Here are a couple of tweets today from Richard Dawkins making the same basic point I made 13 years ago in a VDARE article on Celebrity Feminist Eugenics:
@RichardDawkins
If you were contemplating Artificial Insemination, would you be content with a random donor? Or would you make a deliberate choice?
@RichardDawkins
Almost 100% say they'd opt for nonrandom choice of sperm donor. Shock, horror, you're all eugenicists!
Dawkins is a product of the English tradition that produced Galton, Fisher, and Hamilton, all of them ardent eugenicists, yet, somehow, none of them Nazis. One might almost think that Stephen Jay Gould wasn't a reliable, unbiased guide to evolutionary theory and its history. But, of course, that's unthinkable.
In reality, eugenics had no more to do with WWII happening than the ever-popular Volkswagen Beetle, probably less. But it did provide a convenient club for academics in the late 20th Century to use to whomp their predecessors of the early 20th Century.
For an analysis of Dawkins' views on race, see my 2004 VDARE article.
And for Dawkins and ethnic nepotism, see my followup article.
In reality, eugenics had no more to do with WWII happening than the ever-popular Volkswagen Beetle, probably less. But it did provide a convenient club for academics in the late 20th Century to use to whomp their predecessors of the early 20th Century.
For an analysis of Dawkins' views on race, see my 2004 VDARE article.
And for Dawkins and ethnic nepotism, see my followup article.
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16 comments:
i've always liked dawkins. would love to know what he really thinks deep down about a lot of these things.
I used to like Dawins but he has out right denounced the reality of race. He is a liar and a non-scientist he is just a celebrity now.
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/18/us/boston-blasts/index.html
Photos of the two Boston bomb suspects. I think it can safely be said that they are not black. As to ethnicity... ? Truth in 3...2...1...
I had the impression that Nazi ideology was highly focused on the concept of race. Like others, they believed that races were in competition and that your 'team' could only win by practicing both offense (denying other races resources, land or life) and defense (encouraging those of your teammates with 'pure blood' to breed with like kind). Their use of the term "master race" isn't apocryphal, is it? To join the SS, applicants had to prove pure German lineage going back 200 years.
Its not like Nazism was the only 20th century political ideology that embraced 19th century eugenic notions; the Nazis just made the idea unfashionable and the others promptly rewrote their histories to pretend they never had such thoughts themselves.
Eugenics itself just seems to be a fancy word for the eons old concept of tribalism. 19th c. intellectuals loved to embrace any concept that seemed "scientific" and to pretend that it had just been newly discovered, even though it had been known all along. Not that scientific knowledge didn't make advances, its just that it successes allowed other notions to try to tag along and say 'me, too'.
Dawkins acknowledges the taxonomic validity of human races in The Ancestor's Tale. He also wrote an article titled The evolutionary future of man - A biological view of progress[1] in which he states:
It is an article of passionate faith among "politically correct" biologists and anthropologists that brain size has no connection with intelligence; that intelligence has nothing to do with genes; and that genes are probably nasty fascist things anyway.
Dawkins also casually acknowledged that Jews control the United States' foreign policy in an interview.[2]
As Sailer mentioned Dawkins' was heavily indebted to W. D. Hamilton, who was even more anti-PC. For instance, Hamilton favorably cites Rushton's refutation of Gould's Mismeasure of Man in Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Volume II. Hamilton also cites the work of Kevin MacDonald and expresses agreement about a tendency of Jewish intellectuals holding hypocritical attitude about ethnocentrism[3]. It appears the last thing Hamilton published before his death was a favorable review of Richard Lynn's book Dysgenics[4]. I recently read Ullica Segerstrale's biography of Hamilton. She acknowlegdes his eugenic views, though I don't recall any mention of his views about hereditarianism or the Jewish people. I wonder why.
It appears I cannot post hyperlinks for some reason, so I just used footnotes with URL's instead.
[1] http://ofgodandlogic.com/morality/dawkins/efom/index.htm
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/oct/01/internationaleducationnews.religion
[3] http://imgur.com/5K0b9sq
[4] http://www.mediafire.com/view/?7xx7f45v0pw6gg6
B.B.
>In reality, eugenics had no more to do with WWII happening than the ever-popular Volkswagen Beetle, probably less.<
But did it have anything to do with the Holocaust? There is a lot of popular theorizing that a bad mixture of Social Darwinism and collectivism and eugenics, originating in the US, led to sterilization programs here that Hitler used as a model for doing dirt in Germany. (Incidentally, notice at that link the amusing tho' random inclusion of an entirely representative Jim Marrs book on the bottom of the list.)
I would like a like to read a good unpacking of this issue. AFAIK no one has done it. The most influential text on that list is War against the Weak, which I read a few years ago - shrill and dubiously argued, but apparently the classic text now.
Our argument IMO is that eugenics is a scientific understanding of how heredity works, like the understanding of how atoms work, and that it can be blamed for the tying of fallopian tubes in West Virginia precisely to the extent that physics can be blamed for the bombing of Nagasaki. But a book to this effect would be nice. (Hint to writers.) (Might Dawkins dare?)
Corrections welcome.
He tweeted about eugenics last month, too--
Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins 16 Mar
The world would be a better place if everybody was qualified to go to university, even if they didn't actually go there.
The world would be a much better place if everybody could do logic and learned statistics.
People "engineer" their children to be musicians or mathematicians by education. Genetically engineering the same is objectionable. But why?
Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins 17 Mar
"But why?" not rhetorical Q. I share general fear of eugenics & was curious to pin down why we like training musicians but not breeding them
My liberal tribe is horrified by positive eugenics. But want there to be a better objection than just "Hitler did it so it must be bad."
There are good arguments against positive eugenics, but they are not trivially sef-evident and it is useful to make them explicit.
Pos eugenics: who chooses? Government? NO! Parents? Not obviously worse than present system where parents give child RANDOM sample of genes
"Eugenics": What's wrong with a nonrandom choice of a gene your child COULD have got from you at random, anyway, by normal genetic lottery?
@David
John Glad, an academic who was an early participant in the Holocaust Memorial Movement has disputed the claim that eugenics led to the holocaust. He published an article titled Eugenics and the Holocaust, 1927-1939 in Mankind Quarterly which you can download here:
http://www.mediafire.com/view/?pgwlbfafnavqmqb
Glad also wrote a book titled Jewish Eugenics, which showed that Jews played a significant role in the eugenics movement.
B.B.
Jews don't like eugenics in the wider population because it makes other groups stronger and better able to compete with them.
Both Julian and Aldous Huxley advocated eugenics - both were renowned humanists.
A persuasive argument is that too much social safety net acts as a dis-eugenic factor.
Maybe the Scandinavians have it right - pay for their hookers and for free birth control.
Whine more about the nazis and maybe the jews will stop creating the situation you're whining about.
Thanks, B.B.
Jews have abandoned whole fields, as they intermarry and practice reverse eugenics outside of Israel.
Jews used to dominate the sciences, particularly physics, also math, engineering, etc. Now all gone, Jews in the US are indistinguishable from WASPy counterparts in managerial positions in Fortune 500, Media, Government etc.
Look at Rahm Emmanuel and his brothers. Not a scientist, or entrepreneur in the bunch. The outmarriage is particularly surprising. My guess is it is part of the erasing of identity that all ethnic groups (Irish, Italians, Poles, etc.) get in the West, not replaced either with a wider White identity.
If who you marry and have kids with is the most central expression of identity, Jews (in the US) don't have much of any of it. They've also abandoned science and engineering and entrepreneurial roles for managerial ones that are inherently more risky -- that's a direct rejection of how Jews traditionally behaved in Europe 1000-1920. To me it indicates a fundamental belief in no threat at all and inherent stability.
If you think you're at risk, owning things (that can be sold quickly or moved overseas), having a highly desirable and portable skill: science and engineering, that's worthwhile and the payoff can be considerable: Louis B. Mayer, Einstein, Zuckerberg, etc. The most you can get as mid-level manager at Scranton's major paper products company is to avoid the next round of layoffs.
I'd forgotten how good those two old articles of yours were, and remain.
I've been a little melancholy lately and I've been probing the darker side of the web. You might be interested in the view of Dawkins by those who don't relish running in the evolutionary rat race. http://saynotolife.blogspot.com/2011/06/pollyannism-of-richard-dawkins.html
I've always thought that most people pick each other out to be especially stupid nowadays in the United States!
Like lemmings running off a cliff! If you have any intelligence, girls/women seem to avoid you like the plague!!!
There actually is some psychological malfunction where women look for men who will be disasters as husbands so that when the marriage fails it won't be THEIR fault!!! Does this make ANY sense to you??? I've wondered WHY this has been happening for half a century by now!
Kurt
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