2013Marek Vácha

The world´s problems are not caused by the genetically impaired, but by people with superb genes who use their talents for amoral ends.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

Eugenics

eu = good, right genus = family, race, genus the study of or belief in the possibility of

improving the qualities of the human species

study of human genetics and of methods to improve the inherited characteristics, physical and mental, of the human race.

Plato

„The children of the good parents they will take to a rearing pen in the care of nurses living apart in a certain section of the city; the children of inferior parents, or any child of the others born defective, they will hide, as is fitting, in a secret and unknown place.“

(Plato, The Republic, Book V, 460C)

Friedrich Nietzsche(1844 – 1900)

Only strong personalities can endure history, the weak ones are extinguished by it.

Francis Galton(1822 – 1911)

1863 term

„nature – nurture“ 1883 term "eugenics"

Francis Galton(1822 – 1911)

"Whenever you can, count."

Eugenic should be "introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion"

Sandel, M.J., (2007) The Case Against Perfection. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA and London, England.p.63

Francis Galton

It was well known that by careful selection farmers and flower fanciers could obtain permanent breeds of plants and animals strong in particular characters.

"Could not the race of men be similarly improved?"

Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?"

Could not man actually take charge of his own evolution?"

(Kevles, D.J., In the name of eugenics: genetics and the uses of human heredity. (1985) University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles. p. 3)

Francis Galton

He indicted the Roman Church for its insistence upon celibacy for clerics because these measure diminished the propagation of the intellectually able.

religious dogmatism... ..."crushed the inquiring spirit, the love of

observation, the pursuit of inductive studies, the habit of indepenent thought."

(Kevles, D.J., In the name of eugenics: genetics and the uses of human heredity. (1985) University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles. p. 3)

Francis Galton(1822 – 1911)

invention of fingerprinting to help the police as he travelled around Britain, he secretly constructed

a beauty map of the cities, concluding that the incidence of pretty girls was highest in London and lowest in Aberdeen

Galton also enlivened dull scientific meetings by attempting to measure the boredom level of the audience, eventually settling on a measure of fidgets per minute, a study which he published in the journal Nature

Francis Galton(1822 – 1911)

Galton concluded the inefficacy of prayer by showing that men much prayed for, such as those high up in the church, did not live longer than those at the top of other professions such as a law

and that ships bearing missionaries sank just as often as those carrying material goods.

Francis Galton(1822 – 1911)

If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create! We might introduce prophets and high priests of civilization into the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins. Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties.

Galton, F., (1864) Hereditary talent and character. MacMillan´s Magazine.11,157-165 p.165-166

Francis Galton(1822 – 1911)

Francis Galton urged the brightest and the healthiest individuals to marry each other. He found an ideal situation in German university professors (then all male) who tended to marry the daughters of professors or their female graduate students.

Eugenics

Negative eugenics: segregation sterilization genocide

Pozitive eugenics

Francis Galton: "What nature does blindly, slowly and

ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly."

Charles Darwin

"You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense," Darwin told his cousin, "for I have always maintained that excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work."

"We now know, that genius... tends to be inherited."

(Kevles, D.J., In the name of eugenics: genetics and the uses of human heredity. (1985) University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles. p. 20)

J.G. Mendel1862

J.G. Mendel1880

Popularizers of eugenics

Francis Galton Charles Davenport

The most progressive revolution in history could be realized if only human matings could be placed upon the same high plane as that of horse breeding."

Karl Pearson Alexander Graham Bell G.B. Shaw Winston Churchill

Theodor Roosevelt to Davenport: "Some day, we will realize that the prime

duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen of the right type, is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type."

Sandel, M.J., (2007) The Case Against Perfection. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA and London, England.p.64

J.B.S. Haldane and "ectogenic children" "Along with other biologists across the

political spectrum, Haldane linked the science of eugenics to social advances. New laboratory techniques would create what he called "ectogenic children", born from embryos that had been fertilized and nurtured outside the womb. (It was Haldane´s ectogenic fantasy that inspired Aldous Huxley to write Brave New World and popularize the idea of test-tube babies)

(Rothman, S.M., Rothman, D., (2004) The Pursuit of Perfection. Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, INC, New York. p. 8)

Order for Sexual Sterilization of an inmate in a state hospital in Virginia (USA).

USA: between the 1920s and 1940s, it is estimated that 30 000 to 35 000 people were sterilized involuntarily.

1924: Oliver Wendell Holmes and his court upheld the rights of states to sterilize supposedly genetically inferior individuals against their will:

(Richards, J.E., Hawley, R.S., (2005) The Human Genome. A User´s Guide. 2nd ed. Elsevier Academic Press, Burlington, MA, USA, p.433)

IQ tests

Stanford-Binet IQ test originally developed in the 1920s

as the testers assumed that there should be no sex differences in IQ scores, items on which the two sexes scored differently were again adjusted until, on average, there were no longer any difference between them

IQ tests

however, when the tests showed average differences in score between people from working and middle classes, or between black and whites, these were assumed to reflect "real" underlying differences in intelligence

Immigration Act of 1924

 law was signed by President Coolidge in May 1924. It provided for the following: The quota for immigrants entering the U.S.

was set at two percent of the total of any given nation's residents in the U.S. as reported in the 1890 census;

after July 1, 1927, the two percent rule was to be replaced by an overall cap of 150,000 immigrants annually and quotas determined by "national origins" as revealed in the 1920 census.

1903 – In 1903 an organization called the American Breeders Association was formed. The association set out to bring Mendelian ideas to the United States. Much of what they did dealt wuth horses and other animals, but they also began to follow up some rather theorethical work on human breeding begun by Francis Galton in England. there were pedigrees for idiocy, silliness,

nomadism, vagrancy, criminality

As the twentieth century dawned, Germany was in the vanguard of Western civilization.

It was German professors who won the lion´s share of Nobel science prizes: 33 per cent of the total awarded between 1901 and 1910 and 29 per cent in the following decade.

Ferguson, N., (2011) Civilization. The West and the Rest. Allen Lane, Penguin Books. New York.

According to the theory of „social Darwinism“, Africans were biologically inferior, an inconvenient obstacle to the development of Africa by more advanced white „Aryans“. But no one turned that theory into colonial practice more ruthlessly than the Germans in South-West Africa, today´s Namibia.

Ferguson, N., (2011) Civilization. The West and the Rest. Allen Lane, Penguin Books. New York.

The Germans first laid claim to the bleak shores of South-West Africa in 1884.

A year later Heinrich Ernst Göring – father of the more famous Hermann – was appointed Reich commissioner.

By the time Theodor Leutwein was appointed the colony´s first governor in 1893, German intentions were becoming clear: to expropriate the native Herero and Nama peoples and settle their land with German farmers.

Ferguson, N., (2011) Civilization. The West and the Rest. Allen Lane, Penguin Books. New York.

Racial theory justified flagrant inequality of the sort that would later be institutionalized in the American South as segregation and in South Africa as „apartheid“ – apartness.

In German South-West Africa, blacks were forbidden to ride horses, had to salute whites, could not walk on the footpaths, could not own bicycles or go to the libraries.

Ferguson, N., (2011) Civilization. The West and the Rest. Allen Lane, Penguin Books. New York.

The British and the French had made a point of abolishing slavery in their colonies during the nineteent century. The Germans did not.

Ferguson, N., (2011) Civilization. The West and the Rest. Allen Lane, Penguin Books. New York.

At least oe doctor conducted lethal experiments on concentration-camp prisoners in South-West Africa.

In 1906 as many as 778 autopsies were performed on prisoners for so called racial-biological research.

1917: French commanding officer General Charles Mangin was familiar with the latest racial science. His survey team, after examining recruits with the full range of pseudo-scientific methods, concluded that, thanks to their supposedly underdeveloped nervous systems, African soldiers would feel less fear and suffer less pain than their European countreparts.

It was no mere coincidence that the Reichmarschall in charge of the Luftwaffe was the son of the Reichskommissar of South-West Africa. It was no coincidence that Hans Grimm, the author of People without Space (1926), had spent fourteen years in southern Africa.

Adolf Hitler: Nature is cruel; therefore we are also

entitled to be cruel

A stronger race will supplant the weaker, since the drive for life in its final form will decimate every ridiculous fetter of the so-called humaneness of individuals, in order to make place for the humaneness of nature, which destroys the weak to make place for the strong. (Adolf Hitler)

cit. v Sacks, J., (2011) The Great Partnership. God, Science and the Search for Meaning. Hodder & Stoughton, London. p.119

Nazism

„Glass Man“

He was constructed in 1935 by the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden for an exhibition about genetic health

It must be the duty of racial hygiene to be attentive to a more severe elimination of morally inferior human beings than is the case today...

Glass man

for the first time in human history visitors could watch organs and architecture of the human body...

token of the new humankind, new race

harbinger of the final solution...

In prehistoric times of humanity, selection for endurance, heroism, social usefulness, etc, was made solely by hostile outside factors. This role must be assumed by a human organisation; otherwise, humanity would, for the lack of selective factors, be annihilated by the degenerative phenomena that accompany domestication.

Konrad Lorenz, cit v. Sacks, J., (2011) The Great Partnership. God, Science and the Search for Meaning. Hodder & Stoughton, London. p. 121

Positive Eugenics

It must be the duty of racial hygiene to be attentive to a more severe elimination of morally inferior human beings than is the case today...

„We don´t stand alone“

Compulsory sterilization laws

Program „lebensborn“

In the beginning, the "Lebensborn" were SS nurseries. But in order to create a "super-race", the SS transformed these nurseries in "meeting places" for "racially pure" German women who wanted to meet and make children with SS officers. The children born in the Lebensborn were taken in charge by the SS and it is important to know that most of them were also victims of this race policy. Without any contact with their mothers, without any parental love, most of them became autistic.

Program „lebensborn“

From 1939, one of the most horrible side of the Lebensborn policy was the kidnapping of children "racially goods" in the eastern occupied countries. These kidnappings were organized by the SS in order to take by force children who matched the Nazi's racial criteria (blond hair, blue eyes, etc....). Thousands of children were transferred to the "Lebensborn" centers in order to be "Germanized".

Program „lebensborn“

Program „lebensborn“

Negative Eugenics

Karl Brandt Philipp Bouhler

Nazi physician Karl Brandt, director of the Euthanasia Program. August 27, 1942.

Program T4

1000 : 10 : 5 : 1

Tiergartenstraße 4

This image originates from a film produced by the Reich Propaganda Ministry. It is captioned: "A moral and religious conception of life demands the prevention of hereditarily ill offspring." Nazi propaganda aimed to create public support for the compulsory sterilization effort.

Six places, where euthanasia were performed

Brandenburg near Berlin (January 1940 - September 1940),Grafeneck near Stuttgart (January 1940 - December 1940),Hartheim near Linz in Austria (January 1940 - December 1944),Sonnenstein/Pirna near Dresden (April 1940 - August 1943),Bernburg near Magdeburg (September 1940 - April 1943),Hadamar near Koblenz (January 1941 - August 1941).

Buses used to transport patients to Hadamar euthanasia center. The windows were painted to prevent people from seeing those inside. Germany, between May and September 1941.

1936

'This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community 60,000 reichsmark during his lifetime.

Fellow German, that is your money too.'

Nazi poster bearing the phrase, translated from German, "A strong and healthy nurse is there only to give care to a dangerous madman. Shouldn't we be ashamed?"

Clemens von GalenLebensunwertes Leben ?

“We must expect, therefore, that the poor defenceless patients are, sooner or later, going to be killed. Why? . . . because in the judgement of some official body, on the decision of some committee, they have become “unworthy to live", because they are classed as “unproductive members of the national community". The judgment is that they can no longer produce any goods: they are like an old piece of machinery which no longer works, like an old horse which has become incurably lame, like a cow which no longer gives any milk. What happens to an old piece of machinery? It is thrown on the scrap heap. What happens to a lame horse, an unproductive cow? I will not pursue the comparison to the end — so fearful is its appropriateness and its illuminating power . . .

If it is once admitted that men have the right to kill “unproductive" fellow men — even though it is at present applied only to poor and defenceless mentally ill patients — then the way is open for the murder of all unproductive men and women: the incurably ill, those disabled in industry or war. The way is open, indeed, for the murder of all of us, when we become old and infirm and therefore unproductive".

“For some months we have been heating reports that inmates of establishments for the care of the mentally ill who have been ill for a long period and perhaps appear incurable have been forcibly removed from these establishments on orders from Berlin.

Regularly the relatives receive soon afterwards an intimation that the patient is dead, that the patient's body has been cremated and that they can collect the ashes. There is a general suspicion, verging on certainty, that these numerous unexpected deaths of the mentally ill do not occur naturally but are intentionally brought about in accordance with the doctrine that it is legitimate to destroy a so-called “worthless life” — in other words to kill innocent men and women, if it is thought that their lives are of no further value to the people and the state. A terrible doctrine which seeks to justify the murder of innocent people, which legitimises the violent killing of disabled persons who are no longer capable of work, of cripples, the incurably ill and the aged and infirm!”

I will give you an example of what is happening. One of the patients in Marienthal was a man of 55, a farmer from a country parish in the Münster region — I could give you his name — who has suffered for some years from mental disturbance and was therefore admitted to Marienthal hospital. He was not mentally ill in the full sense: he could receive visits and was always happy, when his relatives came to see him. Only a fortnight ago he was visited by his wife and one of his sons, a soldier on home leave from the front. The son is much attached to his father, and the parting was a sad one: no one can tell, whether the soldier will return and see his father again, since he may fall in battle for his country. The son, the soldier, will certainly never again see his father on earth, for he has since then been put on the list of the “unproductive”. A relative, who wanted to visit the father this week in Marienthal, was turned away with the information that the patient had been transferred elsewhere on the instructions of the Council of State for National Defence. No information could be given about where he had been sent, but the relatives would be informed within a few days. What information will they be given? The same as in other cases of the kind? That the man has died, that his body has been cremated, that the ashes will be handed over on payment of a fee? Then the soldier, risking his life in the field for his fellow-countrymen, will not see his father again on earth, because fellow-countrymen at home have killed him.

Who could then have any confidence in a doctor?

Then no man will be safe: some committee or other will be able to put him on the list of “unproductive” persons, who in their judgment have become “unworthy to live”. And there will be no police to protect him, no court to avenge his murder and bring his murderers to justice.

Who could then have any confidence in a doctor?

Tiergartenstraße 4 today

…after Auschwitz

How can the progress of modern science and medicine and industry promise to liberate people from ignorance, disease, and brutal, mind-numbing work, yet help create a world where people willingly swallow fascist ideology, knowingly practice deliberate genocide, and energetically develop lethal weapons of mass destruction?

Theodor Adorno

Slippery slopeBaby Knauer

dětská "eutanázie"

T4: "eutanázie" dospělých

Auschwitz

In Germany the escalation was almost seamless, beginning with the compulsory sterilisation of unwanted types, then the killing of "impaired" children in hospitals, then to killing of "impaired" adults (the mentally and physically handicapped) in special centres by carbon monoxid gas, then the extension of this to the concentration and extermination camps.

The programm was carried out by doctors and psychiatrists, only a handful of whom objected

Sacks, J., (2011) The Great Partnership. God, Science and the Search for Meaning. Hodder & Stoughton, London. p.120

We now know, that a man can read Goethe and Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day´s work at Auschwitz in the morning.

George Steiner, cit. v Sacks, J., (2011) The Great Partnership. God, Science and the Search for Meaning. Hodder & Stoughton, London. p. 85

Modern Eugenics

"Thanks to medicine, individuals who would have died from diabetes now live long enough to transmit their disease-producing genes"

"The right that must become paramount is not the right to procreate, but rather the right of every child to be born with sound physical and mental constitution, based on a sound genotype . . . every child has the inalienable right to a sound heritage.

(Bentley Glass)

Herman Muller

"It is regarded as ethical to employ every artificial aid to enable an individual to reproduce ... even when his reproduction would be likely to perpetuate the genetic condition that had occasioned the given difficulty."

(His case in point was the medical advances that allowed diabetic women to bear children, thereby increasing the number of diabetics in the society)

Herman Muller

"From now on, evolution is what we make it. /It must become/ a conscious process (...) /so/ it can proceed at a pace far outdistancing that achieved by trial and error. (...) /If man/ sees some grand process like evolution, and that it would be at all possible for him to be in on that game, he would irreverently have to have his whack at that too."

(Muller, H.J., (1959) "The Guidance of Human Evolution" Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 3, no 1 (Autumn 1959):1,8,42 in Rothman, S.M., Rothman, D., (2004) The Pursuit of Perfection. Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, INC, New York. p. 10)

Modern eugenics

intelligence is the key human quality intelligence is measurable intelligence is inherited the world would be a better place if more people

were smart

Critique of the modern eugenics

is there „ideal“ human being? the beauty of humankind is in variety like art, pieces of music or painting, the

question „who/what is the best?“ is bereft of meaning. Mozart is not better than Beethoven we cannot line up people and say who is

„better“ is warm heart better than cold mind?

Critique of the modern eugenics

let us remeber that it is much easier to identify the undesirable than desirable, the malum than bonum That diabetes, epilepsy, schizophrenia, haemophilia are undesirable, to afflicted and fellow men alike, is noncontroversial. But what is „better“ – a cool head or a warm heart, high sensitivity or robustness, a placid or a rebellious temperament, and in what proportion of distribution rather than another: who is to determine that, and based on what knowledge?

(Jonas, H., (1974) Philosophical essays: from ancient creed to technological man. Prentice-Hall)

Genes do not control destiny

the notion of improving the world by selecting people with "good genes" is not so much good science as bad fantasy.

Geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky pointed out that the world´s problems are not caused by people with inferior genomes, but by people with perfectly good genomes using their talents for improper ends.