While the idea of improving humans through selective breeding is at least as old as the ancient Greeks, it gained widespread prominence after 1869. In 1883, Sir Francis Galton coined the word "eugenics," from the Greek word eugenes, meaning "well-born" or "hereditarily endowed with noble qualities," to describe this new science of directed human evolution. Galton's work, and the subsequent rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's genetic studies, convinced many scientists and social reformers that eugenic control over heredity could improve human life.

Galton's ideas swept America during the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. At that time, many scientists and laypeople believed that eugenics could facilitate social progress by eradicating problems ranging from alcoholism and prostitution to poverty and disease. What better way to prevent such misfortunes, eugenicists asked, than to prevent the birth of people genetically susceptible to them? Eugenics seemed to offer an efficient and humane solution to society's ills. Unfounded hope in this imperfect science, however, ultimately contributed to repressive social policies, including marriage and immigration restriction, forced sterilization, segregation, and, in the case of Nazi Germany, euthanasia ("mercy killing") and genocide, all in the name of human betterment.

British Origins

Charles Darwin's theories of evolution by natural selection rocked the scientific world in 1859, and prompted his cousin, Galton, to study human evolution. Galton's first book, Hereditary Genius (1869), analyzed famous European families and concluded that "genius," which he defined as the ability to succeed in life, tended to run in families. Galton believed that individuals inherited the traits that destined them to either success or failure. Thus, success resulted from biology, not from the wealth or poverty of a person's background, and controlled breeding might permanently improve the human race.

Galton hoped to speed and direct human evolution. Writing in Inquiries into the Human Faculty and Its Development (1883), Galton defined eugenics as "the science of improving stock to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had." Familiar with farmers' achievements in breeding more-valuable plants and animals, Galton believed that such methods were "equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants."

Galton identified those fit folk who should have children and stigmatized those he deemed unfit for parenthood. He also believed then-accepted notions of "racial" superiority and inferiority, had more to do with class and cultural prejudice than with biological difference. Galton assumed that wealthy people like himself were fit, whereas poor folk were unfit. Northern European "white" people stood atop the evolutionary scale of fitness, followed by "whites" from southeast Europe, Asians, Native Americans, Africans, and Australian Aborigines.

Positive and Negative Eugenics

Galton identified positive and negative eugenics as the two basic methods to improve humanity. Positive eugenics used education, tax incentives, and childbirth stipends to encourage procreation among fit people. Education would convince fit parents to have more children, out of a desire to increase the common good. Lower taxes on larger families and the provision of a small birth payment for each "eugenic" child would provide further inducements. Conversely, eugenically educated but unfit people would selflessly forgo procreation, to prevent the propagation of their hereditary "taint." Believing that neither altruism nor self-interest would be enough to control the unfit, however, many eugenicists also advocated negative eugenics.

Negative eugenics sought to limit procreation through marriage restriction, segregation, sexual sterilization, and, in its most extreme form, euthanasia. In an attempt to decrease procreation among the "unfit," laws prohibited marriage to people with diseases, or other conditions believed to be hereditary. Similar restrictions banned marriage between people of different races, in order to prevent miscegenation. Popular in the United States, antimiscegenation laws sought to use science to legitimize racial prejudice. Since marriage restriction failed to stop extramarital procreation, eugenicists argued for more intrusive interventions.

Many of these more intrusive interventions relied upon segregation. For example, individuals judged unfit might be segregated in institutions such as insane asylums, tuberculosis sanatoriums, and homes for the so-called feebleminded or mentally retarded. Isolated from "normal" society, these people were also segregated by sex within the institution to prevent procreation. Segregation through incarceration, however, proved too costly to be applied to all but the most severely handicapped.

See the article here:

eugenics: Definition from Answers.com