| Would an individual have been chosen for sterilization if: 1) He was born with a markedly pointy head, which caused much consternation to his parents and relatives. 2) Was developmentally backward. Notably, he failed to acquire language skills for a significant period during his early childhood. 3) He was educationally subnormal, showing signs of what would now be diagnosed as ADHD,and drugged into a stupor. 4) Was bone lazy. I believe that 'schweinehunde' was the informal term used at the time for this condition. 5) Was disobedient and rebellious, or one of those 'malcontents' that perennially threaten to upset the applecart of society (the term 'hooligan' enjoyed a brief vogue for describing this condition). 6) Was Jewish. The eugenics movement designated Jews for mass sterilization, along with Blacks, Poles and the 'bloody Irish' (but then again, these were the same dolts who thought that sterilizing homosexuals would somehow serve to 'keep the race pure'). Albert Einstein was a prime candidate for this preemptive culling. |
Note that nobody here advocated forced sterilizations (or killing off ugly babies).
All we said is that it's pretty much settled that intelligence is inheritable.
PS I will contend one point - and that is whether Jews were marked for mass sterilization. That is false.
Jews were marked by Nazis for extermination. However - people who advocated eugenics in other countries (like US or the UK) had no issues with Jews (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States).
If anything, Jews (or more precisely Ashkenazi) are a poster child for eugenics - since really that's what they went through in the middle ages, which is used to explain their enormous achievement (see http://www.economist.com/node/4032638)