Eugenics. Against the Grain A Program about Politics, Society and Ideas.mp3

Worried about genetically modified organisms, and GM food? Well, a number of scientists are pursuing the genetic modification of humans, altering DNA sequences that will be passed along to future generations. According to Stuart Newman, inheritable genetic engineering is deeply problematic; he argues that its proponents misunderstand the nature of living things and the process of human evolution.
http://www.againstthegrain.org/tag-directory/eugenics

The Transhumanism Bubble;
Stuart A. Newman

Contemporary proposals to use biotechnology to modify human beings, an initiative with both academic and “movement” (Transhumanism) manifestations, stem from a fascinating confluence of scientific and social trends. Traditionally, wealthy families and even those lower on the socioeconomic scale have treated marriage arrangements as a way of conserving and improving bloodlines, using principles similar to those employed in breeding livestock for agriculture and sport. These maneuvers reached a high pitch among the European aristocracy and gentry of the 18th and 19th centuries just as the hierarchical societies in which they ruled by virtue of heredity were coming apart. To Charles Darwin though, the attempts to maintain and enhance family bloodlines not only lacked scientific basis, they were misguided:
Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care. He is impelled by nearly the same motives as the lower animals, when they are left to their own free choice, though he is in so far superior to them that he highly values mental charms and virtues. On the other hand he is strongly attracted by mere wealth or rank. Yet he might by selection do something not only for the bodily constitution and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities. Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind but such hopes are Utopian and will never be even partially realized until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known.
Charles Darwin,The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex(London: J. Murray, 1871), pp. 617-618.

Nearly a century and a half after this passage was published—and seven decades after the German Reich tried to implement its own version of a biological Utopia—Darwin’s hope continues to live on in privileged sectors of technologically advanced societies.