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Eugenics

Eugenics, a term derived from “eugenes,” Greek for “well-born,” was coined in 1883 by Charles Darwin's first cousin Francis Galton to provide a succinct way of characterizing the science of “improving the stock.” This entry will discuss the social and theoretical applications, the main problems, and the resurgence of eugenics.

Social and Theoretical Applications of Eugenics

Drawing upon recent discoveries that showed that Mendel's laws of inheritance could be applied to such human physical traits as eye color, scientists sought to apply Mendelian principles more broadly. If human traits could be sorted into eugenic (good) and bad (dysgenic) ones, then “eugenic science” could be used to frame social policy. The proportion of individuals with good traits could be increased by encouraging “fit” individuals to have more children (so-called positive eugenics) and discouraging “unfit” people to have fewer children (“negative eugenics”). Eugenic thinking was widely embraced, and quickly enshrined both in public policy and in academia in the United States. “Fitter family competitions” were held to encourage the “right people” to reproduce, and sterilization laws were enacted to prevent the “wrong people” from reproducing. By the early 1930s, more than half the states had implemented sterilization laws. More than 30,000 “eugenic sterilizations” had been performed in California.

Scientists were interested in more than merely social applications. Eugenics also had theoretical attractions. It seemed to allow the extension of mechanistic and reductionist principles to even broader swaths of human life. The transformations wrought by industrialization and increased scientific knowledge both fostered eugenicists' confidence in humans' capacity to control “nature” and seemed to vindicate the belief that scientifically based social policy was the best way to achieve progress. If social problems were not relevantly different from more obviously biologically based human diseases and dysfunctions, then they could be addressed in similar ways. Pervasive interference with people's freedom could be justified, and such restrictions could be touted as rational and disinterested. Though eugenicists in the United States had often been the impetus for eugenic policies that were reckless, scientifically flawed, and repressive, it took revelation of the horrors of Nazi eugenics to deflate public support for eugenics in the United States, England, and Germany. (Eugenic sterilization laws remained on the books for more than three decades after the end of World War II.)

Main Problems of Eugenics

As many commentators have pointed out, eugenics has serious internal flaws, not merely politically unpalatable consequences. Three families of problems are especially noteworthy. First, the hereditar-ian views that early-20th-century eugenicists drew upon were unsound. Patterns of inheritance do not exhibit the simple Mendelian logic that early eugenicists conjectured they did. Most inherited conditions are recessive rather than dominant, so individuals who did not manifest an allegedly dysgenic trait could nevertheless pass it on to their offspring. Because they misconstrued the relationship between an observed trait (or an individual's phenotype) and the individual's potential hereditary legacy (or an individual's genotype), eugenicists' observations and predictions were seriously inaccurate. Second, many of the traits that were taken to be genetic or narrowly biological in origin were not. Often—as was the case with such allegedly dysgenic traits as “feeblemindedness,” pauperism, alcoholism, and “drapetomania” (the mental defect allegedly exhibited by slaves who sought to escape)—the traits were not really traits, or biologically based at all, as much as ad hoc inventions or reifications of racial, ethnic, or gender bias. In the early 20th century, many WASP nativists sought to cloak their anti-immigration views in scientifically respectable garb by alleging that there was scientific evidence that supported their claims that the “races” of Eastern and Southern Europe were biologically inferior. But what was adduced was neither scientific nor evidence: Allegations of the inherent “weakness of mind” of non-English-speaking immigrants were often based on such things as poor performance on culturally biased intelligence tests. Similarly flawed reasoning was used to justify claims that African Americans were intellectually inferior or otherwise “defective,” and that sexually active nonmarried women were “morons.”

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