Samuel Jackson Holmes Quotes
there is no doubt that anyone who had a fair knowledge of the principles of genetics, and who was given control over the matings of human beings, could in the course of a very few generations, produce a large number of very diverse types. He could breed a race of idiots, a race of dwarfs, a race of giants, an albino race, an insane race, a race of moral imbeciles, a race which would almost invariably get drunk in the presence of alcohol, a race of preeminent mental ability, or a race of unusual artistic talent. The task would be easy, as it would involve only the isolation of existing strains of the human species.
Actually, while such selective breeding is possible in all animals, the selection for a single trait almost always produces other unintended and unanticipated traits and these could be devastating to the “new generation”, unpleasant, benign, or anything else. At the time selective breeding was the only possible tool to produce “desirable” traits in an animal or to eliminate what someone things of as “undesirable” traits. Today, our understanding of the human genome and genetic engineering offers a much more reliable possibility of affecting animal traits without as many risks of random and unintended consequences that are present with breeding.
Samuel Jackson Holmes, 1868-1964, Zoologist and Geneticist, ”Some Misconceptions of Eugenics”, The Atlantic Monthly, February 1915
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Gore who generally was a progressive on almost all issues, was quite conservative when it came to human genetic manipulation and cloning. Scientists for whom Gore was a favorite politician based on his leadership of digital technology and the Internet and his Nobel prize winning work on environmentalism, but his stance in this quotation was puzzling to many.
He and others have already done it. Joyce's lab at the Scripps Research Institute was the first to produce a self-replicating in vitro system, capable of exponential growth and continuing evolution, composed entirely of RNA enzymes. Most politicians do not understand much about evolution and many actually believe that evolution has not been proven an is not what governs the development of species. And at some point these men and women will have to come to grips with this scientific reality and decide what if any restrictions there should be on the human control and manipulation of the evolution of different species.
What he thought was conceivable in the 1970’s seemed almost certain to come to pass 30 years later. Scientists had already altered the evolution of various plants and animals, and the complete human genome had been sequenced. The question will be not whether man will be able to control and modify his own evolution, but how should this be done and who should decide it. We have realized that man has already—unintentionally—altered the evolution of many species from passenger pigeons which are now extinct and the dog which coevolved with humans. Arguably, man’s development of the ability to control his own evolution is an evolutionary development itself. One great question for society is whether it is better to alter evolution unknowingly or in a planned, relatively controlled manner. For man to participate in the design of human evolution will be the nightmare of the Creationists who insist that evolution is too complicated to be somewhat of a random process and that there must be a designer who they assume is God. When man becomes the designer, that will be very disturbing. For most theologians, there will be little difficulty with the notion that God chose the mechanism of evolution and chose humans to give the intellect and knowledge to implement and design the evolutionary process.
Actually, The Theory of Evolution shows no such thing. Diversity is critical for Natural Selection to function. It is the inbred Royalty of Europe that showed a propensity to various defects and abnormalities. There are millions of examples where the offspring of a couple are superior to both parents with respect to a characteristic. Some also who are inferior to both parents. Then there are some “in-between”. Traits in evolution and generics are not subject to a simple averaging.
As early as this was in scientific history, he essentially described the process whereby new species are formed by the mutation from the old series.
The Eugenics Movement, which grew quite popular for a while, tried to improve the race of man, not by improving individual people or even a generation of people, but of selective and restrictive breeding of humans. The coercion and bias associated with it caused one of the worst violations of human rights in American History, and then was picked up by Adolf Hitler who carried the ideas to one of the worst atrocities in human history—the murder of “inferior races” so that they could not breed, thereby in their warped theory developing a super race.
This quotation gives is a view of regeneration, evolution and species development before Darwin. It also shows us that a number of the Founding Fathers were quite current with the thinking of the major intellectuals of Europe.
This pseudo-scientific organization, in spite of the junk science it was promulgating, actually had a substantial American following and over 20 states actually passed laws to allow forced sterilization who were “UNFIT”. In reality while there is a genetic component to each of the examples it only increases the probabilities and is not determinative. And even f it were and there were selective breeding of humans, these “TRAITS” would not be eliminated in 3 generations,
Samuel Jackson Holmes was an American zoologist and eugenicist. He was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley (UC-Berkeley) for 27 years. Noted as a genetics pioneer, and for his studies of animal behavior, heredity, and evolution. Over the course of his career he migrated from studying animals to humans, taking the behaviors and traits learned in the former and looking for them in the later.
