Re: Biological Reductionism/Ideology

On Wed, 21 Feb 2001, Richard N Hutchinson wrote:

> On Alan's analogy between Nazi experiments on humans and current genetic
> engineering, it's not necessarily a good analogy in the sense that all the
> Nazis accomplished was torturing and killing people.  Today, with the
> unlocking of the human genome, actual SUCCESSFUL genetic engineering of
> humans may become possible, as indicated by the already rapidly increasing
> applications in agriculture.  And as I keep saying, that worries me much
> more than ideology.

The Nazi view of reality reduced the world to master race and slave races.
Subsequently, Hitler's Drang nach Osten succeeded in turning all of
East-Central Europe into a laboratory producing race science - not only
creating work for people like Mengele, but also using the latest
technology (tanks, airplanes) to test out social Darwinism by enthroning a
master race and seeing it in action.   The experiments on people was a
secondary goal to their enslavement, or, in the case of Jews, their
elimination, for the Jews of the Ukraine and Belarus never made it to the
labor camps to work for the Reich, but were shot en masse when the Germans
occupied their villages and towns.  This was a primitive experiment using
primitive tools, to be sure.  With genetic engineering, we can take
further steps to producing a master race than just providing it a habitat
within which to operate.  The two are similar, however, in their attempt
to test out reductive world-views in practice.  As I've been saying, one
should not confine the definition of ideology to what is written in
bestselling books and the definition of scientific reality to what goes
on inside buildings specially designated as laboratories.

> 
> RH
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Boris Stremlin
bc70219@binghamton.edu