tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9054466497850003796.post1553813782935566878..comments2023-02-08T04:38:31.567-08:00Comments on Visual Culture and Evolution: An Online Discussion: 4/10: EugenicsCPNAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02438216163752750156noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9054466497850003796.post-83079993101030414612010-04-11T10:50:05.584-07:002010-04-11T10:50:05.584-07:00Christina Cogdell’s work highlights the intimate r...Christina Cogdell’s work highlights the intimate relationship between design (and architecture) and eugenics in the 1930s. This relationship, I would argue, continued until the punk and post-modernist rebellions of the mid-1970s challenged the primacy of “the grid” and tied the typeface Helvetica to an ideology of purification through corporate control. <br /><br />It is important to understand that the idea of bettering heredity through the bettering of the environment held strong even as a lingering faith in Lamarckism gave way in the 1930s.<br /><br />Increasingly through the twentieth century, biologists and science popularizers worried the public about the rapid rate of genetic mutation in humans, and the fact that, for the first time in evolutionary history, these negative mutations were not being stamped out by the "streamlining power" of natural selection. These authors insisted that, at the very least, public policy should drive the creation of “an environment favorable to a (positive) mutation” (from Henry R. Linville’s “The Biology of Man and Other Organisms,” 1923).<br /><br />This line of thought, the idea that scientists and the cultured had to work together to create an environment that would counter the degenerative effects of modern industrial society runs through the work of Amram Scheinfeld, Frederick Osborn, Hermann Muller, Bentley Glass and other so-called reform eugenicists.<br /><br />Among other problems, the anarchic visual landscape in which the lower classes were embedded did not encourage the positive selection of what Scheinfeld labeled “social genes.” One way to keep things moving along a "natural" progressive path was to bathe the great unwashed in a stream of Swiss design.<br /><br />Ronald Ladouceur<br />www.textbookhistory.comRonald Ladouceurhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15113520446783511739noreply@blogger.com