20th-century eugenics discredited this concept so badly that it is now treated as radioactive waste. There was a lot of bad biology and sociology manufactured to justify supremacism.

'human behavior should be interpreted as a variant of mammal behavior' is a discredited concept. Is it? Given the closeness of the genetic codes of humans and animals and the proven relationship between genes and certain behavioural characteristics, this is difficult to defend though some do of course.

'New evidence on the link between genes, psychological traits, and political engagement'

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-the-lif...

The broader concept of genetics affecting human behavior is a social landmine.

I think the landmine is in looking for some kind of differentiation among humans rooted in the unique genetic patterns of groups of humans (i.e. convicts or members of a given race), not necessarily in understanding how genes shape our behavior generally.

Wow, I had not thought of that angle. I was really thinking in terms of drawing parallels between humans in general (as a single group) and different species of animal. The idea of pointing at genes to suggest that certain populations are fundamentally different didn't occur to me when I wrote that.

It was really just the basic idea of saying "look at what most mammals do, and why we think they do it - wait, all humans do that also!".

> drawing parallels between humans in general (as a single group) and different species of animal

The problem with this comparison is that it's been used a lot in racism to justify some races as being "more animal" and by implication "less human" and less deserving of human rights. It's OK to selectively breed and mass euthanize animals.

> look at what most mammals do, and why we think they do it - wait, all humans do that also!

Do they? Have we checked? We do some things that are similar to animal behavior, but ours is .. considerably more complicated.

I mean, yes obviously we are animals in the sense of being of the same substance and biological processes, and that has theological implications; this is why Darwin pointing that out was so disruptive. However, there's a long tradition of using analogies (not actual research) drawn from the animal kingdom to make wrong and harmful conclusions about humans, usually for the purposes of finding a moral justification for inhuman treatment.

Something that took me a long time to realize about the Scopes Monkey Trial was that, not only was it theologicallly problematic for humans to have derived from animals, it was even more problematic to the public of the time for white humans to share a common ancestor with black humans, since there was demand to make this illegal.

Tennessee 1925: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial

Seven years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jim_Crow_law_examples_... "Classified "Negro" as any person with any Negro blood".

> The problem with this comparison is that it's been used a lot in racism to justify some races as being "more animal" and by implication "less human" and less deserving of human rights. It's OK to selectively breed and mass euthanize animals.

Can't we take a non-racist point of view to analyze the parallels between humans in general (as a single group) and different species of animals?

The irony is that eugenics is itself an example of mammalian aggression.

Human aggression rarely has bare fangs. It's obscured and mediated through culture and belief systems.

That doesn't mean it isn't fundamentally animal aggression. It means it's expressed through abstract symbol systems which disguise its true nature. And it only becomes overt and physical some of the time.

Mainstream economics works in the same way. To many on the right, economic failure is proof of low status in the hierarchy, and low status is inherently impure and toxic and deserves to be exploited and abused.

Caste systems are another example.

I think late 20th c. actual science discredited early 20th c. pseudo science.