The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea

Εξώφυλλο
CSHL Press, 2001 - 451 σελίδες
The Unfit, by Elof Carlson, explores the sources of a movement – negative eugenics – that was used to justify the Holocaust, which claimed millions of innocent lives in World War II. The title reflects the nearly three centuries of belief that some people are socially unfit by virtue of a defective biology, and echoes an earlier theory of degeneracy, dating to biblical antiquity, in which some people were deemed unfit because of some transgression against religious law. The author presents the first biological theory of degeneracy – onanism – and then follows the development of degeneracy theory throughout the nineteenth century and its application to a variety of social classes. The key intellectual theories and their proponents form the framework of this exploration, which includes the concepts of evolution and heredity and how they were applied to social problems. These ideas are followed into the twentieth century with the development of theories of positive and negative eugenics, the establishment of compulsory sterilization laws, racism and anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. This story of misapplied science and technology is one that still haunts humanity in the twenty-first century. The ghost of eugenics recurs in many guises during debates and controversies about intelligence testing, genetic screening, prenatal diagnosis, gene therapy, new reproductive strategies, and uses of our genomic information. Carlson ends his discussion of the history of humanity in this arena with an exploration of the future of genetics that is based on new technologies and application of the Human Genome Project findings, as well as a discussion of the death of the old eugenics and of the problems that will not go away, including our ambivalence about our own biology.

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Περιεχόμενα

The Jukes and the Tribe of Ishmael
161
A Minor Prophet of Democracy
183
Isolating the Unfit through Compulsory Sterilization
199
The Emergence of Two Wings of the Eugenics Movement
231
Europes Undesirables Replace the Domestic Unfit
247
Eugenics Becomes an International Movement
265
Racism the Holocaust and Beyond
279
Appendices
395

The Perfectibility of Man Confronts Vice and Misery
95
Evolutionary Ethics before Darwin
109
Hereditary Units and the Pessimism of the Germ Plasm
129
Eugenics Takes the Spotlight
159
Useful Books on the History of Eugenics
405
Index
427
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Συχνά εμφανιζόμενοι όροι και φράσεις

Δημοφιλή αποσπάσματα

Σελίδα 141 - There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Σελίδα 21 - If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them...
Σελίδα 21 - And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice ; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.
Σελίδα 22 - Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way, when ye were come forth out of Egypt ; how he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou 25 wast faint and weary ; and he feared not God.
Σελίδα 154 - The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.
Σελίδα 76 - Their's is yon house that holds the parish poor, Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door ; There, where the putrid vapours flagging, play, And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day; There children dwell who know no parents...
Σελίδα 121 - The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many "in shallows and in miseries," are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.
Σελίδα 101 - Taking the whole earth, instead of this island, emigration would of course be excluded; and, supposing the present population equal to a thousand millions, the human species would increase as the numbers, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256; and subsistence as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. In two centuries the population would be to the means of subsistence as 256 to 9; in three centuries as 4096 to 13, and in two thousand years the difference would be almost incalculable.
Σελίδα 100 - Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand. She has been comparatively sparing in the room, and the nourishment necessary to rear them.
Σελίδα 218 - ... to examine the mental and physical condition of such inmates as are recommended by the institutional physician and board of managers. If, In the judgment of this committee of experts and the board of managers, procreation is inadvisable, and there.

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