Eugenics

Karl Pearson, Immigration, and the War over Jewish Intelligence, 1925–1935

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I often take great pleasure from looking into the past and finding, among persons and works of great genius, ideas that we very closely share. Recently I’ve been looking into the life and work of Karl Pearson (1857–1936), a man commonly considered to be one of the founders of modern statistical science. Born in London, Pearson’s formal education began only at age 15 at the city’s University College School. A precocious talent, he later attended King’s college at Cambridge where he won the Third Wrangler position of the Mathematical Tripos in 1878. His initial work after his formal education was as an author, lecturer, and lawyer. In 1884 he was offered a position at University College, London in applied mathematics, where he taught mathematics to young engineering students. He was reported to have been an effective and charismatic teacher, devoting considerable time and energy to these duties while also producing an impressive output of original work in applied mathematics.

Pearson’s mathematical contributions are immense. He pioneered discussions of relativity and antimatter, and in 1892 he wrote The Grammar of Science, a famous work covering many scientific themes. He is also credited with being one of the first mathematicians to truly consider data as essential in scientific inquiry. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that “Pearson was responsible for almost single-handedly establishing the modern discipline of mathematical statistics, including the invention of a number of essential statistical techniques.”

Rather than merely developing new probability theory, Pearson used this theory as a tool with actual data. He subsequently became well-known for his work in various measures of correlation; perhaps the most widely used today is Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficient. Many of his statistical procedures are still in use, such as Pearson’s “Chi squared goodness of fit test.” In 1901 Pearson established the journal Biometrika, which remains in print today and is still considered to be one of the most important statistical journals. Read more

Profiting from Eugenics: The case of Shabazz Muhammad

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Eugenics has always verged on common sense for evolutionists. Recently evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller commented on China’s policy of taking eugenics seriously by “creating the world’s highest-quality human capital in terms of the Chinese population’s genes, health, and education.” As a result, the Chinese now have invested in cutting edge genetic research and are moving to create smarter babies. By understanding the genetics of IQ and allowing couples to select which of their fertilized eggs to rear, they will be able to raise the IQ of their offspring. As Miller notes in an interview, “Even if [this process] only boosts the average kid by five IQ points, that’s a huge difference in terms of economic productivity, the competitiveness of the country, how many patents they get, how their businesses are run, and how innovative their economy is.”

Count on the West to continue to import millions of low-IQ immigrants and to go into a moral panic at the very thought that genetic differences could influence IQ and that IQ is important for competitiveness.

However, that doesn’t mean that enterprising people in the West cannot use a basic grasp of eugenics to strike it rich. The LA Times reports that Ron Holmes used a basic knowledge of eugenics to enrich himself and his family (“NCAA to NBA millions: UCLA star’s father mapped out a dream; Ron Holmes has spent two decades guiding his son Shabazz Muhammad toward a pro basketball career. The payoff is near, with the UCLA star projected as a top draft pick“). 

Shabazz Muhammad with his parents, Ron Holmes and Faye Muhammad.

Shabazz Muhammad with his parents, Ron Holmes and Faye Muhammad.

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The Big Questions: Eugenics and Ethno-States

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Every year Edge.org gets some certifiably smart people to give answers to a Big Question. This year’s Big Question is “What should we be worried about?” I suppose if I was invited to comment, it would be about the decline of Whites in all societies that have been historically White, from Australia to Europe, and what that might mean in terms of future racial/ethnic conflict as multiculturalism continues to march forward unimpeded.

But none of these smart people are concerned about that. Nevertheless, there are a couple of comments that bear on these issues. Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico and NYU, discusses Chinese eugenics as a long term threat to the West. In the West, as John Glad has shown, eugenics was a casualty of World War II and the successful effort by Jewish intellectual activists linking eugenics with the Holocaust. Eugenics is alive and well in Israel and China, but any mention of eugenics is greeted by the West with moral panic. Miller notes that “With the 1995 Maternal and Infant Health Law (known as the Eugenic Law until Western opposition forced a name change), China forbade people carrying heritable mental or physical disorders from marrying, and promoted mass prenatal ultrasound testing for birth defects.”

In the early part of the 20th century, eugenics based on Darwinism was common knowledge, and there were concerns about the future of the race, but among Europeans like Madison Grant and the Chinese:

Many scientists and reformers of Republican China (1912-1949) were ardent Darwinians and Galtonians. They worried about racial extinction (miezhong) and “the science of deformed fetuses” (jitaixue), and saw eugenics as a way to restore China’s rightful place as the world’s leading civilization after a century of humiliation by European colonialism. Read more

Review of John Glad’s “Jewish Eugenics”

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Jewish Eugenics, by John Glad. Washington, DC: Wooden Shore Publishers, 2011; 464pp. (Downloadable at either www.whatwemaybe or www.woodenshore.org. These sites also have Glad’s Future Human Evolution.)

John Glad begins Jewish Eugenics by noting that “much of what might be termed  ‘accepted eugenics narrative’ is in crass discordance with the historical facts” (p. 8). In other words, we are about to enter one of those academic minefields where “truth” is rigorously cleansed to make sure it is compatible with ethnic interests. Indeed, “writing books about Jews used to be a far easier undertaking than it is today, with Jewish anxieties over ‘anti-Semitism’ having been so elevated as to render dispassionate scholarly discourse nearly impossible” (p. 8).

I am not so sure that dispassionate scholarship is impossible, but it is surely the case that findings that diverge from the self-image desired by any ethnic group will surely be vigorously contested by academic activists or, more probably, consigned to oblivion. Dr. Glad assures me that in his case, it is the latter, writing of his frustration at the silence that has greeted his work. Welcome to the club.

As a university professor, Glad is quite attuned to the politics of having a good career. Critics of eugenics, like the notorious Ashley Montagu (a disciple of Franz Boas), get fat honoraria for delivering superficial, factually challenged lectures sponsored by numerous academic departments and programs. (Glad characterizes a lecture by Montagu as “an impressive demonstration of indoctrination” [p. 91].) On the other hand, those who defend eugenics “are subjected to academic shunning” (p. 91), their books are not used in classes and not purchased by academic libraries. They get no invitations to attend conferences or deliver lectures. Read more