Future Human Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century 6 (2010)

Future Human Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century 6 John Glad Preface by Seymour W. ltzkoff Hermitage Publishers, 2006 In his Preface to Future Human S. W. ltzkoff points out that most of humanity is today living under subhuman conditions with many of the gifts provided by philanthropists for the support for the poor being deflected by the local bosses. He describes eugenics as the vision of human betterment and the Holocaust correctly as a dysgenic event, of the kind that has often occurred when populations revolt against their fate by punishing a successful minority, as happened in the French Revolution (les aristocrates a la lanterne), and more recently in China and Cambodia. In the Introduction, author John GIad refers to the fact that the cataclysmic events in Europe during the 1940s brought about the death of the eugenics movements in the U.S. and Europe, with Boas and Mead propagating the idea of the infinite malleability of the human brain, even when biological research was beginning to produce a clearer understanding of genetics. Glad mentions the human tendency to propagate political ideologies by creating myths. He enumerates also a number of cultural ideologies that have teratogenic results, including taboos and fetishes relating to the process of procreation that have made all methods of intervention undignified. This reviewer would add here that the survival of such myths is aided by the lack of appreciation in our schools of a clear view of the enormous intergalactic distances, the many star-nebulae with billions of suns and planets with earth-similar circumstances, and also a clear understanding that organic life is a normal outgrowth of atomic-chemical evolution.7 Such a view would eliminate the narrow religious underpinning that so often leads to war, a very primitive way of practicing evolution that can, with modern technology, lead to reverse evolution. Glad then speaks of the negative genetic effect of State-supported welfare systems with their support for just those in society who make no contribution to professional life and are unable to support their offspring without aid from others. He argues that positive eugenics would lower fertility among the genetically disadvantaged. Under the heading Previous Evolution, Glad notes that humans and chimpanzees share nearly 99% of their non-duplicative DNA, thus emphasizing the immense significance of small genetic differences. There are still hundreds of thousands of gene or base pair expressions responsible for the visible differences between apes and man, and not all humans have developed equally, as was recently found with respect to the microcephaline genes regulating brain development, where deficits were found in South Africa (Science Vol. 309; 9 Sept. 2005, p. 1717). Reading on, we hear that human development and diversification progressed rapidly after emigration from Africa, particularly in response to the imperative of adapting to new and challenging environmental conditions in Asia, particularly the colder northern areas. Under the heading Scientific Methods, Glad recommends the dismantling of all those taboos, phobias and neuroses that have been erected around human reproduction. He correctly notes that the results of Cyril Burt's maligned twin studies have been confirmed many times. These showed the importance of heredity, and he reminds us that genetic choice by selective reproduction of plants and breeding of animals has been applied with success since the Neolithic, and has given humanity new plants, pigs, cows, dogs and horses. In discussing cloning, Glad correctly states that therapeutic cloning has great promise and that it has been applied to plant and animal breeding. He says, however, that its application to humans still lacks the necessary detail for the growth mechanisms involved, and that a response is needed to claims that it would be unethical. This latter view is similar to the outlook of adherents to Christian Science who deny the moral virtues of blood transfusions. …