Darwinist Hall Of Shame - The Eugenicists Wing Part Two! Francis Galton - Father of Eugenics. Charles Davenport, American Counterpart.

"Globally, there are an estimated 50 million abortions each year. That’s one abortion for every three live births, so any child in the womb, on average, worldwide, has a one in four chance of being deliberately killed..." - From the Russell Grigg article, below:

Eugenics...Planned Parenthood was born from the American Eugenics movement and over 100 million deaths from genocide were perpetrated in the 20th Century alone....without counting the myriad baby murders that we euphemistically call "abortions."   Eugenics is an excuse for racism, sterilization and murder. With Darwinism as a pseudo-scientific excuse for Atheism and genocide, Social Darwinism has killed more victims than the Black Death...and the toll keeps growing and growing...



I float inside her womb 
Oh mother, I am coming soon 
Suddenly, fear and dread 
When mother says she wants me dead 
Oh how can you do this to me?

Thousands come 
Please don't kill me 
Thousands go 
I want to live 
Day by day 
Can anyone hear me 
The numbers grow 
I want to live 

God hears them cry 
We hear the lie 
And we simply look the other way 

See no evil 
Hear no evil 
Speak no evil 

From a pail with open eyes 
I see the man that I despise 
He looks at me, turns his back 
As my life fades, it fades to black 
And there's no turning back 

Thousands come 
Please don't kill me 
Thousands go 
I want to live 
Day by day 
Can anyone hear me 
The numbers grow 
I want to live 

God hears them cry 
We hear the lie 
And we simply look the other way 

See no evil 
Hear no evil 
Speak no evil 

(Mommy, can you hear me? Mommy, mommy, I'm afraid) 

Thousands come 
Please don't kill me 
Thousands go 
I want to live 
Day by day 
Can anyone hear me 
The numbers grow 
All I want is a chance to live 

God hears us cry 
You hear the lie 
And you simply look the other way 

See no evil 
Hear no evil 
Speak no evil 
See no evil 
Hear no evil 
Speak no evil
Holy Soldier - Andy Robbins, Jamie Cramer, Steven Patrick, Michael Cutting, Terry Russell

Eugenics … death of the defenceless

The legacy of Darwin’s cousin Galton

By Russell Grigg

Few ideas have done more harm to the human race in the last 120 years than those of Sir Francis Galton. He founded the evolutionary pseudo-science of eugenics. Today, ethnic cleansing, the use of abortion to eliminate ‘defective’ unborn babies, infanticide, euthanasia, and the harvesting of unborn babies for research purposes all have a common foundation in the survival-of-the-fittest theory of eugenics. So who was Galton, what is eugenics, and how has it harmed humanity?

Francis Galton

Photos Darwin by TFE Graphics, Hitler and Galton by Wikipedia.org

Francis Galton (featured on right in photo montage, right) was born into a Quaker family in Birmingham, England, in 1822. A grandson of Erasmus Darwin on his mother’s side and so a cousin of Charles Darwin (pictured above left), he shared the Darwinian agnosticism and antagonism to Christianity for most of his adult life.

As a child, he had learned the alphabet by 18 months, was reading by age 2½, memorizing poetry by five, and discussing the Iliad at six.¹ In 1840, he began studies at Cambridge University in medicine and then in mathematics, but, due to a nervous breakdown, succeeded in gaining only a modest B.A. degree, in January 1844.² When his father died that same year, he inherited such a fortune that he never again needed to work for a living.

This gave the wealthy young Galton free time not only for ‘amusement’, but also to dabble in a number of fields, including exploration of large areas of South West Africa, his reports of which gained him membership of the Royal Geographic Society in 1853, and three years later of the Royal Society. In that year, Galton married Louisa Butler, whose father had been Headmaster at Harrow School.

As an amateur scientist of boundless curiosity and energy, he went on to write some 14 books and over 200 papers.³ His inventions included the ‘silent’ dog whistle, a teletype printer; and various instruments and techniques for measuring human intelligence and body parts; and he invented the weather map and discovered the existence of anticyclones.

Interaction with Charles Darwin

The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 was undoubtedly a turning point in Galton’s life. In 1869 he wrote to Darwin, ‘[T]he appearance of your Origin of Species formed a real crisis in my life; your book drove away the constraint of my old superstition [i.e. religious arguments based on design] as if it had been a nightmare and was the first to give me freedom of thought.’⁴

From Nott, J.C. and Gliddon, G.R., Indigenous Races of the Earth, J.B. Libbincott, Philadelphia, USA, 1868. Pseudoscientific illustration of alleged evolution of human ‘races’. An allegedly ‘scientific’ illustration from 1868 showing that blacks were less evolved than whites by suggesting similarities with a chimpanzee. Even the famous evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould commented that the chimpanzee skull is falsely enlarged and the ‘negro’ jaw falsely extended to suggest that ‘negros’ rank even lower than apes. This demonstration was not from racist or ‘fringe’ literature but from one of the leading scientific textbooks of its time. Today’s militant evolutionists like to conveniently evade the social implications of their ideas, but history demonstrates otherwise.

Galton ‘was among the first to recognize the implications for mankind of Darwin’s theory of evolution.’⁵ He believed that talent, character, intellect, etc. were all inherited from one’s ancestors, as was also any lack of these qualities. Thus the poor were not hapless victims of their circumstances, but were paupers because they were biologically inferior. This was contrary to the prevailing scientific view that all such qualities were due to environment, i.e. how and where a person was brought up.⁶ Galton believed that humans, like animals, could and should be selectively bred. In 1883, he coined the term ‘eugenics’ [Greek: εύ (eu) meaning ‘well’ and γένος (genos) meaning ‘kind’ or ‘offspring’] for the study of ways of improving the physical and mental characteristics of the human race.

Galton’s views left no room for the existence of a human soul, the grace of God in the human heart, human freedom to choose to be different, or even for the dignity of the individual. In his first published article on this subject, in 1865,⁷ ‘He denied … that man’s rational faculties are a gift to him from God; he denied that mankind has been cursed with sinfulness since the day of Adam and Eve’; and he viewed religious sentiments as ‘nothing more than evolutionary devices to insure the survival of the human species.’⁸

Concerning the sense of original sin, he wrote that ‘[this] would show, according to my theory, not that man was fallen from a high estate, but that he was rapidly rising from a low one … and that after myriads of years of barbarism, our race has but very recently grown to be civilized and religious.’⁹

In Hereditary Genius (1869), Galton enlarged on all these ideas and proposed that a system of arranged marriages between men of distinction and women of wealth would eventually produce a gifted race. When Charles Darwin read this book, he wrote to Galton, ‘You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work … .’5



Galton’s ideas undoubtedly helped him extend his evolution theory to man. Darwin did not mention Galton in his Origin, but referred to him no less than 11 times in his Descent of Man (1871).

Three International Eugenics Congresses were held in 1912, 1921 and 1932, with eugenics activists attending from Britain, the USA, Germany, France, Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Mauritius, Kenya and South Africa. Notables who supported the ideas pre–World War II included Winston Churchill, economist John Maynard Keynes, science fiction writer H.G. Wells¹⁰ and US Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge. Galton received the Huxley Medal from the Anthropological Institute in 1901, the Darwin Medal from the Royal Society in 1902, the Darwin–Wallace Medal from the Linnaean Society in 1908, and honorary degrees from Cambridge and Oxford Universities; he was knighted in 1909.

Despite these ‘honours’, in life Galton was not his own best advocate for his theories. He had many long-lasting bouts of illness, and notwithstanding his and his wife’s good intellectual pedigrees, they produced no children of their own to carry on his name and heritage. After his death in 1911, his will provided for the funding of a Chair of Eugenics and the Galton Eugenics Laboratory at the University of London.

Eugenics in action

The concept of improving the physical and mental characteristics of the human race may seem admirable at first glance. However, historically the method of achieving it has involved not just increasing the birthrate of the ‘fit’ by selected parenthood (‘positive eugenics’), but also reducing the birthrate of those people thought to impair such improvement, the ‘unfit’ (‘negative eugenics’).¹¹

For example, by 1913, one-third (and from the 1920s on, more than half)¹² of the US States had laws allowing for the compulsory sterilization of those held in custody who were deemed to be ‘unfit’. This resulted in the forced sterilization of some 70,000 victims, including criminals, the mentally retarded, drug addicts, paupers, the blind, the deaf, and people with epilepsy, TB or syphilis. Over 8,000 procedures were done at the one city of Lynchburg, Virginia,¹³ and isolated instances continued into the 1970s.^14,15
About 60,000 Swedish citizens were similarly treated between 1935 and 1976, and there were similar practices in Norway and Canada.¹⁶

In Germany in 1933, Hitler’s government ordered the compulsory sterilization of all German citizens with ‘undesirable’ handicaps, not just those held in custody or in institutions. This was to prevent ‘contamination’ of Hitler’s ‘superior German race’ through intermarriage.

Image Wikipedia.org

Eugenics congress logo.
Click here for larger view

Then from 1938 to 1945, this surgical treatment of such ‘useless eaters’ was superseded by a more comprehensive solution—the eager genocide, by Hitler’s Nazis, of over 11 million people considered to be subhuman or unworthy of life, as is authenticated and documented by the Nuremberg Trials records. Those killed included Jews, evangelical Christians,¹⁷ blacks, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, amputees and mental patients.

This was nothing other than rampant Darwinism—the elimination of millions of human beings branded ‘unfit/inferior’ by, and for the benefit of, those who regarded themselves as being ‘fit/superior’.

The core idea of Darwinism is selection.¹⁸ The Nazis believed that they must direct the process of selection to advance the German race.¹⁹ Galton’s naïve vision of a ‘eugenics utopia’ had mutated into the Nazi nightmare of murderous ethnic cleansing.

Sadly, ideas of racial superiority and eugenics did not die with Hitler’s regime. David Duke, America’s infamous anti-black and anti-Jew racist, developed his views from reading the eugenicist writings of Galton, H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Keith and others, as well as the early writings of modern sociobiologists such as Harvard’s E.O. Wilson.²⁰

Eugenics in the 21^st century.

Following World War II, eugenics became a ‘dirty word’. Eugenicists now called themselves ‘population scientists’, ‘human geneticists’, ‘family politicians’, etc. Journals were renamed. Annals of Eugenics became Annals of Human Genetics, and Eugenics Quarterly became the Journal of Social Biology.²¹ However today, some 60 years after the Holocaust, the murderous concept that Galton’s eugenics spawned is once again alive and flourishing, and wearing a lab-coat of medical respectability.

Doctors now routinely destroy humans, who were created in God’s image (Genesis 1:26), by abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, as well as in fetal/embryonic stem-cell research.

A. Abortion

According to the UK’s Daily Mail, ‘women are increasingly eliminating their unborn children because of non life-threatening deformities such as deformed feet or cleft lips and palates’, and ‘more Down’s Syndrome babies are now killed than are allowed to be born.’²² Dr Jacqueline Laing of London’s Metropolitan University commented, ‘These figures are symptomatic of a eugenic trend of the consumerist society hell-bent on obliterating deformity.’ 

‘This is straightforward eugenics,’ said UK’s Life Trustee, Nuala Scarisbrick. ‘The message is being sent out to disabled people that they should not have been born. It is appalling and abhorrent.’²² 

Globally, there are an estimated 50 million abortions each year. That’s one abortion for every three live births, so any child in the womb, on average, worldwide, has a one in four chance of being deliberately killed.²³

B. Infanticide

China is famous for its coercive one-child-per-family policy. In practice, most families want a boy, so if a girl is born, she can be at risk. Sometimes the same grisly principle is followed, but before birth. In India, it’s common to find out the sex of the baby, and a vast majority of abortions are of girl babies. It makes the feminist support of abortion distressingly ironic. 

And disabled babies are at risk as well. ‘Ethicist’ Peter Singer has advocated legalization of infanticide to a certain age. He writes: ‘[K]illing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.’²⁴

C. Euthanasia

In May 2001, Holland became the first country to legalize euthanasia, with the law coming into effect from January 2002. Euthanasia was tolerated in Belgium until May 2002, when it was legalized. It is tolerated in Switzerland, Norway and Columbia.²³

---

Eugenics and the Scopes Monkey Trial¹

Photo Bryan College

Clarence Darrow (left) and William Jennings Bryan

The textbook from which Scopes taught evolution, A Civic Biology by George Hunter,² and its companion lab book³ were blatantly eugenic and offensively racist. Hunter divided humanity into five races and ranked them according to how high each had reached on the evolutionary scale, from ‘the Ethiopian or negro type’ to ‘the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America’.⁴ A Civic Biology asserted that crime and immorality are inherited and run in families, and said that ‘these families have become parasitic on society. … If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.’⁴

This is the book that Darwinists of the day insisted that Scopes had a right to teach!

All this is documented by Dr David Menton in the DVD Inherently Wind: a Hollywood History of the Scopes Trial (right).

References and notes

1. The 1925 trial in Dayton, Tennessee, USA, of high-school teacher John T. Scopes, charged with violating state law by teaching the theory of evolution.
2. Hunter, G., A Civic Biology Presented in Problems, American Book Co., New York, USA, pp. 195–196, 1914.
3. Hunter, G., Laboratory Problems in Civic Biology, American Book Co., New York, USA, 1916.
4. Ref. 2, pp. 261–265.

---

Judgment at Nuremberg Perhaps the most frequently asked question concerning the eugenics-inspired genocide of the Holocaust is: ‘How could it have happened?’ In the 1961 MGM film Judgment at Nuremberg, about the trial of four Nazi war criminals, judges who had enforced Nazi decrees,1 one of the defendants (Judge Ernst Janning, played by Burt Lancaster) cries out to Chief Judge Dan Haywood (played by Spencer Tracy): ‘Those people—those millions of people—I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it!’ Haywood’s response was eloquent: ‘It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.’ Likewise today, eugenic killing of innocent preborn babies because they are thought to be less than perfect began the first time a doctor consented to kill a handicapped child in the womb. The rest is history. Based on the third Nuremberg Trial (1947), also called the ‘Judges’ Trial’ because it tried Nazi judges and prosecutors for imposing the Nazi ‘racial purity’ programme through the eugenic and racial laws. There were a total of 13 Nuremberg Trials. The photograph (above right) comes from the first Nuremberg Trial (1945–6), the most famous and significant of them because it tried the main German leaders. Front row (left-to-right): Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel; Back row: Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel. (Courtesy Wikipedia)

Conclusion

Not all evolutionists are murderers, of course, and Francis Galton may never have conceived that his theories would lead to the killing of so many millions of people, let alone the onslaught on defenceless unborn babies. However, such action is totally consistent with evolutionary teaching, namely the survival of the fittest by the elimination of the weakest. Deeds are the outcome of beliefs. As Jesus said: ‘A bad tree bears bad fruit’; it ‘cannot bear good fruit’ (Matthew 7:17–18).

Contrary to the deadly philosophy of eugenics, every human person has eternal value in God’s sight and has been created ‘in the image of God’ (Genesis 1:26–27). God also explicitly forbade murder (Exodus 20:13), or intentional killing of innocent humans. Indeed, God so loved humanity that He sent His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to die on the Cross to save us from sin (John 3:16–17), and to transform us into the image of His Son when we believe on Him (Romans 8:29; 2 Corinthians 3:18). In Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity took on human nature (Hebrews 2:14), becoming the Last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45), thus becoming the (kinsman-) Redeemer (Isaiah 59:20) of the race of the first man, Adam.

References and notes

1. Cowan, R., Sir Francis Galton and the study of heredity in the nineteenth century, Garland Publishing Inc., New York, USA, p. vi, 1985. Return to text
2. Forrest, D.W., Francis Galton: The life and work of a Victorian genius, Paul Elek, London, UK, p. 25, 1974. Return to text
3. Subjects included twins, blood transfusions, criminality, travel in undeveloped countries, meteorology, correlational calculus, anthropometry (measurement of the human body), and fingerprints as a means of identity—first used by Scotland Yard in 1901 and now throughout the world. Return to text
4. Galton to Darwin, 24 December 1869, quoted from ref. 1, p. 74. Return to text
5. Galton, Sir Francis, Encyclopædia Britannica 5:97–98, 1992. Return to text
6. These two views of heredity versus environment have also been labelled ‘nature versus nurture’. Return to text
7. Galton, F., Hereditary talent and character, 2 parts, MacMillan’s magazine 12:157–166 and 318–327, June and August 1865 (Source: ref. 1, p. 1.). Return to text
8. Ref. 1, p. 75. Return to text
9. Galton, F., Memories of my life, Methuen & Co., London, UK, pp. 317–18, 1908. Return to text
10. Bergman, J., ‘H.G. Wells: Darwin’s disciple and eugenicist extraordinaire’, Journal of Creation 18(3):106–110, 2004. Return to text
11. The last sentence of Galton’s autobiography reads: ‘Natural Selection rests upon excessive production and wholesale destruction; Eugenics on bringing no more individuals into the world than can be properly cared for, and those only of the best stock.’ (Ref. 9, p. 323.) Return to text
12. In 1931, Vermont became the 31st US State to enact a sterilization law (not repealed until 1973). Source: Washington Post, 8 August 1999, p. A21. Return to text
13. Wieland, C., The lies of Lynchburg, Creation 19(4):22–23, 1997. Return to text
14. ‘Eugenics’, Encyclopædia Britannica 4:593, 1992. Return to text
15. Black, E., War against the weak: Eugenics and America’s campaign to create a master race, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York/London, 2003; see review by Sarfati, J., Creation 27(2):49, 2005. Return to text
16. Isherwood, J., Payout planned for victims of ‘barbaric’ sterilizations, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 August 1997, p. 10. Return to text
17. Sarfati, J., Nazis planned to exterminate Christianity, Creation 24(3):47, 2002. Return to text
18. Evolution describes the results of selection. See Stein, G.J., Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism, American Scientist 76:50–58, January–Februay 1988. Return to text
19. See Bergman, J., Darwinism and the Nazi race Holocaust, Journal of Creation 13(2):101–111, 1999. This is thoroughly documented in Weikart, R., From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, USA, 2004; see review by Sarfati, J., Creation 27(4):39, 2005. Return to text
20. Bergman, J., Darwinism’s influence on modern racists and white supremacist groups: the case of David Duke, Journal of Creation 19(3):103–107, 2005. Return to text
21. Clay, C. and Leapman, M., Master race: The Lebensborn experiment in Nazi Germany, Hodder & Stoughton, London, UK, p. 181, 1995. Return to text
22. British abortion rate skyrockets as couples eliminate ‘defective’ children, LifeSite Daily News, for Monday 31 May 2004. Return to text
23. Statistics from Festival of Light, Adelaide, Australia. Return to text
24. Singer, P., Taking life: humans, excerpted from Practical Ethics, 2^nd ed., Cambridge, pp. 175–217, 1993. Singer is Ira. W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Centre for Human Values, Princeton University. Return to text

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Watch while I'm burned in salt
tell me now where's my fault
I'm torn in two, you pull me through
oh ignore my shout now scrape me out

Oh, nation murders me, me, me

suck me down your hose
pieces of my fingers and toes
use me to brew your lab rat stew
oh dissolve my voice for your woman's choice

my execution, it's your revolution

spill my blood on "civil" hands
and I pay to make you free

oh, nation murders me

yeah, with poiticians dreams
now silencing my screams, screams, screams

Grammatrain (Pete Stewart - vocals/guitar, Paul Roraback - drums, Dalton Roraback - bass)



We use the word, "Eugenics," but it is one of those words that is far more heinous than the apparently innocent name.  Just as "abortion" is actually "baby-murdering." Eugenics is a word that has an evil history, no matter how modern Darwinists seek to sanitize it now.   Eugenics was the concept of "breeding out" the "inferior" stock of humankind.   In other words, murder - genocide - holocaust - choose your term.

A letter from Teddy Roosevelt to Charles Davenport (the American Francis Galton) is instructive, if you care to read it?    At the end, Teddy states that "...we have no business to perpetuate citizens of the wrong type."

Citizens of the "wrong type" included all people of color, any diseased or impaired folks, as well as various types of European immigrants not palatable to Davenport and of course Jews.  Read the letter and then let's take a look at Davenport next, an American champion of Eugenics:

Charles Davenport

From Davenport's Dream edited by Witkowski and Inglis

If smart farmers could breed better livestock, why couldn't smart scientists breed better humans? A growing segment of America's upper crust pondered this question around the turn of the 20th century, and the movement found a standard bearer in Charles Davenport.

Davenport became the director of the Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor in 1898, and shortly afterwards applied for funds from the Carnegie Institution of Washington to support his studies in heredity. He had to wait three years for the funding to arrive, but when it did, he resigned his professorship at the University of Chicago and began devoting himself full time to research.

The Carnegie Institution wasn't the only party that supported Davenport financially. Over the years, he courted other wealthy benefactors to support his work although, in satisfying his desire for their money, he had to manage their desires to drive a social agenda. In a 1910 article, "Eugenics, a Subject for Investigation Rather Than Instruction," he described the danger of:

some impetuous temperament who, planting a banner of Eugenics, rallies a volunteer army of Utopians, freelovers, and muddy thinkers to start a holy war for the new religion.

One well-meaning rich amateur he did find quite useful, however, was Mrs. E.H. Harriman, the widow of a railway baron, whom he thanked at the beginning of his Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, published in 1911. In the book, he made his case that the greater good of society could be served by preventing defective humans from reproducing their kind.

In the decades that followed, eugenics marched on, ultimately employing murderous methods under Germany's Third Reich. Davenport didn't advocate killing human defectives, but he did propose long-term incarceration and, later, sterilization. For the age in which he lived, he was hardly an aberration; the eugenics movement enjoyed widespread support across the American political spectrum.

In critiquing Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, modern biologists point out that Davenport actually understood the basics of Mendelian inheritance quite well. But while he occasionally allowed that certain traits must be driven my multiple genes — and pointed out that far more research was needed — Davenport often reduced to an imagined lone gene complete responsibility for characteristics that are today understood to be influenced by multiple genes — often many of them. Human intelligence may be shaped by 100 or more genes. Likewise, diseases such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are hardly simple, single-gene problems. These salient facts largely escaped Davenport.

Another problem with Davenport's zeal to remake humanity was that he didn't realize how "problem" genes often go hand-in-hand with genes conferring important benefits. Sickle-cell anemia results from two copies of a gene that, through one copy, bolsters resistance to malaria. New research suggests that close relatives of autistic individuals excel in the fields of science and technology, perhaps because they possess some of the genes that lead to autism. Likewise, a genetic makeup that protects against infection might increase the risk of lifestyle diseases such as diabetes. Douglas Wallace of the Center for Molecular and Mitochondrial Medicine and Genetics and the University of California, Irvine, points out that the long-term survival of our species may depend on preserving the genetic diversity that Davenport might have hoped to eliminate.

Besides his tendency to reduce nearly every inheritable characteristic to a single gene — and he picked some doozies, such as wanderlust and love of the sea — Davenport also reduced almost every trait a person might express to inheritance. He glibly described families whose members excelled in art, music and literature, apparently without considering that a shared environment of affluence, connections, and access to the best education money could buy might provide a boost. He was equally incautious when it came to bad luck:

Pauperism is a result of a complex of causes. On one side it is mainly environmental in origin as, for instance in the case when a sudden accident, like death of the father, leaves a widow and family of children without means of livelihood, or a prolonged disease of the wage earner exhausts savings. But it is easy to see that in these cases heredity also plays a part; for the effective worker will be able to save enough money to care for his family in case of accident; and the man of strong stock will not suffer from prolonged disease. Barring a few highly exceptional conditions poverty means relative inefficiency and this in turn usually means mental inferiority.

One wonders if Davenport didn't later regret those words. In 1936, his son-in-law died from a fever, reportedly weakened by overwork at Cold Spring Harbor, and left Davenport's daughter Jane a young widow.

Besides assorted defectives in America's backwoods, Davenport fretted at the waves of immigration from overseas. The Irish were mentally deficient drunks tending toward tuberculosis, but on the bright side, they were chaste people who appreciated that the men wore the pants. Germans were thrifty and intelligent. Jews were certainly smart and God-fearing, but quarrelsome, greedy, and lewd. Italians were lazy and lousy at farming. Greeks were slovenly. Davenport summarized:

Summarizing this review of recent conditions of immigration it appears certain that, unless conditions change of themselves or are radically changed, the population of the United States will, in account of the great influx of blood from South-eastern Europe, rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art, more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality and less given to burglary, drunkenness and vagrancy than were the original English settlers.

And what did Davenport think of those descended from sub-Saharan Africans? In fact, he made a surprising concession: The long-ago influx of African slaves to Europe might have infused some dark ancestry into many Europeans families. But to Davenport, when it came to real intelligence, ability, and trustworthiness, people of color were hardly on the map. He published one diagram of a "family of mulattoes" showing a percentage breakdown of the four colors — black, yellow, red, and white — he thought he saw in their skin. Of the lucky mulattoes pale enough to pass for white, he allowed:

So far as skin color goes, they are truly white as their [white] greatgrandparent and it is quite conceivable that they might have mental and moral qualities as good and typically Caucasian as he had.

(In fairness to Davenport, he wrote this at a time when anthropologists still debated whether all the human races actually constituted a single human species. Those who argued that they did still believed the races to be separated by vast differences.)

Given Davenport's certainty that everything that mattered came down to inheritance, and given his confidence in his own superior breeding, an ironic thread ran through his own life: youthful rebellion against parental authority.

Davenport's mother was doting and indulgent, but his father was puritanical, caring little for his son's dreams of pursuing science. After writing his father a 20-page letter outlining his career goals, Davenport received the disheartening answer that all that mattered was how much money he could make for himself and, perhaps more importantly, his dad. He eventually defied his father and pursued a career in biology.

Davenport married a smart, scientifically inclined woman like himself, and they had three children: Millia ("Billie"), Jane and Charles Jr. When Billie was born, her dad assumed she would be like him: enthusiastic about nature, studious, pious and careful about managing money. The eugenics expert couldn't have been more wrong about his own daughter (pictured with the family above). Adopting androgynous dress in vogue at the time, she became a flapper. She married a fellow bohemian who soon abandoned her for another woman. Then she married a millionaire. To her father's horror, it was a Jewish millionaire with children from a previous marriage. That marriage eventually dissolved, too. Between Billie's failure to make a lasting match, Jane's husband's failure to live up to the eugenic ideal of robust health, and little Charlie Davenport's untimely death from polio, America's foremost eugenicist left behind no grandchildren.

Compared to the man he hired to oversee the Eugenics Record Office, however, Davenport could consider himself lucky. Besides keeping records, Harry Laughlin took up the cause of immigration restrictions with even more zeal than Davenport. A sizeable portion of the American population supported Davenport and Laughlin's eugenic aims throughout the 1920s. Then the Great Depression hit, and plenty of respectable people found themselves standing in soup lines. Maybe poverty had something to do with luck (or lack of it). And it was at this inopportune time that the Nazi-controlled University of Heidelberg awarded Laughlin an honorary medical degree.

If a Nazi-supported degree were Laughlin's only problem, it might not have been so bad, but he happened to possess a mighty embarrassing defect: epilepsy — one of the many deficiencies meriting eugenic sterilization. Laughlin perhaps succeeded in hiding his epilepsy for a time, but he eventually suffered seizures in front of his staff. One seizure struck while he was driving, causing him to crash his car. He was pressed into retirement, and the records office he ran was quietly closed soon afterwards. Loyal if nothing else, Davenport defended Laughlin to the end, writing a eulogy for his friend in 1943.

• For more information:
• Davenport's Dream edited by Witkowski and Inglis
• Better for all the World by Harry Bruinius
• "Advertising Eugenics: Charles M. Goethe's Campaign to Improve the Race" by Schoenl and Peck in Endeavour June 2010
• A Guinea Pig's History of Biology by Jim Endersby
• The Lying Stones of Marrakech by Stephen Jay Gould
• The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
• The Flamingo's Smile by Stephen Jay Gould

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Murder is murder.  The Aborigine hunted down to be skinned, the baby in the womb, the kid with the yellow star on his shirt, the peasant who doesn't agree with the tyrant, the former slave that elitists believe is inferior because some people like Charles Darwin and Francis Galton said so?   God says otherwise.   Choose which you will trust, the so-called wisdom of man or the Word of God?