Last year, The New York Times asked disability rights critic Peter Singer to eulogize disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson. Just after Christmas, they published Singer's obituary which was insultingly titled "Happy Nevertheless".

Paul Longmore, Director of the Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University sent a letter to the Times which expressed his outrage. The Times didn't respond.

The letter is below the fold.
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Since the 1950's high school biology textbooks have focused less and less on the concept of race. This follows naturally the scientific refutation of the various arguments upon which the race concept was built. Over the decades science has debunked theories of race based upon facial features, cranial capacity, brain weight, skeletal differences, language, IQ testing, blood type, polygenism, psychometrics – the list goes on.
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This is a long article, but worth the time to read it:

The tragic view comes closest to describing how I now look at Peter Singer. He is a man of unusual gifts, reaching for the heights. He writes that he is trying to create a system of ethics derived from fact and reason, that largely throws off the perspectives of religion, place, family, tribe, community and maybe even species — to "take the point of view of the universe." His is a grand, heroic undertaking.

But like the protagonist in a classical drama, Singer has his flaw. It is his unexamined assumption that disabled people are inherently "worse off," that we "suffer," that we have lesser "prospects of a happy life." Because of this all-too-common prejudice, and his rare courage in taking it to its logical conclusion, catastrophe looms. Here in the midpoint of the play, I can't look at him without fellow-feeling.

It has sadly reached the point that my ancient 'pooter and cranky dial-up connection simply cannot load the On Holocaust Memorial Day thread anymore. I've had to follow comments from the admin board, and I can't post from there.

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…A New Generation Of Denial

Today – May 1 – is official Holocaust Memorial Day. Being as I am a political leftist, I got myself into a strange back-and-forth over on DailyKos that started innocently enough when someone mentioned the Godwin aspect of the Expelled movie. Given the remembrance today, and the UMC's official apology for eugenics, I innocently mentioned that I'd like to see – sometime before I die and my promise to my godparents dies with me – an official apology by science for its support of eugenics. Particularly biological and evolutionary science.

Talk about opening a can of Holocaust Denial worms! At first I got complaints that 'science' has nothing to apologize for, since science played no part in eugenics. We know that's not true, and the truth is voluminous out there for anyone to access, so I mentioned that. Quite levelly and without rancor. Yes, 'Darwinism' was indeed used to justify eugenics in this and other countries, gladly handed to Hitler as legislative models for his racial purity policies in 1934. That's history, it's well-documented.

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I came across an old textbook entitled, The Principles of Heredity. It was written by geneticist Laurence H. Snyder and published in 1935 (Boston, New York [etc.] D.C. Heath and company). The book was intended as a text for "the beginning student of heredity." The textbook has a chapter on Eugenics that provides us a glimpse of one portion of our American and scientific history. Given that this material was being taught to students, I've transcribed this chapter and offer it merely as a service for those interested in the history of eugenics.

Here

Our semi-annoying, semi-enlightening commenter and sometimes contributor Thought Provoker has spent the better part of the past week valiantly attempting to defend Charles Darwin from Ben Stein's charge in the movie Expelled that Darwinism led to eugenics, and eugenics led to Adolph Hitler's eugenics laws, which led to… The Holocaust.

I admit to sensitivity on this issue, as both my Godparents were Jews, very recent immigrants from Europe. Both of them had tattoos and had lost their entire families in the Holocaust. They never had any children of their own. Can you guess why? So I got 'indoctrinated' very young in the importance of what Never Again! means.

My husband's Aunt Melba (still spry but blind at 96) was sterilized as an adolescent when she and her sister were dropped off at an orphanage back when being an orphan was considered a symptom of "undesirable genetic inheritance" in America. So both sides of this family have some eugenics horror stories in the family album and a serious commitment to making sure it never happens again.

These family stories are related. Such things were as common when I was growing up as unfortunate survivors of polio and thalidomide babies and radiation-induced cancer clusters from atmospheric bomb testing. What happened to my Godparents had its insidious roots in what happened to Aunt Melba years earlier in Oklahoma. Direct, irrefutable connections, as history amply documents in collections from Cold Spring Harbor to the Holocaust Museum.

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Here is SciAm on the recent Watson controversy:

But there are other reasons, for the sake of the laboratory he did so much for as an administrator, that the man should keep his mouth shut about the social implications of genetics. What is today known as Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was once at the center of the American eugenics movement, when it was home to the Eugenics Record Office from 1910 to 1939, at first under the tutelage of the infamous eugenicists Charles Benedict Davenport and Harry Laughlin.

Some time ago, I warned that James Watson was a modern day eugenicist.

He has now taken it a step further:

One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion.

On the back of Barbara Forrest's & Paul Gross' anti-ID polemic is a blurb by prominent evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, praising the book for exploring the struggle between "religion-based tribal values and science-based universal values."

Physician Alexis Carrel and aviator Charles Lindbergh did superb scientific work, designing pumps to keep organs alive outside the body. Let's see what these great intellectual minds can teach us about "science-based universal values". From the New York Time's review of The Immortalists by journalist David Friedman:

The scientific success only fueled Lindbergh and Carrel's philosophic zeal: if immortality was indeed on the horizon, it certainly should not be for everyone. In his 1935 best seller "Man, the Unknown," Carrel urgently argued for the creation of biologic classes, with the weak and sick at one end, and the strong and fit (long might they live, propagate and receive new organs as needed) at the other. The sorting was to be accomplished by a council of scientific experts much like himself.

Lindbergh, meanwhile, suffering through the kidnapping and murder of his oldest son, and the miserable press orgy that followed, became less and less inclined to tolerate any part of the common man. Living in Europe to avoid the paparazzi in the United States, he was soon vocally admiring the order and precision of Nazi Germany.

(HT: John Hawks)

From here (including audio version):

Deadly Medicine Creating the Master Race is currently on display at the Global health Odyssey at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. The traveling exhibit traces the transition of Eugenics a theory that sought to apply Charles Darwin's theories of survival of the fittest' to human beings. Eugenics' ultimate distortion by Nazi Germany led to the slaughter of 6 million Jews. Professor Paul Lombardo an historian who has researched Eugenics, take us through the exhibit.

This one seems to have some anti-psychiatry agenda, and the narrator sounds like someone you'd use for a movie preview, but some of the commentary and clips from history are worth seeing.

James Watson is a eugenicist. His views are discussed in an article by Ralph Brave.

Let's consider a few excerpts:

But what exactly are Watson's eugenics intentions? How would he design better human beings? The germ-line intervention that he and other advocates most often mention is improvements to the immune system. There is a gene, for example, which provides absolute resistance to the AIDS virus. If it were possible to safely implant such a gene into an embryo, who would object? Or a gene that similarly protected someone against SARS or an even more deadly emerging infectious disease?

Such germ-line alterations are viewed cynically by Watson, though, as a means to other ends: the wedge that will open the door to further engineering. "I think that the acceptance of genetic enhancement," he writes in his new book, "will most likely come through efforts to prevent disease."

My, it looks like we have another "wedge." As scientists advance technology with things such as human cloning and embryonic stem cells, are they opening the door to a new world of neo-eugenics? Many think so. Brave talks about the Trojan horse strategy some more:

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Something one of our critics said in a post to the Sam Harris vs. Andrew Sullivan, Part II thread is worth exploring for what it tells us about believers-in scientism, and how science so easily takes the place in their minds/lives of that ever so 'irrational' God they claim so stridently doesn't exist.

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