Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller

Author:Lulu Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The word was coined back in 1883 by a British scientist named Francis Galton, a famous polymath in his own right, who also happened to be the half cousin of Charles Darwin. When On the Origin of Species had first come out, Galton had read his cousin’s book and been so inspired he called it a new “epoch in my own mental development.” Once Galton had come to comprehend that there were forces of natural selection shaping the array of life on Earth, it dawned on him that perhaps you could actually manipulate those forces to select for a master race of humans, by breeding out traits he incorrectly believed to be associated with blood: poverty, criminality, illiteracy, “feeblemindedness,” promiscuity, and more. He called this technique of killing off groups of people you don’t like “eugenics,” Greek for “good” and “birth.” And he began telling anyone who would listen to him—Darwin’s cousin!—about his scientific-sounding plan for making Europe great again.

He trotted out his ideas at fancy gatherings and in fancy magazines like Nature and Macmillan’s. He even wrote a sci-fi novel called The Eugenic College of Kantsaywhere, about a community where only those who passed rigorous tests were allowed to procreate, and anyone else who tried would be imprisoned and punished with “sharp severity.” Galton saw his book as a happy tale. A how-to guide for saving the human race from decay.

Plenty of people dismissed Galton. There’s a chance that eugenics could have remained in the realm of speculative fiction had a small group of influential scientists not championed its cause so zealously. David Starr Jordan, despite all his railing against the dangers of “sciosophy,” was one of the earliest and loudest. He drank the eugenics Kool-Aid hard and fast. He began hallucinating evidence of heritable personality traits everywhere. Even his smitten biographer, Edward McNall Burns, had to admit it was ludicrous. “He attached so exaggerated an importance to biological inheritance, that he seemed to think almost every quality of human personality could be explained thereby.” Poverty, laziness, the ability to classify birds—all simply a matter of the blood!

David Starr Jordan was one of the first to bring Galton’s ideas back to America. As early as the 1880s, decades before most American eugenicists got the fever, David had begun to tuck these ideas into his lectures at Indiana University, informing students that traits like “pauperism” and “degener[acy]” were heritable and thus could be “exterminated just as swamps are drained.” In time, he began taking the ideas outside of the classroom, giving speeches to large gatherings of prominent politicians warning that the “republic shall endure [only] as long as the human harvest is good.” He published his first pro-eugenics article in 1898 and followed it with a flurry of books advocating for the cleansing of the gene pool: The Human Harvest, The Blood of the Nation, Your Family Tree, and so on. In his writings, David took all the kinds of people he wanted to rid from the Earth—the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.