Pop quiz: early eugenics critic
Pop quiz, folks. Who wrote the following in 1926? If you know the answer via, say, me, hold off a bit and let people guess. No fair googling, although it looks like a plain google search doesn’t help much. (The internets can thank me for ASCII-ifying this bit of wisdom later.)
If you figure it out, go back to google and have a look at what the IDists/creationists say about this guy and eugenics and post examples. Have they done their research?
The history of the race shows endless examples of the pain and suffering that men have inflicted upon each other by their cocksureness and their meddling.
We know something about biology. We know a little about eugenics. We have no knowledge of what kind of man would be better than the one that Nature is evolving to fit the environment which he cannot escape. We have neither facts nor theories to give us any evidence based on biology or any other branch of science as to how we could breed intelligence, happiness or anything else that would improve the race. We have no idea of the meaning of the world “improvement.” We can imagine no human organization that we could trust with the job, even if eugenicists knew what should be done, and the proper way to do it. Yet in the face of all this we have already started on the course, and the uplifters are urging us to go ahead, with no conception of where we are going, or what route we shall take!
In an age of meddling, presumption, and gross denial of all the individual feelings and emotions, the world is urged, not only to forcibly control all conduct, but to remake man himself! Amongst the schemes for remolding society this is the most senseless and impudent that has ever been put forward by irresponsible fanatics to plague a long-suffering race.