Biological Determinism Quotes

Eugenics.

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

Only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity.

The frontal region of the Negro skull has been repeatedly shown to be much smaller than that of the Caucasian. Considering this fact, the conclusion is reached that the Negro has a smaller proportion of the faculties pertaining to the frontal lobe than the Caucasian. The Negro, then, lacks reason, judgment, apperception, affection, self-control, will power, orientation, ethical and esthetic attributes, and the relation of the ego (of personality or self) to environment…. The skull capacity of the Negro has been repeatedly demonstrated to be less than that of the Caucasian

What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.

Women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players: they are not great fighters.

Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.

You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.

There is no escaping from the conclusion that nature prevails enormously over nurture.

A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race, and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.

As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power.

A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links.

The great paradox of determinism and free will, which has held the attention of the wisest of philosophers and psychologists for generations, can be phrased in more biological terms as follows: If our genes are inherited, and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment. It would appear that our freedom is only a self delusion.

Even with seemingly simple things like eye color, you can't tell from my genetic code whether I have blue eyes or not. So it's naive to think that complex human behaviors, like risk-seeking, are driven by changes in one or two genes.

It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites.

The capacity of the crania of the Mongol, Indian and Negro, and all dark skinned races, is smaller than that of the pure white man.

Who we can be begins with our molecular blueprints - a series of alien codes penned in invisibly small strings of acids - well before we have anything to do with it. We are a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history.

Already at the origin of the species man was equal to what he was destined to become.

Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.

Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the current status of groups as a measure of where they should and must be ... We inhabit a world of human differences and predilections, but the extrapolation of these facts to theories of rigid limits is ideology.

Is it absurd to imagine that our social behavior, from amoeba to man, is also planned and dictated, from stored information, by the cells? And that the time has come for men to be entrusted with the task, through heroic efforts, of bringing life to other worlds?

The Eugenist takes man purely as a plant or as an animal; he wants to breed him just as animals are bred.

Everything in woman hath a solution. It is called pregnancy.

So, if anatomy is destiny then testosterone is doom.