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User Name Thread Name Subject Posted
GUEST,Darwin Fan BS: racist undercurrent in genetic research (24) RE: BS: racist undercurrent in genetic research 18 Jan 06


There are great dangers in confusing social concepts with science. This has happened often enough in the past two centuries to be worth bringing up again and again. Darwin made some great steps in understanding biological development. The science of his work was then perverted as it was co-opted to make upper classes feel they were inherently 'winners' in the game of life. Thus the phrase 'social Darwinism' describes some of the negative excesses of the robber-baron economy.
Not to be outdone, a great deal of the non-Capitalist world took the non-scientist Karl Marx was at one breath assumed to be scientist and philosopher in the perversion known as Soviet Marxism.
The Nazis and the Soviet Communists took such concepts to extreme in order to create rather nasty worlds with the same fervor of the worst of the religions that they claimed to be replacing.
The new hope (and fear) is that with enough genetic information we can aid a person, a family, a 'tribe' that suffers from some obvious unpleasant tendencies, a marker for breast cancer, Tay-Sachs disease, Alzheimers. Some real human benefits can come out of this work. The down-side will be a very human tendency to define down or limit an individual's potential by referring to what's 'in their genes'. It can become a very proper form of racism: "oh, your genes tell me you have excellent rhythm!" "you should be in the army, you're selected from a warrior race" "don't try to make me laugh! you don't have the chromosomes!"

It was ever thus. Human nature will out because it has in it that which can not be defined.


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