Thread by @ssteingraber1

I’ve been ignoring this latest just-sayin’ nonsense from long-standing reactionary bigot Richard Dawkins, who’s been spouting racist tripe since I was in grad school but now feel its my obligation as a biologist to respond. I think we all should.

SHORT THREAD 1/

https://twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/1228943686953664512

First of all Dawkins slyly misuses the term eugenics, acting as though it simply refers to the selective breeding of desirable heritable traits—as in livestock or food crops—and of course that principal would in theory be workable for humans.

But that’s not eugenics. 2/

The term eugenics was coined by Charles Darwins’ cousin, Francis Dalton, 24 yrs after Origin of Species (1859) in book called Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.

Eugenics exactly refers to the attempt to breed racially superior traits IN HUMANS. 3/

That book and its conclusions, and others it influenced, contributed the intellectual basis for the Nazi programs of extermination, racial hygiene, and all the rest. Eugenics animates the black heart 20th C fascism. It was never a term for plants/animal breeding techniques. 4/

Dawkins knows this. 5/

Second: Dawkins is wrong to say eugenics is based in facts. It is ideological to its core in that it 1) presumes to judge which human traits are superior; and 2) it (falsely) presumes these traits—like intelligence, social rank, brutishness, criminality—are heritable. 6/

One of Dalton’s main recommendations in his book that coins and defines eugenics is that couples of high social rank in Victorian England should be encouraged to marry early. 7/

Let’s set aside for a minute the fact that eugencists believed as an article of faith that some human beings come from more superior “stock” than others and treat the term, as Dawkins tries to do, as a innocuous synonym for selective breeding. (It’s not but hear me out.)... 8/

Selective breeding of desirable traits in dogs, sheep, roses, tomatoes requires breeding many many generations of offspring and choosing a few individuals w the desired traits (short hair, thick wool, disease resistant) to reproduce. The rest are culled, eaten, or sterilized. 8/

So causally suggesting “hey we could do that with humans you know...not that we would want to of course! ...” is a chilling thought exercise that serves no cause but to raise the spector of fascism. 9/

Richard Dawkins is a shameful human being and should be given no quarter within the community of biology.

Now I’m going back to fighting climate change, a real threat to all humanity which will require all of our myriad skill sets and all of our diversity of traits to solve. FIN