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Dr Adam Rutherford

@AdamRutherford

May 8

As it is my job to relate everything to eugenics*, and in the US, actual Gilead-style eugenics is being discussed at the highest level, a quick thread about this article that is causing much ire.

* semi-sarcasm

It is my contention that the public school-Oxbridge axis was fundamental to the development of eugenics in the UK. I go into some depth in my book Control about this, but the broad point is this:

most of the key British eugenicists took this route: Galton, Pearson, Fisher, Rev. Inge, Beveridge, where a veneration for Classical civilisations was standard.

Read 11 tweets

Dr Adam Rutherford

@AdamRutherford

May 6

Interesting new (to me) phenomenon in the Q&A for my talks on eugenics, Fisher etc.

Men robustly challenging me by stating the opposite of what I said.

Case 1: 'WHY DO YOU KEEP SAYING NATURE VS NURTURE WHEN THEY WORK TOGETHER HERE IS AN EXAMPLE YADA'. I replied, Galton said n v n, I said it was incorrect and had already explained at length why, which is central to the specious eugenics hereditarianism. He looked very angry.

Case 2: 'Decolonisation is a nonsense woke fashion! Why must we teach the social context of <physics>? I teach that the Assyrians knew Pythagorean maths before Pythagorus!'

My dude, you just decolonised your own syllabus. (I had not mentioned decolonisation).

Read 5 tweets

Dr Adam Rutherford

@AdamRutherford

May 2

I’d like to read something sensible and scholarly on ‘war on the west’ narratives. It strikes me that these tropes are I’ll defined and suffer from classification issues, ie, what the west is, what the intrinsic values of ‘the west’ are etc.

It seems to me like a besuited version of Great Replacement theory, in that it is reliant on an invented external phantom threat when in fact it describes the fact that the definition is incoherent.

Most of the principles of ‘wokeness’ and the phantom threat itself are in fact values that have longstanding roots in Christian and western philosophies: fairness, kindness, compassion, as well as revolution, a disdain for unearned power.

Read 8 tweets

Dr Adam Rutherford

@AdamRutherford

Apr 28

@Spectator

I can, of course, connect this bizarre @Spectator article by Cosmo Landesman about staring at women in public to eugenics in a few easy moves. Watch and learn, people.

Of course, it concerns the genius and utter bastard Francis Galton.

Galton’s enduring passion was to quantify, often attempting to apply metrics to things previously intangible.

In Vichy, he classified women’s size on a 6-point scale, “thin” to “prize fat.”

But he found that staring at women in public was not conducive to acquiring good data, as he looked like a ‘sex pest’ or ‘perv’, in Landesman’s language.

Read 12 tweets

Dr Adam Rutherford

@AdamRutherford

Apr 25

seeing as it's #WorldPenguinDay, I thought I might share some penguin facts from my 2018 work, the Book of Humans.

First up: Necrophilia.

Sex with dead penguins has been known about in Adélies since
the earliest days of Antarctic exploration, as documented by the scientist aboard Scott’s last and fatal venture south. The
penguin’s behaviour was deemed ‘astonishing depravity’.

The ship scientist George Levick wrote of the young male penguins as ‘hooligan bands of half a dozen or more and [that] hang about the outskirts of the knolls, whose inhabitants they annoy by their constant acts of depravity’.

Read 9 tweets

Dr Adam Rutherford

@AdamRutherford

Apr 17

Happy Easter, to my humanist, Christian and other religious friends alike. Renewal, rebirth, eggs - affirmation of life and nature. Go well.

Eggs are a big part of developmental biology, my own field, and I worked with chicks and quails once upon a time. The technique we used was windowing, where you cut a small hole in the shell and cover it with sellotape, and observe development.

This was a technique used by the Polish Jewish scientist Robert Remak in the 19th C, who discovered one of the fundamental cornerstones of biology as a result: Cell Theory.

Read 10 tweets

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