Tuesday, July 13, 2021

Short commentary on "Eugenics and consanguineous marriages" by Anthony M. Ludovici



For the longest time I thought I was alone in my thinking that incest could be used to promote eugenics, but not too long ago I stumbled upon the essay "Eugenics and consanguineous marriages"
by Anthony M. Ludovici. I will let him speak for himself as you can read his essay below, but the one thing I want to point out is that incest would show the true eugenic character of a bloodline for good or for better. Opponents of incest say it makes the alignment of negative traits inherent in the family more likely to line up so that they are exacerbated. Families with bloodlines with many negative traits would show the truth of their bloodline through the children that they bore, while those with few negative traits would produce clean offspring. The incest experiment allows us to learn deeper and go father with human selection of breeding. 

Eugenics and consanguineous marriages *

by
Anthony M. Ludovici

The Eugenics Review 25, 1933–34, pp. 147–155


- p. 147 -

We live in an age in which science is extremely powerful, almost as powerful as religion once was. But a free-lance scientist like myself is sometimes left wondering whether science is not often a mask behind which the old powers of magic and religion may still be seen grinning. One piece of magic which I propose to divorce from my science is the gratuitous segmentation of the human organism into body and mind (soma and psyche); and contemplating the problem of culture on this basis, I find, a priori, that culture, in so far as it is social harmony and order, must be the product of an ordered, harmonious man. If, moreover, I turn from the social chaos of to-day back to the origins of the most harmonious and orderly cultures, I suspect, without inquiry, that the people who created these cultures must have been unlike us at least in this, that they were harmoniously constituted.


Inbreeding in earlier civilizations


        Turning from these a priori conclusions to fact, we find not only that these early cultures were extremely harmonious, but that their power and influence have been so great that our own culture owes what little beauty and harmony it possesses entirely to them. A further interesting fact is that all these early cultures arose in naturally or artificially confined areas — in islands like Crete and Japan, peninsulas like India, Greece, and Italy, naturally enclosed areas like Peru, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, and more or less artificially enclosed areas like China and Palestine — where broad-mindedness, the universal brotherhood of man, the love of one's neighbour, and other superior forms of claptrap were unknown. Furthermore, we know that where intercourse with the outside world, with the neighbour, is checked, the secluded people are condemned to inbreeding and close inbreeding; indeed, in the only cultures that have left a permanent mark on the world, we find not only inbreeding, but also a strong conscious tendency to keep apart, to segregate. This tendency caused not only a frontier of prejudice to spring up between the secluded nation and the world, but also a series of frontiers within the nation itself, dividing off classes and castes, so that within the inbred mass, smaller inbred classes were formed.
        It would seem as if men who had acquired a set of special qualities possessed an instinct to keep aloof from anyone who could adulterate these qualities. In healthy cultivated man, this instinct is so pronounced as to be a matter of common knowledge. Even among the primitive peoples, it has been noticed by scores of observers. Among the peoples principally responsible for civilization — the Egyptians, the Jews, and the Greeks — the abhorrence of the stranger was so great that the very word for stranger was a term of opprobrium. And each of these peoples was not only inbred but incestuous.
        Can there be any connection between these sets of facts — the fact that these peoples created our civilization, the fact that they lived in enclosed areas, and the fact that they were closely inbred and incestuous? There is a marked prejudice against consanguineous and particularly against incestuous matings in the modern world. Is it possible that like other superstitions, like the belief in the superiority of the psyche over the soma, it is based on ancient magic? If it is, it is important to get rid of it, because the people who were responsible for civilizing the world were probably greater than a people like ourselves who have left no stone unturned in order to decivilize it.

        * The substance of a paper read before the Eugenics Society on July 18th, 1933.


- p. 148 -
Genetics of breeding


        Breeding is the process of producing a new individual by the conjunction of two germ cells, male and female. In random-bred stocks, the hereditary equipment of the couple is different. Each contains factors or developmental determiners of a kind different from the other. In mixed breeding, therefore, one can picture the process of their conjunction as an intermingling of wools not only of different sets of colours, but of different quality; and, as in random-bred stocks there is always latent in the germ plasm much that is deleterious, we must imagine some of these wools as being diseased or morbid.
        Mixed breeding from a pair taken at random in an unstabilized stock has three principal results. It may, by a stroke of luck, produce a new individual who is harmonious, i.e. who presents a symmetrical pattern, and who is free from morbid manifestations; it may, and usually does, produce an individual who is inharmonious; and if, by a similar chance conjunction to that which united the health-determining factors in the lucky individual, the ill-health determining factors happen to unite, it may produce an individual with some more or less grave morbid manifestation. It should, however, always be remembered that even the lucky individual who looks healthy and sound in a random-bred stock, bears in his hereditary equipment the deleterious elements common to the stock which produced his less-fortunate brothers.
        In inbred stocks the hereditary equipment of the breeding pair is the same — i.e. except probably for sex, each has the same factors for determining the characters of the progeny. Moreover, since inbreeding favours the mendelizing out of determiners for developmental defects, and since, in an inbred stock which has reached stability or become completely homozygous, morbidity-determining factors have been eliminated, the new individual, except in the case of a morbid mutation, is unlikely to be morbid. He is likely to be harmonious and healthy, his morphological characters afford some definite indication of his hereditary equipment, and the health and physical harmony of his offspring become a more or less calculable certainty if he is mated with his like.
        If, however, inbreeding occurs in a stock hitherto random-bred, it must be obvious that, since deleterious factors are always latent in the germ-plasm of such a stock, similar morbid factors may be brought together by joining a male and female of the same family. This, it is true, quickly eliminates the "unlucky strokes," and purifies the stock. But the process may be expensive. Its expense will be proportionate to the amount of latent morbidity in the stock.
        It is important to remember, however, that random-breeding and mixed breeding do not eliminate bad hereditary factors from a stock, but merely cover them up. While inbreeding does not create bad hereditary factors, but merely tends to bring them out.
        This is roughly what science has to say about the two methods of breeding. It was all perfectly plain eighty years ago. If the biologists of the nineteenth century had looked at history and life, they would have seen that Nature was, as far as we can tell, almost everywhere striving by inbreeding to produce the desirable state of homozygosity, and had implanted instincts in Man and most beasts to that cited.


Consanguineous mating in animals


        What about the actual practice of Nature and the breeder of animals? In the first place, we know that the closest inbreeding occurs in some plants — for example, the common blue violet, garden beans, the many species of the small evening primrose — in which the egg-cells are fertilized by pollen produced by the same individual. Self-fertilization is also the rule in wheat, oats, and the majority of other cereal crops — the most important of cultivated plants. The process cannot, therefore, be attended by evil results, at least to these plants, otherwise they would not be with us to-day.
        Turning to animals, we find in them no instinctive safeguard against incestuous mating. Reproduction in rats, mice, rabbits and other rodents, according to Dr. Briffault, takes place without any regard for relation-


- p. 149 -

ship, and these animals are notorious for their fertility and vigour. Among antelopes incestuous matings are the rule. The African reedbuck, for instance, has two young at a birth, male and female, which mate together when mature. Only when one happens to die by accident does out- or cross-breeding occur. Brehm Strassen says this is true of the smaller antelopes also, and MacDonald says it is true of the red deer. Lyddeker claims brother and sister mating for the tiger. Among African buffaloes, Seton says, breeding occurs mainly among the immediate offspring of the same cow. The cattle from La Plata in the Falkland Islands, not only quickly multiplied from a few individuals, but also broke up into smaller herds according to colour, and the close inbreeding out of which the race sprang was thus intensified by the animals' own instincts. Rengger reports the same conditions of horses in Paraguay and Circassia. Darwin himself, after enumerating a number of cases of close consanguineous mating in cattle, sheep, and antelopes, says "almost all the animals as yet mentioned are gregarious, and the males most frequently pair with their own daughters, for they expel the young males as well as all intruders."
        According to Dr. A. C. Brehm, the nature of the troop among monkeys makes constant matings between the head of the horde and his daughters, sisters and other close relations wholly inevitable, and in fact among all polygamous animals, whether gorilla, wild boar, or elephant, the leading male must enjoy the favours of his daughters, grand-daughters, and great-grand-daughters, so long as he is able to keep other males away. Nor, as Huth points out, does the incest cease when he is at last turned out; because the first in the field will most probably be his own sons and grandsons.
        A new, and recently authenticated, case of naturally determined incest, appears to have been discovered by the British Museum Expedition to the Gobi Desert in 1929, when a bird, the Eörnis Pterovelox Gobiensis, was found, which hatches twins at each birth, a male and a female, and these same individuals later mate and are monogamous. We also know the rabbits of Australia, the pigs of New Zealand, the cattle of South America — all offspring of a few individuals let loose on the soil. According to Harnady a classical example of a stock of animals bred from only three ancestors is afforded by the red deer of New Zealand. The original three specimens were introduced from England in 1864, and only ten years ago the herd numbered 5,000. Yet they show no signs of disease but are indeed superior in vigour and constitution to the original parent stock.


The experience of breeders


        The evidence from the practice of experienced breeders conclusively points to the best results being obtained from the closest inbreeding.
        But, just as natural selection eliminates individuals which are the outcome of two polluted streams becoming confluent in consanguineous unions, so the wise breeder, imitating Nature's way, carefully weeds out unhappy specimens. If morbid or lethal factors still exist in the stock's germ-plasm, and they happen to come together from both sides in the mating of close relatives, then instead of a confluence of rivers of pure water, a confluence of impure streams occurs, which results in a stream doubly contaminated.
        But it is remarkable that owing to the ethico-theological superstition against inbreeding and incest, bad and ignorant breeders have, until recently, always ascribed to close inbreeding per se, and not to the pollution of the continent streams, the disappointing results of their methods — so much so, indeed, that not only Darwin, who consulted many such ignorant breeders, but countless other authorities, took it for granted that inbreeding must be bad, particularly as it was forbidden by the Table of Affinities.
        Settegast, in 1868, in Germany, took an even stronger stand than Darwin against inbreeding, with the result, as Kronacher shows, that for fifty years nobody ever heard of a reputable breed of German cattle or horses. And it was only when de Chapeaurouge and Lehndorff reversed Settegast's


- p. 150 -

theological prejudices that Germany began once again to produce reputable strains of animals.
        Apart from all theorists, however, knowledgeable breeders all over the world have from time immemorial practised inbreeding, accompanied by careful selection. As long ago as 1823, N. H. Smith, a famous breeder, long resident among the Arabs, wrote: "I cannot say how often an incestuous breed may be carried on before degeneracy occurs, as I am not aware of that being the case in any instance, and experience is in favour of breeding from son and mother, fattier and daughter." And it is this incestuous stock that has given our race-horses some of their finest qualities. The Clydesdale breed of horses, as Calder shows, is also closely inbred, 80 or 90 per cent. of the horses in the recent volumes of the Shire Stud Book going back in direct line to three stallions, living 60 or 70 years ago — William the Conqueror, Lincolnshire Lad, and Matchless. Among dog-breeders, de Chapeaurouge produced a closely inbred stock of pugs with complete success. N. H. Gentry reports from America a successfully inbred stock of Berkshire pigs, while a Dutch landowner recently reared a stock of middle white breed without any evil results from one imported boar and two sows. Kronacher, starting with one male and three females (a mother and two daughters) bred a stock of ordinary goats, in and in for eight generations, without any loss of size, physical development, milking capacity, fertility or vitality. Indeed their fertility tended to increase. And he declares that in this case he practised no selection whatever.
        In cattle the success of close inbreeding is so startling that Darwin felt compelled to suggest that some exception to Nature's supposed law against incest must have been made in their favour! The famous cow Restless came of the most persistent inbreeding. The bull Bolingbroke, with his half-sister Phoenix, produced the bull Favourite. Favourite, with his mother, produced the cow Young Phoenix, a celebrated animal. With his daughter, Favourite then produced the famous bull Comet. He was then put to his daughter's daughter, and again to his daughter's daughter's daughter. The product of this last union had 93.75 per cent. of Favourite's blood in her, and was put to the bull Wellington, who had 62.5 per cent. of Favourite's blood. This union produced Clarissa, an admirable cow, who with the bull Lancaster (having 68.75 per cent. of Favourite's blood in his veins) produced the celebrated cow Restless.


Further experimental data


        Such was the practice of Nature's experienced breeders when Darwin wrote the first authoritative book on breeding, and yet so great was the ethico-religious bias of the day that, although he recognized crossing as a cause of degeneracy, he concluded that too close consanguinity must lead to weakness, sterility and greater susceptibility to disease.
        Overlooking a good deal of what experienced breeders said, and all the historical and anthropological evidence, other nineteenth-century scientists seem to have been influenced by the cases where the inbreeding of tainted stocks had, of course, led to bad results. Moreover, they performed experiments of their own, which, astonishing as it may seem, without exception proved that inbreeding was harmful, thus confirming the following of Darwin's findings:

        (a) That the consequences of close inbreeding were loss of size, constitutional vigour, and fertility.
        (b) That the crossing of animals and plants not closely related was highly beneficial and even necessary.

        Recently these conclusions began to be doubted. In 1916 Professor Castle stated that he had successfully bred Drosophila, brother and sister, for 59 generations, without obtaining any diminution in either vigour or fertility. Moenkhaus crossed the same fly, brother and sister, for 75 generations, without harmful consequences. Hyde and Schultze achieved the same result with mice. Castle tried rats, and Popenoe guinea-pigs, and both concluded that no deleterious effects could be ascribed to the system of mating. King experimented with white rats, mating brother and sister regularly for 22 generations, and


- p. 151 -

among these inbred rats some were obtained which proved actually superior to the stock rats from which they had sprung. The males were 15 per cent. heavier, and the females 3 per cent., while the fertility was nearly 8 per cent. higher.
        Commenting on these experiments, Rice says: "These results lead to the very definite suspicion that the earlier investigators unconsciously selected the animals in such a way as to lead to the diminished fertility and vitality, or else even used defective Strains in their experiments." According to Crew, "Consanguinity itself is no bar to mating. If inbreeding results in disappointment, all that has happened is that that which previously was hidden in a heterozygous stock has now been brought to the surface. Inbreeding is only disastrous if the ingredients of disaster are already in the stock. If inbreeding exposes the undesirable, it equally thoroughly emphasizes the desirable, and the desirable will breed true when complete homozygosis in respect of these characters is attained." Thus to be successful, inbreeding must be attended with the most rigorous selection.
        As a formula for the respective effects of inbreeding and out- or cross-breeding, I suggest the following:
        Inbreeding canalizes and isolates health and desirable qualities, just as it canalizes and isolates ill-health and undesirable qualities. Cross-breeding conceals and spreads ill-health and undesirable qualities, and thus contaminates desirable stocks. But it also tends to improve poor or degenerate stocks at the expense of sound stock.


Incest in man


        In discussing the problem in relation to Man, it is interesting to recall how far the endogamic instincts of cultivated human stocks led to intensive inbreeding within certain groups. In Egypt, in addition to the national endogamy which forbade mixing with the foreigner, incestuous unions prevailed both among the people and within the ruler groups. In the golden age of the Theban Empire, seven kings in the Eighteenth Dynasty married their sisters; in the Nineteenth all but three did so; in the Twentieth every king married his sister. Kings married their sisters in the Sixteenth, Thirteenth and Twelfth Dynasties, and as early as the Fourth. And when the Lagidae ruled Egypt, they could not afford to disregard this ancient custom. Thus Cleopatra, whose wit, beauty and intelligence are proverbial, was the daughter of a brother and sister, great-grand-daughter of another brother and sister, and a great-great-grand-daughter of Berenice who was both cousin and sister to her husband. Egypt declined only when her endogamic fences broke down.
        Persia, strictly endogamic, had an incestuous royal house, and the Magian aristocracy married their mothers, daughters and sisters. According to Robertson Smith, the Phoenicians, and according to Périer the Assyrians, were regularly incestuous, as were also the Scythians and the Tartars. The Jews, also an endogamic people, were surrounded by nations who were all mating consanguineously for the sake of purity, and probably health, too. It is likely, therefore, that at least the aristocrats among the Jews also practised incest, in spite of the table of prohibited degrees. Incestuous practices are known to have been common in the Siamese aristocracy, among the Arabs who allowed them down to Mahomed's time, and among the Burmese, Cambodians and Mongols.
        In Britain, as late as fifth century, we find Vortigern marrying his own daughter. Nor could the practice have been condemned, since the issue of this sinful union was none other than St. Faustus. According to Strabo, the ancient Irish married without distinction their mothers and sisters, and Heineccius tells us it was customary for the ancient Germans to marry their sisters. There is overwhelming evidence that the Peruvians were strictly endogamic. The proud Incas, refusing to mix their blood, married their sisters; and it is said that the soldiers and nobility customarily followed the royal example.
        As to more recent instances of incest among human beings, I have collected accounts of no less than thirty primitive communities in which incest was practised


- p. 152 -

when they were first visited, but here I can do no more than refer to them, as also to the monographs of authorities like Shapiro, Rodenwaldt, Fischer, and Voisin on such closely inbred, though originally crossed stocks as the Pitcairn islanders, the Kisar Hybrids, the Bastards of Rehoboth, and the people of the island of Batz, all of whom are examples of almost contemporary experiments in human breeding with close consanguinity without harmful results. Concluding his study of the hybrids of Kisar, Rodenwaldt says: "We are surely entitled to conclude that men in the past have been too hasty in ascribing to the consequences of consanguinity what were really the result of environmental influences."
        Thus we have seen that Man, like some of the animals, seems to have an instinct impelling him to canalize qualities acquired with pains. It seems as if it were a law of Nature, not, as Darwin thought, to have crosses, but to avoid them. Even in those tribes and races where incest is illegal, we often find the rulers or chiefs deliberately infringing the prohibited degrees to keep their blood pure. For instance in Burmah, marriage with half-sisters is forbidden, but the King always marries his half-sister. In Siam the people may not marry nearer relatives than third cousins, but the King may marry his sister and his daughter. The same is true of the higher classes in Cambodia, of the chiefs of the Marianne and Ladrone Islands, in Hawaii, Nukuhiva, Tahiti and Madagascar, and it was also true of the Northern American Indians of New England. In fact, as the Kalmucks say, "Great folk and dogs have no relatives." Nor are the people addicted to these practices degenerate or diseased; on the contrary, all travellers comment on their great vigour and beauty.
        There is even a case of a people living, more or less in a state of Nature, who, according to Sir Basil Thomson, are actually benefited by inbreeding. Among this people — the Fijians — those stocks which have adhered to the ancestral custom requiring first-cousin marriages, are very much the superiors from every physical point of view of those who no longer practise, or else forbid, first-cousin marriages, and the latter are even said to be dying out, while the former have a higher birth rate and greater vitality.
        According to Junghuhn the Bataks of Sumatra, who also habitually marry their first-cousins, are the finest people in the Indian Archipelago. The chiefs in Polynesia and New Zealand have all been noticed for their superior height, looks and vigour. And throughout Polynesia the closest consanguinity occurs in mating among the chiefs.
        There can, therefore, be but little doubt that Man is as capable as some of the animals of thriving on close consanguineous matings, if the streams that become confluent are pure; in fact that when once a human stock has become quite pure close inbreeding is the only means of maintaining it so.


Biological effects of miscegenation


        I cannot enter now into the history of the controversy that has raged between the advocates of inbreeding and their opponents. I cannot do more than affirm that none of the ancients had the faintest notion that it could be condemned on biological grounds. Even to-day hardly any two authorities agree as to why inbreeding and incest were condemned among many peoples, at least for the populace, and profound students, like Sir James Frazer, Ernest Crawley, Malinowski and Freud, account for the condemnation, each in his own way.
        The moment, of course, that men began to think biologically, it is easy to see why they were prompt in ascribing to divine wisdom a rule which, when broken by badly tainted stocks, appeared to lead to havoc. They reasoned that the havoc was due to the consanguinity, and did not know it was due to the confluence of two tainted streams. And thus, arguing backwards, they justified pseudo-scientifically a rule that had once arisen for no biological reason whatever.
        What do inbreeding and outbreeding or cross-breeding respectively mean to the health of a people? It is impossible to separate the psychological from the physiological; but Charles Darwin and many others, who contrive to do so, agree that outbreeding,


- p. 153 -

cross-breeding and miscegenation are injurious to the mental and moral qualities of a race or variety.
        Random breeding may destroy mental harmony by combining in one individual emotional reflexes which may be, and often are, conflicting. In this sense, the extreme random breeding of to-day is probably not unconnected with the increase in mental instability and possibly, too, with the increase in insanity and mental defectiveness. In fact, it is probable that to-day not one of us knows the supremely exalted and exhilarating feelings of a being who is thoroughly harmonious and healthy because he is inbred.
        The chief effects of miscegenation on the constitution are: firstly, degeneracy, by the reversion that is induced; secondly, dysfunction and disease owing to the production of individuals whose bodies are discordant jumbles of parts from various unlike stocks; and thirdly, increasing morbidity, owing to the fact that there is no canalization of disease, none of health, and deleterious hereditary factors are spread even among sound stocks. Let me take these in their order.
        Darwin and others have shown that outbreeding and cross-breeding lead to reversion, or at least to the loss of acquired characteristics, which is the same thing. This has been demonstrated in pigeons, ducks, horses and other animals. Darwin claimed that it was so in Man. It may, as Otto Seeck maintains, have caused the rapid decline of the ancient Greeks and Romans. But I think I have said enough to show that culture and civilization have been almost exclusively the creation of inbred stocks, and therefore to lead to the view that the present age of extremely random breeding must or should be an age of disintegration and decay.
        The fact that out- and cross-breeding must lead to ill-health often of the most obscure and undiagnosible kind, by producing discordant individuals — or to put it moderately, the fact that miscegenation and random breeding cannot lead to such perfect health as inbreeding and incest — has not yet been recognized by medicine, but it soon must be. And here I suggest an enormous amount of fresh light remains to be shed on the etiology of dysfunction.
        Any intelligent man facing the facts could have come a priori to the conclusion science is reaching to-day. For, if breeding is the conjunction of two cells and their production of a new individual can be pictured, as I pictured it in the opening, as the intertwining of two sets of wools, then it seems elementary that, if harmony and beauty are to be the result, the wools should come from parents who, apart from sexual differences, have at least the same hereditary equipment. Otherwise something inharmonious must result, something in conflict with itself not only in the morphological sense, but also in instincts and impulses as well; and in a living organism, discord and disparate parts mean ill-health, mental instability, degeneracy.


"Disharmonies" due to outbreeding


        The evidence confirmatory of these views is very disquieting. For example, Professor Lundborg tells us that in the lower jaw alone two parts can be inherited independently: the angle of the jaw from one parent and the chin from the other. He further declares that there are at least four different parts of the nose that can be inherited independently, and that cross-breeding, or out-breeding, frequently leads to defects in the endocrine balance of the body. Davenport and others have found that the size of the jaw and of the teeth can be independently inherited. But, as Davenport points out, and as was obvious to me twenty years ago, if parts of the jaw and nose can be inherited independently, why not other parts of the body, so that when the parents are unlike, or display any disparity in build, size, or constitution, there may follow all kinds of disparities in the organs — a heart too small or too large, a liver out of all proportion to the intestine, and so on. And Davenport, in studying the miscegenation in the North and South of America, says that this is what actually happens. In this population there are tall men with internal organs too small, or circulatory system inadequate, and short men with similar disharmonies.


- p. 154 -

        In Hirschsprung's disease, which leads to stubborn constipation, the colon is out of all proportion to the size of the sufferer; in congenital dislocation of the hip, a condition which, according to Bryn, is unusually common among miscegenated stocks, there is a disproportion between the ball of the femur and the socket in the pelvis. Dr. Kathleen Vaughan and others think that the fundamental cause of obstetrical difficulty is lack of accord between the foetal head and the maternal pelvis; while the condition known as heterochromia also gives rise to trouble in one eye.
        But these are extreme cases. How much of the subacute and chronic dysfunction we see to-day may not be due to less pronounced disharmonies of this kind, because of our rooted bias in favour of mixed and random breeding?
        Although to-day in England and Europe, we may be no longer concerned with actual races, but only with populations, within these populations the utmost confusion of types prevails. There is complete confusion of different sizes, shapes and symmetries. And this "biological proletariat," forbidden incest, and led by magic prejudice to avoid even cousin marriages, cannot help producing generation after generation of people who must inevitably suffer from all the consequences of mental and bodily disharmony. True, Rodenwaldt discovered that there appeared to be a limit to the independent inheritance of psycho-physical characters. He says that he was led to ask the question whether a limit did not exist to the characters which remain correlated in crossing, and to the characters which crossing allotted at random.
        But even if, on his authority, we conclude that psycho-physical characters are as a rule handed on in groups which prevent a too frequent occurrence of lethal combinations, on his own showing, an enormous number of psycho-physical characters are inherited independently, and can therefore combine in the child of disparate parents to produce all kinds of mental and physical maladjustments — a fact confirmed by Lenz, Lundborg, Fischer, Ruggles Gates and others.
        A further reason for condemning out- and cross-breeding is that they disseminate taints; they do not get rid of deleterious factors. Darbishire's experiments have clearly shown that a recessive gene, although it may be associated with its dominant allelomorph for generations, and made inactive, is not influenced by this long association and loses none of its effectiveness. So that random and mixed breeding, in addition to causing psycho-physical disharmony, merely covers up tracks and hands on deleterious factors. In a biological proletariat like the population of modern England, in which most stocks possess the utmost variety of morbid factors, mixed breeding merely conceals taints until the cumulative effect produces total degeneration or lethal disease. As Professor Castle says: "Continuous crossing only tends to hide inherent defects, not to exterminate them, and inbreeding only tends to bring them to the surface, not to create them."


Practical proposals


        I suggest, therefore, not only that we are in need of a purification of our stocks, but that by prolonging our present method of random and mixed breeding, we are merely living on, and destroying, the health capital still represented by our uncontaminated stocks. While there is yet time we must canalize our healthy streams and canalize our morbid streams. And if we cannot compel the unhealthy not to breed, and cannot guarantee the healthy spouses worthy of them, let us at least encourage both lots to marry their like or else make them do so.
        The simplest way to accomplish this end is not to found research councils and then to wait patiently until endless experiments at last provide the criteria for artificial human selection — for this process may last so long that at the end of the work we may be too degenerate to wish to avail ourselves of the knowledge derived from it. The simplest way is to break down the barriers now preventing the mating of close relatives, to make it plain to all that these barriers are based on magic, and to spread a new feeling and a new prejudice through the world, which will be


- p. 155 -

against the marriage of unlike or unrelated people.
        This policy would have the effect of immediately canalizing desirability and undesirability, and would straightway separate the sheep from the goats. True, the deaths from disease and the incidence of insanity in the unsound stocks would be heavy, and it would require the utmost courage to go on. But English people do not usually lack the courage to pursue the things they want. The question is, do they really want health and sanity? Or are they already too debilitated to care?
        Between 1925 and 1930, 29,132 people were killed in England and Wales by motor vehicles of all kinds; 5,319 of these were children under ten. In spite of this high and utterly futile death rate from cars, there has been no national protest. Why? Because English people want cars, and are quite prepared to see 30,000 other people sacrificed in five years in order to get what they want. But do English people want health and sanity to the same degree? Are they prepared to sacrifice constructively and usefully more people than they now sacrifice uselessly for the motor car? It may be doubted.
        There is no reason, however, to suppose that it would necessarily be an expensive experiment in the healthy stocks. The investigations of G. H. Darwin into the results of first-cousin marriages, even among random-bred and deeply contaminated stock, revealed a surprisingly low incidence of morbidity. In fact, he discovered that the percentage of offspring from cousin marriages to be found in asylums is no greater than the percentage of offspring from non-related persons; and as regards fertility, he found that the balance was slightly in favour of cousin marriages.
        Truth to tell, from the point of view of sound eugenic policy, while incestuous mating might immediately be encouraged among tainted or morbid stocks, so that disease and deleterious hereditary factors should become canalized as soon as possible, it would probably be wise to delay for a generation or two an immediate recourse to the closest consanguinity in sound stocks, because of the fear of over-rapidly isolating strains with a too limited set of desirable qualities; and for such stocks it would probably be advisable to be content with using pressure to obtain as many first-, second-, and third-cousin marriages as possible for a little while. But for both schemes, a new and very enlightened attitude will have to be adopted by modern mankind, and much latter-day magic will have to be axed. For it is probable that a scheme of canalization of disease and health would not be practicable without artificial selection accompanied by legalized infanticide for the worst products of the diseased stocks.
        Many years ago, long before a number of the facts I have laid before you were known to me, I read a paper before the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, in which I answered affirmatively the question: Would a revival of incest not be the salvation of modern man? I was, of course, jeered at. But it may interest you to know the views of an eminent biologist on this very point. Writing in 1927, Professor Crew of Edinburgh said: "Inbreeding is only disastrous if the ingredients of disaster are already in the stock. Inbreeding will purify a stock, but the process may be most expensive. It would seem to be a fact, sufficiently secure for the foundation of sociological practice, that incest between individuals of undoubtedly sound stock is a sound biological proposition."
        But it may be a long time before mankind, in these democratic times, so hopelessly under the sway of magic, will see the wisdom of this course.

Monday, July 12, 2021

The eugenics of the right to commit suicide

 Freedom & Human Rights

Why is suicide illegal? We own our own life and should be allowed to decide when it ends. Granting people the right to access safe and painless suicide methods should be a human right. The first aspect of suicide rights is freedom and human rights. Anyone who tries to commit suicide is incarcerated in a mental hospital and this must be put to an end. Every human must have the ability to end their life when they see fit. 

Compassion

The second aspect of suicide rights is compassion. There are so many millions of sick and starving people around the world who wish they could just perish but currently they have few options which are safe and effective and again, if they try and fail, they could find themselves in unpleasant surroundings. Why should we force these unhappy people to stay alive if they don't want to?

Eugenics

The third aspect of suicide rights is eugenics. What should happen if every harshly disabled, poverty-stricken, miserable, and generally unhappy person disappeared from the earth, would we not live in the closest thing to paradise? But there is more than this. If every person were given the option to commit suicide at the age of 18, it would be the diseased and maladjusted who would take this option so early. This would prevent such people from entering society and possibly breeding, passing on their social and genetic unpleasant inheritance. If we set a high standard for what the average citizen might be, we would slowly see the disappearance of those who feel they don't meet the mark. If this was allowed at young enough of an age, we could see the correction of our current dysgenic trend as well as the problem of overpopulation. 

For these reasons, suicide rights and access to suicide materials should be made widely available to the public. 

Saturday, July 10, 2021

Applying Beyondist eugenics to incest rather than ethno-nationalism

 


Beyondism is the eugenic religion created by famous psychologist Raymond B. Cattell, you can find its catechism and liturgy (here). The basic premise is that we do not know what kinds of human traits will be best in the future or for all times and all places, so we should encourage the world to break up into ethno-states with different genes and cultures and then observe them to see which perform best or worst. The best of these traits are then absorbed by any group who wishes to do so. Difference is encouraged but so is cooperation. 

So if we wanted to form these ethno-states we would need to close of nations and breeding populations. I am for this in SOME places, I don't believe the whole world must or even should participate in the project. But this is a huge generations long task. Incest would allow us to do this on a smaller scale, using family genes and family tendencies to create divergent families. Families could then be observed and those found to be the best would be sought after for intermarriage. 

As I have already said before, is properly guided, incest does not create disorders. We practice incest with animals all the time to create different breeds and it when done carefully there is not detriment to the animal. Incest would allow us to start human breeding programs much faster and create culture and gene pools much quicker, and we don't need to rely on taking over the state. 

Thursday, July 8, 2021

Creating breeds of humans using incest, the way we do with animals



What if I were to tell you that I wanted to create an entirely new breed of horse, a strong, intelligent and beautiful breed with very unique physical and mental characteristic. Now of course, if I want to collect and hone a group of traits into one bloodline, that would necessarily mean I would need to use incest, as we do in all animal breeding programs. Now you know I am a responsible breeder and will make sure that I breed the horses in a direction which is healthy and I would be careful to weed out all diseases, and in the modern age I could use embryo screening to make sure I only have healthy embryos. Would you think I was crazy? No, you would think I was engaging in animal breeding and you would have no concern about the destiny of my breed which I promise will be stellar. 

However, as soon as we suggest this same process in humans all of a sudden people have a problem. Most people don't understand that incest does not CREAT disease. Some diseases are genetic and recessive at that. If a family has a negative recessive gene it is more likely to run in the family than outside the family. Thus it increases the rate of the chance of the child inheriting two copies of the defective gene from both parents. If there are no negative recessive genes in the family then there is no chance of the child becoming diseased simply because they were born of incest. And in today's world with genetic testing and embryo screening we could make sure that only embryos who do not have copies of the negative recessive gene are brought to term. This not to mention that the statistical rate of inheriting two copies of a negative recessive in incest is very low, less than 3% for first cousins, and with careful breeding and screening this can be brought to zero. 

This is how you would start the process of breeding thoroughbred subtypes of humans. There are traits that run in family lines, personalities and physical appearances, strengths and weaknesses. If we used incest we could hone these traits into creating a breed with certain characteristics. Now the issue is getting the population into incest, but this might be easier than you would think. We know that many many more people are attracted to incest than who would admit it under the current social climate, however we also know that privately there is a mass proliferation of incest porn and chat rooms which a brimming with disciples. All we need to do is legalize and destigmatize this institution and it will begin to proliferate. We can use natural fetishes to institute these breeding programs. 

As for the reason why you would want to do this, there are so many traits in humans that if amplified could make seriously unique and powerful people with aligned physical, mental, spiritual and emotional traits that they would raise them far above the averagely bred human. These new breeds of humans could then be bred together to create new breeds of unique humans who would help society with their honed abilities and proclivities. I could go more in to depth on this, but hopefully you get the point. 

Monday, July 5, 2021

Neo-Malthusianism: the eugenics of sexual licentiousness

Today, most people associate eugenics with the social conservatism of the Nazi regime. But in the beginning of the cause, especially through those who were involved in Neo-Malthusianism, just the opposite was the case. Neo-Malthusianism sprung obviously from Malthusianism. Malthusianism is named after Thomas Malthus who in the late 1700's proposes a theory that poverty was caused by the population growing faster than the resources of the nation, and so outstripping goods and supplies which led to pauperism. Malthus was a Christian and so did not advocate for any kind of birth control, but instead proposed late marriage and thought that this poverty could only be solved through misery and war. However, later in the 1800s, many people took his idea and modernized it. They believed that birth control could be used to curb population growth and thus avoid a Malthusian catastrophe. 

Neo-Malthusianism is the advocacy of human population planning to ensure resources and environmental integrities for current and future human populations as well as for other species.[2] In Britain the term 'Malthusian' can also refer more specifically to arguments made in favour of preventive birth control, hence organizations such as the Malthusian League.[8] Neo-Malthusians differ from Malthus's theories mainly in their support for the use of contraception. Malthus, a devout Christian, believed that "self-control" (i.e., abstinence) was preferable to artificial birth control. He also worried that the effect of contraceptive use would be too powerful in curbing growth, conflicting with the common 18th century perspective (to which Malthus himself adhered) that a steadily growing population remained a necessary factor in the continuing "progress of society," generally. Modern neo-Malthusians are generally more concerned than Malthus with environmental degradation and catastrophic famine than with poverty.


SOURCE: "Malthusianism". Wikipedia. Retrieved 07/05/21 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism

It would seem that with the advocacy of birth control came an advocacy for more sexual freedom. Now most people don't associate sexual liberation with eugenics, but the Neo-Malthusians did. The Neo-Malthusians believed in negative eugenics, which is the reduction of those who are unable to care for their progeny. The Neo-Malthusians argued that the upper classes and the conscientious classes already limited their families and it was only the poor and less educated who had large families. Birth control it was believed would not so much reduce the birth rate of the educated classes because they already limited their families, but would only reduce the population at the other end of the spectrum, thus evening out the classes, making less burden upon the productive members of society. Now, it would seem the Neo-Malthusians has other ideas about sex and sexuality. 

The woman who opened the first birth control clinic in Europe, Aletta Jacobs, was a eugenicist who believed in the legalization of prostitution. She was also a member of the Neo-Malthusian League. 

Aletta Jacobs believed in Neo-Malthusianism and the legalization of prostitution

Aletta Henriëtte Jacobs (Dutch pronunciation: [aːˈlɛtaː ɦɑ̃ːriˈɛtə ˈjaːkɔps]; 9 February 1854 – 10 August 1929) was a Dutch physician and women's suffrage activist. As the first woman officially to attend a Dutch university, she became one of the first female physicians in the Netherlands. In 1882, she founded the world's first birth control clinic and was a leader in both the Dutch and international women's movements. She led campaigns aimed at deregulating prostitution, improving women's working conditions, promoting peace and calling for women's right to vote.

...

Jacobs joined the Neo-Malthusian League of Holland and along with her husband, continued working to improve social conditions among the country's poor and working classes

SOURCE: "Aletta Jacobs". Wikipedia.Retrieved 7/5/21 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aletta_Jacobs

Aletta Jacobs was a eugenicist  

When we speak in meetings like this one about the desirability of the necessity of Birth Control, we, as a rule, take our arguments to defend our cause, from an economic, a sociological or a eugenic point of view. We prove, or try to prove, that in behalf of social welfare, or to improve the race, or for the danger of overpopulation, or in behalf of other reasons of general interest, the control of births in necessary, so that no more children are born than the world needs and can be taken care of in a proper way. 

SOURCE: A generation of birth control in Holland, by Aletta Jacobs M.D. . Retrieved 7/5/21 from: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Reports_and_Papers/7hXaAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22Aletta+Jacobs%22+%22eugenic%22&pg=PA85&printsec=frontcover

Alice Vickery of England was the president of the Neo-Malthusian league and advocated for illegitimacy. She was also one of the first members of the Eugenics Education Society.  

Alice Vickery (also known as A. Vickery Drysdale and A. Drysdale Vickery; 1844 – 12 January 1929) was an English physiciancampaigner for women's rights, and the first British woman to qualify as a chemist and pharmacist. She and her life partner, Charles Robert Drysdale, also a physician, actively supported a number of causes, including free lovebirth control, and destigmatisation of illegitimacy.

...

Vickery was born in Devon in 1844 to a piano maker and organ builder.[2] By 1861, she had moved to South London.[3] Vickery began her medical career at the Ladies' Medical College in 1869. There she met the lecturer Charles Robert Drysdale and started a relationship with him. They never married,[2][3] as they both agreed with his brother George (also a neo-Malthusian physician) that marriage was "legal prostitution".

...

Both Vickery and Drysdale joined the Legitimation League, set up in 1893, and campaigned for equal rights for children born out of wedlock.[

...

After Drysdale's death in 1907, Vickery continued practising as a physician and succeeded him as president of the Malthusian League, while their elder son Charles and daughter-in-law Bessie became the new editors of the journal Malthusian. Soon afterward, she became one of the first members of the Eugenics Education Society.


SOURCE: "Alice Vikery". Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/5/21 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Vickery

Alice Vickery's son Charles Drysdale, succeeded as the president of the neo-Malthusian league as was a advocate for women's rights. He met Margaret Sanger, the great birth control advocate and was influenced by her ideas. 

 

Dr Charles Vickery Drysdale FRSE CB OBE (1874–1961) was an English electrical engineer and social reformer. He is remembered for opening the first birth control clinic in Britain in 1921 and co-founding the Family Planning Association in 1930.

As an engineer he is remembered as the inventor of the Phase-shifting transformer. He was co-founder of the Institute of Physics and served as its Vice-President 1932–1936.

He was first a Malthusian and then a Neo-Malthusian and served as President of the Malthusian League. He is seen as a founding father of Neo-Malthusianism.

...

These views led to his involvement in Britain's National Birth Control Association in 1930.[4] In 1907, greatly influenced by his mother's views he founded the Men's League for Women's Suffrage. He also sat on the Men's Committee for Justice for Women. In 1913 he was the first witness to give evidence to the National Birth-Rate Commission.


SOURCE: "Charles Vickery Drysdale". Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/5/21 from:  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Vickery_Drysdale


Margaret Sanger who opened the first birth control clinic in America was also a eugenicist and member of the Neo-Malthusian league. She advocated for sexuality and that disinhibition could lead to genius. 


Margaret Sanger spent much of her 1914 exile in England, where contact with British neo-Malthusians such as Charles Vickery Drysdale helped refine her socioeconomic justifications for birth control. She shared their concern that over-population led to poverty, famine and war.[40] At the Fifth International Neo-Malthusian Conference in 1922, she was the first woman to chair a session.[41] She organized the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth-Control Conference that took place in New York in 1925.[21]:225[42] Over-population would remain a concern of hers for the rest of her life.

...

While researching information on contraception, Sanger read treatises on sexuality including The Psychology of Sex by the English psychologist Havelock Ellis and was heavily influenced by it.[97] While traveling in Europe in 1914, Sanger met Ellis.[98] Influenced by Ellis, Sanger adopted his view of sexuality as a powerful, liberating force.[21]:13–14 This view provided another argument in favor of birth control, because it would enable women to fully enjoy sexual relations without fear of unwanted pregnancy.[21]:111–117[99] Sanger also believed that sexuality, along with birth control, should be discussed with more candor,[21]:13–14 and praised Ellis for his efforts in this direction. She also blamed Christianity for the suppression of such discussions.

...

However, Sanger was not opposed to homosexuality and praised Ellis for clarifying "the question of homosexuals ... making the thing a—not exactly a perverted thing, but a thing that a person is born with different kinds of eyes, different kinds of structures and so forth ... that he didn't make all homosexuals perverts—and I thought he helped clarify that to the medical profession and to the scientists of the world as perhaps one of the first ones to do that."

...

After World War I, Sanger increasingly appealed to the societal need to limit births by those least able to afford children. The affluent and educated already limited their child-bearing, while the poor and uneducated lacked access to contraception and information about birth control.[111] Here she found an area of overlap with eugenicists.[111] She believed that they both sought to "assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit." She distinguished herself from other eugenicists, by saying that "eugenists imply or insist that a woman's first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her duty to the state. We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and conditions under which her child should be brought into the world. We further maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother."[112] Sanger was a proponent of negative eugenics, which aimed to improve human hereditary traits through social intervention by reducing the reproduction of those who were considered unfit.[7]

Sanger's view of eugenics was influenced by Havelock Ellis and other British eugenicists,[113] including H. G. Wells, with whom she formed a close, lasting friendship.[114] She did not speak specifically to the idea of race or ethnicity being determining factors and "although Sanger articulated birth control in terms of racial betterment and, like most old-stock Americans, supported restricted immigration, she always defined fitness in individual rather than racial terms."[115][21]:195–6 Instead, she stressed limiting the number of births to live within one's economic ability to raise and support healthy children. This would lead to a betterment of society and the human race.[116] Sanger's view put her at odds with leading American eugenicists, such as Charles Davenport, who took a racist view of inherited traits. In A History of the Birth Control Movement in America, Engelman also noted that "Sanger quite effortlessly looked the other way when others spouted racist speech. She had no reservations about relying on flawed and overtly racist works to serve her own propaganda needs."[117]

In "The Morality of Birth Control", a 1921 speech, she divided society into three groups: the "educated and informed" class that regulated the size of their families, the "intelligent and responsible" who desired to control their families in spite of lacking the means or the knowledge, and the "irresponsible and reckless people" whose religious scruples "prevent their exercising control over their numbers". Sanger concludes, "There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped."[118]

Sanger's eugenics policies included an exclusionary immigration policy, free access to birth control methods, and full family planning autonomy for the able-minded, as well as compulsory segregation or sterilization for the "profoundly retarded".[119][120] Sanger wrote, "we [do not] believe that the community could or should send to the lethal chamber the defective progeny resulting from irresponsible and unintelligent breeding."[121] In The Pivot of Civilization she criticized certain charity organizations for providing free obstetric and immediate post-birth care to indigent women without also providing information about birth control nor any assistance in raising or educating the children.[122] By such charities, she wrote, "The poor woman is taught how to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid bringing into the world her eighth."

In personal correspondence she expressed her sadness about the aggressive and lethal Nazi eugenics program, and donated to the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda.[120]

Sanger believed that self-determining motherhood was the only unshakable foundation for racial betterment.[123] Initially she advocated that the responsibility for birth control should remain with able-minded individual parents rather than the state.[124] Later, she proposed that "Permits for parenthood shall be issued upon application by city, county, or state authorities to married couples," but added that the requirement should be implemented by state advocacy and reward for complying, not enforced by punishing anyone for violating it.[125]

She was supported by one of the most racist authors in America in the 1920s, the Klansman[126][127] Lothrop Stoddard, who was a founding member of the Board of Directors of Sanger's American Birth Control League.[128][129][130] Chesler comments:

Margaret Sanger was never herself a racist, but she lived in a profoundly bigoted society, and her failure to repudiate prejudice—especially when it was manifest among proponents of her cause—has haunted her ever since.[21]:15

SOURCE: "Margaret Sanger"". Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/5/21 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger 


Margaret Sanger believed disinhibition led to genius 

Science likewise illuminates the whole problem of genius. Hidden in the common stuff of humanity lies buried this power of self-expression. Modern science is teaching us that genius is not some mysterious gift of the gods, some treasure conferred upon individuals chosen by chance. Nor is it, as Lombroso believed, the result of a pathological and degenerate condition, allied to criminality and madness. Rather is it due to the removal of physiological and psychological inhibitions and constraints which makes possible the release and the channeling of the primordial inner energies of man into full and divine expression. The removal of these inhibitions, so scientists assure us, makes possible more rapid and profound perceptions,—so rapid indeed that they seem to the ordinary human being, practically instantaneous, or intuitive. The qualities of genius are not, therefore, qualities lacking in the common reservoir of humanity, but rather the unimpeded release and direction of powers latent in all of us. This process of course is not necessarily conscious.


SOURCE: Margaret Sanger. The Pivot of Civilization. Retrieved 7/5/21 from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1689/1689-h/1689-h.htm

Over population of the less productive classes is a problem today as it was in the 1800's and early 1900s. The educated and intelligent still have small families and in the developing world there are too many people to feed. My opinion is that if we introduced birth control and sexual liberation, the poverty-stricken people of the world will begin to reduce in number because as they have access to sex without reproduction, they will want more of it and so will use birth control more. Sexual liberation is the avenue to negative eugenics.