My freshman year at Washington University in St. Louis, "The Panda's Thumb" was part of the required reading list for incoming freshmen majoring in Arts and Sciences. I wasn't personally required to read it, so, being a bit snowed trying to keep up with my engineering courses, I did the next best thing and asked for a summary.

It would appear Mr. Gould was probably recommended to us more for propaganda purposes than his scientific acumen. I believe it was John Ray who pointed out this article, written by fellow evolutionist Robert Wright, explaining why Gould's science was bad (or at least of strategic aid to creationists).

But something in Wright's analysis didn't seem quite right to me. He lays the blame for social Darwinism square at the feet of religious conservatives, which he implies are the "old" version of today's "religious right"... (emphases added)

Early in this century, biological progressivism was dear to the hearts of social Darwinists, who used evolution to justify racism, imperialism, and a laissez-faire indifference to poverty. Part of the logic behind social Darwinism—to the extent that it had a coherent logic—was something like the following: The suffering, even death, of the weak at the hands of the strong is an example of "survival of the fittest." And surely the "survival of the fittest" has God's blessing. After all, He built the dynamic into His great creative process, natural selection. And how do we know that natural selection is God's handiwork? Because of its inexorable tendency to create organisms as majestic as ourselves, organisms worthy of admission to Heaven. In short, biological progressivism was used to deify nature in all its aspects, and nature, thus deified, was invoked in support of oppression.

This variant of social Darwinism — which infers political and moral values from the direction of evolution — has been essentially dead for a long time, but for Gould it is still an ever-present enemy. His denunciations of progressivism often include dark allusions to the political values that accompanied it in the early twentieth century. His war against progressivism, it seems, is waged partly to vanquish a religious right that died out long ago. Yet the effect of the war is to give aid and comfort to a new religious right...

I have a number of other disagreements with what he writes elsewhere, but for the moment, let's just focus on the author's thesis that Gould, the Marxist, in opposing eugenics was opposing "a religious right that died out long ago."

So I thought it was be instructive to do a bit of research into the history of the eugenics movement and look to see what it's prime founders, movers, and shakers thought. Were they like the "religious right" of today? Or were they leftists, academics, secular humanists and utopians?

Francis Galton

Francis Galton coined the phrase "Nature versus Nuture" and also the term "Eugenics". A quick summary is found here:

At one point, through statistical means, of course, Galton discovers with delight that "It is therefore a fact, that in proportion to the pains bestowed on their education generally, the sons of clergymen rarely take a lead in science. The pursuit of science is uncongenial to the priestly character." This despite the advances in genetics being made by Gregor Mendel, a contemporary monk.

In "Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer" Galton goes to great lengths to show that God, if he exists at all, the does not interact with the universe, examining the lifespans for priests and kings, and noting they appear to live shorter, not longer than many other professions. He also notes missionaries often died quickly upon arriving in foreign nations.

Of course, none of this is good science by today's standards. An examination of the effect of prayer on kings would need to compare prayed-for kings against non-prayed-for kings, in a double-blind fashion. And we'd factor out other things like whether their job was stressful (probably was), whether they often had diseases due to inbreeding (definitely), etc. It's also a bit of a straw man, as saints in the bible are usually depicted as receiving nothing but trouble for their beliefs, and often martyrdom, rather than being promised a long and trouble-free life, as Galton seems to think. But it well illustrates Galton's tendancies towards traditional beliefs about God.

In "The Posssibility of Theocratic Intervention", Galton concludes that God either cannot intervene in the universe, or must be quite a horrible god:

It follows from what has been said that theocratic intervention, whether in response to prayer or given unasked, cannot affect the value of statistical conclusions on the relative total effects of Nature and Nurture, unless Milton's horrible supposition [of a devil-like God] be seriously entertained.

I find this amusing, and troubling, given that it is the exact same argument used by Wright, who wants to lay eugenics at the feet of the religious right:

But, really, how consoling could any Darwinian god be? Those who would like to believe in a higher power that is both omnipotent and benign will be frustrated by the most casual inspection of the medium of our design. Among the key ingredients in natural selection's creative energy are death and suffering, the casting aside of the "unfit." And, for every bit of love and harmony, there seems to be a flip side of antagonism and cruelty; among the things we do for loved ones is hate their enemies. What kind of god would use natural selection as a creative tool? It is tempting to answer as the biologist George Williams has: a very bad god.

Wright concludes if there is any hope for faith in God, it will be in some future religion which can arise one humanity becomes truly good, apparently through the continued efforts of science.

So it's interesting that Wright blames eugenics on right-leaning religious conservatives, given the startingly similarity between his view of traditional faith and those proceeding from its very founder. My point is not to argue the veracity or falsity of Wrights' views, but rather to note their similarity to Galton's.

From the very beginning, eugenics was envisioned as a matter of social (e.g. state) control. In fact, Galton's very definition was:

Eugenics is the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, whether physically or mentally.

Later, Galton argued eugenics should be a religion:

In 1905, he wrote about the three stages of eugenics as he conceived the new order. At first eugenics would be, Galton supposed, an academic affair; then it would a practical policy; and finally "it must be introduced into the national consciousness as a new religion."

Contrary to the whitewash some moderns are trying to give Galton, in reviving his views, Galton was clearly comfortable taking eugenics to the extremes similar to those it would later reach under National Socialist Germany:

More ominously, in an 1873 article, "Hereditary Improvement," he not only advocated increasing the reproduction of talented individuals but also argued that if "inferior" people insisted on procreating, they should be considered enemies of the state and "have forfeited all claims to kindness."

We can see that eugenics' founder saw eugenics as a state-enforced religion, a social engineering program from an individual antagonistic to traditional ideas of a theistic (intervening) God. So, contrary to Robert Wright's claims, eugenics certainly didn't originate from a traditional view of God, and desire for a limited government.

The American Eugenics Society

From what I'm able learn the AES was founded by