The American Eugenics Society magically changed its name to "Society for the Study of Social Biology" so I'm just having fun uncovering the dirt.
Their current president, Hans-Peter Kohler (let's call him Hans for short) is quite a character...in that make your skin crawl, evil guy way.
He received an MA in Demography and PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley. Ok, boring.
His primary research area is fertility (ok getting a little more interesting...) in developing countries (sterilize and abort minorities! Kill the poor! Sorry. He didn't say that. I just felt like perhaps he thought it.) He is all into fertility trending, HIV, twins (ok he is no Mengele) , low fertility of southern and eastern Europeans (the first "unfit" kind of immigrants to America) and he won an award from the Population Association of America (population things generally trend towards the zero population growth/population control side of eugenics).
http://www.ssc.upenn.edu/~hpkohler/ is his fun website.
Then, the VP, Jim Carey (not the comedian) seems all hunky-dory, studying insects. But then...he studies them for addressing things in humans such as lifespan, dietary restriction, anti-aging drugs, morbidity. In my warped little mind I kind of humorously imagine him in a lab coat, trying to develop immortality.
The Secretary/Treasurer is Christine Himes. She too studies aging, "social gerontology" (wow what a neat term, sounds so pc), body size and disability (ahem...a pc term for obesity), and family. You know, the elderly and obese...the "unfit" and "feeble". the eugenic target.
Sadly the Society for Social Biology's website is, well, lacking. More on it when I can find it.
There is an updated list of members of the the American eugenics society posted at www.scribd.com/doc/22768234/Names-Social-Biology-Revision-1. This has information on Kohler and the others. Basic insights. They stand for a new version of eugenics called biodemography. In this version the controlling science studying evolution is demography, not genetics, hence biodemography. The leader is James Vaupel,an American who is head of the Max Planck Institute of Demographic Research in Germany.(1995-2011). The reason demography is leading is that there is a huge birth crash going on. In terms of eugenics this indicates lack of fitness. Europeans and Chinese are involved in the crash though their genetics according to the previous version makes them more fit with higher IQ's. Hmm. Cognitive dissonance. This Vaupel is rapidly rebuilding eugenics in the face of this situation. He has shifted the emphasis in the Society to the family whose destruction has caused the birth crash and how to rebuild it without religion or prolife principles and while retaining feminism, contraception and abortion. (Good luck to that, Jim.)
ReplyDeleteThe Society HAS radically changed. No population controllers are officers or directors and Planned Parenthood is mentioned in only one recent journal articles (since 2006). (This is about how to destroy the Moslem birth rate.). They are now trying to link the social sciences and genetics to show that bad or criminal behavior (or even being a conservative) is genetic. I suppose the next move is to medicalize these conditions and then require behavior change under Obamacare (which has some very bizarre inner workings dealing with "preventative" health care - not detention, oh no, "treatment" - treatment as in the Soviet Union in the old days.)
If you want to follow up read Kenneth Wachter at the opening of the MPIDR, and the preface to Between Zeus and the Salmon. They are both online.