The body politic
Q These artworks present very different interpretations of the human body. How are they all connected?
A They are connected together in relationship with the main ideologies that emerged in the 1930s, which were supposed to give man a new form under the name of "the new man." All these ideologies were dreaming of creating a new man free from machination, free from poverty and so on. These ideologies were very influential on the ways artists represented this new body, so this is the main stream of the exhibition.
Q These artworks present very different interpretations of the human body. How are they all connected?
A They are connected together in relationship with the main ideologies that emerged in the 1930s, which were supposed to give man a new form under the name of "the new man." All these ideologies were dreaming of creating a new man free from machination, free from poverty and so on. These ideologies were very influential on the ways artists represented this new body, so this is the main stream of the exhibition.
Q What were these "new men" of the 1930s supposed to be, exactly?
A On one side you have artists like the Surrealists, who were dreaming of man totally free to enjoy the pleasures of flesh and love, and who were dreaming of a body of "convulsive beauty," which means a body in a state of, so to speak, er, permanent orgasm.
On the other side you had the political man who was instead thinking of the new man as a kind of very strong, very severe-looking and very disciplined type of human, often involved in sport.
Another side was creating new body by social regeneration, which was a type of essentially Soviet ideology, to make a new man out of education, chastisement and purification.
And on another side, much more dangerous and criminal, was the Nazi ideology, thinking of creating a racially pure man.
A On one side you have artists like the Surrealists, who were dreaming of man totally free to enjoy the pleasures of flesh and love, and who were dreaming of a body of "convulsive beauty," which means a body in a state of, so to speak, er, permanent orgasm.
On the other side you had the political man who was instead thinking of the new man as a kind of very strong, very severe-looking and very disciplined type of human, often involved in sport.
Another side was creating new body by social regeneration, which was a type of essentially Soviet ideology, to make a new man out of education, chastisement and purification.
And on another side, much more dangerous and criminal, was the Nazi ideology, thinking of creating a racially pure man.
Q How does this come across in the art?
A At the core of the exhibition are two large rooms filled with portraits of individuals, and these portraits are very deeply moving because they represent individuals confronting what is happening at the time. They are also, to me, the most beautiful portraits that were ever made in the art of painting.
If you're showing the plight of the individual, you are also showing something against the growing power of the masses. Because it was really the time when individuals were confronted by the growing power of masses like armies, political groups, sports teams, the 1930s are filled with images of masses parading in the streets or in stadiums, thousands of people that all look the same, like clones - very frightening. So the individual becomes an even more important presence than ever ... even if they feel more lonely than ever.
A At the core of the exhibition are two large rooms filled with portraits of individuals, and these portraits are very deeply moving because they represent individuals confronting what is happening at the time. They are also, to me, the most beautiful portraits that were ever made in the art of painting.
If you're showing the plight of the individual, you are also showing something against the growing power of the masses. Because it was really the time when individuals were confronted by the growing power of masses like armies, political groups, sports teams, the 1930s are filled with images of masses parading in the streets or in stadiums, thousands of people that all look the same, like clones - very frightening. So the individual becomes an even more important presence than ever ... even if they feel more lonely than ever.
Q How do these 1930s issues persist in society today?
A I think what should interest people today is the biological undertone of these works. In the 1930s, some wanted men to grow like corn in the fields at time of harvest. Many theoreticians in the Soviet Union and in Germany were interested in breeding the human race like plants.
Now, we are living in a society where eugenics is still very powerful and the problems of eugenics are still very present. We are dreaming again of creating a new man, beautiful, pure and immortal. Illness, death and birth are burning questions again because of the current progress of medicine. This progress is excellent in many ways, but on the other side, we are turning to a new society of eugenics. It's very dangerous.
A I think what should interest people today is the biological undertone of these works. In the 1930s, some wanted men to grow like corn in the fields at time of harvest. Many theoreticians in the Soviet Union and in Germany were interested in breeding the human race like plants.
Now, we are living in a society where eugenics is still very powerful and the problems of eugenics are still very present. We are dreaming again of creating a new man, beautiful, pure and immortal. Illness, death and birth are burning questions again because of the current progress of medicine. This progress is excellent in many ways, but on the other side, we are turning to a new society of eugenics. It's very dangerous.
Of Race and Rockets - Space Pioneer Funds Racist Foundation
An accomplished rocket scientist has become the sole donor to the Pioneer Fund, which is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Since 2003, Walter P. Kistler — the founder of Kistler Aerospace, who in 1996 endowed in perpetuity the well-known Bellevue, Wash., science outfit Foundation for the Future — has given $200,000 to the Pioneer Fund. The fund is an organization that has bankrolled many of the leading Anglo-American race scientists of the last several decades as well as anti-immigration groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform and Californians for Population Stabilization. Kistler told the Intelligence Report he would be happy to donate even more to the Pioneer Fund, which he considers "an institution that has courageously attempted to do research in the field of human differences."
An accomplished rocket scientist has become the sole donor to the Pioneer Fund, which is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Since 2003, Walter P. Kistler — the founder of Kistler Aerospace, who in 1996 endowed in perpetuity the well-known Bellevue, Wash., science outfit Foundation for the Future — has given $200,000 to the Pioneer Fund. The fund is an organization that has bankrolled many of the leading Anglo-American race scientists of the last several decades as well as anti-immigration groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform and Californians for Population Stabilization. Kistler told the Intelligence Report he would be happy to donate even more to the Pioneer Fund, which he considers "an institution that has courageously attempted to do research in the field of human differences."
"I am fearless about supporting scientific research in this field," Kistler said. "I am not concerned about battles in society about what is and what is not 'racist.'"
Kistler's donations are the first substantial financial backing Pioneer has received since the Canadian race scientist J. Philippe Rushton took over in 2002 as the organization's president. (Rushton is best known for "research" supposedly showing an inverse relationship between brain and genital size, with blacks being larger in the latter.) Kistler said he holds Rushton "in high regard for the courage he demonstrates in pursuing research in the field of human differences." Prior to Rushton taking the job, the fund was slowly drawing down its resources.
Kistler's donations are the first substantial financial backing Pioneer has received since the Canadian race scientist J. Philippe Rushton took over in 2002 as the organization's president. (Rushton is best known for "research" supposedly showing an inverse relationship between brain and genital size, with blacks being larger in the latter.) Kistler said he holds Rushton "in high regard for the courage he demonstrates in pursuing research in the field of human differences." Prior to Rushton taking the job, the fund was slowly drawing down its resources.
The Pioneer Fund has a long and sordid history. Created in 1937, its original mandate was to pursue "race betterment" by promoting the genetic stock of those "deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution." Its original endowment came from Wickliffe Draper, a racist scion of old-stock Protestant gentry who despised unions and helped fund opponents of desegregation in the 1950s. During the 1950s and 1960s, Pioneer grants were given to the International Association for the Advancement of Eugenics and Ethnology, which brought together academic defenders of segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa. Other, more recent grantees included Nobel Laureate William Shockley, a physicist at Stanford best known for his "voluntary sterilization plan" for individuals with IQs below 100.
Kistler, 89, is a Swiss physicist who came to the United States in 1951 and worked on Bell Aircraft's most advanced rocket projects. A pioneer in electric measurement technology using quartz crystals, he later founded several companies, most notably Kistler Instrument Corporation and Kistler Aerospace. Kistler reportedly helped fund the Ansari X Prize to support privately built manned space vehicles, which awarded $10 million in 2004 to SpaceShipOne. He was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame in 1998.
Kistler has long associated with race scientists. In 1999, he traveled to London for meetings of the Galton Society, which was formerly known as the Eugenics Society. (Eugenics is the "science" of improving the human race through selective breeding that was discredited by its strong association with Nazi ideology and the Nazis' murder of the mentally "deficient.") Scheduled to speak there were Arthur Jensen and Glayde Whitney, but protesters shouted down the meeting.
Whitney, who until he died in 2002 was a controversial genetics expert at Florida State University, was also the author of a fawning introduction to David Duke's 1998 racist and anti-Semitic autobiography, My Awakening. Whitney described the former Klansman's 717-page tome as "a painstakingly documented, academically excellent work of socio-biological-political history that has the potential to ... change the very course of history."
The rise and rise of the New Malthusianism
Population is almost always linked to a problem of one kind or another. Historically, most societies regarded people as the source of economic and political power – so for them, the 'population problem' was often not having enough people to work on the land and fight against potential enemies. Consequently, most cultures were pro-natalist; they encouraged people to have large families. Since the emergence of modernity, however, such pro-natalism has been undermined by a new view of population growth as something we should dread. In the nineteenth century, the anti-natalist philosophy of Thomas Malthus inspired a powerful movement for curbing population growth.
The central preoccupation of the Malthusian movement was not simply growth itself, but a fear that the wrong kind of people tend to have the highest fertility rates. The problem, apparently, was one of differential fertility rates; Malthusians were haunted by anxiety that families of the wrong class and the wrong colour might overwhelm those who came from the right stock. Not surprisingly, then, they had a very selective attitude towards population control. They were principally concerned with controlling the population growth of 'other people'. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Malthusian agenda resonated with elites who were concerned about the birth rate of the lower classes. The fear that these classes might outbreed others, and contribute to the degeneration of 'the race', fostered a new eugenic outlook. Eugenics was seen as a science that could improve the human stock by promoting superior races over 'less suitable' ones.
As Matthew Connelly notes in his new book Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, there where two distinct - if not always unconnected - strands to eugenics. One strand promoted racially motivated policies such as forced sterilisation, immigration quotas and, in the case of Nazi Germany, physical extermination of people deemed to be unfit. The other strand, which Connelly refers to as 'reform eugenics', did not 'reject the mainline idea that more privileged socioeconomic and racial groups tended to display more desirable characteristics'. However, it 'simply did not emphasise it'. Instead 'reform eugenics' stressed the 'potential for improved conditions to nurture talent and ability at every social level'.
After the experience of the Second World War, eugenics in its overtly racial form stood discredited. Many of those who had been devoted to pursuing population-growth policies now embraced 'reform eugenics' and rebranded themselves as family planners.
Since the end of Second World War, the population-control lobby has carefully presented itself as a benevolent and technocratic movement. It understands that it can no longer publicly air racial concerns about 'unfit people'. In 1952, William Vogt, a leading figure in the postwar Malthusian movement in America, told his colleagues that 'it is commonly said in the Orient what we want to cut their population because we are afraid of them'. Yet he insisted that the programme of population control 'can be sold on the basis of the mother's health and health of the other children', and 'there will be no trouble getting into foreign countries on that basis'. Fatal Misconception provides numerous examples of how the population-control lobby sought to package its mission as an innocuous public health initiative.
[ ... ]
New trends in Malthusianism
It is important to point out that anxieties about population growth often emerge independently of real demographic trends. The demographic consciousness is not just about apparently tangible 'problems'; indeed, quite often fears that have little to do with demography are expressed through the prism of population. As one American author has noted: 'What is called a demographic problem may better be described as a moral and intellectual problem that takes a demographic form.' (1) At times, racial and elite anxieties and concern about national security or the environment have been discussed through the idea of demography. One weakness of Fatal Misconception is that it isolates the story about the population-control movement from broader social and historical trends. It observes that 'world population growth is slowing, and the Heroic Age of population control appears to be over, at least for now'. And yet, ironically, even though population growth has slowed, Malthusianism has never been as influential as it is today.
Connelly is right to argue that the term 'population control' has been discredited. However, there has never been a time like now when the advocates for reducing population levels have been so brazen and strident. Of course, their arguments are rarely couched in the language of eugenics or race. The theme of 'competitive fertility rates' is only an aside in the contemporary Malthusian narrative: for example, there are still occasional warnings about the rapid growth of Europe's Muslim population and about 'too many old people' weighing down Western societies. Today, most of the warnings about population growth are linked to the campaign to 'save the planet' from a rapidly breeding human species.
Dominic Lawson: We're hiding from the truth: eugenics lives on
There's some good news and some bad news for 92-year old Dr Hans-Joachim Sewering. The good news is that he has just been awarded a medal for "unequalled services in the cause of the independence of the medical profession" by the German Federation of Internal Medicine (BDI). The bad news is that Der Spiegel magazine has not forgotten what it published 30 years ago about Dr Sewering: documents testifying that under the Nazis he had sent children with disabilities to a facility where they were killed as part of a systematic programme of exterminating the mentally and physically handicapped.
The BDI this week refused to respond to Spiegel's renewed claims about Dr Sewering, who now lives in comfortable retirement in the town of, er, Dachau. Dr Sewering continues to insist that he did not cooperate with the Nazis' programme of compulsory eugenic euthanasia. He admits that he was an active member of the SS, but claims that his membership of Hitler's most ruthless paramilitary wing was purely for "social reasons" – the sing-songs, the dressing-up, that sort of thing.
It wasn't necessary to be an enthusiastic Nazi to have some sympathy for the objectives of the campaign to rid Germany of "lebensunwertes Leben" – lives unworthy of living. Hitler had simply taken to a foully logical conclusion the views of then-fashionable eugenicists: after all, Winston Churchill, when Home Secretary in Asquith's Liberal Cabinet in 1910, proclaimed that "the unnatural growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes is a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. The source from which this stain of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed."
Churchill, of course, was proposing compulsory sterilisation of what he termed "the feeble-minded", not their extermination. Well, that was almost a hundred years ago, people say, whenever his remarks are exhumed. Yet such attitudes survived long after the Nazis' eugenically-inspired crimes against humanity were revealed – and in the most unlikely countries: it was not until 1976 that Sweden abolished laws promoting the sterilisation of women for openly eugenic reasons.
Churchill was unsuccessful in his attempt to introduce such legislation in the UK, which is a cause for some national self-congratulation; but we should not delude ourselves into believing that our legal system, even today, is entirely free from eugenic prejudice. Remnants of it survive in our abortion laws.
Last week the House of Commons agonised over the legal time limits for abortion, in no fewer than 145 speeches on amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. Eventually Members of Parliament voted to retain the 24-week limit for legal abortions – the moment when the unborn child is thought to be viable outside the mother's womb.
This was not altogether surprising. When sailing in such turbulent moral waters, it is understandable that most MPs would grab at the rail of "viability"; otherwise there is little to stop the conscientious legislator from being tossed from one side of the boat – any abortion is the unconscionable ending of another's life – to the other: no constraint of any sort should be placed on a woman's "right to choose", right up to the moment when the umbilical cord is cut, whenever that happens to be.
In effect, MPs decided that up to 24 weeks the unborn child has no rights at all – but after that moment its rights are absolute, superseding any wishes the mother might have to terminate the pregnancy. It's a bit weird, if you think about it, but that's the logic of Parliament's decision.
Only there's a big hole in this logic, even on its own terms. The original Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, under Margaret Thatcher's government in 1990, passed into law the notion that if there was a substantial risk that an unborn child could be "seriously handicapped", then there was no limit on the period during which its life, in utero, could be terminated. And there you have it: such rights as are imputed to all "viable" unborn children are absolutely withdrawn if the child is not ... normal.
There was in fact one amendment to this aspect of the law, which was put to the vote last week. It merely stipulated that when such a diagnosis is made, the mother-to-be should be provided with an-up-to-date analysis of the prospects and treatments available for such a child, and details of help-lines run by organisations such as the Down's Syndrome Association (which represents far and away the most common – and most feared – form of congenital disability).
This amendment was conclusively rejected by MPs, by 309 votes to 173. Not only did the great majority support the notion that a disabled unborn child could be terminated right up until 40 weeks' gestation, they didn't even want there to be a legal requirement that such a decision is based on more than an understandable spasm of panic, or even horror.
Lindbergh's deranged quest for immortality
"Some people, even academics and science students, are still shocked when they hear about the contribution that the aviator Lindbergh made to developing life-saving cardiac machinery," says Friedman.
But there was a serious downside to what Friedman refers to as Lindbergh and Carrel's "daring quest" to live forever.
Carrel was a eugenicist with fascistic leanings. He believed the world was split into superior and inferior beings, and hoped that science would allow the superior - which included himself and Lindbergh, of course - to dominate and eventually weed out the inferiors.
He thought the planet was "encumbered" with people who "should be dead", including "the weak, the diseased, and the fools". Something like Lindbergh's pump was not intended to help the many, but the few.
Lindbergh himself sympathised with the Nazis.
"I wouldn't say Lindbergh was the philosophical partner of Himmler or Hitler," says Friedman. "But yes, he certainly admired the order, science and technology of Nazi Germany - and the idea of creating an ethnically pure race."
Friedman says Lindbergh considered himself a "superior being". "Let's not forget that, as a pilot, he felt he had escaped the chains of mortality. He had had a god-like experience. He flew amongst the clouds, often in a cockpit that was open to the elements. Flying was such a rare experience back then. In taking to the skies, he did something humans have dreamt of for centuries. So it is perhaps not surprising that he ended up trying to play god in a laboratory."
Eugenics American Style
The Associated Press reported on May 5, 2008 that an influential group of physicians has now recommended a sort of laundry-list of individuals who should not be given life-saving medical treatment, in the event of a pandemic. Made up of medical intelligentsia, the Center for Disease Control and the Department of Homeland Security, this reporting body has fingered lives they now consider unworthy should the bottom drop out.
The average person expects that the government will contemplate the "ifs" when it comes to matters of national security and economic instability. But, did we ever expect that a body such as the Department of Homeland Security would consider the ifs in matters of healthcare crises? And, did any of us ever dream that such a department – one we associate with protecting our borders and national resources – would ever poke their collective nose into the business of making medical treatment decisions on the behalf of individual citizens?
Clearly, the government has completely given up any façade of attempting to protect our liberties or personal privacy. Things such as the USA Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the proposed Federal act, HR-1955 make it abundantly clear to anyone reading the news that the government has long since forgotten the benefits of liberty and its unalienable guarantee under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It would seem as though our own government is taking tremendous strides to own the lives, bodies and liberties of its citizenry through its brazen rewriting and indifference for our laws. And, though this report isn't exactly a written law, its message is incredibly ominous.
During the years-long struggle to protect the life of Terri Schiavo (a profoundly brain-injured Florida woman who received nourishment and hydration through a gastric tube), many nationally-known and legally-active disability rights groups argued that hers was a case of trampled privacy and personal liberty. They would contend that it was the state's Circuit Court – and not the Congress – that assaulted Terri's privacy by making medical decisions for her, based on laws passed years after she lost the faculty to consent to such actions. Some supporters of Terri's right to receive ordinary care have also pointed out that the court had ordered the removal of all nourishment and hydration – even if by mouth. This action is illegal under Florida's statutes and hints at the case law that may have been left behind in the wake of the Schiavo matter. In Florida, at least, the supposition seems to be that the state owns your life and your body. The secondary presumption is that the government knows what's best for you – irrespective of your own desires or needs.
By the time the mainstream media finished mangling the aspects of the legal battle and creating theatre of Terri's circumstances, the average viewer – knowing painfully little of the true Constitutional questions of Terri's case – were forced to decide that it was nothing more than folly.
It was a red carpet for the new age of aggressive eugenics.
Any government-sanctioned study or reporting means that would single out certain types of people for care-rationing should raise apprehension in all citizens who value their lives and their privacy. This is surely a injudicious and drunken step backwards into the eugenics the United States saw in the early 1900s and that the Third Reich embraced during their reign over Europe.
The pub-table or coffee-house exchanges that you have may take in the concept that living in a compromised position isn't what you deem a good quality of life. That's fine. Those decisions and opinions are yours. But, when the government encroaches those personally-held views and beliefs, we face the most vulgar demonstration of tyranny there could be. This, after all, embodies losing control of your life at the hands of people who cannot even fix our roads.
Eugenics and the Future of the Human Species
The eugenics debate is only the visible extremity of the Man vs. Nature conundrum. Have we truly conquered nature and extracted ourselves from its determinism? Have we graduated from natural to cultural evolution, from natural to artificial selection, and from genes to memes?
Does the evolutionary process culminate in a being that transcends its genetic baggage, that programs and charts its future, and that allows its weakest and sickest to survive? Supplanting the imperative of the survival of the fittest with a culturally-sensitive principle may be the hallmark of a successful evolution, rather than the beginning of an inexorable decline.
The eugenics movement turns this argument on its head. They accept the premise that the contribution of natural selection to the makeup of future human generations is glacial and negligible. But they reject the conclusion that, having ridden ourselves of its tyranny, we can now let the weak and sick among us survive and multiply. Rather, they propose to replace natural selection with eugenics.
But who, by which authority, and according to what guidelines will administer this man-made culling and decide who is to live and who is to die, who is to breed and who may not? Why select by intelligence and not by courtesy or altruism or church-going - or al of them together? It is here that eugenics fails miserably. Should the criterion be physical, like in ancient Sparta? Should it be mental? Should IQ determine one's fate - or social status or wealth? Different answers yield disparate eugenic programs and target dissimilar groups in the population.
Aren't eugenic criteria liable to be unduly influenced by fashion and cultural bias? Can we agree on a universal eugenic agenda in a world as ethnically and culturally diverse as ours? If we do get it wrong - and the chances are overwhelming - will we not damage our gene pool irreparably and, with it, the future of our species?
And even if many will avoid a slippery slope leading from eugenics to active extermination of "inferior" groups in the general population - can we guarantee that everyone will? How to prevent eugenics from being appropriated by an intrusive, authoritarian, or even murderous state?
New Legislation Calls for Government Ownership of DNA
"We are considered guinea pigs, as opposed to human beings with rights," according to Twila Brase, president of the Citizen's Council on Health Care, a Minnesota based organization. "The Senate just voted to strip citizens of parental rights, privacy rights, patient rights and DNA property rights. They voted to make every citizen a research subject of the state government starting at birth," she said. "They voted to let the government create genetic profiles of every citizen without their consent."
Brase warned that the ultimate outcome of such DNA databases could spark the next wave of demands for eugenics, the science of improving the human race through the control of various inherited traits. The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, who brought us the message of "choice" about reproductive freedom, was one of the original advocates of eugenics to cull from the population people considered unfit.
In 1921 Sanger said that eugenics is "the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems". She later lamented "the ever increasing, unceasingly spawning of human beings who never should have been born at all".
Minnesota lawmakers recently endorsed a proposal that would exempt stockpiles of DNA information already collected from every newborn from any type of consent requirements. If approved, researchers would be able to utilize the DNA of more than 780,000 Minnesota children for whatever research project they have in mind, according to Brase.
The DNA of every newborn will be collected at birth and "warehoused in a state genomic biobank, and given away to genetic researchers without parental consent, or in adulthood, without the individual's consent. Already, the health department reports that 42,210 children have been subjected to genetic research without their consent," Brase told World Net Daily.
Although Brase works with Minnesota issues, similar laws, rules and regulations are already in use across the country. Lists of the various statutes or regulatory provisions under which the newborns' DNA is collected for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, can be found in The National Conference of State Legislatures.
These programs are the result of "screening" requirements for the detection of treatable illnesses. Senator Chris Dodd, D-Conn., wants to turn these programs into a consolidated national effort. "Fortunately, some newborn screening occurs in every state but fewer than half of the states including Connecticut actually test for all disorders that are detectable," according to Dodd who sees this legislation as providing resources for states to expand their newborn screening programs.
The problem of all this for Brase is that "researchers already are looking for genes related to violence, crime, and different behaviors... This isn't just about diabetes, asthma and cancer," she said. "It's also about behavioral issues. In England they decided they should have doctors looking for problem children, and have those children reported, and their DNA taken in case they would become criminals."
A senior police forensics expert believes that genetic samples should be studied because identification of potential criminals as young as age 5 may be identified, according to a UK published report. "If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large," according to Gary Pugh, director of forensics at Scotland Yard. "You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won't. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threats to society."
The UK database is already the largest in Europe with 4.5 million genetic samples, but activists want it expanded. Costs and logistics make it impossible right now to demand everyone provide a DNA sample, Pugh said.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is being suggested for targeted children from 5-12 in the UK, says the Institute for Public Policy Research. Pugh has suggested adding children to this database in primary schools, even if they have not offended.
Although Chris Davis, of the National Primary Head Teacher's Association, warns the move could be seen as "a step towards a police state", Pugh says the UK's annual cost of $26 billion from violent crime makes it well worth the effort.
Brase sees such efforts to study the traits and gene factors across the board as just the beginning. She wonders what could happen through subsequent programs to address such conditions. "Not all research is great," she said. "There is research that is highly objectionable into the genetic propensities of an individual. Not all research should be hailed as wonderful initiatives."
~ and, on the lighter side... ~
Story of evolution can be seen as comedy of errors (The Ancient Hiccup, Male Hernias, and more)
"Oh what a piece of work is man," wrote Shakespeare, long before Darwin suggested just how little work went into us. Somehow, that same process that gave us reason, language and art also left us with hernias, flatulence and hiccups.
Story of evolution can be seen as comedy of errors (The Ancient Hiccup, Male Hernias, and more)
"Oh what a piece of work is man," wrote Shakespeare, long before Darwin suggested just how little work went into us. Somehow, that same process that gave us reason, language and art also left us with hernias, flatulence and hiccups.
One argument scientists often make against so-called intelligent design — the idea that evolution cannot by itself explain life — is that on closer inspection, we look like we've been put together by someone who didn't read the manual, or at least did a somewhat sloppy job of things.
Viewed as products of evolution, however, our anatomical quirks start to make sense, says University of Chicago fossil hunter and anatomy professor Neil Shubin, author of the recent book Your Inner Fish. And by focusing on our less lofty traits, evolutionary biology can help dispel one of the most egregious and even tragic fallacies surrounding Darwinian evolution — that it moves toward perfection, with man at the apex of some towering ladder.
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Fishy news about hernias
Fishy news about hernias
Our descent from fish explains why men are so much more prone to hernias than women. In fish, Shubin explains, the testicles lie up near the heart.
(Had they remained there, he said, it would give a whole new meaning to the Pledge of Allegiance.)
The budding gonads still form up high in a human embryo, but male mammals reproduce better with their sperm kept a bit cooler than body temperature. And so during gestation, human testicles take an incredible journey down through the body to their destination in the scrotum.
The trip downward puts a loop in the cord that connects the testes to the penis, leaving a weakness in the body wall where the cord attaches that never quite repairs itself.
Hence the trouble with hernias down the road.
The matter of milk
No good story about human design flaws can pass up a discussion of flatulence — and science has addressed the kind that would occur if everyone in the world drank a tall glass of milk at the same time.
Geneticist Pragna Patel of the University of Southern California said one of her favorite examples of evolution in progress involves the gene that determines who can digest the sugars in milk and who cannot.
From genetic studies it appears that so-called lactose intolerance was our ancestral state.
A few people, however, were genetically gifted with an enzyme called lactase, which breaks down lactose, and in groups that started drinking lots of milk around 10,000 years ago, that version of the gene started to take over.
Scientists recently sequenced the lactase gene and found 43 different variations that allow adults to drink the milk of other animals.
"It's the first clear evidence of convergent evolution," Patel said, though it's not known whether those lacking this innovation failed to pass on their genes because they suffered from lack of nutrition or just didn't get invited to any parties.
