Genetic Science versus Authoritarianism on the Left: The Disruption of yet another Academic Meeting by Radical Protestors

Abstract

A 'People Against Eugenics' mob recently trespassed on a London science meeting and succeeded in terminating the proceedings. Their shouting and other disruptive measures prevented sixty Galton Institute conferencers from hearing papers by Professor Glayde Whitney and Emeritus Professor Arthur Jensen. The meeting was closed prematurely when police ordered the premises to be evacuated by the conferencers as well as the trespassers. Key Words: Galton Institute, reproduction technology, eugenics, divereity, intolerance, scientific freedom Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal - well-meaning but without understanding. U.S. Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) in a dissenting opinion of 1927. Cited in F. A. Hayek, 1960, in The Constitution of Liberty.' At midday on Friday, 17 September 1999, as members and guests of the Galton institute settled themselves to listen to a lecture on 'Reproduction Technology for a New Eugenics' by psychologist Glayde Whitney of Florida State University, some two dozen demonstrators (mainly around age twenty) invaded the ticket-only occasion in London's Regent's Park, shouted to make the professor inaudible, and unfurled (with some difficulty) a banner reading DIVERSITY, NOT EUGENICS. The sixty-or-so conferencers rn who ranged from young female nurses and family planning counsellors to senior Cambridge University dons (one a great-nephew of the famed economist J. M. Keynes) mpleaded with the protestors to desist from their trespass and to listen to speakers Glayde Whitney and Arthur Jensen before expressing their objections, or to hold their own meeting which a Galton Institute deputation would attend. No agreement on any of these plans being forthcoming, police were called lest more serious disorder occur. Arriving quickly, some twenty police consulted the Zoological Society of London, owner of the Meeting Rooms in Regents Park just opposite London Zoo), and ordered that the conference building should be evacuated. Amidst popping flashlights, the conference participants, some of whom had travelled considerable distances to attend the annual gathering, and the twenty-odd protestors were expelled into Regent's Park and the Meeting Rooms locked behind them. Some of the demonstrators sought to identify and interrogate individual conferencers, typically pretending to be reporters from the Guardian and Observer newspapers. But when it became clear that both the Zoological Society and the Galton Institute had no plans to continue the meeting elsewhere, and were prepared to abandon even the agreeable luncheon scheduled for members, the conferencers dispersed, heavy with a sense of unbelieving dismay. Progress in Genetic Science: The Reality Ironically, after a talk to the Galton Institute the previous day by the witty, genial and silver-haired Richard Lynn, Brand had suggested that with the rapid advances being made in genetic science, international anti-racist such as Stephen Rose, Stephen Ceci, Stephen Gould and Stephen Jones) might soon embrace neo-eugenics as the obvious way to create the equal society they have so long sought - by narrowing the standard deviation for IQ after a century of expensive social-environmentalist dispensations had failed to make progress toward that objective. However, it would seem likely that the youngsters of 'People Against Eugenics' and those who are behind them will keep alive for a while the absurd opposition of post-1945 Leftists to acknowledging the importance of genetic factors in human psychology. 'People Against Eugenics' will make it harder for the 'Steves' to wriggle off the hook that they have fashioned for themselves. After all the demonstrations against Jensen from 1969 to 1999, there must be a chance that one day the Left will be remembered as anti-hereditarian dinosaurs trying vainly - as extreme 'behaviorism', 'social environmentalism', 'interactionism' and 4constructivism' were in turn invalidated - to deny the influence of biology on psychology. …