Science, Morality, and Eugenics

Very recently there was a major Twitter controversy featuring the famous biologist and atheist author Richard Dawkins. He sent out the following tweet:

The subject matter being eugenics produced an unsurprising backlash as the history of the Nazi eugenics programs and programs done in the United States and elsewhere are still very recent in memory. However, should this have created the outcry at all? Is Dawkins wrong in anyway? I answer no for both.

I made the following quote tweet and reply tweet on the issue:

This was met with multiple accusations of racism from Twitter users. I screenshotted two for your viewing pleasure:

Now, I must admit I only included the second tweet accusing me of racism because they complimented my legs, even if they meant it in a derogatory manner. I’m never going to pass up on a chance at taking that compliment. However, their accusations of racism are completely unfounded and can only really be justified in the absolutely most unfair interpretation of both mine and Dawkins’s tweets.

To start, Dawkins starts his tweet by affirming an approval of deploring eugenics from a political, ideological, and moral perspective. His only contention is with those that deny that it could in fact work. If we look at the biology and genetic research dating all the way back to Charles Darwin and later Francis Galton whom actually came up with the concept, to modern scientific literature the answer to whether it would work or not is absolutely yes. This is undeniable. While I cannot 100% determine Dawkins’s reasoning for making the tweet I can speculate the main point was that we most separate science from politics, ideology, and morality. This way we can objectively observe the empirical evidence. He likely chose eugenics exactly for the fact that it is such a repulsive idea to so many people. Whether he did this underestimating the backlash or through a bit of trolling I do not know. However, I don’t really think that matters either way.

It seems that the point of the tweet is being completely overlooked by the vast majority of Twitter and is actually confirming the reasoning I suspect is behind Dawkins’s tweet. People put their politics, religion, ideology, and morality ahead of the actual empirical evidence. This is something that’s unfortunately true even for highly intelligent people and somewhat more surprisingly by people educated in the specific fields such as Dr. Adam Rutherford:

Now, the fact that Dr. Rutherford stated is undoubtedly true, but he also knows that the point Dawkins made is also true. Dr. Rutherford’s tweet only explains in the specific case that the results of this were reversed over time when the policy was not in place. This policy was obviously horrendous and part of likely the worst genocide in the 20th century, but it doesn’t provide any evidence that eugenics could not work. Dr. Rutherford knows this. He clearly states so in his books that it would work. This in no way means we should justify or defend the actions of Nazis or anyone else that has implemented eugenics. In fact, very much the opposite. However, we do this by taking political action against such policies.

The truth is that we need to be able to have these kind of conversations without having politics, religion, ideology, or morality preventing the empirical evidence from being known. That evidence is real whether we like it or not, and we have to live by the natural laws whether we like them or not. Eugenics is just one of many controversial topics which whether we like it or not do actually need to be discussed. Even though eugenics is largely considered unethical, we are seeing conversations about eradicating certain undesirable features from society such as down syndrome. One particular case in Iceland is very notable here. Notice the author of the article compares women receiving prenatal screenings for down syndrome then choosing to getting abortions to genocide. This is a very serious accusation and it is absolutely a case of eugenics in practice. Women in Iceland that are getting prenatal screenings are deciding to get abortions and slowly eliminate down syndrome from the gene pool. This can and should spark an ethical debate, and it presents a contradiction between two positions: the right of a woman to choose and opposition to eliminating people with down syndrome from the gene pool. Where you fall in this debate is an extremely complicated and controversial subject. You undoubtedly will piss someone off no matter which side you fall. However, that’s the nature of most hard decisions in the real world. The only solution is to be able to have these conversations in a civil manner.

This is part of a larger problem in many left-wing circles as well. There is an inherent distrust of science by much of the left and the fear that it is possibly racist is one of the reasons. This links back a long way to people perverting Darwinian theory saying that it proved blacks were less evolved than white people and still to this day monkey chanting is a common racial attack against blacks. However, this fear is still misguided and needs to stop. It is also based in double standards against science and atheism that they never hold when it comes to pseudoscience and religion. The truth is that Richard Dawkins has written and spoken extensively on the topic of race and why it is a scientifically meaningless category. He has even criticized the census forms for splitting people up by racial categories and arguing that there should only be one option: human. Now, this maybe doesn’t deal with the real problem that is racism in the world, but Richard Dawkins isn’t a racist. In fact, he is by definition someone that is rejecting racism by rejecting the entire unscientific categorization by race.

I am going to leave you with a tweet I made asking what would happen if we held religious people to the same standards of woke we held atheists. I don’t think we should. In fact, I think we should suspect people to be morally superior to their religion until proven otherwise. However, I suspect if we did hold them to the same standard it would become socially unacceptable to openly follow those religions in a very short period of time. Far too many of them are filled with horribly racist, sexist, homophobic and even genocidal beliefs. You be the judge which is worse: religion or science?

I must add a late addition to this as Richard Dawkins made two follow up tweets largely confirming what I speculated as his reasoning.