WEEK 8: BIOPOLITICS, ‘DEGENERATION’ AND EUGENICS

WEEK 8: BIOPOLITICS, ‘DEGENERATION’ AND EUGENICS

‘Degeneration may be defined as a gradual change of the structure in which the organism becomes adapted to less varied and less complex conditions of life … such as to leave the whole animal in a lower condition, that is, fitted to less complex action and reaction in regard to its surroundings, than was the ancestral form with which we are comparing it’.

E. R. LANKESTER (1880)

DEGENERATION

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)

H.G. Wells, ‘The Man of the Year Million’ (1893)

The Irish as Regressives

The ‘Aesthete’

Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’)

Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911)

• ‘We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea’.

Karl Pearson (1857-1936)

• "My view – and I think it may be called the scientific view of a nation – is that of an organized whole, kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races”.