Outline of the History of Inegalitarian Hereditarianism

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I. Pre-Darwinian Thought

- The Torah, New Testament, and Koran hail the total annihilation of nonbelievers and/or enemy peoples.

- The practice of infanticide of sickly, small, albino, and deformed infants occurs in traditional societies throughout history and around the world.

- Many peoples practiced deliberate artificial selection of domesticated plants and animals.

- Ideas about the inferior and ape-like nature of races other than one's own are ancient and occur in many different regions. In the West, the belief that inferior races were closer to apes long predates evolution, part of Aristotelian-Christian Great Chain of Being ranking all living things from "low" to "high."

- Various Christian beliefs about racial inferiority: curse of Ham, polygenic creation (Adam and Eve were white, other races are separate creation), degeneration since Eden.

- The Bible - both Old and New Testaments have rules for slaves - was frequently cited in defense of slavery. Abolitionists also referred to the Bible.

- Thomas Jefferson believed that blacks could interbreed with apes, were incapable of forethought, lacked skill in poetry and music. Such views were promoted by 18th and 19th century intellectuals like the Frenchman Gobineau. Andrew Jackson believed that the extermination of lesser tribes was inevitable and progressive.

- Scientific racism provided a secular justification for racism, imperialism, slavery and other inegalitarian practices.

- Fears of biological and cultural degeneration of human beings appeared in the writings of some 18th C intellectuals, with an early attempt at eugenics advocacy that did not become a mass movement.

- Hegel emphasized historical necessity of destruction of nations in his progressionist historical theory. Engels, following Hegel, wrote of the progressive destruction of "reactionary" dynasties and peoples

- By the mid-19th century, prior to the publication of The Origin, many scientists and educated professionals already accepted evolution - due in no small part to Lamarck and Robert Chambers.

II. Darwin and His Circle

- "The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle For Life," the subtitle to the Origin, does in fact refer to human races but only part as a more broad category of varieties of plants and animals. Darwin believed that selection takes place between populations and species as well as individuals.

- Scientists who did not accept evolution or at least Darwin's theory of its cause tended to be at least as racist as Darwin and his circle.

- Wallace (at least at one point) believed that the extinction of inferior races and continued natural selection would result in the evolutionary advance of the human species, and eventually an intellectually and morally superior homogenous human race would arise and the world would become a Utopia.

- Darwin believed that non-piece work pay for workers, unions, and co-ops were contrary to natural selection's principle of competition and hence detrimental to future human progress.

- Darwin was gravely worried about the decline of the human species through civilization's thwarting of natural selection, although he did note some factors that would slow this process. Darwinism not only explained why degeneration was happening, it suggested that it was inevitable.

- Darwin did not understand the mechanism of inheritance and believed in a kind of modified Lamarckism, with his own (incorrect) theory of inheritance.

- Darwin believed that the elimination of inferior races, and the domination of Europeans over non-Europeans, was beneficial to human evolutionary and social progress in the long run. Naturalists of the era hardly made any distinction between biological and social realms.

- Both Darwin and Wallace, despite their beliefs about the inevitable and salutary effects of the extinction of inferior human races, personally abhorred slavery and colonial cruelties.

- Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was a genius, pioneering statistics and working towards a model of inheritance that Mendel would later discover on his own. Galton's eugenic beliefs were inspired by The Origin; Darwin heavily cited Galton's views on dysgenic decline in The Descent of Man. Galton thought that if inferior people did not voluntarily stop breeding they should be forced to do so.

- Unlike Galton, Darwin believed that there should be no centralized regulatory policy promoting fertility in the superior and discouraging it in the inferior; rather, he believed that education and advocacy to influence voluntary behavior would be more effective and feasible.

- Galton believed that Jews were specialized for parasitism on other peoples. Darwin, on the other hand, never made antisemitic statements.

- The modern eugenics movement was largely founded by the circle of British intellectuals around Darwin, relatives, friends, guardians of his legacy, including Galton and his student Pearson and Charles Darwin's son Leonard Darwin. However, it was outside of Britain, namely the US, Sweden, and Germany. where eugenics would be most influential.

- Darwin's German disciple Ernst Haeckel was an immense influence on eugenics and the statist wing of Social Darwinism (Herbert Spencer was a representative of the laissez-faire wing). Darwin praised Haeckel for understanding natural selection and having greater knowledge than he on the subject of human evolution.

III. Inegalitarian Hereditarianism After Darwin

- Ernst Haeckel advocated struggle between races, eugenic murder, and antisemitism. (Some of these writings were published after the death of Darwin, so it should not be assumed that Darwin endorsed all of these things.)

- Leonard Darwin, president of the British Eugenics Society, wrote that his pro-eugenicist activities were what his father would have wanted.

- The most influential American eugenicist, Charles Davenport, was a Harvard-trained biologist who introduced Mendelism and Pearson's biometrics to American biology. His friend Madison Grant was an influential naturalist and environmentalist. Hitler called Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race his "Bible." Another Davenport associate, Harry Laughlin, helped get legislation passed that made it difficult for European Jews to emigrate to the US and was awarded an honor by the Nazis. Eugenics and genetics overlapped and merged in the early era of genetics.

- Tens of thousands of Americans were involuntarily sterilized on eugenic grounds, most of them in the 1920s. Similar policies were instituted in a number of countries around the world; one notable example is Sweden.

- Leading eugenicists tended to have scientific background and were freethinkers and Darwinists. Some were amateurs in biology and medicine or came from other fields like economics. A few were non-Darwinian evolutionists (at the time there were several strong rivals, including orthogenesis, saltationism, and Lamarckism). A number were clergy. A small number were creationists who accepted microevolution (as do creationist today).

- Few public intellectuals (including Franz Boas) were opposed to eugenics and only a tiny handful of biologists were outspoken against it.

- "Eugenics" covered a broad range of policies from the benign to the atrocious: increased availability of birth control, tax incentives for the superior to have more children, improvement in prenatal care and education, infanticide of handicapped newborns, involuntary sterilization, targeted immigration restriction, murder of the handicapped, murder of members of certain races. Some eugenicists, like Leonard Darwin and Margaret Sanger, were relatively mild, while others were far worse. Most eugenicists probably did not support policies much worse than involuntary sterilization of people with low IQ, which while bad is not at the level of everyday Nazi crimes.

- Invoking Darwinism (or more broadly evolutionary biology) was used to promote all kinds of positions, many of them mutually exclusive: feminism vs patriarchy, militarism vs pacifism, capitalism vs socialism vs anarchism, labor vs robber barons, democracy vs dictatorship. Even Darwin and Wallace disagreed on major policy matters, and cited natural selection to do so. The wide variety of "Darwinian" advocacy shows how uninformative natural selection is as a basis of policy.

- A number of feminists tied eugenics to birth control and female liberation.

- Notable American robber baron families, including Carnegie and Rockefeller, generously funded eugenics research and advocacy.

- More affluent and WASP-associated Protestant churches were generally in favor of eugenics, while the Catholic church, more associated with poor white ethnics, opposed it. The more liberal/progressive churches were more likely to favor eugenics.

IV. Nazism

- Germany and other European countries were actually more antisemitic by the end of the 19th century than they had been at its beginning, due to a variety of political and social factors. Antisemitism shifted from religious emphasis to economic and biological themes. Non-Darwinist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who married Richard Wagner's daughter, provided a "biological" rationale for Jew-hatred.

- The founders of German eugenics, who were mostly biologists and physicians, accepted evolution through natural selection and advocated eugenics because they believed that civilization had weakened natural selection; they sought to synthesize socialism, nationalism, and eugenics in a regulatory state. The basic tenets of German racial hygiene had been established years prior to Hitler taking power. Not all of these architects of German "racial hygiene" were antisemitic.

- Proto-Nazi eugenicists generally enjoyed mutually respectful relations with their American and British colleagues.

- Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene was both a standard genetics text in America and the UK as well as a basic resource for Nazi eugenics. One author, Fischer, was one of Mengele's mentors. Another, Lenz had worked in Namibia during the Herero genocide and wrote that one of his papers prefigured Nazi policy. Hitler read Human Heredity while in prison for the Beer Hall Putsch.

- Hitler believed that the earth existed long before the human species, evolutionary progress through natural selection, and that natural selection had been thwarted by civilization.

- Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg cited Darwinism and positivism as important modern movements countering Christian beliefs, which he despised.

- Even most American eugenicists were opposed to the antisemitic Nuremberg Laws. Among nations that practiced eugenics, German was unique in fusing eugenicist "racial hygiene" to eliminationist biologicized antisemitism.

- Nazi germ/cancer metaphors for German society and the alleged Jewish threat are related to social organicism, the idea that societies are organisms within which individuals are cells (as developed by Haeckel and others).

- Nazi ideology opposed Darwinism's materialism and lack of teleology but was not opposed to evolution as such. Because of their materialism and atheism the works of Darwin and Haeckel were banned, even as some Nazi scientists worked within a Darwinian-Haeckelian paradigm. Haeckel's Monist Society was banned because of its feminist and other unacceptable aspects; however, an Ernst Haeckel Society was established by the SS.

- Within the framework of German racial suprematism and biologicized antisemitism, there was a plurality of schools of biological thought within Nazi science: holist vs mechanist, Haeckelian vs non-Haeckelian. (This is in contrast to Lysenko-era Stalinism, in which no deviation was tolerated.)

- Mainstream evolutionary biology research within the paradigm of the Modern Synthesis was conducted in Nazi Germany, including by Nazi biologist Heberer and non-Nazi biologist Rensch. Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz wrote that evolutionary biology was congruent with Nazism.

- Nazi elites generally followed Positive Christianity, which emphasized Christ's socialist opposition to Jews rather than his martyrdom (emphasized by so called Negative Christianity AKA Christianity).

- The Wehrmacht had the motto "God With Us" on their belt buckles (a carryover from the Kaiser period) while the SS had "My Honor Is My Loyalty." German Churches, which had stoked eliminationist antisemitism for centuries, were generally compliant with the Nazi regime and offered no official resistance to the Holocaust. Materials for SS instruction condemned Christian egalitarianism and even criticized Martin Luther for the Jewish aspects of his religious beliefs.

V. Post-WWII

- More sophisticated mathematical models of genetics developed in the 30s, 40s and 50s showed that the foundational assumptions of eugenics were in error and the whole enterprise was grossly theoretically as well as ethically flawed. However, that has not stopped some scientists from attempting to develop more "sophisticated" eugenic policies or from advocating direct manipulation of the human genome in order to produce an advanced type of human.

- In addition to changes in the science of genetics, horror over the Holocaust resulted in the demise of the hereditarian-eugenicist period of Western science, except for some notable holdouts - particularly in the areas of psychometry and to a lesser extent, behavioral genetics. Revisionist histories suggested that eugenics was a fringe political movement that somehow gained the support of the powerful, never a mainstream applied science with advocates across the political spectrum.

- Involuntary eugenic sterilization continued in Social Democratic Sweden until the 1970s.

- Julian Huxley, coiner of transhumanism, was a eugenicist who favored Nietzschean transcendence of traditional morality.

- James Watson and Francis Crick advocated various eugenic policies and accepted Shockley-style scientific racism. Ernst Mayr, one of the founders of the Modern Synthesis, suggested as late as 1971 that reproductive licenses would be a good idea. W.D. Hamilton, one of the most important theoretical biologists since the Modern Synthesis, praised the racist work and anti-dysgenic warnings of Roger Pearson in the 1990s.

- Transhumanist experiments on the human germline have been advocated by bioethicist Peter Singer, and Richard Dawkins has argued that we should be open to it. David Barash suggested that human-ape hybridization be tried.

- Modern scientific racists are generally atheistic and see themselves as being in the scientific tradition of Darwin and Galton.

- Scientific racism is boosted in the 2010s by both academics, including a clique within criminology (JC Barnes, Brian Boutwell) and the web of ideological movements known as neoreaction and the alt-right, which have exploded with the rise of Trump.

- CRISPR gene editing technology is viewed by scientists and ethicists not just as a means of preventing devastating genetic disease but improving human beings mentally and physically; the first CRISPR editing of experimental human embryos is performed in 2017.

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