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    Re: Can We Address That British Eugenics Scandal? by Justin Podur Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on September 15, 2020, 10:49 am, in reply to "Re: Can We Address That British Eugenics Scandal? by Justin Podur"

    Good good, wasn't sure that you did but wanted to be clear on my side. Here's that ASHG statement in full fyi:

    'ASHG Denounces Attempts to Link Genetics and Racial Supremacy
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    The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) is alarmed to see a societal resurgence of groups rejecting the value of genetic diversity and using discredited or distorted genetic concepts to bolster bogus claims of white supremacy. ASHG denounces this misuse of genetics to feed racist ideologies. In public dialog, our research community should be clear about genetic knowledge related to ancestry and genomic diversity. To that end, ASHG affirms the following:

    • Genetics demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories. Although there are clear observable correlations between variation in the human genome and how individuals identify by race, the study of human genetics challenges the traditional concept of different races of humans as biologically separate and distinct. This is validated by many decades of research, including recent examples.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
    • Most human genetic variation is distributed as a gradient, so distinct boundaries between population groups cannot be accurately assigned. There is considerable genetic overlap among members of different populations. Such patterns of genome variation are explained by patterns of migration and mixing of different populations throughout human history.7 In this way, genetics exposes the concept of “racial purity” as scientifically meaningless.
    • It follows that there can be no genetics-based support for claiming one group as superior to another. Although a person’s genetics influences their phenotypic characteristics, and self-identified race might be influenced by physical appearance, race itself is a social construct. Any attempt to use genetics to rank populations demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of genetics.
    • The past decade has seen the emergence of strategies for assessing an individual’s genetic ancestry. Such analyses8 are providing increasingly accurate ways of helping to define individuals’ ancestral origins and enabling new ways to explore and discuss ancestries that move us beyond blunt definitions of self-identified race.

    Through its support for research at the leading edge of human genetics, ASHG will continue to advance scientific knowledge and debunk genetics-based arguments promoting racial supremacy. ASHG also encourages all society members to be active as citizens in political, policy, and social advocacy organizations that reflect their values. This is a perfect complement to their scientific contributions to this debate through ASHG.

    ASHG will continue to foster dialog in the field on the impact, value, and implications of diversity and ancestry within the research agenda, including through ASHG’s primary forums for scientific debate and discussion: The American Journal of Human Genetics and the ASHG Annual Meeting. Recognizing that the invocation of genetics to promote racist ideologies is one of many factors causing racism to persist, ASHG will focus in the public arena on contributing new fundamental knowledge to the societal dialog about ancestry, supporting greater diversity in research, continuing to engage the field and public to build genetic literacy, and addressing misconceptions of genetics and ancestry.
    Acknowledgments

    The statement above has been reviewed, edited, and approved by the ASHG Executive Committee on behalf of the ASHG Board of Directors. They alone are responsible for its content. The statement was informed by input from ASHG members with expertise and interest on the topic but does not necessarily represent the views of those members. ASHG thanks them for their contributions, dedication, and input.'     - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6218810/

    It doesn't explicitly deal with human domestication after all, but there are some dodgy links between rewilding and nazi ideology, of trying to breed back into a more 'pure', less 'corrupted' bloodline. They did their own experiments with cattle for example, trying to bring back a version of the extinct aurochs:

    ' For the scholarly world, the memory of the aurochs was preserved in a 1550s appendix to Conrad Gesner’s Historiae animalium. Intended to distinguish this nearly vanished animal from Europe’s other species of wild cattle, the European bison, the mention formally reinscribed the aurochs into the annals of zoological science. Over 350 years after its publication, this encyclopedia of animals both real and imagined (satyrs and sea monsters appear alongside hedgehogs and hippopotamuses) served, for the Heck brothers, as a key source on the extinct aurochs. This, along with a handful of artistic representations, formed the basis of the Heck brothers’ wild ideal. Their research cited copies of the lost “Augsburg Picture” (which is thought, today, to have represented a domestic bull), a 1730 Meissen porcelain group by Kändler depicting a pack of hounds encircling a wounded bull (whose piebald coloration should have similarly suggested a domesticated subject), and the prehistoric cave paintings at the Abrigo de los Toros in Spain. The Hecks’ aurochs would be the culmination of an erratic trip through Western art history, from its primeval origins up to Baroque naturalism. Through a mimetic reversal, the breeding process sought to restore attributes known only through human cultural products. While the project took up widely held scientific theories of inheritance and conformed to the natural historical conception of the aurochs as the sole progenitor of domestic cattle (a view familiar at least since Georges Cuvier’s 1812 Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes), the Heck brothers’ biological means served primarily aesthetic ends.

    This conflation of biological and aesthetic destiny coincided with a strain of Nazi thought that sought to apply pseudo-Darwinian theories in support of a racialized conception of the state. In this mode, the zoologist Konrad Lorenz identified parallels between the changes he observed in animals as the result of their domestication and what he saw as the deleterious genetic effects of civilization. Among the traits shared by domesticated animals and city dwellers were a supposed increase in phenotypic variation (novel coloration, for instance), neoteny (the retention of juvenile features, as in the short face of a Pekinese), atrophy of the muscles, and an increase in sexual activity and fertility. These traits were not only dangerous signs of degeneration; they were also aesthetically displeasing. In his 1940 article “Durch Domestikation verursachte Störungen arteigenen Verhaltens” (Domestication-induced disorders of species-typical behavior), Lorenz presented a series of images of Roman sculptures, comparing the “beautiful” (an Olympian) with the “ugly” (a satyr or, even, a bust of Socrates). These art-historical valuations were extended to wild animals and their domestic counterparts: wolves and dogs, boars and pigs, mouflon and sheep, jungle fowl and barnyard roosters. For Lorenz, the wild ancestor (the photographs of which were mostly acquired from Oskar Heinroth, Lutz Heck’s associate at the Berlin Zoo) were consistently deemed the more beautiful. This aesthetic response, Lorenz theorized, was also an inborn survival strategy.


    Sketch by Konrad Lorenz comparing the morphology of wild and domesticated animals—humans included. From a letter to Oskar Heinroth, 18 January 1939.

    Beauty was, for Lorenz, the outward sign of a “biological unity.” Domestication, with its attendant increase in variation and “mutations,” was a process of decay. The evolutionary unity of the wild form deteriorates into aberrant types. For the Hecks, the idea of the aurochs was precisely that of a lost genetic unity—the fragments of which persisted, scattered among diverse domestic cattle breeds. Their task would be the re-stitching of these genetic fragments'     - http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/45/wang.php

    Renounced by the folks at rewild:

    https://discuss.rewild.com/t/rewilding-and-the-danger-of-a-neo-eugenics/1916

    For me the whole idea of rewilding would be to encourage and keep alive the spontaneous rebellions against forced human domestication which keep on emerging despite every attempt to crush them - in fact suggesting that any attempts to create docility and passivity only result in surface changes and don't go so deeply into our biology as with the other plant & animal domesticates. Which to me is a hopeful thought...

    cheers,
    I

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