(2004-10-28) Locke Maslow Eugenics

Chris Locke connects Abraham Maslow to the Eugenics movement. I'm not sure how much he's kidding... Anyway, a few days ago I picked up a new book by Edwin Black, the guy who wrote IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation... compellingly demonstrates how Hitler's ideas for the "final solution" germinated not in Germany, but in the U.S., driven by "scientists" including Edward L. Thorndike and Theodosius Dobzhansky. There is no reference to these two in Black's new book -- War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race -- but they were definitely part of the Eugenics movement... Abraham Maslow received his BA in 1930, his MA in 1931, and his PhD in 1934, all in psychology, all from the University of Wisconsin. A year after graduation, he returned to New York to work with E.L. Thorndike at Columbia... In 1959, Maslow put together a book of papers -- New Knowledge in Human Values -- including "Human Nature as a Product of Evolution" by the same Theodosius Dobzhansky, who five years later would ascend to Director, then to Chairman of the American Eugenics Society. Dobzhansky was also a professor of genetics at Columbia during Maslow's time there.