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