s. Morton did not in fact believe, as Gould asserted, that intelligence was correlated with brain size. Rather, he was measuring his skulls to study human variation as part of his inquiry into whether God had created the human races separately. A team of physical anthropologists remeasured all of the skulls they could identify in Morton’s collection and found his measurements were almost invariably correct.Read more at location 406
“Ironically, Gould’s own analysis of Morton is likely the stronger example of a bias influencing results,”Read more at location 411
There are two lessons to be drawn from the Morton-Gould imbroglio. One is that scientists, despite their training to be objective observers, are as fallible as anyone else when their emotions or politics are involved, whether they come from the right or, as in Gould’s case, from the left.Read more at location 416
A firm refutation of the idea that human races were different species was supplied by Darwin. In On the Origin of Species,Read more at location 422
Social Darwinism. This was the proposition that just as in nature the fittest survive and the weak are pushed to the wall, the same rule should prevail in human societies too, lest nations be debilitated by the poor and sick having too many children.Read more at location 447
Still, it was Spencer who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which Darwin adopted.Read more at location 451
Spencer argued that government aid that would allow the poor and sickly to propagate would impede society’s adaptation.Read more at location 452
Even government support for education should be cut off, lest it postpone the elimination of those who failed to adapt.Read more at location 453
Yes, vaccination has saved millions whose weaker constitutions would otherwise have let them succumb to smallpox, Darwin wrote. And yes, the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind, which, to judge from animal breeding, “must be highly injurious to the race of man.” But the aid we feel impelled to give to the helpless is part of our social instincts, Darwin said.Read more at location 459
But for many intellectuals, theoretical benefits often outweigh overwhelming present evils. Airy notions of racial improvement drove the eugenics movement, which over many decades created the mental climate for the mass exterminations conducted by the National Socialists in Germany.Read more at location 466
Yet this catastrophe started out in such a different place. It started with Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton.Read more at location 467
By analogy with animal breeding, people could no doubt be bred, if it were ethically acceptable, so as to enhance specific desired traits. But it is impossible to know what traits would benefit society as a whole.Read more at location 500
The principal organizer of the new eugenics movement was Charles Davenport.Read more at location 509
Davenport, though he had no special distinction as a scientist, found it easy to raise money for his eugenics program. He secured funds from leading philanthropies, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the recently founded Carnegie Institution.Read more at location 515
The Eugenics Research Association included members from Harvard, Columbia, Yale and Johns Hopkins.Read more at location 522
“Besides Davenport, there were Raymond Pearl and Herbert S. Jennings, both of Johns Hopkins University; Clarence Little, the president of the University of Michigan and later the founder of the Jackson Laboratory in Maine; and the Harvard professors Edward M. East and William E. Castle. . . . The large majority of American colleges and universities—including Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Wisconsin, Northwestern, and Berkeley—offered well-attended courses in eugenics, or genetics courses that incorporated eugenic material.”Read more at location 525
“The elite thinkers of American medicine, science and higher education were busy expanding the body of eugenic knowledgeRead more at location 530
“We have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.”Read more at location 533
The court was considering an appeal by Carrie Buck, a woman whom the State of Virginia wished to sterilize on the grounds that she, her mother and her daughter were mentally impaired.Read more at location 535
In the 1927 case, known as Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court found for the state, with only one dissent. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority, endorsed without reservation the eugenicists’ credoRead more at location 537
The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”Read more at location 541
Eugenicists perverted intelligence tests into a tool for degrading people. The tests had been first developed by Alfred Binet to recognize children in need of special educational help.Read more at location 546
Questions like “The Knight engine is used in the: Packard/Stearns/Lozier/Pierce Arrow” or “Becky Sharp appears in: Vanity Fair/Romola/A Christmas Carol/Henry IV” were heavily loaded against those who had not received a particular kind of education.Read more at location 549
Yet tests like these were used to destroy people’s hopes of having children or deny them entry into militaryRead more at location 552
1930, 24 states had sterilization laws on their books, and by 1940, 35,878 Americans had been sterilized or castrated.Read more at location 556
Eugenicists also began to influence the nation’s immigration laws. The 1924 Immigration Act pegged each country’s quota to the proportion of its nationals present in the 1890 census, a reference point later changed to the 1920 census.Read more at location 558
The intent and effect of the law was to increase immigration from Nordic countries and restrict people from southern and eastern Europe,Read more at location 559
The eugenicists had inspectors installed in the major capitals of Europe to screen prospective immigrants.Read more at location 563
Many supporters of the 1924 Immigration Act were influenced by a book called The Passing of the Great Race. Its author, Madison Grant, was a New York lawyer and conservationist who helped found the Save the Redwoods League, the Bronx Zoo, Glacier National Park and Denali National Park.Read more at location 567
Franz Boas, the founder of American social anthropology and a champion of the idea that significant differences between societies are cultural, not biological, in origin. Grant tried to get Boas firedRead more at location 570
England’s decline was due to the “lowering proportion of its Nordic blood and the transfer of political power from the vigorous Nordic aristocracy and middle classes to the radical and labor elements, both largely recruited from the Mediterranean type,”Read more at location 580
“We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America ‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss.Read more at location 584
The Galtonian version of eugenics at first attracted a wide following among the intelligentsia, including the playwright George Bernard Shaw and social radicals such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb.Read more at location 594
While a Mendelian trait could in principle be almost eliminated by sterilizing its carriers, were it ethical to do so, complex traits are much harder to influence in this way.Read more at location 605
By 1933, eugenics had reached a fateful turning point. In both England and the United States, scientists had first embraced the idea and then turned against it, followed by their respective publics.Read more at location 616
if scientists in Germany had followed their colleagues in rejecting eugenic ideas. Hitler’s rise to power foreclosed any such possibility.Read more at location 617
They saw that American eugenicists favored Nordic races and sought to keep the gene pool unsullied.Read more at location 619
U.S. eugenic laws and ideology “became inspirational blueprints for Germany’s rising tide of race biologists and race-based hatemongers,” wrote the author Edwin Black.24 Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, and Germany’s eugenics program quickly got under way.Read more at location 622
Doctors who failed to report suspect patients were fined. Sterilizations began on January 1, 1934, and covered children over ten and people at large, not just those in institutions.Read more at location 629
The other departure in Germany’s eugenics program was the addition of Jews to the list of those considered unfit.Read more at location 640
The term “non-Aryan” offended foreign nations such as Japan. Future laws referred to Jews explicitlyRead more at location 643
The National Socialist Party proposed that half-Jews be considered Jews, but the Ministry of the Interior rejected the idea as impractical. It divided half-Jews into two categories, considering them as full Jews only if they belonged to the Jewish religion or were married to a Jew.Read more at location 644
It was Hitler’s aim to depopulate the countries of Eastern Europe so as to make room for German settlers.Read more at location 652
Nordic supremacy, purity of the blood, condemnation of intermarriage, sterilization of the unfit—all these were ideas embraced by American eugenicists. The destruction of the Jews, however, was Hitler’s idea.Read more at location 654
In Germany, scientists played a major role in paving the way for the destruction of the Jews but were not solely culpable. Anti-Semitic statements mar the writings of leading German philosophers, including even Kant. Wagner ranted against Jews in his essays.Read more at location 659
After the Second World War, scientists resolved for the best of reasons that genetics research would never again be allowed to fuel the racial fantasies of murderous despots.Read more at location 671
