Thank God it doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. But it has not always been so, cf. the eugenics movement that raged in the first half of the 20th century, especially in the United States.
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Many evolutionary population geneticists objected to eugenics early on, and in fact demonstrated that eugenics doesn’t make sense in light of evolutionary science.
What now?
There’s nothing in your link that says we should treat anyone in a particular way. Please understand the difference between [What some have argued] with [What is actually true].
Presumably would would agree with me that people’s worth, and how we should treat them, are not based on them being absolutely physically and cognitively equal in every possible respect? If you don’t agree with me on this, then is it your contention that if God created some ethnic group less physically capable, or less cognitively equipped, than some other ethnic group, that would justify mistreating them?
I’m really a layman in this matter and I could be wrong, but it seems to me that eugenics theories were so widely accepted among scientists in the first half of the 20th century in the United States that one can legitimately say that they represented the scientific consensus of the time, even if there were opponents.
Before we get into this, we should first define what we mean by eugenics. There are several varieties and conceptions of it. This article gives a good list:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/eugenics/
Which type of eugenics are you talking about?
Of course I agree. This is why I find it sad to abort babies based on the fact that they have three chromosomes 21 instead of two.
This article is pretty good:
In 1925, T.H. Morgan clearly identifies an important criticism of the eugenics movement. He directly attacks Davenport’s and Laughlin’s approach (without mentioning their names) by pointing out that despite all their exhaustive family pedigrees, they failed to really understand the nature of the trait they thought they were studying.
In the case of man’s physical defects, there are a few extremely abnormal conditions where the evidence indicates that something is inherited, but even here there is much that is obscure. The case most often quoted is feeble-mindedness that has been said to be inherited as a Mendelian recessive, but until some more satisfactory definition can be given as to where feeble-mindedness begins and ends, and until it has been determined how many and what internal physical defects may produce a general condition of this sort, and until it has been determined to what extent feeble-mindedness is due to syphilis, it is extravagant to pretend to claim there is a single Mendelian factor for this condition … until all the social conditions surrounding the childhood of the individual are examined and given proper weight, serious doubts will arise as to what form of inheritances is producing the results.20
Some have argued that the lesson of this period was that:
Genetics was corrupted in the 1920s by the confusion of folk knowledge with scientific inference. For whatever reasons, outsiders who recognized it were shunned, and insiders were, as they say, a day late and a dollar short. The fairly obvious lesson to be learned is that where science appears to validate folk beliefs, it needs to be subjected to considerably higher standards of scrutiny than ordinary science.21
We may want to ask ourselves: What (if anything) that we research today will seem as unfathomable as the sex-linked trait, love of the sea?
Another scientific criticism of eugenics is that mental disability was likely caused by sporadic mutations that were not actually part of the familial genetic line.
It is also helpful to remember that there versions of “eugenics” that we generally accept as ethical. For example, you oppose oppose abortion just because of down’s syndrome:
However, do you also oppose couples choosing not have children after the mother is 40 years old because the likelihood of conceiving a down’s syndrome kid is higher? Most likely you don’t see a problem with this, but it also is a type of eugenics, one that is certainly less of a problem for you.
Likewise, genetic counseling for certain subpopulations (e.g. to manage Tay Sach’s disease in Ashkenazi Jews) is common, even extending to genetic matchmaking (Opinion | Genetic matchmaking can improve medical outcomes | Mint). This is eugenics. It isn’t forced by the government, and does not include forced sterlizations or forced breeding or even voluntary abortions. So is it ethically wrong? Probably you don’t have an objection to this, but is also a type of eugenics.
I bring up this up primarily to point out that the topic is complex. You can be almost certain that any simple story is false.
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But then it’s patently obvious that evolutionary science does not support racist or eugenicist ideologies, isn’t it?
Do you understand why evolutionary science conflicts with eugenics as in this case @Giltil? Down’s syndrome is sporadic, and kids with this have very low reproductive success. The standard approach to eugenics (not what I described above), the one that caused all the ethical abuses, has just no impact on Down’s Syndrome for this reason.
It should also be noted that many parents who elect to have abortions, do that in part by considering what kind of life they envision their child will have, and whether they will be able to provide the kind of care and upbringing they think the child would require to have a decent life.
These ethical considerations go well beyond simplistic notions of “worth” based on physical and cognitive capacities determined by genetics.
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It probably ought to be pointed out, too, that the eugenics movement was principally not a set of scientific views, but a set of social policies which were said to flow from those views. The translation from “is” to “ought” always requires the input of values.
And THAT is where the criticisms of the eugenics movement primarily rest: in the domain of values, not in the domain of science. When one finds out that a particular disease, or a propensity for that disease, is heritable, that’s just a fact, which is neither morally good nor morally wrong, any more than gravity becomes morally wrong when it kills people who fall from heights. It surely is possible for people to do immoral things in response to a fact; people start wars sometimes in response to “facts” that aren’t actually true. But facts, themselves, are neither moral nor immoral, and it always seems to me that blaming “science” for eugenics misses the point. When Justice Holmes said that “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” this was less a statement about the heritability of intelligence than it was a declaration of his lack of humane values.
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@PDPrice are you related to him?
I would honestly have no idea!