UCL to investigate eugenics conference secretly held on campus

I'm not advocating banning meetings with fascists to discuss their racist theories. What I am advocating is banning them from pretending they are serious scientific conferences at upper universities.

It's like the climate change denialists - they are pseudo-scientists funded by oil and coal industries, yet they are always seeking dubious academic credentials and the pretense of proper science.

Precisely this.

It isn't no platforming for physcists to refuse to enage with flat earthers. It's hard enough as it is without having to have exausting pointless "debeates" with cranks. All the theories surrounding racism have been largely debunked.

The question is though what counts as fascist. Eugenics is a real thing and the potential for it will only increase as advances in biology occur. As repulsive as I find the practise of eugenics on humans it is something that could be done. The biology and philosphy surrounding it does deserve a space in academia probably.

You might not be concerned about bad science, but I doubt that UCL share your lack of concern. Clearly the aim here was to covertly arrange the conference and then use the good name of a top university, UCL, to give it a spurious academic credibility that is totally unmerited.

The thing is you have no idea whether this was a genuine scientific meeting or whether it was as you describe (and the only evidence that it was is the article's unfounded claim, which you will keep repeating in the hope that someone will magically transform it into proof).

There are a number of things that don't ring true here.

This is the 2015 conference website

http://emilkirkegaard.dk/LCI15/

It doesn't look the hole in a corner affair that has been previously suggested.

However, you would think that a genuine academic conference "looking for empirical studies of intelligence, personality and behaviour." would find a wide variety of papers, from people with a wide variety of viewpoints, but only three of the listed papers didn't relate to heredity. One dealt with pre-natal poisoning as affecting intelligence and two related specifically to the USA and seemed to be scoring purely political points.

What is James Thompson's day job? Most people don't go on about their honorary positions.

Precisely this.

It isn't no platforming for physcists to refuse to enage with flat earthers. It's hard enough as it is without having to have exausting pointless "debeates" with cranks. All the theories surrounding racism have been largely debunked.

The question is though what counts as fascist. Eugenics is a real thing and the potential for it will only increase as advances in biology occur. As repulsive as I find the practise of eugenics on humans it is something that could be done. The biology and philosphy surrounding it does deserve a space in academia probably.

How do you know that their science is bad before you’ve heard what they have to say?

Anything said against SJW orthodoxy is automatically bad science and doesn't need to be further exposed. That itself is SJW orthodoxy, as demonstrated by the posters here.

Yawn.

Are you suggesting UCL knew all about it and had openly hosted it by intention, not had it sneaked on them, as they implied?

How do you know that their science is bad before you’ve heard what they have to say?

I doubt they knew the precise content, but I suspect if you had phoned up their conference office, they would have known the conference existed, who had organised it and the fact that UCL was associated with it.

I can't picture (for example) Imperial hosting a conference on the flat earth or Cambridge on the proof for UFOs.

A fund at Trinity College Cambridge is the largest financial backer of psychical research in the country


https://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/perrott-warrick-project/


https://www.sheldrake.org/the-perrott-warrick-fund

The Psychical Research Society indeed was founded from the College.


I think your predictive abilities leave something to be desired. May I suggest a training course.


https://www.astrology.org.uk/summer-school/


Anyway, all these people getting stressed about this IQ conference should have some therapy. Where better, than at the annual conference of the Society of Homeopaths which this year is being held at UCL's School of Pharmacy (last year was LMH)


https://homeopathy-soh.org/events/annual-conference-and-agm-2/

A fund at Trinity College Cambridge is the largest financial backer of psychical research in the country


https://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/perrott-warrick-project/


https://www.sheldrake.org/the-perrott-warrick-fund

The Psychical Research Society indeed was founded from the College.


I think your predictive abilities leave something to be desired. May I suggest a training course.


https://www.astrology.org.uk/summer-school/


Anyway, all these people getting stressed about this IQ conference should have some therapy. Where better, than at the annual conference of the Society of Homeopaths which this year is being held at UCL's School of Pharmacy (last year was LMH)


https://homeopathy-soh.org/events/annual-conference-and-agm-2/

I'm not advocating banning meetings with fascists to discuss their racist theories. What I am advocating is banning them from pretending they are serious scientific conferences at upper universities.

It's like the climate change denialists - they are pseudo-scientists funded by oil and coal industries, yet they are always seeking dubious academic credentials and the pretense of proper science.

Isn't Iceland using eugenics by eliminating down syndrome?



Eugenics is a positive thing imo and the only argument against it is the Nazi's which is pretty weak


Even if you had a child with down syndrome and you're proud of that child

Surely you would rather that child not have down syndrome so they can live a better life?

What science?

Exactly. I've absolutely no idea what science because I haven't heard what they've got to say. Neither you nor I can criticize anything these people are saying until we've actually heard it.

I am struggling to understand why you should be so outraged at this, assuming what you say is true.

Surely "serious scientists" will be able to intellectually eviscerate these "pseudo scientists" in open debate so where is your problem?

The objection on our side of politics is the refusal to countenance such debate.

A lot of the political concern about so called "eugenics" is moral not scientific, anyway. Take the abolition of Downs Syndrome. That is extremely easy technically, indeed Iceland have all but eliminated it from their country, for example.

The debate is of morality, and public policy, not scientific truth or efficacy.