And science as much as any other form of culture has been involved in the attempt to preserve social order; biology in particular has long served as a useful social weapon. In the late 19th and early 20th century, American and British social darwinists found in the theory of evolution by natural selection a kind of...
Tag - eugenics
Three commentaries raise a number of issues concerning current developments in biotechnology research and engineering. We hope these pieces will provoke ongoing discussion of how we as progressive people should respond to these events.
In this article I will discuss the transition from eugenics to population control as it occurred in the work of one man, Raymond Pearl (1879-1940). Pearl is a useful and important figure for several reasons. He was a well-known biologist with a considerable reputation both in the United States and abroad. In the early...
The reproductive rights advocacy that feminists have long carried out may be more essential now than ever before. Access to abortion, freedom from sterilization abuse, and the availability to all women of child care and child health services: the extent to which we have these rights may well determine whether the new...
The outcome which we must worry about and forestall, is that women—and men—will lose the admittedly limited choices we now have if the new eugenicists step in and in the guise of "fetal rights to health" legislate how pregnant women must behave.
In 1973, two black sisters in Alabama, aged 12 and 14, were sterilized in a federally funded family planning program. Their mother had been persuaded to give her consent by making an X on a form which she could not read. She did not know that the operation was permanent.
In late 1973, people in the Boston area who heard about our group began to give us some details about a study being conducted at the Boston Hospital for Women. In this study the researchers were screening all newborn males for the XYY karyotype and then following the XYY children to detect any “psychopathology” =...
After over almost a year's reflection and review and after analyzing the reaction to the new wave of books this fall on sociobiology, particularly E.O. Wilson's On Human Nature, the Sociobiology Study group of the Boston Chapter of Science for the People has decided on a new course of action. We find there is a...
The very fact of the AAAS sponsoring this symposium on the "controversy" is an indication of the success we have had in making the claims of the sociobiologists controversial. What caught many of us in Science for the People by surprise at the AAAS meetings was the extent of the spreading negative reaction to...
A raft of reports has appeared claiming a genetic basis for intelligence in human beings. These hereditarian explanations for intelligence have been given considerable publicity—by far more than given to opposing views. As a result, whether consciously or not, the U.S. scientific and general public has begun to absorb...