Eugenicist Nikola Tesla
He believed that by the year 2100 eugenics
would be “universally established” as a system of weeding out
undesirable people from the population.
The year 2100 will see eugenics
universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of
the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s
new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of
nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.
The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race
is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the
deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. Several European countries
and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and
the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists
is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is
not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century
from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person
eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.
Read More:
Nikola Tesla the Eugenicist: Eliminating Undesirables by 2100
"One of the earliest modern advocates of eugenics (before it was labeled as such) was Alexander Graham Bell. In 1881 Bell investigated the rate of deafness on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. From this he concluded that deafness was hereditary in nature and, through noting that congenitally deaf parents were more likely to produce deaf children, tentatively suggested that couples where both were deaf should not marry, in his lecture Memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race presented to the National Academy of Sciences on 13 November 1883.[36][37] However, it was his hobby of livestock breeding which led to his appointment to biologist David Starr Jordan's Committee on Eugenics, under the auspices of the American Breeders Association. The committee unequivocally extended the principle to man.[38]
ReplyDeleteAnother scientist considered the "father of the American eugenics movement" was Charles Benedict Davenport.[39] In 1904 he secured funding for the Station for Experimental Evolution, later renamed the Carnegie Department of Genetics. It was also around that time that Davenport became actively involved with the American Breeders' Association (ABA). This led to Davenport's first eugenics text, "The science of human improvement by better breeding", one of the first papers to connect agriculture and human heredity.[39] Davenport later went on to set up a Eugenics Record Office (ERO), collecting hundreds of thousands of medical histories from Americans, which many considered to have a racist and anti-immigration agenda.[39] Davenport and his views were supported at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as late as 1963, when his views began to be de-emphasized.
As the science continued in the 20th century, researchers interested in familial mental disorders conducted a number of studies to document the heritability of such illnesses as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. Their findings were used by the eugenics movement as proof for its cause. State laws were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to prohibit marriage and force sterilization of the mentally ill in order to prevent the "passing on" of mental illness to the next generation. These laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 and were not abolished until the mid-20th century. All in all, 60,000 Americans were sterilized.[40]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_eugenics#United_States
Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded" from marrying. In 1898 Charles B. Davenport, a prominent American biologist, began as director of a biological research station based in Cold Spring Harbor where he experimented with evolution in plants and animals. In 1904 Davenport received funds from the Carnegie Institution to found the Station for Experimental Evolution. The Eugenics Record Office (ERO) opened in 1910 while Davenport and Harry H. Laughlin began to promote eugenics.[44]
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_eugenics#United_States