If you’re interested in tracing the history of scientific thought, of how ideas evolved, were viewed, practiced, and how they ultimately could go terribly wrong to effect social policy in an adverse way, there is perhaps no better place to start than with the birth of Evolution and how it affected popular culture and governmental behavior. One can go back to ancient civilizations, religions, and philosophy to study this, but for sheer charisma, the heinous interpretations and actions resulting from the misunderstandings of Darwin’s important work are current today. And the antidote of more information and common sense is not far away, if one goes searching for it.
I did graduate work in Environmental Philosophy at the University of North Texas for several years, and while my employment today doesn’t often entail using the understanding of earlier world views, it remains a strong interest. In conversation if I encounter someone who is interested in but unfamiliar with the topic, I have one favorite essay as a starting place to give a comprehensive view of how codified Social Darwinism came to be. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908 – 36,” in Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Rutledge, 1989) is a great starting point. Who knew that the eugenics ideas adopted at a natural history museum could end up strongly influencing how inspections would be conducted at Ellis Island, and eventually the drafting of restrictive, Social Darwinist immigration quotas in 1921 and 1924?
Today, I found an essay in DailyKOS, “Big Mike and the Paper Hanger,” that I’ll print and tuck into the Haraway book. It’s a very nice overview of science and mathematics going off the rails when enough information and good techniques aren’t available (or weren’t completely understood at the time).
Charles Darwin’s half cousin, Francis Galton, like Jean-Baptiste Lamark, contributed a great deal to modern science, but along the way, got some of it terribly wrong. Modern scientists have found more suitable applications for some of these important theories, and discarded others. As these early scientists and mathematicians looked for applications for their theories, civilizations literally trembled, and the poor and the apparently genetically inferior were dealt with.
In my collection of books from a family estate is one from 1877 called The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity, by R.L. Dugdale, Member of the Executive Committee of the Prison Association, NY. Mine is the fourth printing from 1888, Putnam. It’s quite a vile slim volume that comes from a collection called “Questions of the Day.” The index doesn’t list sources, but the book may well contain reference to Galton. This perverse application of a pseudo science is a relic that one would hope is of bygone days, yet today we have hate-mongers and racists spouting similar ideas. Ethnic cleansing is happening today in war zones around the world; and here at home attitudes toward immigration and immigrants are as bigotted as the old Chinese exclusion act. There is no fact, only subjective opnion, behind the hysteria preached on some of the popular news networks. It comes straight out of Galton’s misapplied “science.” The realism of the 1920s fed into the surreal Nazi behavior of the 1930s and 1940s. We’ve settled back into the realism mode, where suggestion and innuendo place immigrants with darker skin as inferior and who must be blocked or deported.
I look forward to the rest of this book, by whoever is behind the moniker Devilstower.
