Should science embrace eugenics again?
30 Oct '17 18:40LONDON, November 21, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A leading international anti-religion crusader and supporter of Darwinian theory, Dr. Richard Dawkins, has said that the pseudo-science of eugenics that drove the Nazi regime’s genocidal project “may not be bad.”
Since the end of the second world war, the name of eugenics, the social philosophy that the human species or particular races ought to be improved by selective breeding or other forms of genetic manipulation, is one that conjures instant images of the Nazi death camps and “racial hygiene” programs.
In a letter to the editor of Scotland’s Sunday Herald, Dawkins argues that the time has come to lay this spectre to rest. Dawkins writes that though no one wants to be seen to be in agreement with Hitler on any particular, “if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability?”
Dawkins holds the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, but is best known as one of the world’s most outspoken current opponents of religious belief, giving lectures and interviews and writing articles in which “fundamentalist” Christianity is among his favourite targets.
“I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler’s death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them,” Dawkins wrote Sunday.
Dawkins’ campaign against religion has led him to publish a book, “The God Delusion”, in September this year and he is one of the instigators of the notion, popular with journalists, that the Catholic Church’s opposition to artificial contraception will result in mass starvation.
Since the end of the second world war, the name of eugenics, the social philosophy that the human species or particular races ought to be improved by selective breeding or other forms of genetic manipulation, is one that conjures instant images of the Nazi death camps and “racial hygiene” programs.
In a letter to the editor of Scotland’s Sunday Herald, Dawkins argues that the time has come to lay this spectre to rest. Dawkins writes that though no one wants to be seen to be in agreement with Hitler on any particular, “if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability?”
Dawkins holds the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, but is best known as one of the world’s most outspoken current opponents of religious belief, giving lectures and interviews and writing articles in which “fundamentalist” Christianity is among his favourite targets.
“I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler’s death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them,” Dawkins wrote Sunday.
Dawkins’ campaign against religion has led him to publish a book, “The God Delusion”, in September this year and he is one of the instigators of the notion, popular with journalists, that the Catholic Church’s opposition to artificial contraception will result in mass starvation.
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