Dick Sobsey: 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 that means 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 favour some and don't favour 
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. 
