Starting in the late 19th century in, Eugenics was a social philosophy (based on psuedo-scientific methods) that aimed to improve the quality of human hereditary qualities to breed a master race. Eugenics is defined as the “self direction of human evolution,” but can also is dervided from the latin roots meaning “good breeding” or “good genes.” This tree is from the logo of the 2nd international congress of Eugenics held in 1921. This field of study and the social programs based upon it drew upon many types of scientific and social theories and methods.

History

The perfecrtion of the human species is a common ideal in Utopian visions, dating back to ancient greece. Selective breeding was suggested as early as the time of Plato, who believed 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.

But it was work by Sir Francis Galton in the 1860s and 1870s that systemized these ideas and practices along the lines of new knowledge about the evolution of man and animals provided by the theory of his cousin Charles Darwin. After reading Darwin's Origin of Species, Galton was struck with an interpretation of Darwin's work where the mechanisms of natural selection were potentially thwarted by human civilization, and since many human societies sought to protect the underprivileged and weak, those societies were at odds with the natural selection responsible for extinction of the weakest. He and other social darwinists became concerned with charitable practices, and instead believed that nature should be left to its own devices, and that the strong should not help the weak.

However Galton took these ideas to another level. He not only believed in passive avoidance of assistance, but in taking active measure to assist natural selection. Only by changing social policies, Galton reasoned, could society be saved from a "reversion towards mediocrity"—a phrase he coined in statistics which he later changed to the now-common, "regression towards the mean." Galton's theory, which he first sketched out in his 1865 article "Hereditary Talent and Character," and elaborated in his 1869 book Hereditary Genius, began by studying the way in which human intellectual, moral, and personality traits tended to run in families. Galton's basic argument was that "genius" and "talent" were hereditary traits in humans (though neither he nor Darwin had yet a working model of this type of heredity), and that just as one could use artificial selection to exaggerate traits in animals, one could expect similar results applying such models to humans.

Implementation Programs

In practice Eugenics lead to political and social policies that included selective breeding, influence in reproductive practices, and later genetic engineering. Eugenics encompasses two types of social policies which fell into the categories of "positive" eugenics (encouraging the designated "most fit" to reproduce more often) and "negative" eugenics (discouraging or preventing the designated "less fit" from reproducing).

Eugenics was based in a strong statistical approach, uses both Mendelian genetic models, and pure statistical models, to study how the variations in human were related to hereditary lineage. Thus Eugenicists gathered information on the physical character of men and women, through measuring "height" and "arm length" in terms of "averages" in order to try to manipulate these statistics in society at large. They also examined how these features were passed on using the combinatorial methods of analysis to understand the resemblance between parents and offspring.

Eugenics developed to refer to human selective reproduction with the intent to create children with desirable traits, especially those that best meet an ideal of racial purity ("positive" eugenics), as well as elimination of undesirable traits ("negative" eugenics). "Negative" eugenic policies in the past have ranged from segregation to sterilization and even to genocide. Their understanding of the principles of genetic inheritance led eugenicists to conclude that genetically defective members of society -- including the "feeble-minded," criminals, the sexually wanton, epileptics, the insane, and non-white races -- were rapidly out-reproducing the "normal" members of society at an alarming rate, passing on their "deleterious" genes at the expense of the "normal." "Positive" eugenic policies have been typically awards or bonuses for "fit" genetically gifted parents after having another child, though even relatively innocuous things like marriage counseling and planned parenthood have had early links with eugenic ideology.

Where

In the first half of the twentieth century, numerous countries enacted eugenics policies and programs of many types, many notably coercive or restrictive. Eugenics was supported by many prominent thinkers worldwide since its inception, including mainstream figures like Alexander Graham Bell and W.E.B. DuBois, and was an academic discipline at many colleges and universities.

Translation: "Only Genetically Healthy Offspring Ensure the Strength of the People. We do not stand alone. The man holds a shield inscribed with Germany's 1933 Law for the Protection of Genetically Diseased Offspring. He and a woman holding a baby stand in front of a map of Germany surrounded by the flags of nations that also have sterilization laws." 1936

Eugenics began falling into serious disrepute in scientific circles in the 1930s, around the same time eugenic rhetoric was incorporated by Ernst Rudin into the racial policies of Nazi Germany. In the postwar period, eugenics became associated with Nazism in the public and scientific eye, even though a variety of states maintained eugenic programs for a number of decades afterwards.

Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler was infamous for its eugenics programs, which attempted to maintain a "pure" German race through a series of programs which ran under the banner of "racial hygiene." Among other acts, the Nazis performed extensive experimentation on live human beings to test their genetic theories, ranging from simple measurement of physical characteristics to the more ghastly experiments carried out by Josef Mengele for Otmar von Verschuer on twins in the concentration camps. Heinrich Himmler on Germany's 1933 sterilization law promoted the sterilization of all Jews and "colored" German children. During the 1930s and 1940s the Nazi regime forcibly sterilized hundreds of thousands of people who they viewed as mentally and physically "unfit," and killed tens of thousands of the institutionalized disabled in their compulsory euthanasia programs. Eventually, the "undesirables" were collected, segregated, and systematically murdered. The final result of the Nazi eugenics program was the Holocaust, which claimed six million lives. They also implemented a number of "positive" eugenics policies, giving awards to "Aryan" women who had large numbers of children, and even encouraged a service in which "racially pure" single women would become impregnated by SS officers.

The nation that had the second largest eugenics movement was the United States where in the late 19th century many state enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded" from marrying.

From 1900 on, the movement found a receptive ear in state legislatures, as it did in Washington, and it exerted a profound influence on American public policy. By the 1930s, most states had passed eugenical laws authorizing the sterilization of "defectives," and in an infamous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed such laws were constitutional. Eugenical lobbying also contributed to the powerful anti-immigration movement of the 1910s and 1920s, using their scientific studies to support the claim that non-whites and immigrants were inferior to native-born white Americans in intelligence, physical condition, and moral stature. In 1924, the Immigration Restriction Act was passed, with eugenicists for the first time playing a central role in the Congressional debate, as expert advisers on the threat of "unfit" individuals entering the country. The new Act strengthened the existing laws prohibiting race mixing in an attempt to maintain the gene pool. 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. Even though the meticulous studies of Franz Boas, H.S. Jennings, and others amply demonstrated the failure of eugenical methodology and the falsity of their claims, the eugenical tide continued to swell.

Only after the Second World War, when the horrific results of the Nazi eugenic program became fully evident, did the movement lose steam. Though much smaller in scope, it continues today. Although the Nazis' eugenical Holocaust of WWII constituted an enormous public relations disaster for proponents of eugenics, the movement would later resurface under the banner of population control and radical environmentalism. Institutions such as Planned Parenthood had its start in Eugenics. Indeed, Planned Parenthood successfully carried the banner of eugenics into the post-WWII era. Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, a virulently racist woman who touted the slogan: "Birth Control: to create a race of thoroughbreds." Her manifesto, entitled The Pivot of Civilization, thoroughly delineates the mission of Planned Parenthood and its allied organizations in the eugenics movement. In this treatise, which featured an introduction written by Freemason and Fabian socialist H.G. Wells, Sanger reveals the true motives underpinning the promotion of birth control: Sanger believed that almost half the population was mentally handicapped, and only 13% truly of superior intelligence, and thus worthy of breeding.

Reasons and Rhetoric

Advocates of the approach have said variously that it would lessen human suffering and genetically caused health problems, would save society money, and some have said it would create a new, stronger and more intelligent human race. Many supporters were concerned that the less fit were out-reproducing the more intelligent, a catastrophe in Darwinian terms.

In this illustration from the 1937 publication A People in Danger, addressing the problem of criminal Whites: "The Threat of the Underman. Male criminals had an average of 4.9 children, criminal marriage, 4.4 children, parents of slow learners, 3.5 children, a German family 2.2 children, a marriage from the educated circles, 1.9 children."

Ethical Considerations

In 1948 the Unties Nations developed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as a response to the abuses of the second World War. This document affirmed that "Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family."

Because of the association with "master race" ideologies, eugenics in the present period is a controversial idea and most of those involved in genetic and reproductive technology research tend to disassociate themselves with the term "eugenics". Modern inquiries into the potential use of genetic engineering have led to an increased invocation of the history of eugenics in the discourse of bioethics, usually as a cautionary tale. Endeavors such as the Human Genome Project have again made the possibility of effective modification of the human species seem real, just as did the ideas of Darwin and the rediscovery of Mendel. The difference this time around is, however, the guarded attitude towards "eugenics"—it has become a watchword to be feared rather than embraced. Many commentators have suggested that the new "eugenics" will come from reproductive technologies which allow parents to create "designer babies". It has been argued that this "non-coercive" form of biological "improvement" will be predominately motivated by individual competitiveness and the desire for creating "the best opportunities" for children, rather than by the urge to improve the species as a whole.
This raises issues about the consequences and ethical considerations about "non-coercive" form of biological "improvement".

Should parents test for or prevent diseases and other medical conditions before birth? Should parents choose the sex/gender of their child? Or determine the physical, personality, or intellectual characteristics? Whether genetic testing is limited to pre-natal testing for diseases or pre-implantation embryo selection, these types of considerations have led some to fear genetic discrimination, belief in genetic determinism, reliance of genetic explanations of differences.