Eugenics, Eugenics

Its advocates regarded it as a social philosophy for the improvement of human hereditary traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of certain people and traits, and the reduction of reproduction of certain people and traits. The exact definition of eugenics has been a matter of debate since the term was coined. In the definition of it as a "social philosophy"that is, a philosophy with implications for social orderis not meant to be definitive, and is taken from "Development of a Eugenic Philosophy" by Frederick Osborn in American Sociological Review , Vol. 2, No. 3 (Jun., 1937) , pp. 389-397.

See for example EMBO Reports, European Molecular Biology Organization "In the name of science - the role of biologists in Nazi atrocities: lessons for today's scientists" EMBO Reports Vol 2 No 10 2001, pp 871 et seq which discusses eugenics and its culmination in Nazi atrocities. It concludes "It was scientists who interpreted racial differences as the justification to murder ... It is the responsibility of today's scientists to prevent this from happening again." The "interventions" advocated and practised by eugenicists involved prominently the identification and classification of individuals and their families, including the poor, mentally ill, blind,"promiscuous" women, homosexuals and entire "racial" groupssuch as the Roma and Jewsas "degenerate" or "unfit"; the segregation or institutionalisation of such individuals and groups, their sterilization, euthanasia, and in the extreme case of Nazi Germany, their mass extermination. See for example, Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race The practices engaged in by eugenicists involving violations of privacy, attacks on reputation, violations of the right to life, to found a family, to discrimination are all today classified as violations of human rights.

Black, pp 274-295 G. K. Chesterton was an early critic of the philosophy of eugenics, expressing this opinion in his book, '' s:Eugenics and other Evils|Eugenics and Other Evils ''. Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities, and received funding from many sources. Allen, Garland E., [http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v5/n5/full/7400158.html Was Nazi eugenics created in the US?], Embo Reports, 2004 Three International Eugenics Conference s presented a global venue for eugenicists with meetings in 1912 in London, and in 1921 and 1932 in New York. Eugenic policies were first implemented in the early 1900s in the United States . Deborah Barrett and Charles Kurzman. Oct., 2004. ''Globalizing Social Movement Theory: The Case of Eugenics.'' Theory and Society, Vol. 33, No. 5, pp. 505 Later, in the 1920s and 30s, the eugenic policy of compulsory sterilization|sterilizing certain mental patients was implemented in a variety of other countries, including Belgium , ''Science,'' New Series, Vol. 57, No. 1463 (Jan. 12, 1923), p. 46 Brazil , Sales Augusto dos Santos and Laurence Hallewell. Jan., 2002. ''Historical Roots of the "Whitening" of Brazil.'' Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 29, No. 1, Brazil: The Hegemonic Process in Political and Cultural Formation, pp. 81 Canada , McLaren, Angus. 1990. ''Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945.'' McClelland and Steward Inc. Toronto.

In a historical and broader sense, eugenics can also be a study of "improving human genetic qualities." It is sometimes broadly applied to describe any human action whose goal is to improve the gene pool. Some forms of infanticide in ancient societies, present-day reprogenetics, preemptive abortions and designer babies have been (sometimes controversially) referred to as eugenic.

This aspect of eugenics has historically been tainted with scientific racism.

Possible approaches include financial and political stimuli, targeted demographic analyses, in vitro fertilization, egg transplants, and cloning. Glad, 2008 Negative eugenics is aimed at lowering fertility among the genetically disadvantaged. This includes abortions, sterilization, and other methods of family planning.

However, some private organizations assist people in genetic counseling, and reprogenetics may be considered as a form of non-state-enforced liberal eugenics.

One is mandatory eugenics or authoritarian eugenics, in which the government mandates a eugenics program. Policies and/or legislation is often seen as being coercive and restrictive. Another is promotional voluntary eugenics, in which eugenics is voluntarily practiced and promoted to the general population, but not officially mandated. This is a form of non-state enforced eugenics, using a liberal or democratic approach, which can mostly be seen in the 1900s.

This, and the allied words, eugeneia , etc., are equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least a neater word and a more generalized one than viticulture which I once ventured to use. Francis Galton, Inquiries into human faculty and its development (London, Macmillan, 1883): 17, fn1.

Unlike Quetelet, however, Galton did not exalt the "average man" but decried him as mediocre. Galton and his statistical heir Karl Pearson developed what was called the biometrical approach to eugenics, which developed new and complex statistical models (later exported to wholly different fields) to describe the heredity of traits. However, with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's hereditary laws, two separate camps of eugenics advocates emerged. One was made up of statisticians, the other of biologists. Statisticians thought the biologists had exceptionally crude mathematical models, while biologists thought the statisticians knew little about biology. See Chapters 2 and 6 in MacKenzie, Statistics in Britain.

While both claimed intelligence was hereditary, eugenics asserted new policies were needed to actively change the status quo towards a more "eugenic" state, while the Social Darwinists argued society itself would naturally "check" the problem of "dysgenics" if no welfare policies were in place (for example, the poor might reproduce more but would have higher mortality rates). Donald MacKenzie, "Eugenics in Britain," Social Studies of Science 6(3) (1975): 503.

Among other activities, the Nazis performed extensive experimentation on live human beings to test their genetic theories, ranging from simple measurement of physical characteristics to the experiments carried out by Josef Mengele for Otmar von Verschuer on twins in the concentration camps. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazi regime forcibly sterilized hundreds of thousands of people whom they viewed as mentally and physically unfit, an estimated 400,000 between 1934 and 1937. The scale of the Nazi program prompted one American eugenics advocate to seek an expansion of their program, with one complaining that "the Germans are beating us at our own game". Quoted in Selgelid, Michael J. 2000. Neugenics.

Many of their concerns for eugenics and racial hygiene were also explicitly present in their systematic killing of millions of "undesirable" people including Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals during the Holocaust (much of the killing equipment and methods employed in the death camps were first developed in the euthanasia program). The scope and coercion involved in the German eugenics programs along with a strong use of the rhetoric of eugenics and so-called "racial science" throughout the regime created an indelible cultural association between eugenics and the Third Reich in the postwar years. See Proctor, Racial hygiene , and Kuntz, ed., Deadly medicine.

Therefore, according to Itzkoff, "the Holocaust was the very antithesis of eugenic practice." However, this proposition is not supported by most researchers. Hitler did regard Jews as being intelligent, but also considered them inferior in all other ways - morally, spiritually, artistically and physically. In his view, their intelligence enabled them to thrive, but only by undermining and perverting the civilisation of other races. The extensive Nazi propaganda comparing Jews to plagues of rats demonstrates that the Holocaust was indeed a eugenics program in its conception.

It was taught in college and high school classrooms.Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood of America to urge the legalization of contraception for the lower classes. In its time eugenics was touted by some as scientific and progressive, the natural application of knowledge about breeding to the arena of human life. Before the realization of death camps in World War II, the idea that eugenics would lead to genocide was not taken seriously by the average American.

Indiana Supreme Court Legal History Lecture Series,"Three Generations of Imbeciles are Enough:"Reflections on 100 Years of Eugenics in Indiana, at [3] Although the law was overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1921, Williams v. Smith , 131 NE 2 (Ind.), 1921, text at [4] the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.

In 1898 Charles B. Davenport, a prominent American biologist, began as director of a biological research station based in Cold Spring Harbor where he experimented with evolution in plants and animals. In 1904 Davenport received funds from the Carnegie Institution to found the Station for Experimental Evolution. The Eugenics Record Office opened in 1910 while Davenport and Harry H. Laughlin began to promote eugenics. The history of eugenics in the United States is discussed at length in Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian attitudes in American thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963) and Daniel Kevles, In the name of eugenics: Genetics and the uses of human heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985), the latter being the standard survey work on the subject.

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.) See Kevles, In the name of eugenics.

See Pg. 23 " 'Human Progress through Eugenics" from Psychology of Mental Fossils, toward an Archeo-psychology by Douglas Keith Candland at [5] It did, however, have scientific detractors (notably, Thomas Hunt Morgan, one of the few Mendelians to explicitly criticize eugenics), though most of these focused more on what they considered the crude methodology of eugenicists, and the characterization of almost every human characteristic as being hereditary, rather than the idea of eugenics itself. Hamilton Cravens, The triumph of evolution: American scientists and the heredity-environment controversy, 1900-1941 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978): 179.

Paul Lombardo, "Eugenic Sterilization Laws," essay in the Eugenics Archive, available online at http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/essay8text.html.

When Nazi administrators went on trial for war crimes in Nuremberg after World War II, they justified the mass sterilizations (over 450,000 in less than a decade) by citing the United States as their inspiration. The connections between U.S. and Nazi eugenicists is discussed in Edwin Black, " Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California connection ", San Francisco Chronicle (9 November 2003), as well as Black's War Against the Weak (New York: Four Wars Eight Windows, 2003). Stefan Khl's work, The Nazi connection: Eugenics, American racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), is considered the standard scholarly work on the subject.

The most famous example of the influence of eugenics and its emphasis on strict racial segregation on such "anti-miscegenation" legislation was Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned this law in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, and declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.

The new act, inspired by the eugenic belief in the racial superiority of "old stock" white Americans as members of the " Nordic race " (a form of white supremacy ), strengthened the position of existing laws prohibiting race- mixing. Paul Lombardo, "Eugenics Laws Restricting Immigration," essay in the Eugenics Archive, available online at http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/essay9text.html.

During the early 20th 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 Naturalization in 1920) presented arguments they would pollute the national gene pool if their numbers went unrestricted. It has been 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. See Lombardo, "Eugenics Laws Restricting Immigration"; and Stephen Jay Gould, The mismeasure of man (New York: Norton, 1981).

The Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta was enacted in 1928, focusing the movement on the sterilization of mentally deficient individuals, as determined by the Alberta Eugenics Board. The campaign to enforce this action was backed by groups such as the United Farm Women's Group, including key member Emily Murphy.

King and Hansen, 1999. B.J.Pol.S. 29, 77107 [10] The popularity of eugenics in Britain was reflected by the fact that only two universities established courses in this field (University College London and Liverpool University), and the position of a professorship in eugenics was never created at either. The Galton Institute, affiliated to UCL, was headed by Galton's protg, Karl Pearson.

Besides the large-scale program in the United States, other nations included Australia, Norway, France, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, and Switzerland with programs to sterilize people the government declared to be mentally deficient. Singapore practiced a limited form of eugenics that involved discouraging marriage between university graduates and the rest through segregation in matchmaking agencies, in the hope that the former would produce better children, although this point is contestable. There are a number of works discussing eugenics in various countries around the world. For the history of eugenics in Scandinavia, see Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, eds., Eugenics And the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Demark, Sweden, Norway, and Findland (Michigan State University Press, 2005). Another international approach is Mark B. Adams, ed., The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

They claim, for example, that Planned Parenthood was funded and cultivated by the Eugenics Society for these reasons. Julian Huxley, the first Director-General of UNESCO and a founder of the World Wildlife Fund was also a Eugenics Society president and a strong supporter of eugenics American Bioethics Advisory Commission, "Eugenics," ABAC website [12] ven though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable. --Julian Huxley UNESCO: Its Purpose and its Philosophy (Washington D.C. 1947), cited in Liagin, Excessive Force: Power Politics and Population Control, at 85 (Washington, D.C.: Information Project for Africa 1996) High school and college textbooks from the 1920s through the '40s often had chapters touting the scientific progress to be had from applying eugenic principles to the population. Many early scientific journals devoted to heredity in general were run by eugenicists and featured eugenics articles alongside studies of heredity in nonhuman organisms. After eugenics fell out of scientific favor, most references to eugenics were removed from textbooks and subsequent editions of relevant journals. Even the names of some journals changed to reflect new attitudes. For example, Eugenics Quarterly became Social Biology in 1969 (the journal still exists today, though it looks little like its predecessor). Notable members of the American Eugenics Society (192294) during the second half of the 20th century included Joseph Fletcher, originator of Situational ethics; Dr. Clarence Gamble of the Procter & Gamble fortune; and Garrett Hardin, a population control advocate and author of the essay The Tragedy of the Commons.

Endeavors such as the Human Genome Project made the effective modification of the human species seem possible again (as did Darwin's initial theory of evolution in the 1860s, along with the rediscovery of Mendel's laws in the early 20th century). The difference at the beginning of the 21st century was the guarded attitude towards eugenics, which had become a watchword to be feared rather than embraced.

In the U.S. and Europe, though, these attempts have frequently been criticized as in the same spirit of classist and racist forms of eugenics of the 1930s. Because of its association with compulsory sterilization and the racial ideals of the Nazi Party, the word eugenics is rarely used by the advocates of such programs.

Because of this non-coercive nature, lack of involvement by the state and a difference in goals, some commentators have questioned whether such activities are eugenics or something else altogether. But critics note that Francis Galton did not advocate coercion when he defined the principles of eugenics.

They express skepticism that any form of eugenics could be to the benefit of the disabled considering their treatment by historical eugenic campaigns.

Some observers such as Philip Kitcher have described the use of genetic screening by parents as making possible a form of "voluntary" eugenics. Philip Kitcher, The Lives to Come (Penguin, 1997). Review available online at http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/genome/geneticsandsociety/hg16f009.html.

A hypothetical scenario posits that if one racial minority group is on average less intelligent than the racial majority group, then it is more likely that the racial minority group will be submitted to a eugenics program rather than the least intelligent members of the whole population.

The other one, Marxism, had no use for race, didn't believe in genes and denied that human nature was a meaningful concept. Clearly, it's not an emphasis on genes or evolution that is dangerous. It's the desire to remake humanity by coercive means (eugenics or social engineering) and the belief that humanity advances through a struggle in which superior groups (race or classes) triumph over inferior ones.

Edward M. Miller: "Eugenics: Economics for the Long Run", 1997 The possible elimination of the autism genotype is a significant political issue in the autism rights movement, which claims autism is a form of neurodiversity. Many advocates of Down's Syndrome rights also consider Down's Syndrome (Trisomy-21) a form of neurodiversity.

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