In the name of science: the conceptual and ideological background of Charles Richet’s eugenics

Abstract

The French physiologist and Nobel Prize winner Charles Richet was the author of an impressive quantity of writings, including novels and poetry. He was an out-and-out eugenicist, convinced that "intentional, conscious, scientific, and methodical" selection could achieve "any result, provided we have enough patience." He believed that the quantitative and qualitative growth of the population was of vital importance for France. In La sélection humaine (1919) and other writings, he dreamt of conscious selection to create "intellectual élites." This process would be crowned by the production of a "higher human nature, a real surhumanité." A staunch believer in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, Richet combined Darwinism and Lamarckism.

“Never sacrifice anything to laboratory work”: The “physiological psychology” of Charles Richet (1875–1905)

“…Several canonical 'founders' of psychology like G. Stanley Hall and James McKeen Cattell were also supportive of eugenics. Judging Richet's eugenics in light of later Nazism leads to anachronisms and absurd amalgams but there remains an ambiguity about his supposed anti-semitism throughout his intellectual journey and his stance is not always clear (La Vergata, 2018). The historian Anne Carol (1995) considered that, as Richet was far from the only scientist to have shared these ideas, it is improper to make him an exemplary case, to use history to judge or demonize him.…”

“…For all these reasons, Richet deserves, in our opinion, to have a place among the important figures of the beginnings of psychology, especially in France, by integrating his metapsychics as an example of application of his scientific agenda, although this does not justify rehabilitating all his conclusions and especially his later drifts toward a scientific eugenics (Carol, 1995;La Vergata, 2018).…”

Contextualizando The descent of man, de Charles Darwin: debates calorosos persistem após 150 anos de sua publicação

“…29 Fizeram parte de movimentos eugênicos ou sustentaram publicamente a eugenia nomes conhecidos como: o francês Charles Richet (1866Richet ( -1944, importante nome da fisiologia e da imunologia, ganhador do Prêmio Nobel (La Vergata, 2018);o brasileiro Monteiro Lobato (1882-1948, escritor reconhecido por suas obras literárias infantis (Bizzo, 2012, p. 81);o britânico Karl Pearson (1857-1936, matemático e bioestatístico que contribuiu para a meteorologia (Delzell & Poliak, 2013); a americana Margaret Sanger (1879Sanger ( -1966, importante nome do movimento feminista e militante do controle da natalidade (Sanger, 1921) O ofício da história da ciência, especialmente desde o contextualismo e estudos culturais do final do século passado instalaram as desconstruções míticas sobre os personagens das ciências, muitas vezes pouco compreendidas pelos cientistas apegados a seus heróis modelares do campo em que atuam. Por essa razão, vale repetir aqui a síntese da reputação de Darwin que está refletida na historiografia da ciência atual:…”