Issues in Population and Bioethics | Page 3

over a serious illness can in the long run contribute to
weakening the resistance of the whole human race to certain diseases.
If we pay absolutely no attention to what is called hereditary hygiene,
we could find ourselves facing a degeneration of the human race.
Mankind's hereditary potential for resisting serious disease will be
weakened."
(Jostein Gaarder in "Sophie's World", a bestselling philosophy textbook
for adolescents published in Oslo, Norway, in 1991 and, afterwards,
throughout the world, having been translated to dozens of languages)
The Nazis regarded the murder of the feeble-minded and the mentally
insane - intended to purify the race and maintain hereditary hygiene - as
a form of euthanasia.
German doctors were enthusiastic proponents of an eugenics
movements rooted in 19th century social Darwinism. Luke Gormally
writes, in his essay "Walton, Davies, and Boyd" (published in
"Euthanasia Examined - Ethical, Clinical, and Legal Perspectives", ed.
John Keown, Cambridge University Press, 1995):
"When the jurist Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche
published their tract The Permission to Destroy Life that is Not Worth
Living in 1920 ... their motive was to rid society of the 'human ballast
and enormous economic burden' of care for the mentally ill, the
handicapped, retarded and deformed children, and the incurably ill. But
the reason they invoked to justify the killing of human beings who fell
into these categories was that the lives of such human beings were 'not
worth living', were 'devoid of value'"
It is this association with the hideous Nazi regime that gave eugenics -
a term coined by a relative of Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton, in
1883 - its bad name. Richard Lynn, of the University of Ulster of North
Ireland, thinks that this recoil resulted in "Dysgenics - the genetic
deterioration of modern (human) population", as the title of his
controversial tome puts it.
The crux of the argument for eugenics is that a host of technological,
cultural, and social developments conspired to give rise to negative

selection of the weakest, least intelligent, sickest, the habitually
criminal, the sexually deviant, the mentally-ill, and the least adapted.
Contraception is more widely used by the affluent and the
well-educated than by the destitute and dull. Birth control as practiced
in places like China distorted both the sex distribution in the cities - and
increased the weight of the rural population (rural couples in China are
allowed to have two children rather than the urban one).
Modern medicine and the welfare state collaborate in sustaining alive
individuals - mainly the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, the sick,
and the genetically defective - who would otherwise have been culled
by natural selection to the betterment of the entire species.
Eugenics may be based on a literal understanding of Darwin's
metaphor.
The 2002 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has this to say:
"Darwin's description of the process of natural selection as the survival
of the fittest in the struggle for life is a metaphor. "Struggle" does not
necessarily mean contention, strife, or combat; "survival" does not
mean that ravages of death are needed to make the selection effective;
and "fittest" is virtually never a single optimal genotype but rather an
array of genotypes that collectively enhance population survival rather
than extinction. All these considerations are most apposite to
consideration of natural selection in humans. Decreasing infant and
childhood mortality rates do not necessarily mean that natural selection
in the human species no longer operates. Theoretically, natural
selection could be very effective if all the children born reached
maturity.
Two conditions are needed to make this theoretical possibility realized:
first, variation in the number of children per family and, second,
variation correlated with the genetic properties of the parents. Neither
of these conditions is farfetched."
The eugenics debate is only the visible extremity of the Man vs. Nature
conundrum. Have we truly conquered nature and extracted ourselves
from its determinism? Have we graduated from natural to cultural
evolution, from natural to artificial selection, and from genes to
memes?
Does the evolutionary process culminate in a being that transcends its
genetic baggage, that programs and charts its future, and that allows its

weakest and sickest to survive? Supplanting the imperative of the
survival of the fittest with a culturally-sensitive principle may be the
hallmark of a successful evolution, rather than the beginning of an
inexorable decline.
The eugenics movement turns this argument on its head. They accept
the premise that the contribution of natural selection to the makeup of
future human generations is glacial and negligible. But they reject the
conclusion that, having ridden ourselves of its tyranny, we can now let
the weak and sick among us survive and multiply. Rather, they propose
to replace natural selection with eugenics.
But who, by which authority, and according to what guidelines will
administer this man-made culling