Author: Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Eugenics
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Book Description
The Eugenics Review
Author: Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics
Author: Adam RutherfordPublisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324035617
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171
Book Description
How did an obscure academic idea pave the way to the Holocaust within just fifty years? Control is a book about eugenics, what geneticist Adam Rutherford calls “a defining idea of the twentieth century.” Inspired by Darwin’s ideas about evolution, eugenics arose in Victorian England as a theory for improving the British population, and quickly spread to America, where it was embraced by presidents, funded by Gilded Age monopolists, and enshrined into racist American laws that became the ideological cornerstone of the Third Reich. Despite this horrific legacy, eugenics looms large today as the advances in genetics in the last thirty years—from the sequencing of the human genome to modern gene editing techniques—have brought the idea of population purification back into the mainstream. Eugenics has “a short history, but a long past,” Rutherford writes. The first half of Control is the history of an idea, from its roots in key philosophical texts of the classical world all the way into their genocidal enactment in the twentieth century. The second part of the book explores how eugenics operates today, as part of our language and culture, as part of current political and racial discussions, and as an eternal temptation to powerful people who wish to improve society through reproductive control. With disarming wit and scientific precision, Rutherford explains why eugenics still figures prominently in the twenty-first century, despite its genocidal past. And he confronts insidious recurring questions—did eugenics work in Nazi Germany? And could it work today?—revealing the intellectual bankruptcy of the idea, and the scientific impossibility of its realization.
The New Eugenics
Author: Judith DaarPublisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300229038
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
A provocative examination of how unequal access to reproductive technology replays the sins of the eugenics movement Eugenics, the effort to improve the human species by inhibiting reproduction of “inferior” genetic strains, ultimately came to be regarded as the great shame of the Progressive movement. Judith Daar, a prominent expert on the intersection of law and medicine, argues that current attitudes toward the potential users of modern assisted reproductive technologies threaten to replicate eugenics’ same discriminatory practices. In this book, Daar asserts how barriers that block certain people’s access to reproductive technologies are often founded on biases rooted in notions of class, race, and marital status. As a result, poor, minority, unmarried, disabled, and LGBT individuals are denied technologies available to well-off nonminority heterosexual applicants. An original argument on a highly emotional and important issue, this work offers a surprising departure from more familiar arguments on the issue as it warns physicians, government agencies, and the general public against repeating the mistakes of the past.
Eugenics in the Garden
Author: Fabiola López-DuránPublisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477314962
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Book Description
As Latin American elites strove to modernize their cities at the turn of the twentieth century, they eagerly adopted the eugenic theory that improvements to the physical environment would lead to improvements in the human race. Based on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of the “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” this strain of eugenics empowered a utopian project that made race, gender, class, and the built environment the critical instruments of modernity and progress. Through a transnational and interdisciplinary lens, Eugenics in the Garden reveals how eugenics, fueled by a fear of social degeneration in France, spread from the realms of medical science to architecture and urban planning, becoming a critical instrument in the crafting of modernity in the new Latin world. Journeying back and forth between France, Brazil, and Argentina, Fabiola López-Durán uncovers the complicity of physicians and architects on both sides of the Atlantic, who participated in a global strategy of social engineering, legitimized by the authority of science. In doing so, she reveals the ideological trajectory of one of the most celebrated architects of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier, who deployed architecture in what he saw as the perfecting and whitening of man. The first in-depth interrogation of eugenics’ influence on the construction of the modern built environment, Eugenics in the Garden convincingly demonstrates that race was the main tool in the geopolitics of space, and that racism was, and remains, an ideology of progress.
Why Fish Don't Exist
Author: Lulu MillerPublisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501160346
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
Nineteenth-century scientist David Starr Jordan built one of the most important fish specimen collections ever seen, until the 1906 San Francisco earthquake shattered his life's work.
Pure America
Author: Elizabeth CattePublisher:
ISBN: 9781953368195
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
The highly anticipated follow-up to What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia explores the legacy of white supremacy in a small Virginia town
In Reckless Hands
Author: Victoria F. NoursePublisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393065294
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
The Human Gene Editing Debate
Author: John H. EvansPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197519571
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
In 2018 the first genetically modified babies were reportedly born in China, made possible by the invention of CRISPR technology in 2012. This controversial advancement overturned the pre-existing moral consensus, which had held for over fifty years before: while gene editing an adult person was morally acceptable, modifying babies, and thus subsequent generations, crossed a significant moral line. If this line is passed over, scientists will be left without an agreed-upon ethical limit. What do we do now? John H. Evans here provides a meta-level guide to how these debates move forward and their significance to society. He explains how the bioethical debate has long been characterized as a slippery slope, with consensually ethical use at the top, nightmarish dystopia at the bottom, and specific agreed-upon limits in between, which draw the lines between the ethical and the unethical. Evans frames his analysis around these limits, or barriers. Historically they have existed to guide scientists and to prevent the debate from slipping down the metaphorical slope into unacceptable eugenicist possibilities, such as in Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World or the movie Gattaca. Evans examines the history of how barriers were placed, then fell, then replaced by new ones, and discusses how these insights inform where the debate may head. He evaluates other proposed barriers relevant to where we are now, projects that most of the barriers suggested by scientists and bioethicists will not hold, and cautiously identifies a few that could serve as the moral boundary for the next generation. At a critical time in this new era of intervention in the human genome, The Human Gene Editing Debate provides a necessary, comprehensive analysis of the conversation's direction, past, present, and future.
An Image of God
Author: Sharon M. LeonPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022603903X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Book Description
During the first half of the twentieth century, supporters of the eugenics movement offered an image of a racially transformed America by curtailing the reproduction of “unfit” members of society. Through institutionalization, compulsory sterilization, the restriction of immigration and marriages, and other methods, eugenicists promised to improve the population—a policy agenda that was embraced by many leading intellectuals and public figures. But Catholic activists and thinkers across the United States opposed many of these measures, asserting that “every man, even a lunatic, is an image of God, not a mere animal." In An Image of God, Sharon Leon examines the efforts of American Catholics to thwart eugenic policies, illuminating the ways in which Catholic thought transformed the public conversation about individual rights, the role of the state, and the intersections of race, community, and family. Through an examination of the broader questions raised in this debate, Leon casts new light on major issues that remain central in American political life today: the institution of marriage, the role of government, and the separation of church and state. This is essential reading in the history of religion, science, politics, and human rights.
The Guarded Gate
Author: Daniel OkrentPublisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1476798052
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496
Book Description
NAMED ONE OF THE “100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR” BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW From the widely celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Last Call—this “rigorously historical” (The Washington Post) and timely account of how the rise of eugenics helped America keep out “inferiors” in the 1920s is “a sobering, valuable contribution to discussions about immigration” (Booklist). A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, The Guarded Gate tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers—many of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than forty years. Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its beginning in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that “biological laws” had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law was enacted three years later. In his trademark lively and authoritative style, Okrent brings to life the rich cast of characters from this time, including Lodge’s closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Darwin’s first cousin, Francis Galton, the idiosyncratic polymath who gave life to eugenics; the fabulously wealthy and profoundly bigoted Madison Grant, founder of the Bronx Zoo, and his best friend, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History; Margaret Sanger, who saw eugenics as a sensible adjunct to her birth control campaign; and Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. A work of history relevant for today, The Guarded Gate is “a masterful, sobering, thoughtful, and necessary book” that painstakingly connects the American eugenicists to the rise of Nazism, and shows how their beliefs found fertile soil in the minds of citizens and leaders both here and abroad.