STEM, Evil Scientists, and Evil Social Scientists

Earlier posts have discussed the three announced motions for the The Winter Holidays Open in Zagreb. (STEM searching, Enviro cost accounting, Poor environmental accounting, 100% Inheritance tax)

This post wonders if evil scientists popular in movies scare young people away from Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) classes and careers. (And maybe of more concern, do evil scientists in movies attract the wrong sort of others to STEM classes: future evil scientists?)

Is anything okay in science? Home crisper tools today let any budding evil genius try their hand at creating and editing life. Mail-Order CRISPR Kits Allow Absolutely Anyone to Hack DNA, (Scientific American, November 2, 2017). For the recent gene editing news from China, see The CRISPR Baby Scandal Gets Worse by the Day (The Atlantic, December 3, 2018): “…alleged creation of the world’s first gene-edited infants was full of technical errors and ethical blunders.”

Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) degrees gained without a also taking courses in ethics and history, and without some experience in debate, is a clear and present danger. Consider the role scientists have played advising and working for governments in the twentieth century. The horrific experiments carried on by Nazi, Soviet, US government scientists.

The Soviet Union was eager to industrialize and promoted STEM education for students and endless top-down science and technology projects. The Perversion Of Knowledge: The True Story Of Soviet Science (Basic Books, 2004). From Kirkus Reviews (May 20, 2010): 

Soviet-era scientific academies were pawns of the state, in particular the secret services, and that their activities were subordinated to the needs—some good, but mostly bad and ugly—of the state’s survival. Perversions of scientific integrity ranged from the ravings of Lysenko to the construction of nuclear weapons. But what primarily interests Birstein is the scientific community’s role in developing biological and chemical weapons to fight enemies of the state and its willingness to test these weapons on humans. … 

Thus the Soviet Union joins the shameful list of countries (including the US, Germany, Japan, and Britain) that have used humans for unethical biomedical experiments.

Kirkus Reviews (May 20, 2010)

Another network of evil, mad, or just deeply misguided scientists were the Eugenics advocates of the U.S. and Europe. Eugenics scientists from leading universities advocated sterilizing the unfit in the U.S. as well as across the developing world. Earlier posts have discussed the Eugenics Movement, and it’s role passing U.S. immigration restrictions. 

Legal Immigration, Freedom of Movement, and National Sovereignty (EconomicThinking, updated October 10, 2018) is by far the most read Economic Thinking post (10 times any other). The post discusses the 2018-19 NSDA legal immigration topic, and includes a history of Eugenics scientists and enthusiasts as key anti-immigration advocates (along with labor unions):

Eugenics researchers claimed these new immigrants would harm America for genetic and cultural reasons.

This is a deeply disturbing and controversial episode in American history, so students should do their own careful research. On the past scholarly support for eugenics see, for example, Harvard’s Eugenics Era: When academics embraced scientific racism, immigration restrictions, and the suppression of “the unfit”…

The Eugentics movement morphed into efforts to reduce population control growth, especially among those elite scientists considered unfit. Population control became a key part of U.S. foreign aid as well as “welfare” programs for America’s poor. 

Consider this Population Control post from Eugenics Archive:

Population control has been a central axis of eugenics movements across the globe for more than a century, although a visible and active movement to control population growth emerged with force only after World War II. Today, population control rationales continue to influence policies related to reproduction and remain laden with implicit assumptions of who is fit or unfit to procreate and/or parent.

Mass incarceration: The new eugenics? (Acton Commentary May 7, 2014 looks to U.S. history for the roots of mass incarceration: 

…mass incarceration might be just another historic example of elites using government power to control the country’s “degenerates” – namely, the lower classes – and to create and control social outcomes that benefit the interests of those in power...

Progressive eugenicists, taking action to control “white trash” and the like, launched a campaign to use government coercion to forcibly sterilize lower class whites (and later blacks). Eugenics was considered good for America’s social welfare and economic progress. According to Wray, progressives sought “legislative reform campaigns aimed at restricting foreign immigration, mandating state institutionalization of the biologically unfit, and legalizing eugenical involuntary sterilzation.” Eugenics was a way protect society from social traits like “pauperism, laziness, promiscuity and licentiousness, inbreeding, nomadism [idleness], and delinquency.” Does this sound familiar?

Population control programs were funded by major U.S. foundations as well as the government. Organizations like Zero Population Growth sent free education materials and videos to high schools across the U.S.. Consider this online history: 30 Years of ZPG: Our History as Written in 1998 (Population Connection):

We lobby the U.S. Congress on both international and domestic family planning funding, ensuring that it isn’t cut. ZPG’s Population Education Department has developed an award- winning school curriculum that incorporates environmental and population issues in standard classroom fare that educates hundreds of teachers and students every single year. ZPG tries to bring attention to the benefits of childless and single child families and is focusing on the environmental impact of a growing population, rather than only on numbers.

The message of population control scientists like Paul Ehrlich (author of The Population Bomb) reached as far as China where top-down plans for single-child families was supported and funded by the U.N. and U.S. China’s one-child policy began in 1979. Consider this 1984 New York Times article by scientist Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute WORLD POPULATION CRISIS… (May 8, 1984):

…There is some indication that Third World leaders are finally waking up to the fact that population growth is placing intolerable pressures on the earth’s land, water and energy supplies. Among the first to reexamine population policies were the Chinese. After weighing a projected population growth of 300 to 400 million people against the future availability of cropland, water, energy and jobs, China’s leaders concluded that they had no choice but to press for one-child families, lest they jeopardize hard-earned gains in living standards. The main difference between China and other densely populated developing countries, such as Bangladesh, India, Egypt, Nigeria or Mexico, may be that the Chinese have had the foresight to make projections of their population and resources and the courage to translate their findings into policy. But other countries may also find that one-child families are the only humane alternative. Administering a one-child family program is not easy. To hold the line at one child, China relies on an established political structure extending down to the individual, strong peer pressure, substantial financial rewards for having only one child and hefty financial penalties for having more than one. Where a preference for sons is strong, the program is particularly difficult to enforce, as Chinese leaders can attest. And the line between peer pressure, in a society where citizen awareness of the population threat is high, and official coercion is a thin one.

New York Times, May 8, 1984 

Before the Claims of Crispr Babies, There Was China’s One-Child Policy: The Chinese government has a long history of using technology to control and manipulate reproduction. (New York Times, November 28, 2018) connected recent news with the Chinese government’s one-child policy:

Behind the science of what’s doable is the mind-set of what’s desirable. China’s unprecedented reproductive experiment, officially ended in 2015 although many restrictions continue, has created a people accustomed — in many cases, forcibly so — to controlling the number and gender of their offspring. The one-child policy was established ostensibly to curb population growth, but China’s leaders were not shy about exhorting the country’s people to reduce quantity to improve quality, shading the policy with eugenic undertones.

t, history suggests t STEM social science training without also learning ethics and history is a danger to society. Students benefit from the experience debate offers by researching topics, advocating for and against them, and evaluating them from many perspectives.

And, unfortunately, advocates for population control still provide funding for programs in the U.S. and around the world. See, for example, Stop U.S. Tax Dollars From Funding Population Control in China (Population Research Institute,  begins:

China’s infamous “planned birth” policy has brought forced abortion and sterilization, fines, persecution, and imprisonment to millions of Chinese women. For decades, the Chinese government brutally enforced a limit of one child per family. Even with the recent move to a two-child policy, women and children will continue to suffer the same abuses. But many people don’t realize that a UN agency, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), works alongside the Chinese government to help make these abuses possible.

There are of course many still concerned about the worlds expanding population. 

Can Planet Earth Feed 10 Billion People? Humanity has 30 years to find out. (The Atlantic, March, 2018) reflects:

In 1970, when I was in high school, about one out of every four people was hungry—“undernourished,” to use the term preferred today by the United Nations. Today the proportion has fallen to roughly one out of 10. In those four-plus decades, the global average life span has, astoundingly, risen by more than 11 years; most of the increase occurred in poor places. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia, Latin America, and Africa have lifted themselves from destitution into something like the middle class. This enrichment has not occurred evenly or equitably: Millions upon millions are not prosperous. Still, nothing like this surge of well-being has ever happened before. No one knows whether the rise can continue, or whether our current affluence can be sustained.

So will today’s and tomorrow’s STEM students be the ones to solve future energy, agriculture, and environmental challenges through new innovations, inventions, and enterprises, or will they be evil genius advisors advocating totalitarian science policies to reduce human populations and choices?

Related earlier posts:

• The Legacy of China’s One-Child Policy

• China’s Instant Cities: Send Us the Girl Who Can Get Things Done

• Texasworld! (everyone in the world could live in Texas, comfortable…)