Eugenics – RationalWiki

We must, if we are to be consistent, and if we're to have a real pedigree herd, mate the best of our men with the best of our women as often as possible, and the inferior men with the inferior women as seldom as possible, and bring up only the offspring of the best.

Eugenics is the purported study of applying the principles of natural selection and selective breeding through altering human reproduction with the goal of changing the relative frequency of traits in a human population. It was the most dangerous form of biological determinism in modern history.

Eugenics was first developed in the 19th century, a misguided outgrowth of an intellectual milieu influenced by the popularity of early evolutionary theory and which included a spate of works on genetic disorders (many of which are incurable horrors), "scientific racism" and the Social Darwinism of the likes of Herbert Spencer. The term "eugenics" was coined by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, in his 1883 book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. Galton was responsible for many of the early works of eugenics, including attempts to connect genetics with a most prized trait known as intelligence.[1]

In the United States, it was the biologist Charles Davenport who laid the groundwork for the establishment of eugenics programs.[2] Eugenics gained traction as it was championed in the nascent Progressive Era of the late 19th century into the early 20th century, finding prominent political proponents in presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. However, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Winston Churchill were also fans of eugenics.[3][4][5]

Some eugenics-based ideas were implemented both in the United States and in Europe. In the U.S., this strongly influenced immigration policy, as in the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924,[wp] which showed a preference for Northern Europeans, as they were believed to be somehow superior to Asians and South and Eastern Europeans.

The first U.S. state to implement eugenics was Indiana, in 1907, in which those housed in penal and mental institutions could be forcibly sterilized.[6] The first European country to implement forced sterilization was Denmark, in 1929.[7]California was the third U.S. state to implement eugenics, in 1909. California would go on to become responsible for a third of all of the forced sterilizations conducted in the United States (~20,000 out of ~60,000).

North Carolina had a eugenics policy from 1929 through 1977. In 2012 a gubernatorial committee proposed a settlement of USD$50,000 to each of the remaining living survivors victims of this policy.[8]

The Supreme Court gave legal backing to forced sterilization using eugenic ideas in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, a eugenics proponent, wrote in the decision, "Three generations of imbeciles is enough."[9] The Buck v. Bell decision encouraged more states to enact eugenics legislation. 23 states had such legislation prior to Buck v. Bell and 32 after. 18 states never had eugenics legislation.[10]

Israel, of all fucking places, is not immune from this either. Ethiopian Jews were injected with birth control initiatives intended to (at least temporarily) stop them from breeding. How widespread this was is still under investigation.[11]

One way eugenics was popularized was through "Better Baby" contests. These contests were sponsored by hospitals to determine the most "fit" baby, who all happened to be WASPs, naturally. This was spun off into "Fitter Family" contests, which would be held at state fairs, carnivals, and churches to allow entire families to compete.[12][13]

Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he approved of the eugenics policy going on in America at the time, to the point where one could say he was inspired by the idea. When he came to power, Nazi Germany saw the most sweeping application of a eugenics program, which is unsurprising, given the Nazis' maniacal obsession with racial purity, or "racial hygiene" as they called it. The "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" was implemented within half a year of his rise to power, and resulted in the forced sterilization of up to 400,000 people that were diagnosed with hereditary mental or physical disabilities.[14]

After the outbreak of the war, this policy was carried to another extreme: people bearing hereditary defects were designated as "unfit to live," and the eugenics program moved from sterilization to extermination. Within the scope of "Action T4," an estimated 200,000 children and adults were systematically killed in order to avoid having to bear the costs of institutional care.[15] The groups targeted by action T4 were the incurably ill, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught, and elderly people.[16] Achieving racial purity through eugenics on a grand scale can also be seen as an important motivation behind the Holocaust, which saw the murder of millions of "undesirables," such as Jews, gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, and the disabled.

Some Christian churches, particularly the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Episcopalians, embraced the eugenics movement. The Methodist Church would host Fitter Family contests and Methodist Bishops endorsed one of the first eugenics books circulated to the US churches. The professor of Christian ethics and founder of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, Rev. Harry F. War, writing in Eugenics, the magazine of the American Eugenic Society, said eugenics and Christianity were both compatible because both pursued the challenge of removing the causes that produce the weak.[13]

However, other Christian churches were strongly opposed to eugenics, particularly the Catholic Church and conservative Protestants. Catholics disliked eugenic laws that allowed for sterilization; Protestants viewed eugenics as a threat to a reliance on god to cure social ills.[17]

Because of eugenics' association with Nazi Germany, a common bullshitting tactic is to declare some historical figure that endorsed eugenics a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer (see, e.g., Margaret Sanger). This is ahistorical as not every eugenics proponent supported the measures of Nazi Germany (or were even around to see it). Indeed, if this were the case, that would make Teddy and Silent Cal Nazis as well.

Galton divided eugenic practice into "positive" and "negative eugenics." The positive variety consisted of political and economic incentives (such as tax breaks and sex education) for the "fit" to reproduce and the negative type consisted of disincentives such as birth control or forced sterilization. "Dysgenics" refers to the deterioration of the human stock -- many eugenicists concentrated on "improvement" of the human race by reversing alleged dysgenic forces. There is also a split between "liberal eugenics" and "authoritarian eugenics."[18] Liberal eugenics promotes consensual eugenic practice while authoritarian eugenics promotes state-mandated and enforced programs. Proponents personally emphasized different aspects of eugenics, positive, negative, dysgenic forces, etc. Thus, they often disagreed on matters of policy, much less were they all Nazis.

Whilst eugenics is based, in theory, in the perfectly valid science of genetics, its application is always far from scientific. For obvious reasons the room to experiment is limited in the extreme. Furthermore, whereas it is (relatively) easy, for example, to breed cattle for higher milk yield, defining what is meant by a "better" human being is a very difficult question. At this point eugenics stops being scientific and starts being normative and political, and a rather nasty type of politics at that. Eugenics drew heavily from various racist and racialist tracts of the period.

The most obvious flaw with application of eugenics is that its proponents have tended to conflate phenotypical (read: superficial) traits with genotypical traits. Any species that looks fit on the outside may carry recessive traits that don't exhibit themselves but will be passed on and vice versa. The development of the field of epigenetics,[wp] i.e. heritable environmental factors in genetic expression that occur without change to underlying DNA structures, poses further problems for eugenics.

There is no reason to believe that a selective breeding plan to encourage certain physical traits in humans could not achieve the same results that plant and animal breeders have achieved for centuries (who were without specific knowledge of the genes they were selecting in and out). Odds are that the purebred humans with distinguishing features would be less healthy than the offspring of unconstrained mating would be, for the same reason that kennel-club purebred dogs are often less healthy than mutts. This concept of "purity" is flawed in that it creates many of the same problems as inbreeding a loss of biodiversity can in fact lead to increased susceptibility to a common concentrated weakness.[19] An example of this would be deer populations. A long time ago, natural selection selected for fitter males with antlers, but cue the rise of sport hunting and antlered populations plunged down fast. Another example of concentration is haemophilia, which became the plague of the royal families.

The extreme reductionism of eugenics often crossed into what is now comical territory. Nearly every social behavior, including things such as "pauperism" and the vaguely defined "feeble-mindedness," could be traced back to a single genetic disorder according to eugenicists. Many works of eugenics recall the similar trend evident in phrenology (indeed, there was some overlap between eugenics and phrenology).[20]

While eugenics gained widespread support in the early 20th century (even within the scientific community) of a number of nations, there was also strong opposition during this period.[21] The biologist Raymond Pearl, for example, once a supporter of the movement, turned against it in the late 1920s.[22] The geneticist Lancelot Hogben argued that eugenics relied on a false dichotomy of "nature vs. nurture" and that it infected science with political value judgments;[23] Hogben was asked by William Beveridge (the then-director of the London School of Economics) to create a "Chair of Social Biology" department on campus, gave him the finger and prevented any of his eugenic ideas from being taken seriously in the formation of the British welfare state.[24]Clarence Darrow famously denounced it as a "cult."[25] The Carnegie Institute, which initially funded the Eugenics Record Office, withdrew its funding after a review of its research, leading to its closing in 1939 (before the Holocaust even became public record).[26]

Stephen J. Gould was strongly opposed to eugenics. He wrote extensively on the topic, including his treatment on intelligence in The Mismeasure of Man.

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Eugenics - RationalWiki