popsickle_in_one t1_ja8s28k wrote
Reply to comment by 0ttr in TIL John Scopes, a high school teacher in Tennessee, was arrested and tried for merely teaching the theory of evolution in 1925. by JesusLikesHisCheezIt
Selective breeding was known about long before Darwin proposed his theory of Evolution.
Eugenics merely applies that knowledge to humans. You don't need to know a thing about evolution.
The Nazis you allude to actually rejected evolution as the origin of species.
Understanding evolution shows how eugenics (and indeed selective breeding) is actually bad for the species in question, and doesn't create a super race. (look at how many purebred dogs have genetic deficiencies compared to mongrels)
People could twist their racism to fit a narrative and claim that was evolution. Darwin himself was very much anti-racist though and his theory shows that there isn't a superior breed of humans.
0ttr t1_ja94jlm wrote
However, it was very popular at the time, and no doubt evolution reinforced it and was used as a justification for it, hence the presence of it in a high school biology text. Many, many highly educated people supported eugenic ideas all the way up to US Supreme Court justices. It was not just racism--it was any kind of character or physical flaw.
And of course, the understanding of evolution, in an era prior to understanding gene encoding, chromosomes, and DNA, was considerably less sophisticated than it is now, again, certainly down at the level of a high school text.
You are arguing about what we know now, and what we know in hindsight, and that's fine, but that's not what they "knew" then. Your statements literally contradict the text quoted out of the book used in the case.
Clearly that was not the only reason evolution was being objected to, but it was definitely a reason, and convoluting creationism with the teaching of Christian morality is certainly a mishmash of theology, but it is clashing with a mishmash of science and pseudoscience that was in a mainstream accepted high school biology text at the time.
popsickle_in_one t1_ja9d7u7 wrote
The book is wrong. Evolution from the start discredited eugenics or any notion that there were superior races. How could there be if all types of humans had been evolving for the same amount of time?
People supported eugenics because they were racist, not because the theory of evolution ever taught them it was a good idea. People would have manipulated the ideas to fit racism, but it wasn't the cause, and studying it, even then, would have led to the opposite conclusion that the racists were trying to make.
People already knew about selective breeding, selecting against deformities in people has been present since ancient times. Darwin did not introduce this concept.
Also, the idea that Christian morality stood against eugenics at the time was laughable, since the both the British Eugenics Education Society, and the American Eugenics Society counted top clergymen among their members, and modified their message to appeal to Christians.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4001825/
Meanwhile eugenics was being consistently denounced by biologists and anthropologists, and they were especially concerned with the unscientific ideals eugenicists were spouting in order to propagate their message (such as picking undesirable 'traits' that weren't even biological in nature ie committing crimes)
0ttr t1_ja9g1ix wrote
Well, of course the book is wrong, no one in 2023 is disputing that a book used by a teacher in the 1920s era is wrong!
Clergyman were indeed eugenicists. So were scientists. Bryan was a Christian who was not a eugenicist and made arguments based on those principles, just like some scientist made their arguments for and against. So to argue that science was not tainted by it is blatantly false. Henry F. Osborn was a eugenicist and president of the AMNH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Fairfield_Osborn. Charles B. Davenport, zoologist, eugenicist. Henry Crampton, president NYAS, major evolutionary biologist, eugenicist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Crampton
So I think you need to adjust your thinking. The Nazis drew upon American eugenics research because it was so "thorough".
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