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89 Paul Kammerer was a visionary––so said his friend Hugo Iltis. He lived at a time when utopian visions of the new science of eugenics were emerging in biology, and his ideas on biology as a positive force in social evolution began to appear as early as 1910. In 1913, in Sind wir Sklaven der Vergangenheit oder Werkmeister der Zukunft? (Are we slaves of the past or masters of the future?), Kammerer expressed his enduring hope for an improved humanity.1 The advances he envisioned went beyond better living conditions, good housing, good nutrition, health, and medical reform. For Kammerer, life was malleable at its core; external influence offered a lever for change—a way to become the craftsmen of a more just world. The changes he imagined did not just apply biology to society; they went further to leverage a productive power inherent in life and harness it to craft a biologically more ethical humanity. That power was the power of development. Natural science, Kammerer said, could fulfill the task of “unleashing the tremendous forces that are still bound in human plasma in the direction of forward development .”2 It was a eugenic vision; Kammerer advocated eugenics and shared many of its goals. But his eugenics was one that privileged development. For this reason, he downplayed selection, instead stressing methods that differed radically from those prevailing in the mainstream eugenics of the 1920s and 1930s. Eugenics now serves as the epitome of science gone ethically awry. But in Kammerer’s youth, it was accepted as the ultimate promise of scientific progress , a promise widely shared by international scientists on all sides of the political spectrum. Kammerer assimilated this promise and some of the hierarchy of the concept; but his approach was distinct from the version that flourished in America in the wake of World War I. He eventually became sharply critical of what he called “selectionist” eugenics. His vision for human improvement aimed to replace the socially imposed selective elimination of the “unfit” with 5 “Productive” Eugenics Harnessing the Energies of Development 90 PART I CONSTRUCTING HEREDITY a eugenics based in the inheritance of acquired characteristics and guided by the view that improvement in the human condition must respect the inherent worth of all individuals. Rather than sacrificing supposedly “unfit” individuals for the group, he saw the fates of individuals and the fates of groups as organically connected. He believed that a eugenics guided by environmental change that respected individual rights could even shape a human altruistic impulse, one already present in incipient form, and mold it into a full-blown biological drive for the general good. Kammerer used his science to build a network of concepts into the intellectual base needed to justify and promote his alternative eugenics. These concepts included the inheritance of acquired characteristics; a stress on symbiosis, or mutual aid, as a positive force in the process of evolution; and the biological tradeoff between fecundity—sheer numbers of potential young—and the quality of resources devoted to the care of fewer offspring. Their integration was the basis of his “productive eugenics,” and central to that integration was Kammerer ’s approach to the relationship between heredity and development. After 1910, mainstream eugenics paid scant attention to development. Productive eugenics, on the other hand, was based in Kammerer’s belief that the malleability inherent in life’s developmental processes included changeable heredity; through it, science could remold humanity in ways dictated by altered environmental conditions that reached to life’s core. For Kammerer, the approach was more scientifically valid, more effective, and more ethical than the selectionist methods of most mainstream eugenics. In the context of the socialist values shaped by a largely Jewish intelligentsia in Vienna during the interwar years, Kammerer’s commitment to social reform via development intensified his desire for an alternative eugenics that rejected the forced sterilization and fixed racial hierarchies that increasingly dictated mainstream eugenics. Selectionist Eugenics Eugenics was proposed in England in the 1870s by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. Galton had been inspired by the work of his famous relative to found a new science that would apply Darwin’s mechanism of selection to the selective breeding of “good” humans. Before 1900, that science had been largely theoretical. But after the turn of the century, the international eugenics movement grew in influence with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s laws of heredity, the development of the chromosomal theory of genetics, and increasing public concern about perceived threats to...

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