by Stefano Vaj
[237] Reported in Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick 1963, p. 139.
[238] This assertion is taken from Jonathan Beckwith, “Social and Political Use of Genetics in the US, Past and Present,” in Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 1976, p. 47. See also Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2002.
[239] For an eloquent illustration of the founding elements of the American ideological system, see for instance Alain de Benoist and Giorgio Locchi, Il male americano, Akropolis, Naples 1979, and for its evolution inside the culture of globalisation, Guillaume Faye, Le système à tuer les peuples, op. cit.
[240] On Ludwig Woltmann, vedi anche Alain de Benoist, “Ludwig Woltmann et le darwinisme allemand ou le socialisme prolet-aryen,” in Nouvelle Ecole no. 38.
[241] Eric Delcroix, Le Théâtre de Satan. Décadence du droit, partialité des juges, L’Æncre, Paris 2002, p. 335, partial Italian edition: “I diritti dell’uomo in azione. La deriva della legge e dei giudici verso lo psicoreato,” in l’Uomo libero no. 50.
[242] Edward A. Ross, The Old World in the New: the Significance of Past and Present Immigration to theAmerican People, The Century Co., New York 1944, p. 113-150.
[243] Madison Grant, The Conquest of a Continent or, The Expansion of Races in America, Charles Schribner & Sons, New York 1933, ult. ed. Liberty Bell Publications 2004.
[244] James J. Davis, „Our Labor Shortage and Immigration,” in Industrial Management, 1923, p. 323.
[245] Harry H. Laughlin, „Analysis of America’s Melting Pot,” audience in front of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalisation, LXVII Congress, III Session, US Government Printing Office, 1922, p. 755.
[246] There were of course those who did not perceive the split, or even ended up “taking the plunge” to the point of still arguing in July 1934 that “Germany is carrying out a policy that is along the lines with the best of eugenic thought in all the civilised countries” (Paul Popenoe “The German Sterilisation Law,” in that month’s issue of the Journal of Heredity, pp. 257-260).
[247] Mark B. Adams, The Wellborn Science. Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1990, p. 5, also quoted in Cristian Fuschetto, Fabbricare l’uomo. L’eugenetica tra biologia e ideologia, op. cit., p. 18.
[248] See the pathetic contortions on these matters by Cristian Fuschetto, Fabbricare l’uomo. L’eugenetica tra biologia et ideologia, op. cit, which manages to dig up the old distinction between a possible “negative” (good) eugenics and the “positive’ and bad eugenics (diabolical, Promethean, “Nazi,” etc.), after fifty years of demonstration how the concept of health and illness are concepts that are eminently cultural. Habermas himself alludes to a barely more modern form of this old discourse, founded on verification of the moral certainty of a hypothetical consent of the germ cells (!), in The Future of Human Nature, op. cit., p. 45-48.
[249] Quoted in Alain Peyrefitte, C’était de Gaulle, vol I, Editions de Fallois/Fayard, Paris 1994, p. 52. For the statements by de Gaulle on matters of immigrations, cf. too Guillaume Faye in the chapter on “De Gaulle et l’immigration,” in La colonisation de l’Europe, L’Æncre, Paris 1999.
[250] Reported by Philippe Alméras, Retour sur le siècle, Les Cahiers de Jalle, Boston 1991, p. 101.
[251] Reported in Le Théâtre de Satan. Décadence du droit, partialité des juges, op. cit., p. 302.
[252] Nouvelle Ecole, no. 14 January – February 1971.
[253] Quoted in Jean-Jacques Mourreau, “L’eugénisme. Survol historique,” Nouvelle Ecole no.14 of January-February 1971, to which we refer for a more complete account of the history of eugenics prior to 1945, particularly for the non-fascist European expressions that it reports. The embarrassing passage quoted was also commented upon after the war by the communists; in particular one French Marxist wrote, almost to excuse him: “In Riazanov’s head, the allusion to the preservation of the race might make one smile, but it is perhaps necessary to remember the average level of sanitation in the Soviet Union at the time, the state of famine that had lasted for many years.” (Emile Copfermann, “Sexualité et répression,” in Partisans, October-November 1966, p. 70).
[254] Yves Christen, “L’eugénisme. Prospectives actuelles,” Nouvelle Ecole, no. 14 January-February 1971. A fact that deserves mentioning is that at the time Jean-Jacques Mourreau was twenty-five years old and Christen, a future transhumanist who had just completed a Masters Degree in Genetics, Biochemistry and Animal Biology, twenty-three!
[255] Quoted by John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe „The Root of Racism and Abortion: An Exploration of Eugenics.”
[256] Gilbert Meilaender, “Designing Our Descendants,” in First Things, January 2001.
[257] Ramez Naam, More than Human. Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, Broadway 2005, p. 166.
[258] Albert Jacquard, In Praise of Difference, op. cit.
[259] It is attractive to imagine that religious interdictions concerning pork, the symbol of breeding for food purposes, might be related to a more general condemnation, or diffidence of a moral kind, with regard to the implications of the Neolithic revolution.
[260] For example, in the case of camels, where this sort of human selection is much more ancient, the capacity to mate and give birth without human assistance seems today altogether exceptional. Cf. John Reader, Africa. A Biography of the Continent, ult.ed. Penguin 1998.
[261] Cf. Ronald A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1930 (ult. ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000).
[262] Actually, as spectacular as they are ancient. The “typical African fruit,” the banana, is first of all the product of human importation (namely from south-east Asia) into the partly different ecological and climatic environment of the Black Continent, and secondly is in all its edible varieties… devoid of seeds and parthenocarpic (that is all, the fruit are produced from unpollinated female flowers), something that totally prevents its reproduction other than by piping, a process which obviously does not occur in nature. Cf. John Reader, Africa, op. cit. No bananas, therefore, without a farmer who has planted them.
[263] In addition, the excavations of Atapuerca suggest the presence (in Europe!) of people morphologically very similar to Homo sapiens, and possibly belonging to our species, sevenhundred or eighthundred thousand years ago. Cf. Maurizio Blondet, L’uccellosauro ed altri animali, Edizioni Effedieffe, Milan 2002.
[264] With regard to the obvious conclusions on diet, nutrition and even medicine that can be drawn therefrom, see Loren Cordain, The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat, Willey, New York 2001; Michael Eades, The Protein Power, Bantham, New York 1997; Robert C. Atkins, The Age-Defying Diet, St. Martin Press, Baltimora 2003. See also Jerry Brainum, “The Paleolithic Diet,” in Olympian News.
[265] This is all the more significant because of their members’s ability to choose what to eat, and the phenomena of addiction and tolerance (linked to the metabolism of insulin) that consuming starch and sugar tends to induce in humans, who therefore tend to maintain and increase their consumption unless they make a deliberate effort to control it. Cf. Robert C. Atkins, Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution, ult. ed. Evans 2003.
[266] See Genevois, “Les nouveaux blés et la révolution verte,” in Journal d’agriculture et botanique appliquée, 1, 2, 3, 1975, vol. XXII, pp. 47-55.
[267] Enzo Caprioli deals with this topic from the same angle, in “Cibo geneticamente modificato o scontro tra civiltà?” l’Uomo libero no. 55.
[268] Already in the nineteen thirties Spengler wrote: “Even today, when we are still living out the last phases of this trivial optimism, these imbecilities make one shudder, thinking of the appalling boredom — the tædium vitæ of the Roman imperial age — that spreads over the soul in the mere reading of such idylls, of which e
ven a partial actualisation in real life could only lead to wholesale murder and suicide”. (Oswald Spengler, Time and Technics, p. 7 of the online English edition).
[269] Albert Jacquard, In Praise of Difference, op. cit.
[270] Giovanni Monastra, “Maschera e volto” degli OGM, op. cit.
[271] Erik P. Eckholm, Disappearing Species: The Social Challenge, Worldwatch Institute, Washington D.C.1978, p. 6; see also Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1992, p. 280.
[272] In fact, as we shall see later, it is highly probable that we will have the ability to create new species before really understanding how new species are born (or at least were born) in nature. The problem naturally does not concern American fundamentalists of the “literalist” type, for whom, if the idea of creating new species is sheer blasphemy, the ones existing today all appeared more or less at the same time from the magic wand of Yahweh during the six days spoken of in the Book of Genesis… In any event, what we know for certain is precisely the fact that the living species did neither appear in six days, nor in six thousand years, but practically throughout the duration of life on Earth; and furthermore we know, from Pasteur’s well-known experiment, that all living beings, and all the more so all the higher living beings, descend from other living beings, without any “spontaneous generation” out of inert matter (nullum vivum nisi e vivo). This clearly implies that the “new” species will have to be derived some way or other from already existing ones; which besides is confirmed by the co-presence in different species, to different degrees, of similar and recurrent morphological and genetic traits, that may well be without any present adaptive value with respect to possible alternatives, but are consistent with the description of the living world and of natural history in terms of genealogical clades, branches and lineages. The fact that the neo-Darwinian “new synthesis,” founded only on random selection and micro-mutations, may be considered as unsatisfactory in its explanatory capacity, especially from a mathematical point of view, is another story. Recent, revolutionary discoveries of a purely theoretical kind about the capacity of elementary mechanisms to generate different degrees of complexity have on the other hand been applied in very interesting ways to the evolution of the living, for instance by Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science, Wolfram Inc. 2002, in particular in the chapter “Fundamental Issues in Biology”. This appears to render largely outdated the problem that has for long troubled both Darwinists and anti-Darwinists, that is the complexity, variety and adaptation of living species (with their respective references to Jacques’ Monod’s “chance and necessity” or to the deus ex machina of Intelligent Design): that complexity should necessarily be the result of an equally or more complex mechanism is just a prejudice.
[273] The varieties of grape that yields the very vast range of wines produced in the world today are known not to be different species (with very few exceptions, such as the grape used for the Lambrusco wine, thay always and invariably stem from Vitis vinifera), and not even different races, but… clones of single individuals, originally obtained via cross-breeding and then constantly replicated. Every single bottle of Müller-Thurgau stems from grafts of the plant originally created by Messrs, Müller and Thurgau, and the differences depend only on the soil in which it is planted, the climate, the vintage and of the cultivation and winemaking technical proceedings of their respective producers and bottlers.
[274] It is not by chance that the spectre of Frankenstein (the story with the same name by Mary Shelley had as its subtitle The Modern Prometheus) is often held up, together with that of the “Nazi,” as the incapacitating myth with respect to any type of application of the kind; whether possible applications are put in place for eugenic ends or not, they anyhow fall within the domain of an amplification of the “mastery of man over himself” that the prevailing trend would like to see abolished, or at least perpetually denounced and made to look guilty. Cf. the epithet “Frankenfood” for GMO food products.
[275] Hervé Kempf, La révolution biolithique. Humains artificiels et machines animées, op. cit., p. 8.
[276] Hervé Kempf, La révolution biolithique. Humains artificiels et machines animées, op. cit., p. 211.
[277] Hervé Kempf, La révolution biolithique. Humains artificiels et machines animées, op. cit. p. 212.
[278] According to Jeremy Rifkin, and from the opposite trench to Guillaume Faye, a deeper cultural convergence exists, which considers the ecological environment and the living being itself as cybernetic systems, and in the case of the living being the DNA as its software, with a consequent effort to develop technologies based precisely upon this approach. There exist moreover even more advanced levels, which envisage in the long term a possible convergence between genetic engineering, and more in general biology, with information technology, well beyond the first rough experiments, such as for instance those that Il Sole-24Ore reported on the 26th February 2004, confirming the news that electronic terminals had successfully been connected to the brain of a lamprey. Be it about the possibility of storing the backup of the identity of a human being on an artificial support, or of developing computers based on neurons and/or DNA molecules, or to directly interfacing nervous tissues with devices and sensors of an arbitrary nature, such a trend certainly heads in the direction of blurring the confines between the organism and the context in which it operates, as those between biological systems and systems of other kinds, for instance.
[279] Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century, op. cit., p. 8-9.
[280] “Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch,” from the poetry Patmos. Quoting these two verses of the German poet is a little inflated nowadays, at least in some circles, given that it became one of Heidegger’s favourite quotations, and through him, of Alain de Benoist.
[281] Brian Alexander, Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion. A Raucous Tour of Cloning, Transhumanism, and the New Era of Immortality, op. cit. p. 25.
[282] Ibid. p. 33
[283] Richard Dawkins, “Son of Moore’s Law,” in John Brockman, The Next Fifty Years, Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century, Vintage Books, New York 2002, p. 146.
[284] Bishop, Waldholz, Genome. The Story of the Most Astonishing Scientific Adventure of Our Time: the Attempt to Map All the Genes in the Human Body, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1990, p. 203.
[285] It is interesting to remark that Francis Crick, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962 for his research on DNA, was a resolute eugenicist, who went as far as to proclaim: “New legal definitions of life and death are necessary, if we are to avoid that the demographic explosion yield problems of quality as much as of quantity. For example, we could imagine a new definition for ‘birth’, deferring its date to two days post parturition. This would allow one to examine the newborn, that would not yet be considered a human being in the full meaning of the term, and to administer euthanasia to those born with a defect or malformation. […] My ideas thus expressed would imply a total re-evaluation of human life itself. I don’t believe a word of the traditional point of view that all men are born equal and are sacred.” (in Tribune Médicale, 21st November 1970)
[286] McKusick, “Mapping and Sequencing the Human Genome,” in New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 320, 1989, p. 912.
[287] Cf. Claudia Di Giorgio, “Completata la sequenza del genoma umano” in La Repubblica, 06/04/2000.
[288] In the meantime, we have moreover discovered that sequencing the entire DNA of an organism does not give us the whole genetic map of that organism. For the recent discovery of the importance of the “epigenetic” code and the famous story of the “callipyge” lamb named Solid Gold because of its overly muscular rump, that the geneticists did not manage to replicate then, cf. W. Wayt Gibbs, “The Unseen Genome” in Scientific American, November 2003, as well as Beck and Alexander, The Epigenome. Molecular Hide and Seek, Wiley, New York 2003.
[289] According to Moore’s Law, always obeyed since 1965 when it was first formula
ted, the calculating power of processors is to double (or for the same power, their market price to halve) every eighteen months. The predictions with respect to various “ceilings” that the physics of the material would reach at a certain point have until now been bypassed by means of different tricks.
[290] Richard Dawkins, “Son of Moore’s Law,” in John Brockman, The Next Fifty Years, Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century, op. cit. In fact, as has already been remarked with respect to the theses of the “close genetic kinship” between the human races, a similar kinship exists, in the measure of 98%, with apes, 85% with mice and 50% with the fruit flies so dear to experimental geneticists (Cf. Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. 16.
[291] Cf. Solexa Inc. Quoted in Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. IX.
[292] Actually, one great surprise brought by the completion of the Genome Project is that human genes are not hundred thousand or hundred and fifty thousand as previously believed, but around thirty thousand. This makes things more complicated, not simpler, because it indicates that a relevant part of the information is stocked not in a single gene but in the astronomical number of interactions between them, as well as in the already mentioned epigenetic mechanisms.
[293] On the topic of computational irreducibility of physical and biological systems, cf. Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science, op. cit. especially the section “Computational Irreducibility.”
[294] Cf. the “Lucy Genome Project,” discussed in Richard Dawkins, “Son of Moore’s Law,” in John Brockman, The Next Fifty Years. Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century, op. cit. about the reconstruction of the genome of the Australopithecus. As Dawkins remarks, one essential component of humanist anthropocentrism, is the implicit fact that other species of the Homo family went extinct. How would one distinguish “speciecism” from “racism” once an Australopithecus walked among us?