Control : The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics (9781324035619) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc

* Sperm observed by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek in 1677; eggs by Karl Ernst von Baer in 1827.

† This maxim was not Darwin’s but that of the philosopher and biologist Herbert Spencer. I don’t like it much because it became tautologous as evolutionary biology developed: fitness is a term used to quantify the ability of an organism to contribute its genes to the next generation. Therefore, it sort of means “survival of the individuals that survive.” Nevertheless, Darwin adopted it as an alternative phrase for natural selection, and added it to the fifth edition of The Origin of Species in 1869.

‡ In a footnote in his 1883 book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development: “We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea.”

§ In fact, it was a recording of the previous day’s weather, published in The Times on April 1, 1875.

¶ Basic tools of statistics such as standard deviation, correlation coefficients and regression lines were either invented or developed by Galton to process his ideas and add data-driven evidence.

# Possibly influenced by Prospero’s lament for Caliban in The Tempest: “a born devil on whose nature Nurture can never stick.”

** Some frequently used data sets selected by the controversial intelligence researcher Richard Lynn that purport to represent national IQs—including those that claim to show many sub-Saharan African countries having significantly lower averages than European countries—are meaningless, invalid, and absurd. For example, the national IQ for Botswana in the NIQ_QNWSAS data set is 69.5, but upon inspection, this number was arrived at with a single sample of 104 natively Tswana-speaking high-school students aged seventeen to twenty, tested in English, and thus not comparable with that of other countries. For Somalia (measured at IQ 67.7): a single sample of refugees aged eight to eighteen tested in a Kenyan refugee camp; and so on. Nevertheless, these data are unquestioningly cited as valid by dozens if not hundreds of peer-reviewed academic papers, despite their fatal flaws.

†† Larmarckian inheritance is sometimes mocked for its stupidity. We now know that the giraffe did not get a long neck because it strives to get the juiciest leaves, and the offspring of blacksmiths don’t have bigger muscles because their father smashed iron all his life. Evolutionary change does not act on characteristics that are acquired during life. Lamarck was a good scientist and his ideas do not deserve to be mocked. He was wrong, and scientists should always be very happy to be wrong.

‡‡ During the writing of this book, I was continually bewildered by the recapitulations of history in the present, even the repetition of the same language.

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