(silence)
I want to introduce some ideas about
 eugenics as it developed over time and 
eugenics in some ways how it's practiced
 today. And so if we go back and 
look at the 19th century, and I think 
you can certainly go back and say 
that in some way eugenics was being
 practiced in ancient times, etc. But I 
think if we look at the modern advent
 of eugenics anyway, in the 19th 
century we really had a shift in that
 science was replacing religion as 
starting to be a dominant force and 
one of the implications of that for 
example if you lived in a class system
 or in a royalty system, before it 
was sort of "I'm a king and you're not, 
because God wants it that way." Now 
we shifted, we needed a new explanation
 for the same phenomenon and now I 
could say, "I'm the king and you're not
 because nature wants it that way, 
I'm more highly evolved in some way."
 And so power inequity started to be 
explained by scientific differences 
instead of religious differences. 
I think we also see this for example,
 you had in the olden days you had 
Martin Luther who said that it was
 okay to kill changelings because they 
didn't have a soul. In modern bioethics
 we talk about the lack of sentience 
and whether or not people don't qualify 
for personhood and if they don't 
qualify for personhood they don't have 
moral status. Or we talk about the 
lack of quality of life and I'm not 
entirely sure that we can define 
quality of life or measure quality of
 life in some objective way any more 
than we can a soul, but we're a lot 
more comfortable today with the quality 
of life explanation than the soul explanation.
 The theory of evolution 
certainly had a major impact, and I 
guess the way that it turned into 
eugenics in someway is through the 
concept in a sense of meta-evolution. So 
if you take Darwin's theory the way that 
it's explained most of the time, 
it talks about a natural process in 
which the relationship between the 
environment and organisms in the 
environment favor some and don't favor 
others and those that survive, multiply, 
etc. are considered to be the 
fittest. Having discovered that to some
 extent we could have said "that's 
fine, now we know what's going on" but
 being the kind of people we are, 
what we tended to say is "that's fine,
 now how can we take control of this 
process?" And so one of the things that
 happened is we began to say rather 
than whoever survives is the fittest,
 that we can identify who is the 
fittest, in many cases that meant noble
 of English birth, white, etc. and 
that we would in a sense help evolution
 achieve that. And of course one of
 the explanations that we've had over 
time is because man has interfered in 
some way with the natural process of 
evolution that therefore we need to 
compensate by that, since we can somehow understand what nature was trying 
to do and we can make that happen 
as a result of our manipulation of the 
process. I would simply point to other
 places where we have not been 
particularly successful in trying to
 replace natural processes with 
scientific control. And if you look at
 for example our idea of managing 
forests, for example, in taking over 
and trying to do better than nature we 
developed forests that have rows of 
trees of the same age lined up waiting
 for massive forest fires to occur. 
And so there is some question about
 whether our interfering with these natural processes actually in some way 
produces an outcome that's better 
even in terms of our own expectations, 
let alone whatever we might conceive
 of as naturally desirable. It's also 
interesting, Darwin was very clear 
in talking about his understanding of 
evolution and how he came to that understanding, that his concept was based 
heavily on Malthus, that talked about 
population control, competition, and 
that population control needed to be
 controlled in a sense by creating 
harsh conditions. And so it's interesting 
because Malthus presented in a 
sense an economic model in which he was talking about how resources would 
be shared or dispersed. And it's 
interesting now a lot of times, we make 
that reference to social Darwinism in 
terms of some of the practices of 
highly capitalistic, competitive models 
of the ways that things should work 
out there. But I think when you look at 
that influence you can also see 
that in some way our view of evolution
 maybe sort of started from a 
capitalistic model, so maybe we should
 talk about biological capitalism rather
than social Darwinism. 
