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Discovery Institute blames Darwin, not Galton, for eugenics

By evolvingthoughts on February 11, 2007.

Another stupid piece by DIsco, in which David Klinghofer tries to blame Darwin for eugenics, totally overlooking the fact that the mediate source is animal husbandry, which predates Darwin by several thousand years, and that the immediate source is genetics, not evolution. I think that we should immediately teach the doctrine of signatures (in which natal traits are formed by the parents looking at similar objects, like the "striped and speckled sheep" in Genesis, which were mated before peeled branches) rather than genetics, because of the bad consequences of people misusing that science for prior political aims. After all, if it is due to genetics, it must be false, right? Let's see them play that one out (although I wouldn't put it past them).

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Perhaps the title should be "Discovery Instute blames Darwin, not Mendel, for eugenics."

Of course, Galton didn't know about Mendel, but it seems that flourishing of eugenics was in the era when Mendel was more in favor than Darwin. Were any of the eugenicists in favor of "random variation" in a population? Did any of them think that their policies would result in macro-evolution?

As is only too common in the supposedly anti-evolutionary arguments, they are really argument against something else - genetics, development, reproduction, biochemistry, atoms, ...

Galton was the founder of the modern eugenics movement. His institute was a eugenics institute, and the biometrics movement he founded went hand in hand with the eugenics movement. Mendel became popular much later, whent he eugenicists were well under way.

The eugenic justification was that without eugenic programs, the "racial health" of the species (or race, usually the British, Germanic, or American "races" as if they were biological realities) would decline because modern society was allowing "bad genetic health" to persist. Of course, in an evolutionary context, anything that survives and spreads more effectively than other variants simply is fitter; there's no evaluation involved. It didn't involve Mendelian variation as such.