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littleyou3d · 3 years ago

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Building Your Own Belonging with Little You 3D

As they grow, children develop schema for the world around them — a general understanding of society that organizes people, places, and things into categories and buckets, so to speak. Societal stereotypes influence and often takeover these schemas. Unfortunately, this takeover is not always accurate, appropriate, or beneficial to the socio-emotional development of a child. In fact, this societal influence can stunt a child’s development, proving to be harmful to the child and even society at large.

Grace, a science teacher in North Philadelphia, in the beginning of the year said, “one of my favorite activities is to have my students illustrate a scientist. This is a pretty classic activity with somewhat predictable results. Children tend to draw a man in a lab coat holding beakers with brightly colored liquids in them. Sometimes the man has crazy hair, sometimes he is wearing goggles or thick glasses. Generally, this man is some version of Albert Einstein. From here, the activity progresses to revealing to the students that all they have to do in order to see a scientist is look in the mirror because they can be scientists, and in fact, they already are scientists!” The purpose of the activity is to begin to break down the stereotype that has caused them to rely on this singular schema of science and to begin to build themselves into that schema, even if it is not a long-term interest of theirs. It’s true that this is just an ice breaker for a year of science instruction, however it is extremely telling. This simple activity shows the power of societal stereotypes paired with a lack of representation.

Students need to see themselves or the possibility of themselves in everything they study and everything they learn. It is crucial that diversity is allowed, welcomed, created, and constantly reinvented within the classroom.

It is intuitive for adults to attempt to inspire students by encouraging them to pursue their dreams, and of course students should pursue their dreams! However, too often, those dreams are unintentionally interpreted and limited by the society that a child is raised in or around. For example, a young Black child who identifies as a female might dream of becoming a scientist. However, that dream is slowly muted as she learns about prominent figures in science such as Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Nicholas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Niehls Bohr, Gregor Mendel, etc. Even Rosalind Franklin — a traditionally mentioned scientific figure — does not fully reflect this child’s identity or journey. What begins to happen is the internalization of the subliminal messaging that successful scientists — those who leave a legacy — look and behave a certain way. Although this is an example related to a specific subject area in school, it can be generalized to most other subjects and/or situations. The bottom line is that dreams can only be pursued to the point that their pathways can be designed and built; and pathways can only be designed and built if the tools to do so are readily accessible.

The team at Little You has thoughtfully created a free to use application accessible on the web that not only allows, but also encourages children to design personalized avatars that can then be printed using 3D printing technology and delivered to the user’s home. Little You has curated a thorough web space for young people to learn how to design a character that reflects their own personality, style, future occupations, or even the different aspects of their humanity. The web space includes instructional videos and user-created examples in addition to clean visuals and infographics that make navigation easy for any user. Once the character is designed, users can purchase a figurine of their character. The team at Little You will then print the character using high quality 3D printers and ship it off!

Little You is a place where young people can intentionally and safely ignore the boundaries placed on them by society in terms of how they are supposed to look in order to succeed at certain jobs, hobbies, and careers. Young people can explore their curiosities and identities and see those aspects of themselves come to fruition in the form of a tangible self-portrait that could look exactly like them or could reflect creative experimentation with their physical looks. Where society attempts to stunt their ideas, Little You encourages its users to explore the possibilities of their own reflection, supporting the notion that your dreams do not have to be associated with any particular form of self-expression.

The possibilities for classroom incorporation of Little You into curricula are multiple. In fact, the possibility for cross-curricular connections is extremely intuitive as students incorporate literacy skills to read and listen to directions, technology skills as they utilize the site and creative skills as they build their character. Teachers can easily collaborate to incorporate these characters into every subject multiple times a year.

Educators know that belonging is a critical part of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs on the path to self-actualization. Little You has created a platform that allows young people to create a sense of belonging for themselves. Furthermore, that belongingness can then go beyond an avatar created on the internet and becomes a tangible figure for them to own. This figure can then have a place in their life as a sort of trophy reminding them that they are the champions of their own dreams and ambitions if only they take the time to build a portrait of themselves into the roles they desire.

While society will continually attempt to dictate the manner in which children see the world as well as how they define their place within it, educators will find it is quite possible to foster an environment within the classroom where challenging societal stigmas is normal, welcomed, and expected. This will not be accomplished with a perfectly executed lesson plan or a thorough cross-curricular unit plan. This feat will be accomplished with the little things that teachers choose to thoughtfully incorporate into each day in order to build a mindset of belonging amongst each group of children that steps into the room.

#3d anime #3d characters #3d modelling #anime character

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getgamez · 5 years ago

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Creatura

.ugb-eb16b41 .ugb-video-popup__wrapper{max-width:1774px;border-radius:25px;background-color:#1b2838;background-image:url(https://getgamez.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Creatura-free.jpg)}.ugb-eb16b41 .ugb-video-popup__play-button svg{fill:#ffffff !important}.ugb-eb16b41 .ugb-video-popup__wrapper:before{background-color:#1b2838;opacity:0.3}.ugb-eb16b41 .ugb-video-popup__wrapper:hover:before{opacity:0.6}.ugb-eb16b41.ugb-video-popup{margin-top:-7px !important}@media screen and (max-width:768px){.ugb-eb16b41 .ugb-video-popup__wrapper{max-width:242px;height:180px !important}} Game Overview In Creatura, design and take care of enclosures full of animals and plants grown from scratch, using scientifically accurate natural/artifical selection and DNA editing. Make an epic journey over billions years of evolution, from single cell organisms sharing water with algae, to complex animals living in lush gardens. Manage and recreate fully customizable vivariums, while carefully balancing biomes characteristics to sustain perfect ecosystems. Fulfil unique almanac with species yet to be discovered, and edit your own fauna & flora with authentic DNA editor, learning how modern tools and techniques like CRISPR and GMO work in detail. Creatura has one, open-ended “sandbox-like” gameplay mode, with beautiful bonsai experience of any vivarium you can think of. Sell plant cuttings to buy decorations and consumables, research fauna & flora to unlock advanced DNA editing methods, and with enough patience and luck, grow rare and unique specimens for trading. Or just watch the grass growing, with up-to-date biology research based on Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel legacy, it’s all science after all. Use artificial selection to grow any possible plant out of billions of combinations, or utilize natural selection to breed unique animals, dependent on adapting to their environments. Learn how to edit DNA, understand concepts like genomes, genotypes & gene sequencing, and apply your own changes to codons using GCAT system and authentic DNA editor. Control the time to watch hundreds of plants and animals evolve in just seconds by utilizing up to 1000x time-lapse, in highly optimized and smooth gaming experience. Manage a fully simulated virtual aquarium/terrarium. Use consumables and decorations to control pH, adjust temperature and water levels to maintain proper humidity. Customize the tank stands, rims and lids, change the water, ground and background color, shape the ground, water level, and decorate it with wide range of possible decorations. Grow and breed specimens until mutating the rare and unique variations to make your vivarium even more special, or to sell/trade them for great profit. Discover millions of possible plants and animals, name them and put in almanac to document your evolutionary journey. Create the most visually stunning virtual bonsai aquariums/terrariums, in a relaxing and educational gaming environment without any fail conditions. Use or make your own texture packs (with Steam Workshop support) for even more unique experience. Screenshots for System Requirements Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: 7/10 Processor: Intel Core, AMD Phenom Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: DirectX 10 / OpenGL 4.3 compatible DirectX: Version 10 Storage: 500 MB available space Read the full article

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dalitinvivo · 5 years ago

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desires.

What is it that you desire? Do you know? Do your desires change from day to day? What is your deep-rooted goal in life? Do you have a goal? Do you know what you want out of life? Are you happy with your current situation? Could you be happy if you just adjusted your perspective?

Or do you feel, well, unsatisfied? Satisfaction is not really the word I am looking for, because the majority of us experiences something good and wants more of it. Are we ever really satisfied? Could you have just one piece of chocolate and it be enough? Or could just one cookie appease you?

What kind of life would give you joy? If you didn’t have to work another day of your life for financial comfort, what would you do with your time? Maybe, the answer to this is what you ought to be doing.

Going back to self-awareness. Besides sugar and money, whatever it is that makes you feel connected to yourself and your true desires is what will bring you happiness. Or maybe you completely disconnect... is this meditation, now?

But it is a process, right? You may have responsibility, you may have accountability, to take it one step at a time and not just throw in the towel. Or, you could, and go rogue, and you probably will need help to get back on track. Maybe not. Maybe, you could stay rogue. What steps do you need to take for what you want?

You have the option to do whatever it is that you want in life. Fortunately, we are free and whatever you may believe, we will likely only know this one life during this lifetime. As far as we know... unless there are generations of karma building in the black holes of space, probably nothing will matter once we die. Unless, we desire to leave behind a legacy, a family, love, a creation of some sort – but to each one of us, once we die, we MOST likely will have no idea the impact of what we left behind. Maybe...

Gregor Mendel is titled the “Father of Modern Genetics.” Only, his work wasn’t even acknowledged until 40 years after his death! He didn’t do it for the title. He loved plants and was a curious and methodical note-taker and experimenter. Do you think he imagined what impact he would bring to our understanding of living organisms? Some of his notes suggest he understood the potential impact. For all we know, he desired that recognition. Maybe that fuelled his motivation...? Unlikely- the knowledge was his fuel.

Awareness of your desires, why they are important to you, taking action, learning to ask for what you want and enjoying the process will naturally bring you serenity. Right? One would think. :)

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pamphletstoinspire · 5 years ago

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Part 7 - The Last Installment On Catholic Social Teaching: Solidarity, Part 2

Last time, in this space, we noted that the Church speaks of solidarity as both a “social principle” and a “moral virtue.” Further, the Church doesn’t hesitate to teach that the state has a role to play in helping to reform “structures of sin” into “structures of solidarity” — since such a task is simply more than an aggregate of individuals can achieve.

At this point, it is common for some to complain that the state intervening with the force of law (in some cases) to help alter structures of sin somehow makes it impossible for the individual to do his part too. But this is like saying the Civil Rights Act destroying the structure of sin called “Jim Crow Law” wrecked the possibility of private business owners hiring black people at a living wage. It’s like saying that if the state were to demolish the structure of sin called the abortion regime by overturning Roe v. Wade, it would ruin the economy by adding more workers and consumers to the capitalist system.

Still others complain that if the state creates a social safety net for the weakest members of society, this is “wealth redistribution,” and Scripture envisages nothing but personal charity as the way to provide for the common good. But, of course, the fact is that Jesus and Paul both tell us to pay our taxes — taxes are nothing but wealth redistribution for the common good. Paul insists in Romans 13 that it is the proper office of the state to provide for the common good. So long as it gets done and everybody benefits from the good thing our pooled resources help accomplish, what difference does it make if it was done through private charity or the work of the state? There are still plenty of opportunities after we have paid our taxes to help those in need.

This is not, however, to say that we are to then leave the work of solidarity and the common good to the state. On the contrary, the bulk of the task falls to us as husbands, wives, sons, daughters, workers, owners and citizens to make it our very personal and hands-on business to love our neighbors. After rendering his taxes unto Caesar, Jesus (who was so poor he had nowhere to lay his head) still found plenty of opportunities to go about doing good. It’s supposed to be the same with us.

According to the Church, solidarity has to be deeply personal, not farmed out to some faceless bureaucracy while we play couch potatoes. So the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church continues, “Solidarity is also an authentic moral virtue, not a ‘feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good. That is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.’”

This is what St. James is getting at when he says, “What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:14-17).

It’s the same point Jesus makes when he declares, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day, many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers’” (Matthew 7:21-23).

Solidarity is deeply threatening to much of Western — especially American — culture because we have deeply internalized the belief that “my rights” are the sole concern of law and the sole criterion of the good is “consent.” The idea that we stand in a permanent relationship of debt to God, to all who come before us and to all who come after us is abhorrent to many millions. Nonetheless, we are debtors, owing more than we can even imagine, much less repay. In the words of the Compendium:

“The principle of solidarity requires that men and women of our day cultivate a greater awareness that they are debtors of the society of which they have become part. They are debtors because of those conditions that make human existence livable, and because of the indivisible and indispensable legacy constituted by culture, scientific and technical knowledge, material and immaterial goods and by all that the human condition has produced.”

We owe our existence — and the existence of all that is — to God. But we also owe an unpayable debt to all who came before us and to the vast, interconnecting web of relationships that sustains us at this very hour. Without the civilization they built — without language, Mozart, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, the man who made the first shoe, the inventor of the wheel, the company who is making sure your electricity is on right now, the creators of the trucking network who made sure you got the meat for your Big Mac at lunch, the soldiers who stormed Normandy, your mom who taught you to tie your shoes, the Framers of the Constitution, the scribes who invented the alphabet, the people monitoring weather satellites, the nuns who invented hospitals, the people who discovered fire, the inventors of agriculture, the martyrs who died for Christ, the people who cooked up the scientific method, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, Shakespeare, Les Paul, Ed Sullivan and Gregor Mendel — you and I would be bawling beasts in a howling wilderness and in all likelihood would have died in our infancy.

But we don’t just owe a debt to those who came before us. We owe a debt to pay it forward, just as they have paid it forward to us. We owe this debt because God has commanded us to love one another as he has loved us. That is how the debt is repaid, and by repaying it, we love the God who needs nothing from us and to whom we can give nothing that is not already his. Similarly, when we refuse to give generously (and this includes, especially, the forgiveness of enemies), we stand at peculiar risk of facing the same judgment of the servant in the parable who, having been forgiven a debt of millions by the King, turns on a fellow servant who owes him a paltry sum and treats him mercilessly. When the King discovers his treatment of his fellow servant and his refusal to “pay forward” the mercy he received, the King condemns him — not for his sin, but for his refusal to grant the mercy he himself received (Matthew 18:23-35).

Therefore, the Compendium calls us to exhibit “the willingness to give oneself for the good of one’s neighbor, beyond any individual or particular interest … so that humanity’s journey will not be interrupted but remain open to present and future generations, all of them called together to share the same gift in solidarity.”

Most of this teaching is both explicit and implicit in the natural law: the law written on the heart — what J. Budziszewski called “what we can’t not know,” the law known as the Golden Rule. But in the kingdom of God, grace perfects nature and raises it to participate in the life of God himself. And so the Compendium tells us that solidarity reaches its climax in Jesus, the Son of Man, who joins himself to our humanity, becomes poor that we might become rich and becomes sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). As the Compendium says:

“The unsurpassed apex of the perspective indicated here is the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the New Man, who is one with humanity even to the point of ‘death on a cross’ (Philippians 2:8). In him it is always possible to recognize the living sign of that measureless and transcendent love of God-with-us, who takes on the infirmities of his people, walks with them, saves them and makes them one. In him and thanks to him, life in society too, despite all its contradictions and ambiguities, can be rediscovered as a place of life and hope, in that it is a sign of grace that is continuously offered to all and because it is an invitation to ever higher and more involved forms of sharing.”

In the kingdom of God, says the Compendium: “One’s neighbor is then not only a human being with his or her own rights and a fundamental equality with everyone else, but becomes the living image of God the Father, redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ and placed under the permanent action of the Holy Spirit. One’s neighbor must, therefore, be loved, even if an enemy, with the same love with which the Lord loves him or her; and for that person’s sake, one must be ready for sacrifice, even the ultimate one: to lay down one’s life for the brethren” (1 John 3:16 and John 15:13).

That is why the Church — and each of us — is bound to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world: because the ultimate aim of working for the common good is that each person become a participant, not merely in economic life, but in the divine life, a member of the Body of Christ.

Just as the point of Catholic economic teaching is that we become workers and owners of property as well as generous givers to the needs of others, so the point of salvation is that we become active participants in the work of God, not merely passive patients. So Paul teaches God has given each member of the body “varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:4-7).

For our destiny is that each person become a full participant in the joy of glorifying God, loving neighbor as oneself and the splendor of the new heaven and the new earth, where every member is given his or her gifts, as Paul teaches:

“… for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; so that we may no longer be children, tossed back and forth and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love” (Ephesians 4:11-16).

BY: MARK SHEA

From: https://www.pamphletstoinspire.com/

#catholic social teaching

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emilyiannielli · 5 years ago

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Heartbreak of dying in obscurity as your legend lives on through missed opportunities (page 1 of 2) Death is unpredictable, and so is fame. Only if these people knew fame before death! 20 of the most brightest and influential people who sadly died before they could see and appreciate fame and fortune, which was elusive to them in life but was well deserved in death. They left lasting legacies not even knowing it. Many tragically died in squalor and poverty and sadly, tragic deaths and some sadly committed suicide because they could no longer go on. 1. Vincent Van Gogh (World renowned artist) 2. Emily Dickinson (World class poet) 3. Galileo Galilei (Father of modern physics) 4. Edgar Allen Poe (World class writer) 5. Gregor Johann Mendel (Father of modern genetics ) 6. Henry Darger (World renowned artist) 7. Henry David Thoreau (World famous philosopher) 8. Alfred Wegener (World famous scientist) 9. El Greco (World renowned artist) 10. Franz Kafka (World class writer) https://www.instagram.com/p/ByyW9X9niGD/?igshid=1100c5zcvqi8a

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lodelss · 5 years ago

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Audrey Farley | Longreads | June 2019 | 13 minutes (3,381 words)

On May 28, Justice Clarence Thomas issued an eyebrow-raising opinion. It concurred with the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold an Indiana law that requires abortion providers to follow a certain protocol to dispose of fetal remains and prohibits abortions on the sole basis of a fetus’s sex, race, or disability. It wasn’t the justice’s position that caught attention, but rather his method. In speaking to the law’s second provision on selective abortions, Thomas launched into a history of eugenics, the debunked science of racial improvement that gained popularity in the early decades of the 20th century.

Arguing that abortion is “an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation,” the justice offered a lengthy discussion of the origins of the birth-control movement in the United States. In this discussion, written for the benefit of other courts considering abortion laws, Thomas explains how Planned Parenthood grew in tandem with state-sterilization campaigns, providing the foundation for the legalized abortion movement. (As historians corrected, legal abortion preceded birth control, as it was not regulated until the 19th century.) The justice cites the disturbing rhetoric of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who wrote in The Pivot of Civilization that birth control was a means of reducing the “ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.” While conceding that Sanger did not support abortion, Thomas nonetheless argues that “Sanger’s arguments about the eugenic value of birth control in securing ‘the elimination of the unfit’ apply with even greater force to abortion, making it significantly more effective as a tool of eugenics.”

Thomas does not offer concrete evidence that American women actually abort fetuses solely because of sex, race, or disability. Nor does he explore the possible reasons for abortions related to these criteria, such as financial hardship or the lack of societal support for individuals with chronic conditions. His grievance with abortion boils down to this point: the practice is ill-borne. This claim is inaccurate, for reasons that historians swiftly noted; it also obscures the fact that eugenics did in fact initiate many traditions in this country, not all of which are perceived to be heinous today. Thomas’s incautious opinion, which echoes other voices in the abortion debate, unwittingly invites a more nuanced discussion of eugenics’ legacies.

Shortly after the opinion’s release, critics faulted the justice for “using eugenics as a rhetorical sledgehammer.” Adam Cohen, whose book on eugenics Thomas repeatedly cited, observed that Thomas’s argument “relied on a kind of historical guilt-by-association,” rather than on a fully baked thesis. Cohen stressed that, like Sanger, most leading eugenicists actually opposed abortion. From his perspective, Thomas’s opinion was a thinly veiled attempt “to put a new weapon in the arsenal of the anti-abortion movement” by posing this question to opponents: “If you do not buy the argument that abortion ends a human life, how about the idea that it is an attempt to restrict reproduction in order to ‘improve’ the human race?”

State-level lawmakers are testing the same tactic. Six states have introduced legislation banning abortions solely due to a prenatal Down Syndrome diagnosis, and those championing these bills repeatedly invoke eugenics. A representative in Pennsylvania said of the legislation, “We shouldn’t allow eugenics to prevent babies with Down Syndrome from being given the chance at life.” A lawmaker in Utah stated that “selective abortion . . . is the very definition of eugenics.” Pope Francis agrees, saying selective abortion after a diagnosis “is the expression of an inhuman eugenics mentality.”

However one feels about the ethics of aborting a fetus diagnosed with Down Syndrome, it is imperative to recognize the key differences between eugenic sterilization and abortion: who makes the decision and why. As Cohen explains in his response to Thomas, in the case of eugenic sterilization, the state acts in the (alleged) collective interests of the population; in the case of abortion, a pregnant person acts in their own interests or those they attribute to the fetus, as in cases where the fetus is not likely to live long outside the womb. For this reason, “A woman in Indiana who has an abortion because the child will be born with a severe disability is not acting eugenically — she is not trying to uplift the human race.”

Some of Thomas’s critics allow that societal biases do influence individual notions of a worthy life, which, in turn, impact decisions related to abortion. But these critics insist that restricting abortion will not resolve these prejudices. HuffPost reporter Lydia O’Connor attributes the practice of sex-selective abortion in Asia, which Thomas references, to pervasive sexism. Like Mara Hvistendahl, who published a book on the subject, she maintains that taking away one of women’s civil liberties is not going to reverse sexism. In fact, restricting marginalized persons’ pregnancy choices extends eugenics-era practices. University of Michigan history professor Alexandra Minna Stern told The Washington Post, “That’s the through line that I see, in terms of state-mandated reproductive control.” From her perspective, demanding that women give birth is not so different than preventing them from doing so.

Stern’s comment suggests the problem, for Thomas and other lawmakers, of drawing upon eugenics to legislate against abortion: there exist many other “through lines” between early-century race crusaders and contemporary institutions that the political right does not care to acknowledge. Anti-immigration legislation is an obvious one. Congress passed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, banning entry from Asian countries and restricting the numbers of Italians and Eastern Europeans, expressly to prevent further “pollution” of the gene pool by intellectually and morally “defective” immigrants. Republican lawmakers’ public comments suggest that the same logic informs current immigration policies. President Trump has repeatedly defended his support of a Mexican border wall on the grounds that it will keep rapists, drug dealers, and criminals out of the country. The president has also said that America needs fewer immigrants from “shithole countries” and “more people from places like Norway.”

“Family values” as we know them today also harken back to eugenics, when authorities first determined that the nuclear family was essential to protecting the white race. But conservatives are not likely to trace this lineage either. Nor do conservatives acknowledge the eugenic mechanisms rampant within the criminal justice system. In 2013, a California audit found that 39 of the 144 women in the state’s prison system who underwent a bilateral tubal ligation between 2005 and 2013 did so under conditions of missing or dubious consent. In 27 of these 39 cases, a physician failed to sign the inmate’s consent form certifying the inmate’s mental competence and understanding of the procedure’s lasting effects. In 18 cases, the waiting period between the inmate’s consent and the date of surgery was potentially violated. The 144 sterilized inmates shared a profile: they were between 26 and 40 years of age, were poorly educated, and had been pregnant five or more times. In several southern states, judges have issued standing orders promising women sentence reductions in exchange for birth control implants.

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These examples highlight how both the logic and practice of eugenics endure, despite the fact that many Americans situate eugenics in the remote past. They reveal that concerns about the “stock” of the nation continue to shape social and legal policies, even as citizens agree on the moral atrocities of the eugenics movement. But not all of the legacies of eugenics are as easy to stamp with a “toxic” label. There are many eugenics-inspired traditions that people of diverse political leanings would regard as socially valuable, or at least largely innocuous: genetic science, baby contests, couples counseling, IQ tests, and gifted education, for instance. These traditions have developed purposes beyond their eugenic ones, and thereby further complicate Thomas’s rhetorical maneuver. They suggest the illogic of simply lifting historical practices from their context and dropping them onto the present.

Genetics flourished in the United States to undergird sterilization campaigns. Realizing the need to expand upon Gregor Mendel’s research on inheritance patterns, which had inspired Francis Galton to conceive eugenics in England in the 19th century, Charles Davenport founded the Eugenics Records Office to apply studies on inheritance to the burgeoning social movement in America. Davenport and his peers also supported the work of pioneering geneticists like Thomas Hunt Morgan, whose work on fruit flies later earned him a Nobel Prize. For many years, “human genetics and eugenics were one and the same,” Edwin Black explains in War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. This changed when geneticists like Morgan denounced eugenics as unscientific, claiming that it disregarded the role of the environment in the development of traits and that the inheritance of positive or negative traits extended well beyond one generation. When Nazi Germany further tarnished the movement by drawing upon its idiom of racial improvement to execute genocide, eugenicists rebranded, adopting the more respected term “genetics.” They quietly changed the titles of professional organizations and journals; and the President of the American Eugenics Society advised the organization’s members to look to genetics, as well as the sciences of population and psychology, “for the factual material on which to build an acceptable philosophy of eugenics.”

Thomas acknowledges this chronology in his opinion, but he does not suggest that we abandon genetic science altogether. And why would he? The study of genes has greatly contributed to medical knowledge, as well as to the development of much-needed drugs. It has helped untold numbers of people to become parents regardless of their race or ethnicity, and it has saved the lives — in some cases, though interventions in utero — of people who would previously have been classified “unfit.” In another ironic twist, a Guardian columnist explains, genetics has “singularly demonstrated that race as a scientific concept holds no water.”

Not unlike genetics — though with considerably less impact — baby contests, like the one Gerber hosts annually, have also shape-shifted over the years. These competitions began as eugenic exhibits at state fairs to promote infants with “a sound mind in a sound body.” The founders of “Better Babies” contests were concerned about high infant mortality at a time when the average American woman was producing only half of the children she had birthed before the Civil War. The contests transformed into Fitter Family contests, where adults won medals based on the whiteness of their pigment, the arch of their noses, the straightness of their teeth, and the flawlessness of their family trees. “Yea, I have a goodly heritage,” read the winning medals, assuring recipients that they should get married and have children — plenty of children. Today, contests like Gerber’s may seem silly and may even provide an occasion for the public to express preferences for certain physical traits, just as advocates of “Better Babies” contests did. But the tradition has certainly moved away from its eugenic roots. Contests celebrate children from all nationalities and social classes, are inclusive of babies with developmental disabilities, and fund programs in low-income communities, once the target of eugenics campaigns. Their purpose is corporate engagement — not the betterment of any specific race.

When Nazi Germany further tarnished the movement by drawing upon its idiom of racial improvement to execute genocide, eugenicists rebranded, adopting the more respected term ‘genetics.’

Perhaps the most useful example of institutional transformation, however, is couples counseling, since it developed precisely to carry eugenics into the present day. Whereas eugenicists initially leveraged genetics and baby contests to expand public support for their movement, they promoted couples counseling to disguise eugenic practices from a society increasingly wary of rhetoric about racial integrity. Nonetheless, this tradition also developed social functions beyond its original one, suggesting the need for measured historical inquiry — attention to the influence of the past without disregarding present realities. Like reproductive technologies, couples counseling can be deployed as a “tool of eugenic manipulation”; but its origins alone are not enough to establish it as one.

As a therapeutic practice, couples counseling emerged in the 1930s to complement sterilization campaigns, which were drawing criticism for relying on shoddy science. The father of the tradition, Paul Popenoe, envisioned counseling as the “positive” side of the eugenics coin. (If sterilization prevented the “unfit” from reproducing, marriage counseling saw that the “fit” reproduced.) Popenoe had gained recognition in the 1910s, when he visited asylums across California to inspect inmates subjected to the state’s new sterilization law. Based on his findings, Popenoe argued in Journal of Heredity that approximately ten million Americans — then, a tenth of the population — should be sterilized. Of course, he wasn’t alone in thinking this; Davenport and Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office were campaigning across the country for laws like the one in California. When Popenoe became secretary of the Human Betterment Foundation and founder of the Southern California branch of the American Eugenics Society, he continued to advocate for involuntary sterilization. But he also devoted attention to another “evil” behind the decrease of the fitter races: feminism. This obsession enabled him to adapt eugenics in its time of crisis.

In a 1918 textbook co-authored with Roswell Johnson, Applied Eugenics, Popenoe defined feminism as a foolish effort to eliminate biological, political, and economic differentiation between the sexes. In that book, he predicted that feminism would benefit the race by inadvertently reducing the number of feminists within the population: “Under the new regime a large proportion of such women do not marry and accordingly have few if any children to inherit their defects. Hence the average level of maternal instinct of the women of America is likely to rise.” Popenoe grew concerned when the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment (affording women the right to vote) strengthened the movement. He didn’t like how, after gaining suffrage, women began to demand access to other institutions, like higher education. He believed an education distracted a woman from her most important role (you guessed it: motherhood!). In Applied Eugenics, he and Johnson wrote that the typical college girl “had been rendered so cold and unattractive, so overstuffed intellectually and starved emotionally that a typical man does not desire to spend the rest of his life in her company.”

What if cautiously accepting certain institutions in spite of their nefarious roots is necessary to their transformation?

Popenoe also blamed Margaret Sanger for the degradation of the race. She had promised that birth control pills would weed out “idiots,” delinquents, alcoholics, and prisoners. In reality, Popenoe complained, the lower classes were breeding faster than ever, while middle- and upper-class women were taking the pill after two children or even before giving birth to any. (Sanger’s promotion of birth control among all classes and races eventually led to her excommunication from the eugenics movement, a fact that Thomas overlooks in his opinion.)

In 1930, Popenoe opened a counseling clinic to redress the devastating impact of feminism on the American family and instruct on the principles of good breeding. He wanted to ensure that only certain people got married and that, once married, these people stayed married and reproduced. Dubbed “Mr. Marriage,” Popenoe advised dating couples of their genetic risks and used a personality test to assess compatibility. He intervened in disputes and scolded individuals for disobeying gender conventions. In 1953, Popenoe founded and authored the popular advice column “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” in Ladies’ Home Journal.

Thanks to Popenoe, marriage clinics popped up across the country, giving rise to the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, which today represents over 24,000 marriage and family therapists. The long half-life of the early marriage industry contradicts popular belief that eugenics waned after World War II, when Hitler’s unpopularity and scientific challenges to the movement led to decreased involuntary sterilizations. As Wendy Kline explains in Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom, eugenicists simply found alternative methods to achieve their means: talk therapy and “voluntary” sterilization, among others. After Popenoe died in 1979, his torch passed to figures like James Dobson, founder of the organization Focus on the Family and host of the radio program of the same name; Popenoe’s own son, David, who writes prolifically on traditional family values; and other crusaders for the nuclear family in churches and local communities.

But wouldn’t it be wrong, both logically and morally, to suggest that couples counseling doesn’t meaningfully help people today? Stigmas already prevent some individuals from pursuing this resource; discrediting it because of its dubious heritage could mean that even fewer people benefit from counseling — and therefore, from the social and economic advantages of marriage. Isn’t this scenario similar to what Popenoe had in mind when he initiated couples counseling? What if cautiously accepting certain institutions in spite of their nefarious roots is necessary to their transformation?

In the mid-century, religious and community leaders made up the vast majority of couples counselors; by the end of the century, psychologists, social workers, and trained professionals primarily fulfilled this role. With this changing of the guard, there was a shift in thinking about marriage: from purely moral terms to behavioral and medical ones. Even if moral biases continued to influence individual practitioners (as they do all human services), counselors increasingly considered research and evidence-based practices in the therapy setting. It is estimated that almost half of American couples today have attended counseling with a partner, with the majority finding it useful. Insofar as it allows individuals to repair relationships with their partners, family counseling can greatly improve people’s lives. Any critique of counseling should consider this reality. The intentions of its early proponents are far less relevant, and we do more to subvert those intentions by accepting counseling than by nixing it.

When we impose a dark history onto the present, whether for political or moral gains, we often just re-inflict the violence of that past on those we nominally seek to protect.

Thomas’s abortion-as-eugenics-via-birth-control argument fails precisely because he tries to cut-and-paste eugenics history, overlooking differences between eugenic visions of birth control and popular attitudes about birth control (including abortion) today. The irony, of course, is that Thomas’s genetic fallacy rehearses eugenicists’ hereditary logic, placing undue emphasis on origins. Whereas eugenicists dehumanized certain people because of their perceived poor roots, Thomas discredits birth control because the roots of the organization that championed it (Planned Parenthood) entangle with those of eugenics. Had he applied more scrutiny to his subjects, he might have acknowledged that many disabled persons and people of color support birth control and abortion, believing both practices to provide economic security and expand their civil liberties. If eugenicists imagined birth control weeding out certain groups, many members of marginalized communities regard it as a technology necessary to broader struggles for social justice. In Sanger’s day, African American scholars like W.E.B. Dubois thought the same, supporting birth control while adamantly opposing involuntary sterilization.

Had Thomas more carefully considered the differences between state-sponsored sterilization campaigns and abortion practices today, he might have realized the ways in which abortion actually does intersect with eugenics. Toward this end, he might have examined the pressures placed upon certain women to abort. Cuts to prenatal care under Medicaid or caps on welfare benefits based on family size are deliberate measures to prevent poor women from reproducing. This becomes very clear when lawmakers promoting such policies suggest we need to stop women from having babies just to get another few hundred dollars a month. The burden that the medical profession places upon disabled women to abort for non-medical reasons is also deserving of discussion. But rather than acknowledging these efforts to restrict women’s reproduction in the interests of society, Thomas targets the women who are subjected to them. In doing so, he forecloses meaningful conversation about how the logic of eugenics truly reverberates in our time.

Of course, Thomas is not the first to invoke a historical atrocity to discredit something or someone in the present, nor will he be the last. Last year, revelations of Hans Asperger’s Nazi connections prompted some to question the clinical significance of his findings on Asperger’s syndrome, as well as the use of the term to describe certain individuals on the autism spectrum. Like the invocation of eugenics, this instance raises questions about when — and how — to consider backstories when evaluating practices that seem neutral or even positive today. We need to properly contextualize past and present practices to avoid abstractions like Thomas’s. It is equally important to engage the voices of those impacted. When we impose a dark history onto the present, whether for political or moral gains, we often just re-inflict the violence of that past on those we nominally seek to protect.

***

Audrey Farley recently earned a PhD in English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she studied 20th-century American literature and culture. Her writing has appeared or will soon appear in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Washington Post, Narratively, Lady Science, Public Books, ASAP, and Marginalia Review of Books.

Editor: Ben Huberman Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel Illustrator: Tom Peake

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filiplig · 7 years ago

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Moalem, Sharon - Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives—and Our Lives Change Our Genes

page 2 | location 23-30 | Added on Monday, 5 October 2015 22:47:35

Ever since Gregor Mendel’s mid-nineteenth-century* investigations into the inherited traits of pea plants were used to set the foundations for our understanding of genetics, we’ve been taught that who we are is a resolutely predictable matter of the genes we’ve inherited from previous generations. A little from Mom. A little from Dad. Whip it up, and there’s you. That calcified view of genetic inheritance is what students in middle school classrooms are still studying to this day when they map out pedigree charts in an effort to make sense of their fellow students’ eye color, curly hair, tongue rolling, or hairy fingers. And the lesson, delivered as though on stone tablets from Mendel himself, is that we don’t have much of a choice in the matter of what we get or what we give, because our genetic legacy was completely fixed when our parents conceived us. But that’s all wrong.

page 4 | location 47-50 | Added on Monday, 5 October 2015 22:50:12

War, peace, feast, famine, diaspora, disease—if our ancestors went through it and survived, we’ve inherited it. And once we’ve got it, we’re that much more likely to pass it on to the next generation in one way or another. That might mean cancer. It might mean Alzheimer’s disease. It might mean obesity. But it might also mean longevity. It might mean grace under fire. And it might just mean happiness itself.

page 34 | location 512-516 | Added on Tuesday, 6 October 2015 22:48:23

All of which prompts us to ask, why the difference in expression? Because our genes do not respond to our lives in a binary fashion. As we will come to learn, and contrary to Mendel’s findings, even if our inherited genes seem set in stone, the way they express themselves can be anything but. Whereas our inheritance may have been initially understood through a black-and-white Mendelian lens, today we’re starting to understand the power of seeing things in full and genetically expressive color.

page 223 | location 3415-3417 | Added on Wednesday, 7 October 2015 21:52:58

Doucleff (2012, Feb. 11). Anatomy of a tear-jerker: Why does Adele’s “Someone Like You” make everyone cry? Science has found the formula. The Wall Street Journal.

page 40 | location 603-607 | Added on Wednesday, 7 October 2015 21:56:16

But there is plenty of room for improvisation built into our lives. Timing. Timbre. Tone. Volume. Dynamics. Through tiny chemical processes, your body is using each gene you carry like a musician uses an instrument. It can be played loudly or softly. It can be played quickly or slowly. And it can even be played in different ways, as needed, in much the way that the incomparable Yo-Yo Ma can make his 1712 Stradivarius cello play everything from Brahms to bluegrass. That’s genetic expression.

page 132 | location 2013-2017 | Added on Thursday, 15 October 2015 23:08:46

To understand ciliopathies, it’s important to understand cilia and the genetics that are behind them. And to do that, first you must know that cilia are everywhere—and I mean absolutely everywhere. While you might never have heard of them, they’ve been looking out for you and your well-being since before you were born. Like a modified form of touch, some of your cells even use cilia to physically sense their way around their microscopic world. However, there are other compelling examples of the importance of using touch to make sense of the world around us.

page 205 | location 3138-3142 | Added on Wednesday, 21 October 2015 22:55:02

A good way to visualize this is to picture a football stadium in which almost everyone is wearing a white shirt, save for every single person in every tenth row—those people are all wearing red. Look around the stadium. What do you see? A sea of red. Now imagine that everyone wearing a red shirt is also holding an envelope. And imagine that in every envelope there is a piece of paper with a sentence on it. And imagine that all of those sentences, put together, tell a story about everyone else in the stadium. That’s how genetic research into rare diseases works.

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lodelss · 5 years ago

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We Still Don’t Know How to Navigate the Cultural Legacy of Eugenics

Audrey Farley | Longreads | June 2019 | 13 minutes (3,381 words)

Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

When Nazi Germany further tarnished the movement by drawing upon its idiom of racial improvement to execute genocide, eugenicists rebranded, adopting the more respected term ‘genetics.’

What if cautiously accepting certain institutions in spite of their nefarious roots is necessary to their transformation?

When we impose a dark history onto the present, whether for political or moral gains, we often just re-inflict the violence of that past on those we nominally seek to protect.

***

Editor: Ben Huberman Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel Illustrator: Tom Peake

from Blogger http://bit.ly/2Ksf1u0 via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Blogger

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