Racist or Scientific
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin is a name known to all. When you hear his name, you think of his book ‘The Origin of Species’ or his infamous Social Darwinism Theory. According to his theory, only plants and animals who dominate and evolve in their given environment will pass their genes to the next generation. His theory arose in the laissez-faire capitalist stage of the industrial revolution, stating that only the fittest humans would rise to the top, while the poor and genetically unfit would remain at the bottom.
When Social Darwinism became popular in the late 1800s, British scholar Sir Francis Galton proposed a new science of improving the human race by weeding out the weakest undesirables in a given society (Eugenics). The movement caught on in the United States during the first part of the 20th century when 32 states passed laws resulting in the forced sterilization of over 64,000 Americans – this included immigrants, people of colour, the mentally challenged, as well as ‘weak-minded women of the childbearing age’.
When Adolf Hitler came to power he prophesied the survival of the Aryan race depended on the unpolluting of the gene pool, leading to the mass extermination of ethnic groups deemed unfit for Germanic procreation. Hitler’s final solution lead to the holocaust of World War II when Nazi Germany exterminated more than 6 million Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Soviets, and disabled people.
Today with the advent of gene-editing techniques such as CRISPR, many critics believe that Social Darwinism may be on the rise again. When and if parents are allowed to edit the genetic traits of their unborn children, Social Darwinism will return as a social, moral and ethical debate over Darwin’s original definition of ‘survival of the fittest’.
What would happen if parents went on a purge to produce the perfect child?