Tonight we will look into two contemporary characters of two different kinds – the Spiritist Allan Kardec, and the eugenicist materialist Charles Darwin. We will read selections from Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, look into some details of how eugenicists thought and how they used mathematics, and the IQ test to help give rise to today’s brand of transhumanism. I will then provide a critique Gould’s argument that Darwin should be excused for not going against the grain of his society’s prejudices, by showing how Allan Kardec, through his studies on spirit communication and psychology, managed to transcend various prejudices of his time that Darwin in fact adopted sexist and eugenic speculations into his reductionistic formulae known hyperbolically as the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Spiritists and Eugenicists on Women and Race
