Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
cated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training. This is entirely
in accord with evolution. . . . The human race will not have ceased to crawl on
all fours before God, kings, and capital, in order later to submit humbly before
the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection!
41
(Trotsky, like many Marxists in the 1920s, greatly admired Darwin.) In
a passage reminiscent of Wallace or Spencer, Trotsky predicts that
“man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body
will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice
more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The
average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or
a Marx. And above this ridge, new peaks will rise.”
42
In the Aftermath of World War II
Following the Second World War, visions of biological transformation
fell from favor. Although the orientation of Nazi eugenics was over-
whelmingly negative (the major exception being the
Lebensborn
program, which encouraged both married and unmarried women of
superior Aryan stock to bear children of SS officers), such visions seemed
uncomfortably close to the National Socialist aim of creating a master
race. Indeed, in the United States at least, there was a backlash against
the hereditarian assumptions on which any kind of eugenics, positive or
negative, necessarily depend.
43
It is unlikely, however, that many scien-
tists changed their minds about the importance of genes to differences
in human mentality and behavior, and within a decade, there were new
calls to control human reproduction. The resurgence of interest in eugen-
ics—still unembarrassedly called that—was fueled by a number of
postwar anxieties that included advances in medical treatment and the
prospect of a population explosion. Of greatest importance was the
threat of long-term genetic damage resulting from increased exposure to
radiation.
44
Many geneticists in the 1950s believed that radiation-induced muta-
tion presented a new threat to the human race. This peril was vigorously
publicized by Muller, whose 1947 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the
mutagenic properties of x-rays allowed him now to speak with new
authority. In his 1949 presidential address to the newly founded
American Society of Human Genetics, Muller argued that the human
