Sunday, July 25, 2010

Haekeling the Origin of Biometrics

Haekel's Radiolarium illustrations
BTC-   I made a discovery following up on the work of Ernst Haekel.  His study and art revolving around single celled organisms were painstakingly documented in the beautiful film, Proteus.  Haekel's achilles heel in social politics was validating something called "racial anthropology". This is a discipline which teaches the superiority of one human race to another as scientific fact.

This part of Haekel's history is shocking.  His later ideas in naturalist philosophy steered into the notion that all of nature is inextractable from diety or "God" concept, including all mankind.  However, I seem to recall the Hindu's having a similar belief but managing to hang onto the caste system.  The unfortunate truth is that Haekel's take on racial politics influenced some of the greatest ethnic cleansing despots in world history.

This throwback along with other observations make me uneasy.  I recently noticed a pattern with a lot of socio-political theory; which has pitched America right back into the late 1880's and 1890's - anti-trust, monopolies, Muckracking [whistleblowing] journalism, the critical mass adoption of more technology, entertaining world policing, pre-world war conditions and the Wall Street collusion with the Senate branch of the government.

From wikipedia's entry on scientific racism : 
Like scientific racism, eugenics grew popular in the early 20th century, and both ideas influenced Nazi racial policies and Nazi eugenics. In 1901, Galton, Karl Pearson (1857–1936) and Walter F. R. Weldon (1860–1906) founded the Biometrika scientific journal, which promoted biometrics and statistical analysis of heredity.Charles Davenport (1866–1944) was briefly involved in the review. In Race Crossing in Jamaica (1929), he made statistical arguments that biological and cultural degradation followed white and black interbreeding. Davenport was connected to Nazi Germany before and during World War II. In 1939 he wrote a contribution to thefestschrift for Otto Reche (1879–1966), who became an important figure within the plan to remove populations considered "inferior" from eastern Germany.

Even some fashionistas started to get wise.  

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