The complex William Jennings Bryan (2007)
ideonexus.com
ideonexus.com
1. If I were to write the post today, I would draw a comparison to Bryan with Oil Companies disputing the science of Global Warming. Global Warming is real, but Oil Companies attack the science when really they disagree with the policy conclusions being drawn from the science. I also see this with modern nutrition, where companies producing unhealthy food are flooding the world wide web with attacks on the science to convince people to keep consuming their products. Bryan was doing the same thing. He abhorred eugenics, but rather than attack the policies, he attacked evolution as a science in the courtroom. That is what he is remembered for and there's a history lesson there that's going to repeat with these modern examples of anti-science.
2. I apologize for the formatting. I upgraded Wordpress and PHP three months ago and lost all formatting on all my posts and the images are messed up. So it's hard to see that much of this is a direct blockquote from the science textbook being referenced. I believe science is real, but I keep a copy of that textbook on my shelf to remind me of how science can be used to justify horrific public policies.
https://profjoecain.net/last-message-of-william-jennings-bry...
At a public speech given right after the court case and just before his death, one of his arguments against evolution is because the theory was being used to object to vaccinations, asylums, and many medical treatments for fear that these measures were allowing the unfit to survive:
https://bertie.ccsu.edu/naturesci/evolution/unit15scopes/Bry...
To be clear, I want to reaffirm that I do not agree with the theological arguments and absolutely accept the Theory of Evolution. I'm only sharing this information because the debate over evolution was very much about ethics as it was about science.
It was central to Bryan's involvement.
> Bryan chastised evolution for teaching children that humans were but one of 35,000 types of mammals and bemoaned the notion that human beings were descended "Not even from American monkeys, but from old world monkeys"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_trial#Proceedings
> Bryan opposed Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection for two reasons. He believed what he considered a materialistic account of the descent of man (and all life) through evolution to be directly contrary to the Biblical creation account. Also, he considered Darwinism as applied to society (social Darwinism) to be a great evil force in the world by promoting hatred and conflicts and inhibiting upward social and economic mobility of the poor and oppressed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jennings_Bryan#Anti-ev...
Sometimes lawyers do have to make arguments to win a case, that doesn't mean they themselves have to believe them.
Kind of like knowing your client is guilty, you still have to fight to win to make the system work.
And if these statements were made outside of the trial, it is similar. You wouldn't walk out of the courthouse and say 'yeah my client is guilty but we'll have a go of it in court tomorrow'.
So if I were aiming to explore the complexities of Bryan and how he (might) have been maligned, I’d start with Mencken’s articles.
See the publicity section of this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_trial
It's a conundrum. We do these things in animals, but find it morally wrong in humans, yet the science is there, we can modify ourselves and each other in horrible ways, or possibly good ways.
Everyone forgets that the Nazis got there eugenics program from the US. The US was leading the way in Eugenics in the decades before the Nazis came to power. It can happen again with CRISPR
You're not wrong, but the US didn't do death camps or mass eradication for its eugenics stuff; it was mostly forced sterilization. That's of course still deplorable, but I don't think it's completely fair to pin what the Nazis did entirely on the US.
Of course the genocide of the indigenous Americans was absolutely horrible, and comparable to what the Nazis did, but I do not believe that that was generally eugenics-justified.
The idea of eugenics is to use selective pressures to create superior humans over time. To increase the quality of the stock. To speed up the process of evolution. It was seen as the natural application of the theory of evolution -- do what nature does, but more deliberately.
We breed animals for attributes that we find appealing, and we could try do the same for humans. We could breed for height (easy), for intelligence (tricky), for disease resistance (hard). We could do so by various positive incentives or from horrifying negative reinforcement. But doing so does not increase the "quality of the stock".
Fundamentally evolution operates not by selection pressure, but by population variance. To explore the fitness landscape you don't make a guess about what the landscape looks like, because that's impossible, and landscapes change. You instead try to create as much robust variation as possible.
Selective breeding of animals and plants for food or as pets has not increased their fitness; if anything it has dangerously compromised their fitness through monoculture effects.
The reason I love this article is because Bryan was in a conundrum -- he knew in his heart that eugenics was wrong, but did not know enough science to realize that eugenics did not logically follow from evolution. So being told that eugenics is a natural application of evolution, he decided that therefore evolution itself must be wrong.
"We breed animals for attributes that we find appealing, and we could try do the same for humans. We could breed for height (easy), for intelligence (tricky), for disease resistance (hard). We could do so by various positive incentives or from horrifying negative reinforcement. But doing so does not increase the "quality of the stock"."
I was just implying, we can use these practices to change human attributes also, just like animals.
You are correct in overall fitness, example lot of dog breads or chickens that can't survive on their own. But have 'desired' attributes.
Whether they are improving 'fitness', that's for debate.
They would be improving their 'fitness' to survive under whatever pressure they were being put under to achieve some 'attribute', but that doesn't mean they would be more fit out in nature. But 'fitness' out in nature also changes with whatever environment the subject is placed in, example : desert versus jungle.
Eugenics is not just the application of selective breeding to humans. We've been doing selective breeding since the dimmest reaches of history.
Eugenics arose at the convergence of evolutionary theory -- that something like humans, who are qualitatively much more advanced, could arise from lower animals, was an insane idea. We can breed cows all we want, what we get are still cows. We're not breeding cows and ending up with pigs.
So the idea became something like "evolution makes things better" (this is not true) and "we can already tell what better means" (also not true) and we can breed and cull humans (this is technically true), and therefore we can evolve humans to the next stage.
This is nonsense and unscientific. Eugenics is a dead science. Its predicates are wrong -- like in the textbook in the linked article, those things are things that we know are either false or meaningless in a biological context.
Maybe the problem here is the term 'eugenics' itself? There is too much baggage and different interpretations from its use during different time periods..
I think there are people today that would just use the word Eugenics to mean "Scientist doing gene type stuff to make superhumans".
We can bread humans just like cows.
So, Is there a modern term for human breading to increase 'desired attributes'.
Some modern term for doing this in the realm of modern science, but that someone potentially could do for 'Nazi-like' goals of a better human? Like when a Chinese scientist uses CRISPR on a human, what would that be called? Forget arguments about fitness, or is it a new species, just using CRISPR to do something like give someone extra fingers or better eye-sight.
This "science" is what WJB was reacting to. He thought, as many thinkers of the time did, that it was an inevitable application of evolution. Thus he thought evolution was an incorrect theory. He did not know enough (nor did his contemporaries) to realize that it was the logical chain from evolution to eugenics that was fundamentally flawed.
He was not reacting to CRISPR because it did not exist.
Eugenics, like phrenology, is a discredited field, and it seems like it isn't worth it to resurrect the word. Other attempts to selectively breed or cull humans have their own moral dimensions that may or may not be less appealing, and may or may not fail for the same reasons that eugenics fails.
Was Eugenics really discredited, or did it become too 'distasteful' after WW2/Nazis.
How can we say evolution works with selective breeding with cows, but somehow it is completely wrong and unscientific if it is humans?
I can breed bigger cows. But somehow if it is humans, then it becomes completely impossible? Suddenly breeding is un-scientific.
It really seems like the 'discrediting' is itself just that the subject is so taboo that nobody wants to argue for it.
EDIT: Also, I'm not arguing that it is practically possible. Humans would be a difficult animal to selectively breed. They don't mate well in captivity, etc... Kind of un-domesticated. But theoretically, it should be possible. And maybe they do it to themselves un-consciously. There are some theories that humans are self domesticating and self selecting.
Variation is the engine of evolution; the more variation there is inside of a population the more likely it will be able to reach corners of the fitness landscape that cannot be seen a priori but result in adaptive leaps.
If you had to make an attempt at "applied evolution to advance the human race" really you'd do the opposite of eugenics -- you'd encourage more reproduction from a more varied cohort, including "undesirables", especially those with genetic aberrations or significant mental or social issues, but far and away the main thing to do would be to increase the number of people, as that is the greatest contribution to variation within a sexually reproducing species.
Even in the micro selective breeding barely works; an attempt to breed taller people would almost certainly increase the average height while reducing the expected heights of outliers.
I'm just saying, we can increase different 'attributes' in animals, so we also can in humans. Humans are not somehow a special case of animal where we can't improve any attributes.
You are correct. Just like chickens, where we have breed them to have such huge breasts that they can't survive without assistance. We assist them to live just long enough to be slaughtered.. The chicken group with the over-sized breasts are less 'fit' as a species. But, the goal isn't fitness, it is large breast meat.
That decreases overall fitness. Sure, but fitness to do what? You're saying overall fitness as in the group has variation, so adaptable to some future environment. I'm just saying, you can make them taller or bigger.
Lets say you breed humans to be more resistant to hot temperatures, but that reduces the variability in the group by reducing the number of cold resistant. Then in future, surprise, the environment gets colder, so the group dies out, because they had lost the cold variations. So what. The goal wasn't how adaptable to some future environment, it was how can I increase attributes I value today in todays environment, like being bigger, faster, etc... Maybe in the future there is a food shortage and all the bigger people starve. That could happen.
Of course. This is theoretical, breeding humans is hard. Because we'd also need a way to kill off the outliers. A lot of chickens get tossed in the trash in order to maximize the breast meat of the 'surviving' group.
And, I think also, the Eugenics people probably also as you say, miss-understood 'fitness'. Because bigger, faster, etc.. isn't necessarily better. But the perception is that bigger, faster, etc.. would be a super human. Even if that super human might die from catching the flu or something.