I read Dennis Sewell’s article on the damaging influence of eugenics on the welfare state with interest and mostly agree with his views.
I read Dennis Sewell’s article on the damaging influence of eugenics on the welfare state with interest and mostly agree with his views. Even in my most right-wing moments, I don’t want to open my Spectator to find articles proposing a selective breeding programme (though, come to think of it, this may have been the idea behind the Spectator Editors’ Dinner — I left around 11, so never got the chance to find out).
All the same, his attack on eugenics, as with many anti-Darwin assaults, seems to focus on the evil done in the name of eugenics rather than the science itself. While it’s true that political scientism has had disastrous consequences, and that Darwin has had adherents every bit as nasty as Marx, that is no reason to decide that Darwinism must never colour our thinking.
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