The History and Practice of Eugenics PT. 5

After the war, both the British and America changed the phrases that they had used and were now associated with the Nazis. For instance, "social biology" and the "right to die." This has evolved into bioethics. Bioethics is essentially a bunch of doctors deciding what is alright for doctors to do to us or not do to us in the name of medicine.

Intelligence Quotient and aptitude tests like the SAT are the result of psychologists trying to develop methods for determining which people were mentally superior to others. While some psychologists believed that intelligence could be fostered and raised, others used the tests and studies to further their preconceived ideas of race based mental superiority. Henry Goddard was one of those. He wrote a book with photographs of people that were later proven to be fake showing how these people even looked different. Goddard gave us the word "moron." One of his books was titled, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. He was one of the early people involved in developing the field of clinical psychology. He was also instrumental in getting schools, hospitals, the legal system, and the military to use intelligence tests. He had some redeeming achievements. He helped write the first US law that required, blind, deaf or mentally retarded children to receive special education. And he testified in court that mental deficiency should limit the criminal liability of those who committed crimes. But while working at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-minded Girls and Boys in New Jersey, he stated, "Democracy then, means that the people rule by selecting the wisest, most intelligent and most human to tell them what to do to be happy." He was a professor in the Department of Abnormal and Clinical Psychology at the Ohio State University, until he retired in 1938. He came to believe that his work was flawed and during the latter years of his life worked for education, and improving the environment and manner that children were raised in.

These people were not trying to find people of superior mental ability, rather they were trying to find people who were in their opinions inferior and they basically made the data fit their purposes because the were racists. Some of these studies found that black men scored 60 % lower on tests and that the more white ancestry they had, the better they did on the tests. The determined that education would not help a person to better themselves so it was a waste of time to educate black people. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was a eugenics program that came to light in 1972 and a good example of what they thought black people were good for.

Again, here the science was contradictory. If inferior black genes could contaminate white genes, then why would a black person be smarter if they had more white genes? That would indicate that white genes were dominant in higher percentages. If your great grandmother had a child by a black man, and that child had contaminated genes, then the child she had which was your parent, would have contaminated genes, provided genetics worked that quickly, within a few generations. If a black woman had a child by a white man, and her child was smarter, if evolution worked that quickly, then the next generation should be smarter, by virtue of it's continued white ancestry, without the necessity of more white blood being injected into the gene pool.

They eventually took their tests to the Army, and they became the Army Alpha Test, and the Beta Test for non English speaking persons. Their tests found that there were so many people who were "morons" that the army wouldn't be able to reject them all and still maintain the manpower they needed to fight wars. They said that 47% of whites and 89% of Negroes had a mental capacity below a 13 year old. At the same time, they found that Dutch, German, Swedish, English, etc. had a very low number of morons. They even determined that Americans were unfit for democracy. They eventually started taking your intelligence age and dividing that by your actual age, to get the number of your I.Q.

Carl Brigham, a colleague of Henry Goddard, adapted the Army test for college entrance exams which became the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT. Thousands of students take these tests every year and their self worth is affected by their score. But these tests really do not show your ability to learn, because their purpose was never to do that. They were designed to exclude certain people culturally. Their true aim was to ease their consciences about the fact that so many people are socially and economically oppressed for the benefit of others. They wanted to relieve themselves of any responsibility for it and to justify their lack of humanity towards their fellow humans. It is really as Alex Jones has said, the "scientific justification for tyranny", and "creates a convenient excuse for treating our fellow man as lower than animals." He quoted Robert Thomas Malthus as saying that a massive food collapse would be helpful because it would wipe out the poor. This is what is called a Malthusian Catastrophe. Darwin believed in Malthusian ideas and used it to develop his ideas for the "Survival of the Fittest."

During the early part of the 20th century, high school and college text books emphasized the ideology of eugenics.(http://www.textbookhistory.com/?p=1860http://www.textbookhistory.com/?p=1860)

Now, in our time, we are taught that most people are mentally ill in some way, and that there is a genetic predisposition for mental illness. Supposedly, people are born that way, and they aren't formed at all by the family, community or environmental or economic conditions they grow up in or live in as an adult. They are still using pseudo-science to base their theories on. Some of the people at the larger colleges like Harvard and Stanford, have taken huge amounts of money from the Big Pharma companies that make the medicines used to treat these mental illnesses. Dr. Janet Wozniak, of Harvard University, popularized the idea that the number of children that were bipolar might be increasing. She began studying it at the behest of a man named Dr. Joseph Biederman, who was working with children who had ADD/HD. Wozniak and Biederman had to change the definition of what bipolar was in order to make it fit their theory with regard to children. People who are bipolar have periods of time when they are manic, periods of time when they are depressed, and times when they are normal, and they cycle through these periods. They said that in children, the episodes were brief and frequent, which was in contrast to what was known about adults. They said that if you saw every time a child changed their mood, lost their temper or became over excited as an episode, then this was being bipolar. Those who criticized their theory, said that bipolar should have the same symptoms in children as it did in adults. Children with this trouble controlling their temper, usually didn't grow up to be bipolar, and the medical history of adults who were bipolar did not show that they had had these problems with temper as children. Biederman was the source of the idea that the rate of bi-polar children had increased 4000% in the last ten years which has resulted in countless children being medicated, most likely unnecessarily. He took over 1.6 Million dollars from the drug companies to come up with this opinion.

(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123544191http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123544191 )(http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/07/harvard_scientists_disciplined.htmlhttp://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/07/harvard_scientists_disciplined.htm)

(http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-child-does-not-have-bipolar-disorder/201107/child-bipolar-disorder-imperiled-conflict-intehttp://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-child-does-not-have-bipolar-disorder/201107/child-bipolar-disorder-imperiled-conflict-inte)