Eugenics? What eugenics?

Herbert Spencer and his social Darwinism reigned supreme for about sixty years, and, your right, that was a product of so called progressive forces. Nietzsche was also a corrupting force, with his "super man" ideas running around, rightly or wrongly understood. The religious right didn't exist and certainly didn't promote that poison.

It's easier to show it's ignorance if your side didn't have "Intelligent Design", Teri Shciavo, and stem cells all wrapped up with one big silly bow for us to attack and make you guys look like boobs.

By the way, it was one of those fake San Francisco liberal, and later the evil NAACP who both exposed the whole thing, and made the government pay:

In 1966, Peter Buxtun, a PHS venereal disease investigator in San Francisco, sent a letter to the director of the Division of Venereal Diseases to express his concerns about the morality of the experiment.The Center for Disease Control (CDC) reaffirmed the need to continue the study until completion (until all subjects had died and had been autopsied). To bolster its position, the CDC sought and gained support for the continuation of the study from the local chapters of the National Medical Association (representing African-American physicians) and the American Medical Association.

With his concerns rebuked, Peter Buxtun went to the press. The story broke first in the Washington Star on July 25, 1972, then became front page news in the New York Times the following day. As a result of public outcry, in 1972, an ad hoc advisory panel was appointed which determined the study was medically unjustified and ordered the termination of the study. As part of a settlement of a class action lawsuit subsequently filed by NAACP, 9 million dollars and the promise of free medical treatment was given to surviving participants and surviving family members who had been infected as a consequence of the study.

We support fully informed science and progress over political calculation. We know the difference between legitimate moral qualms about this science (which you have) and political theater aimed to raise cash. I know I've been reading science fiction that explores the dark possibilities from Harlan Ellison's heyday right up to Gattaca so the very bad things that could happen are very clear to see.

The Republican establishment has been lying to evangelicals faces for twenty-five years on abortion and now stem cells, firing you up over their moral commitment while delivering you up to the corporate will.

the left's insistence on terming policy preferences as a battle between the forces of Light and Darkness

It seems to me that it's not just the left that has a preference for terming policy as a battle between Light and Darkness. The left does the smart and stupid shtick and the right does the immoral(God haters)vs moral(God lovers)shtick. It would be nice if we could all stick to the ideas behind the argument.

Which conservatives "object to science in general"?

ICR
AIG
CRSQ
DISCOVERY INSTITUTE
KANSAS BOE
DOVER SCHOOL BOARD
Churches all across the country
Conservative think-tanks
etc.

I am not one of those conservatives who object to evolution (at least not in the fundamentalist Christian sense that you mean), but if I were, it wouldn't mean that I objected to science in general; it would only mean that I objected to the theory of evolution.

Evolution haters tend to also object to the sciences of geology (since it shows evolutionary progression in the fossil record and dispels the Noah's flood myth), physics (they love that 2nd law), information theory, chemistry, and various branches of biology, especially genetics. There's also a strong correlation of evolution denial and climate change denial.

There's also a strong correlation of evolution denial and climate change denial.

This is kind of funny because the global warming crowd must indeed be the biggest believers in Intelligent Design. Despite the fact that the earth has gone through previous cycles of warming and cooling, resulting only from natural causes and without any causation from humankind, it is convinced that humans are the primary cause of global warming in the present. This is exactly the same principle behind Intelligent Design, except that, when applied to evolution, the ID theorists will at least argue the lack of natural precedents.

Anyway, your statement, while it may be true, says nothing about the verity of evolution or human-caused climate change.

Speaking as a person deeply skeptical of the scientific community (owing primarily to the utter lack of ethical and philosophical training among those grease monkeys), the criticism is seldom if ever of science, but of its application. When a branch of science is particularly dirty, say genetics, you might see objections that appear to be anti-science. But they are really objections against the philosophical assumptions underlying particular procedures (i.e., because we can do it we should), and the public policy applications sought by the persons trotting out the science.

I'm unaware of a Luddite resurgence on the right (although there might be a few among the crunchies). So Aaron's claim that conservatives object to science is dishonest. The objection is always to something else. And it happens on the left nearly as frequently. For the left, the science of embryolgy is back in the middle ages, what with humours and vegetative matter spontaneously erupting into life as a babe leaps from the womb. And I would agree with the left in downplaying the findings of scientific determinists who seem to thirst for a genetic rationale for racism. Ultimately science is a tool. When the left attempts to pit religion against science they are arguing in bad faith.

By the way, letsbesods, given that the work of both Gallileo and Copernicus was at times supported by the Church, I'm not sure they would support you in your ahistorical knowledge of history (although on the whole Gallileo may have, but he also may have lacked prudence). And your claim that understanding is not a goal of religion is absurd.

Evolution haters tend to also object to the sciences of geology (since it shows evolutionary progression in the fossil record and dispels the Noah's flood myth), physics (they love that 2nd law), information theory, chemistry, and various branches of biology, especially genetics. There's also a strong correlation of evolution denial and climate change denial.

That's like saying that because John can't stand the pope, John objects to religion. John might be wrong about the pope, but his rejection of the papacy does not imply a rejection of religion. That's also like saying that because Jane doesn't believe in a capital gains tax cut, she hates capitalism. You can see why a tax-cut proponent would want to position his opponents as haters of capitalism, but it's still fallacious thinking.

And: The Discovery Institute does not object to science in general, nor do "churches all across the country," nor do "conservative think tanks."

This blanket indictment of anyone who objects to Darwinian evolution, ESCR, the way Terri Schiavo's case was handled, as "science-haters" is just not true. I can see its political uses, but if one wants to understand what these critics object to, even if one wants to persuade them that they're wrong, one should think more clearly.

Pro- and anti-science is a smoke screen for the actual problem: fewer and fewer people with each generation understand science.

Every objection at the level of "theory of evolution" boils down to a misreading (willful or not) of the core tenet of the scientific method: a theory is the best explanation we have right now, and it is as much subject to change as the newest and shakiest hypothesis. The difference is one of degree. A hypothesis can be shot down relatively easily; a theory takes much more work, because it has survived many attempts to shoot it down.

Religionists resort to the "temper tantrum" approach: they can't find a rational rebuttal, so they stamp their feet and appeal to the egos and emotions of those who also don't understand science.

A secondary, but for me significant, problem is the inability of many people to make a distinction between belief and understanding. Belief is not subject to challenge, and changes slowly and with great difficulty, if at all; understanding can and does change as time goes on and further information requires. Understanding leads to knowledge; belief is capable of preventing knowledge, and often succeeds in preventing understanding.

This is exactly the same principle behind Intelligent Design, except that, ...

Appealing to goddidit is not the same as pointing out the huge quantities of long buried carbon humans have released into the atmosphere.

If a moron were to vote, what party would he/she most likely be a member of. That's what I want to know.

letsbegods - You're correct that we should separate science from scientists. Blaming science for the evils done by particular scientists isn't right. But it's those on the left, in Rod's mind, who have equated cloning, embryonic stem cell research, etc, with "science" as a way to show that people against those things are anti-science. Your agrument should be with those on the left, not Rod.

Yes Loudon, last I checked, when is a conditional, thanks for playing Fool.

However, the reason liberals criticize conservatives as anti-science is that on many social and environmental issues conservatives dodge the normative argument and attempt to distort either scientific conclusions or the scientific method.

Shorter Joseph: Conservatives lie to win.

Like with Iraq, torture, and immigration, areas where Rod is stunned to find out his guys have lie, and continue to do so. So too do they distort, manipulate, pressure, and outright fabricate to win scientific arguments.

A surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration's policy accomplishments, according to current and former public health officials.

The report described the link between poverty and poor health, urged the U.S. government to help combat widespread diseases as a key aim of its foreign policy, and called on corporations to help improve health conditions in the countries where they operate. A copy of the report was obtained by The Washington Post.

Carmona told lawmakers that, as he fought to release the document, he was "called in and again admonished . . . via a senior official who said, 'You don't get it.' " He said a senior official told him that "this will be a political document, or it will not be released."

After a long struggle that pitted top scientific and medical experts inside and outside the government against Steiger and his political bosses, Carmona refused to make the requested changes, according to the officials. Carmona engaged in similar fights over other public health reports, including an unpublished report on prison health. A few days before the end of his term as the nation's senior medical officer, he was abruptly told he would not be reappointed.

liar, liar

Why should anyone believe their approach to the "debate" over stem cells is any different?

Rod raises a straw man and bashes him severely. The broad accusation against the GOP is that it wars against the scientifically appropriate use of already obtained results, not that it wages a moral crusade against particular methods. Yes, there are those who take that narrow stand concerning, say, stem cell research. But the broader and more serious accusations -- see the former Surgeon General's testimony -- are about warping results and analysis in the name of politics.

Jeffrey - At least as far as I can tell, Rod was talking about moral limits on eugenics, ESCR, human cloning, etc. If you don't think that the GOP and conservatives got labelled as anti-science for their views on these issues, you weren't paying attention in the last election.

Franklin - I agree that no one will know what the benefits of this research are until it's tried. Opponents of the research aren't willing to go down that path and find out. That doesn't make them any more anti-science though than saying "I don't know what effects injecting toilet bowl cleanser into Eskimos will do, but I'm not willing to try it to find out." You're right, opponents of ESCR refuse to acknowledge the "let's find out" agrument because the very action of "finding out" is immoral. It's not that eventually ESCR might be put to evil use, the very research itself is considered immoral and evil.

I'm not sure where you're going with the fission/flight/wheel analogy. Are there people who think these things are immoral?

Because you, Richard, in your inchoate rage, fail to note that there are real distinctions among conservatives.

Rage? I am not least bit exercised about this issue. I am interested in it though and have been since reading Harlan Ellison in high school, so wrote about it.

Why don't you deal with the argument that conservative opponents of ESCR and cloning are making instead of dragging in administration flim-flam artists as if they represented some sort of "conservative" approach to science?

Because the conservative opponents of ESCR can't divorce themselves from the "administration flim-flam artists" they voted for, (who claim just as strenuously as you say they aren't, that they are too conservatives.)

Second your hypothetical arguments are not as important as the reality that these said flim-flam artists control the levers of power and thus yours and my destiny alike.

In the future I will tag when a comment is filled with rage and when it is simply a counter-argument. There are two or three subjects that do hit my rage buttons, this isn't one of them.

And I would love to see the look on someone's face when they ask the Tuskegee question and get the response, "No, of course not. That is how science was done back then. We do things differently now."

You deny there are large segments of the conservative community that are anti-science?

Yes.

Actually, it's a cell.

Keep telling yourself that, Dick.

Keep telling yourself that, Dick.

Ooh, making fun of my name. What is this, junior high school? I will say this, taunting a black man about his genitalia is kind of a losing proposition. If you know what I mean.

There will come a point where it will find private funding, and people will have to resort to bombing laboratories to prevent it.

Exactly the point of my earlier post. All of this research will continue, and will be applied. The only question is how and by whom.

Ooh, making fun of my name. What is this, junior high school? I will say this, taunting a black man about his genitalia is kind of a losing proposition. If you know what I mean.

Stay classy as ever, Richard.

Guys, come on, take this thing down a notch or two. If what you have to say will generate more heat than light, how about not saying it, or saying it in a different way, eh?

If I were to look for a hue-and-cry over artificial sterilization, would I find one? Would it be half as visible as the ESCR one? One-quarter? One percent?

I'm not sure I understand your point? Although artificial sterilization is nasty to be sure, when voluntarily undergone it is different in kind from ESCR as it does not involve the destruction of innocent babes. Further, ESCR invokes principles of justice given that it involves sacrificing one person that another might have some benefit. So I would expect more public outcry over ESCR.

But if you're looking for people to jump on a bandwagon chastizing folks who have had vasectomies or tubal ligations, count me in.

Richard, the best wit is playground wit. Junior high insults would be too sophisticated and too off color.

I haven't read "A Boy And His Dog" or watched the movie version in ages. I didn't remember that Blood was the result of genetic experimentation. I was thinking that he was a post-apocalyptic mutant.

There are conservatives writing on the internet who take evolution seriously. Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire spring to mind. They cover some the blind spots that some on the left have with the implications of human evolution.

A cell has "moral personhood?" Does it exist in the nucleus? How about in the mitochondria? Maybe it's a part of the ribosomes?

Actually, Daniel, this is the core of the eugenics meme. In the anonymous comment of 9:23 am you can almost the hear the panting and excited giggling at the prospect of ridding the world of mental defectives.

It's worth noting, as well, that your defense regarding multiple ethical continua could have been uttered 150 years ago about another peculiar institution. You say the defense of blacks diminishes the defense of white lives, I say the defense of the most defenseless life is the best protect of all lives. Whose side do you think history is on?

That Rod can claim conservatives are not anti-science, and yet in the same breath ally with fools who can't tell the difference between a blastocyst and a child speaks worlds.

This is the core of this eugenics meme. To equate the science of fetal tissue and fetal stem cells with Tuskegee and the eugenics movement is just absurd, unless you consider abaondoned fetal tissue to be the same as a living, breathing human.

So let me get this straight: because you don't believe that unborn human life possesses moral personhood, you don't believe you are obliged either to make an argument against we who do? You just declare that we're prima facie idiots, and roll on towards the progressive future? You guys exemplify exactly what I criticized in this post. Loudon is right: time was in this country when it was obvious to all thinking people that black people were subhuman. It hardly needed arguing, they thought, and those who insisted that black slaves were fully human were thought to be madmen or moral degenerates.

Today, virtually everybody realizes how immoral that position was, just as today most people (though rather fewer, I'd guess) recognize that the eugenics project embraced by progressives in the early 20th century was profoundly immoral. But that wasn't always the case. Don't you think that we ought to learn something from our past moral hubris regarding the sanctity of human life? Sneering and condescension is not a persuasive argument, or an argument at all.

Don't you think that we ought to learn something from our past moral hubris regarding the sanctity of human life? Sneering and condescension is not a persuasive argument, or an argument at all.

And trotting out a eugenics meme and accusing progressives of supporting eugenics isn't a persuasive argument, or an argument at all, either.

Of course we can learn from the past. We can also have perspective as we move forward and realize that experimenting on minorities and the mentally ill has no moral parallel to using fetal tissue. Equating minorities and the mentally ill to fetal tissue is actually the more absurdist argument.

The question of when human life begins is not a scientific one, it is a political one, in the best sense of the word. Politics is not just a euphemism for "getting mine." It is the arena in which competing visions of The Good are worked out. Science can tell us what properties and capabilities an embryo has at each stage of its existence. It cannot tell us whether, at any of these stages, it is a "person" with the right to the full panoply of constitutional protections. In some cultures, a "person" does not exist until its father accepts it as fit and viable, or even until it survives some adolescent rite of passage.

If our culture chooses to posit that a "person" is created the instant egg meets sperm, it will have to deal with the fact that roughly one-third of such "persons" are doomed to die naturally before viability, and, certainly, before baptism. What does that make of a divinity who sets things up that way? A major-league child abuser?

From the beginnings of human culture, people have simultaneously deferred to scientific knowledge (such as it was) and feared it. Those who understood the human body, natural processes, and the healing and poisonous properties of plants and minerals had power--both the power to heal and the power to withhold healing or even to kill.

Which is why we have codes of professional ethics, beginning with the Hippocratic Oath (actually, I think there are some earlier Egyptian and Asian versions.) They are the restraints a society puts on its knowledge priesthood. They don't always work, of course, but they're better than nothing.

For instance, the restraints placed on human dissection by the Church in the Middle Ages were better than the over-enthusiastic methods of body procurement practiced by Burke and Hare a couple of centuries later. But we needed the knowledge properly managed dissection could provide. We are now, in fact, desperately short of cadavers available for autopsies, although computer-scanning is on the verge of replacing them for most purposes.

In fact, computer-scanning is now helping to solve the problem that kept many able and intelligent people out of the biological and medical sciences a generation ago--reluctance to dissect, or vivisect, animals.

In short, at their best, culture and science can work together to establish ethical restraints and then to provide work-arounds for them.

Marian, I thought you said politics isn't a euphemism for "getting mine"? I guess it's a euphemism for "getting ours." I hope I'm on the leeward side of the ethical restraints and don't end upon the receiving end of a work around.

It cannot tell us whether, at any of these stages, it is a "person" with the right to the full panoply of constitutional protections.

Wouldn't the Constitution tell us that?

Amendment 14

1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

At the dawn of the medical age, when scientists were just beginning to discover both the evolutionary basis to biology as well as painless, "humane" procedures to render humans infertile, it was the nation's rationalists who hit upon the idea of sterilization as a way to solve the problem of multiplying morons, Bruinius explains; the main opposition to the horrific idea came from religious fundamentalists. [Emphasis mine -- RD]

Devil's Advocate time:

Why is it such a horrible thing to ask people who shouldn't breed to not breed?

Imagine a world populated by 10 billion or more children of children of children of children of average Americans.

Or average [insert nationality here].

What that has to do with a medical decision between a woman and her doctor is still open for debate.

. . . unless . . .

Why is it such a horrible thing to ask people who shouldn't breed to not breed?

TV doesn't let them breed.

Thank you for highlighting the importance of single issue voting, given that life and human dignity are issues that tend to permeate public policy.

TV doesn't let them breed.

Lies. TV just makes it more palatable for them to remain childless.

Daniel (writing to Rod Dreher): "And trotting out a eugenics meme and accusing progressives of supporting eugenics isn't a persuasive argument, or an argument at all, either.

I have noticed that Rod is prone to employing that form of rhetoric. See how frequently he lists topics related to abortion under the topic "culture of death". That is a bit disappointing.

Exactly what would be the problem with paying people to stay childless? It would save the nation money in the long run, as those who are incapable of raising children properly are a huge drain on the system.

One would think conservatives would jump all up on that.

Ultimately, what's your point, Rod, besides "EUGENICS=BAD."

You've failed to show in any way how voluntarily not having children one can't care for is a bad thing.

Why is it a bad thing? Is it because 'Every sperm is sacred?'

...if unborn life is not sacred from conception, I don't know on what solid moral grounds one would object to eugenics.

The same moral grounds that would object to treating women as possessions, something western civilization has only recently (in historical terms) found its way to abolish.

Rod, the narrowsightedness you correctly point out (and validly criticize) is endemic to our culture... at least the one I grew up in. We don't have leaders any more, we have promoters of agendas. An agenda does not exist for goals if it doesn't also specify what it is against.

Doing the right thing must mean ignoring agendas. If it doesn't then we become a society that only does the right thing when someone can profit from it... oops, already there, I see. :-(