Home > Eugenics

1 Pre-history

Selective breeding was suggested as early as Plato, who stated or rather wished that human reproduction should be controlled by authorities. He proposed that the selection should be performed by a fake lottery, controlled by the government, so that the people's feelings wouldn't be hurt by awareness of selection principles. Other instances of eugenics-like programs in ancient times include the city of Sparta's mythological practice of leaving weak babies outside of city borders to die.

2 Galton's formulation

However, the initial principle defined by Galton, was directly in connection with the teaching and work of Darwin, himself very influenced by Malthus. According to Darwin, the mechanisms of the natural selection are thwarted by human civilization. One of the objectives of civilization is somehow to help the underprivileged ones, therefore to be opposed to the natural selection responsible for extinction of the weakest. According to eugenicists, the loss of effectiveness could lead to an increasing number of individuals who would have normally been eliminated through natural selection processes. Eugenicists thus propose to promote actions to balance effects of natural selection mechanism loss within civilizations. This basic principle inspired numerous and very diverse philosophies, scientific or pseudo-scientific theories and social practices.

In modern usage, it more commonly refers to human selective reproduction with the intent to create children with desirable traits, especially those that best meet some ideal of racial purity ("positive" eugenics), as well as elimination of individuals carrying undesirable traits ("negative" eugenics). "Negative" eugenic policies in the past have ranged from segregation to sterilization to even genocide. "Positive" eugenic policies have been typically awards or bonuses for "fit" parents after having another child, though even relatively innocuous things like marriage counselingMarriage counseling is a type of psychological counseling where a married couple meet with the psychologist, social worker or other type of mental health professional for counseling to hopefully heal their marriage. When one of the partners refuses to go have had early links with eugenic ideology.

3 20th century advocacy and policy

One of the earliest modern advocates of eugenic ideas (before they were labeled as such) was Alexander Graham BellAlexander Graham Bell ( March 3, 1847 August 2, 1922) was a scientist, inventor, and founder of the Bell telephone company. In addition to his work in telecommunications technology, he also was responsible for important advances in aviation and hydrofoil, best known as one of the inventors of the telephoneThe telephone or phone is a telecommunications device that transmits speech by means of electric signals. Generally attributed to the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, the first was built in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1876. However, an Italian inventor Anton. In 1881, Bell investigated the rate of deafTo be deaf is commonly understood to mean to be unable to hear, or to affiliate oneself with Deaf culture. Deaf versus deaf Main article: Deaf culture The word deaf is used and understood in two ways. First, there is the medical, pathological and audiologness on Martha's VineyardMartha's Vineyard is an island off the southern coast of Cape Cod, and is often known simply as "the Vineyard". Located in the state of Massachusetts, the Vineyard makes up most of Dukes County, Massachusetts (the rest of the county consists of Cuttyhunk, Mass. From this he concluded that deafness was hereditary in nature and recommended a marriage prohibition against the deaf (in his "Memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human Race"). Like many other early eugenicists, he proposed controlling immigration for the purpose of eugenics, and warned that boarding schools for the deaf could be considered possible breeding places of a deaf human race.

The nation that had the second largest eugenics movement was the United States. Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded" from marrying. Charles B. Davenport , a prominent American biologist, assumed the role of director of a biological research station based in Cold Spring Harbor. Here he began experimenting with evolution of plants and animals. That same year, Davenport received funds from the Carnegie Institution to found the Station of Experimental Evolution. 1910 heralded the Eugenics Record Office, Davenport and Harry H. Laughlin began to promote eugenics. In years to come the ERO collected a mass of family pedigrees, which concluded that those that were unfit were from economically and socially poor backgrounds. Eugenicists such as Davenport, the psychologist Henry H. Goddard, and the conservationist Madison Grant (all well respected in their time) began to lobby for various solutions to the problem of the "unfit" (Davenport favored immigration restriction and sterilization as primary methods, Goddard favored segregation in his The Kallikak Family, Grant favored all of the above and more -- even entertaining the idea of extermination). Though we now see the methodology and research methods as being highly flawed, in their time they were seen as legitimate scientific research, though they did have their scientific detractors (notably Thomas Hunt Morgan).

In 1924, the Immigration Restriction Act was passed, with eugenicists for the first time playing a central role in the Congressional debate, as expert advisors on the threat of "inferior stock" from Eastern and Southern Europe. This reduced the number of immigrants from abroad to fifteen percent of that of previous years, to control the proportion of "unfit" individuals entering the country. The new Act strengthened the existing laws prohibiting race mixing in an attempt to maintain the gene pool. Eugenic considerations also lay behind the adoption of incest laws in much of the USA, and were used to justify many anti-miscegenation laws.

Some states also practiced sterilization of "imbeciles" for much of the 20th century. The US Supreme Court ruled in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case that the state of Virginia could sterilize those they thought unfit. Between 1907 and 1963, the most significant era of eugenic sterilization, over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States. A favorable report of the results of the sterilizations in California, by far the most sterilizing state, was published in book form by the biologist Paul Popenoe, and was widely cited by the Nazi government as evidence that a wide-reaching sterilization programs were feasible and humane. When Nazi administrators were on trial for war-crimes in Nuremberg after World War II, they justified their mass-sterilizations (over 450,000 in less than a decade) by pointing a finger at the USA as their inspiration.

Almost all non-Catholic western nations adopted some eugenics legislation, with the notable exception of Britain. Sweden forcibly sterilized 62,000 "unfits" as part of a eugenics program over a forty year period. Similar incidents occurred in Canada, Australia, Norway, Finland, Estonia, Switzerland and Iceland for people the government declared to be mentally deficient. Singapore practiced a limited form of "positive" eugenics which involved encouraging marriage between college graduates in the hope that they would produce better children.

Various authors, notably Stephen Jay Gould, have repeatedly asserted that restrictions on immigration passed in the United States during the 1920s (which were overhauled in 1965) were motivated by the goals of eugenics, in particular a desire to exclude "inferior" races from the national gene pool. In the early part of the twentieth century the United States and Canada began to receive far higher numbers of southern and eastern European immigrants. Influential eugenicists like Lothrop Stoddard and Harry Laughlin (who was appointed as an expert witness for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalisation in 1920) presented arguments that these were inferior races who would pollute the national gene pool if their numbers went unrestricted. It is argued that this stirred both Canada and the United States into passing laws creating a hierarchy of nationalities, rating them from the most desirable Anglo-Saxon and Nordic peoples to the Chinese and Japanese immigrants who were almost completely banned from entering the country. However, several people, in particular Franz Samelson , Mark Snyderman , and Richard Herrnstein have argued, based on their examination of the records of the Congressional debates over immigration policy, that in fact Congress gave virtually no consideration to these factors. Rather, they maintain, the restrictions were motivated primarily by a desire to maintain the US's cultural integrity against the heavy influx of foreigners.

Some who disagree with the idea of eugenics in general contend that eugenics legislation still had benefits; namely, that advocates such as Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood of America) found it a useful tool to urge the legalization of contraception. In its time, eugenics was seen by many as scientific and progressive, the natural application of knowledge about breeding to the arena of human life. Before the death camps of World War II, the idea that eugenics, in an ultimate expression, could lead to genocide was not taken as a serious possibility.