Michael Medved of the Discovery Institute.

Wow. So the Rush Limbaugh wannabe hard-right wingnut (it pays well) is trying to sell the 'new eugenics' of a couple of overpaid shrinks at UCLA. Is this supposed to be impressive? Intellectual? Representative of actual cutting-edge genetics and evolutionary biology?

Medved's a fellow of DI since exactly 6 months ago. I don't find that very impressive either, but then, since Medved's got exactly zip scientific credentials, I don't suppose I'm supposed to be impressed. Just makes me glad I avoid DI types, since their goals don't seem to have much to do with science.

The consensus, based on records, is that they were Homo erectus. The original fossils disappeared during WWII, but after WWII, additional H. erectus fossils were found at the same site. Any suggestion that Black faked the excavation site and fossils will need to explain the fossils uncovered in the 1950s and 1960s. Black died in 1934.

You know Eugen Fischer, no? Here's a most interesting essay by him concerning the evolution of the Jews: Racial Origin of the Hebrews. He even mentions Peking Man.

I don't think "hoax" correctly describes the things Darwinans do. "Fraud" is a better word. For example, what excuse is there for the purposefully deceptive McGregor sculptures? You can see them in all their glory in H. F. Osborn's Men of the Old Stone Age. Here's another example of Darwinian scientific fraud: Trend of the Race by Samuel J. Holmes. On page 18 there is a table of recessive and dominant human hereditary traits. Note how "inferior mentality" and "superior mentality" are inserted among the others. Of course the rest of the book is full of fraud and lies too…

Anyway, if you want to read something really demented, try the essays by John R. Baker in Biology in Everyday Life. Baker was an Oxford cytologist. His book Race was endorsed by Sir Peter Medawar (who belonged to the Eugenics Society, btw). Baker developed contraceptives which were tested on Blacks in the USA. He contributed to Julian Huxley's Evolution, The Modern Synthesis.

Of course all that Peking ape-man stuff vanished without a trace, like we knew it would, but that's a different story.

I don't know much paleontology (though grandson is determined to BE one). Did find mention of some mystery associated here. Was Peking real, or just another hoax?

Seems like even Charlie Darwin understood that the great apes never lasted very long. My hubby went to the back corners of Indonesia in '68 with the Peace Corps, learned in Tarajaland (Borneo or South Celebes, can't recall) about how the villagers used to 'adopt' baby Orangs and train them to do housework. Called them the "Old Men of the Forest."

Personally - and I surely expect to be demonstrated wrong one of these days (or maybe not) - I don't think they'll ever find a real "missing link" between us and chimpanzees. To whom we are supposedly much closer related than to Orangs. We aren't descended from Neandertal either, the only other genuine homo sapien we ever shared the planet with. That we can find evidence of, anyway.

Maybe we were genetically engineered. That's a sci-fi staple these days! §;o)

Galton died in 1911. With his passing, his positive eugenic principles of marriage regimentation also disappeared from the eugenics main stage.

So… eugenics was never meant to apply to the poor, the sick, the handicapped or the less-than-white? Strange then that these were the first targets of US, Scandinavian and German eugenicists, eh?

I cited in the previous thread the whole "eugenic principles of marriage" scam. It went just like this…

The eugenic marriage, when it comes, will be based upon the principles and knowledge of heredity. When a young man and a young woman, offering themselves for marriage, can produce certified records of their ancestry back for three or four generations, showing that their progenitors have been entirely, or largely, free from nervous prostration, sick headaches, neurasthenia, hysteria, melancholia, St. Vitus' dance, epilepsy, syphilis, alcoholism, pauperism, criminality, prostitution and insanity - when they can further show that their ancestors have been free from all other inheritable forms of nervous disorders, including certain forms of deafness, color blindness and other indications of defectiveness and degeneracy, then it may truly be said that such a union may be correctly styled a eugenic marriage.

[The Science of Eugenics, Page 6]

Can you produce certified records of your ancestry back three or four generations to show no one in your family ever had migraine headaches, was ever poor, ever got drunk, ever was sad, ever caught a venereal disease or was arrested, never became hysterical, etc.? How about AES's criteria, that meant you had to be able to trace your ancestry back to a landed family in one of the 13 original American colonies prior to 1776?

Weirdly enough, I CAN do that. I can trace my father's paternal line straight to Maryland in 1651. That guy traces back to a Huguenot who entered England with William the Conqueror in 1066. His grandson was one of 30 signers of a petition from Rowan and Orange counties to the House of Representatives under George III asking for tax relief, relief of tyranny and oppression. Before those Adams boys in Boston ever thought about revolution.

Dad's maternal side came through Nottinghamshire in 1066, landing in Pennsylvania in 1666. Eventually merged with Wilsons, as in Woodrow. My Mom's maternal ancestors came to North Carolina around 1720 and established the burg of Durham. Her paternal side was a bit polluted with shiftless Irishmen - name of Cash (as in John) - but that's forgivable in this neck of the woods.

Hubby's paternal line is Campbell, rulers of Argyll with a history all the way back to King David II and Dalraida, well before Robert the Bruce, and James (a bit of dysgenic Jesse and Frank there). Thomas Campbell's offspring got to Pennsylvania before 1740. His maternal line is Montgomery, came to England with William in 1066, and Penn. As in Pennsylvania. Throw in a few Zacharys (such good friends of the Taylors of Orange county that they named their son Zachary) and you get the idea.

See how easy it is? Why, these folks would no doubt have encouraged us to have at least a dozen kids to spread this wondrous 'superior' stock around a bit, no matter how poor we are in real life or the fact that there were some bank robbers and musicians in the mix! What would they have done with YOUR desire to have a family, Oleg? How about your parents? Would you even be here at all? Would that have been okay?

I linked an appendix to a book about the AES in the other thread. It contains a list of all the advisory board members from 1923 to 1940, complete with THEIR family credentials back to the 13 pre-1776. Beginning with William Wallace Campbell (I kid you not, he was president of AAAS and NAS) through Robert Simpson Woodward (president of AAAS) there were 29 council members who were presidents or vice-presidents of NAS and/or AAAS and served on committees of the NRC. Among a literal galaxy of impressive scientific, religious and/or political stardom. They took it very seriously, and by 1929 they had a mind to sterilize (no doubt moving on from there to euthanasia) AT LEAST 15 MILLION CITIZENS. Really.

All in the name of "good science." It was not, and even their staunchest benefactors had figured that much out by then.

You don't have to agree, but I sure don't see that as "good science." Hell, I don't even see it as "good humanism." They didn't get very far into these highlands and hollows, though it was most certainly a target area of their philanthropic largesse. Too dangerous, what with all the stills and paranoia of Revenuers and such. We tend to view such incursions of do-gooders bearing scalpels and court orders as target practice… §;o)

Oleg, just to make it clear, I AM talking to you. But you needn't reply. Science in the service of racism and bigotry is just as ugly as anything else in the service of racism and bigotry. It's just more POWERFUL a tool.

But in America, it did not matter that Galton and his followers found themselves fighting for intellectual acceptance with little evidence on their side. Nor did it matter that British eugenic leaders themselves admitted that eugenics did not rise to a level of scientific certainty sufficient to formulate public policy. Nor did it matter that Mendel's newly celebrated laws of heredity might make good sense for peapods, but not for thinking, feeling men, women and children.

In America, racial activists had already convinced themselves that those of different races and ethnic backgrounds considered inferior were no more than a hereditary blight in need of eugenic cleansing.

These people needed no stinkin' science. They used ideas of Darwin, Galton, and Mendel to advance their racist agenda. P. 31:

The racial purity and supremacy doctrines embraced by America's pioneer eugenicists were not the ramblings of ignorant, unsophisticated men. They were the carefully considered ideals of some of the nation's most respected and educated figures, each an expert in his scientific or cultural field, each revered for his erudition.

So when the facts about Mendel's peapods appeared in America in 1900, these influential and eloquent thinkers were able to slap numbers and a few primitive formulas on their class and race hatred, and in so doing create a passion that transcended simple bigotry. Now their bigotry became science—race science. Now Galtonian eugenics was reborn, recast and redirected in the United States as a purely and uniquely American quest.

There goes the "chain of corruption as Darwin > Galton > BES/AES/BCS and high finance sociopolitical movement > negative eugenics legislation US > negative eugenics legislation Scandinavia > negative eugenics legislation Germany."