Nuggets from Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny

Oddly enough, out of such concern came eugenics: the desire not just to preserve but to “improve” the human race—at the expense of those members considered not worth keeping. J. C. Sanford explains:

“Darwin’s book, Origin of the Species and the Survival of Favored Races, introduced the new idea that strong and continuous selection (‘survival of the fittest’) might halt this perceived degenerative trend [in the human species]. Darwin repeatedly pointed to human efforts in animal and plant breeding as a model for such man-directed selection.

“In his book, The Descent of Man, Darwin…contended that there is a need for superior races (i.e., the white race) to replace the ‘inferior races.’ This ushered in the modern era of racism, which came to a head in Hitler’s Germany.

Before World War II, many nations, including America, had government-directed eugenics programs [which] included forced sterilization of the ‘unfit,’ and aggressive promotion of abortion/fertility-control for the underclasses. Ever since the time of Darwin, essentially all of his followers have been eugenicists at heart, and have advocated the genetic improvement of the human race.

When I was an evolutionist, I also was, at heart, a eugenicist. The philosophers and scientists who created the modern ‘synthetic theory’ of evolution were uniformly eugenicists. However, after the horrors of WWII, essentially all open discussions of eugenics were quietly put aside.”