Eugenics History

Eugenics was introduced by sir Francis galton who, interestingly enough, was a cousin of Charles Darwin. It began as a way to better the human race and stop negative genetic traits from continuing on generation to generation. Eugenics may have started out as a way to better humans but it became something much worse.

Eugenics is the pseudoscience of obtaining desired traits in a population through controlled repopulation, specifically by preventing those deemed “unfit” by “Nordic stereotypes” from breeding. Most modern day Americans do not realize the origins of eugenics, which was planted by Charles Darwin and Sir Francis Galton and bloomed in America, and what effect it had on the attempt to create a master race in Nazi Germany. America played a very influential role in German eugenics by collaboration between scientists and funding from American corporations. The negative connotation associated with this science is usually directed towards the scientists of the Holocaust under Adolf Hitler, and not towards American scientists who also partook in horrific experiments and performed inhumane acts as well. This is absurd when you consider that the United States was the backbone of the eugenics movement internationally and only developed a negative perspective of the research when it became affiliated with the holocaust and the troubling actions of Nazi Germany.

Eugenics is a taboo science, but back in 1883 it was a modern advancement, discovered by Francis Galton (Carlson). Galton’s original mission was to improve humanity by encouraging the best and healthiest couples to simply have more children; Galton created positive eugenics (Carlson). However, with the positive comes the inevitable negative. Negative Eugenics was more set on preventing the least able from reproducing, in order to preserve the fitness of the

The eugenics movement began in the 20th century by a man named Francis Galton. As the cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton believed that eugenics was a moral philosophy to improve humanity by encouraging the ablest and healthiest people to have more children (Carlson). This Galtonian ideal of eugenics is often thought of as positive eugenics. Eugenics can be defined as the outgrowth of human heredity aimed at "improving" the quality of the human stock (Allen and Bird). At the other end of the spectrum is what can be classified as negative eugenics and is presently in disrepute. Negative eugenics entails selective breeding in which the least able from the population is taken out of the reproduction pool to preserve humanity's best traits.

Eugenics came from an era where Social Darwinism was used to explain many social inequalities. Social Darwinism was created by Herbert Spencer and was based off of the work by Charles Darwin. Darwinism contains the ideas of survival of the fittest and the capability of an individual to survive in an environment. Spencer took Darwin’s idea and applied it to society, and explained that social inequalities came from the fact that the wealthy are genetically wired to be better off. Eugenicists noticed that government money was being funded towards the poor and degenerates. They didn’t understand this and they believed it was a waste of money because those people were destined to be impoverished. Eugenicists believed sterilization was the solution. Eugenicists believed anyone with the traits of poverty, feeble-mindedness-including manic depression, schizophrenia, alcoholism, rebelliousness, criminality, nomadness, and prostitution in their lives should be sterilized. Before WWII, eugenics was very popular in the United States. People such as Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were in support of eugenics. They both supported the sterilization of the feeble minded and insane, but did not support the killing of these people. Once Hitler’s atrocities had been discovered, the eugenics movement had a large decrease in popularity

Francis Galton’s ideas on heredity were based on the theories of heredity and evolution within The Origin of Species, written by his cousin, Charles Darwin. Galton sought to apply Darwin’s concept of selective breeding to man in an effort to improve upon British society. When speaking to the Sociological Society at London University in 1904, Galton defined eugenics as: “ the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage”(1904). Galton’s initial attempts to apply the concept of eugenics to the improvement of humanity proved futile, up until 1900. According to the historian, Allen E Garland, “ With the rediscovery of Mendel’s law of heredity in 1900, however, the study of heredity in general and eugenics in particular found fertile ground, particularly in the United States (225). Eugenics would fast become a prevalent movement the world over, but nowhere more so than in the United States and

Eugenics, derived from the Greek word eugenes meaning well born, is defined as the study or belief that by encouraging people with good genetic traits to reproduce and discourage those people with less desirable traits the human race can benefit. There were certain groups of people who were affected by these sterilization laws, including people that were mentally disabled or ill and those from socially unacceptable areas of life, that were adopted in 32 states starting in the 1930’s. These sterilizations were done on over 350,000 people in the span eleven years between 1934 and 1945 (Kaelber), leading the United States into one of the darkest parts of our history.

Eugenics is a special effort targeted at cultivating the genetic composition of the human race. In history, eugenicists had promoted selective breeding to accomplish goals that were set. Nowadays, we have the proper technology that makes it possible to directly modify the genetic composition of an individual. Nevertheless, people have different views on how to best use this kind of technology. In 1883, a British scholar named Sir Francis Galton, who was also the cousin of Charles Darwin, used the term eugenics, to represent “well-born.” Galton believed that the human race could directly help its future by selectively breeding individuals who have certain “desired” qualities. This idea was constructed on Galton’s study of the upper class in Britain. After the completion of these studies, Galton established that an elite position in society was due to those persons having good genetic makeup. “Galton idea of Eugenics was developed due to Charles Darwin’s theory of Social Darwinism, which explains survival of the fittest, the capability to

I believe the view held by the author is one of unmistakable unbiased caution. In reading this article, the author, Hannah Lou, points out that although Sir Francis Galton, whose work was inspired by Charles Darwin, believed that, "the key to human progress would rest on a national program of better breeding . . . The chronic poor, the insane and feebleminded, and the ‘criminal

In the 1920s, a company in New York started a movement known as “The Eugenics Movement.” The idea of eugenics was eventually picked up by Germany, China, Peru, India and Bangladesh. The movement is still in effect till this day; however, it is not as prevalent as it once was.

Cousin of Charles Darwin and a respected British scholar, Sir Francis Galton, first used the term eugenics, meaning “well-born” or “good genes” around 1883 (Berson & Cruz, 1998). Building off of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, he believed that the human race could positively direct its future by either breeding or sterilizing select individuals who had specific traits. Galton was convinced that an upper class position in society was largely due to good genes. The actual practice of eugenics, the act of involuntary sterilization, began in the United States as a means of population control with the goal to reduce the transmission of undesirable traits. Initially, sterilizations were targeted towards the mentally ill or disabled, criminals,

The idea of eugenics was first introduced by Sir Francis Galton, who believed that the breeding of two wealthy and successful members of society would produce a child superior to that of two members of the lower class. This assumption was based on the idea that genes for success or particular excellence were present in our DNA, which is passed from parent to child. Despite the blatant lack of research, two men, Georges Vacher de Lapouge and Jon Alfred Mjoen, played to the white supremacists' desires and claimed that white genes were inherently superior to other races, and with this base formed the first eugenics society. The American Eugenics Movement attempted to unethically obliterate the rising tide of lower classes by immorally

Eugenics was the hugely popular political movement that began with the in depth study of human heredity. During the 1920s through the 1940s it was seen as a progressive and state-of-the-art- way of thinking, which fueled its popularity. The technical definition of eugenics is the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. The debate that surrounded eugenics and still does today is the morality of creating someone that only possesses “desirable” characteristics. Who gets to decide what is deemed desirable? The term “Eugenics” was termed by Francis Galton in 1883 and stems from the Greek language meaning “well bred”. Galton was inspired to research the breeding of humans mainly by his cousin Charles Darwin but also by the middle classes of England and the United States. Galton’s studied revolved around variations in the human population through classifications such as race. There has always been a struggle between right and wrong in the Christian religion with the topic of eugenics. The question of who has the power to decide what is the perfect human is a driving force behind the many curiosities and opinions in eugenics. Throughout the research paper I intend to analyze the historical and medical effects of eugenics and how they play a role in Christianity and the success or demise of human life.

Eugenics is the self direction of human evolution. It draws the materials from many sources and organizes them into an harmonious entity. They improve the human population by encouraging the reproduction of desired traits or by preventing the reproduction. Their goals were to have more children and policies to increase the desirables of moral obligations of the American Eugenics

The theory of Eugenics can be dated back all the way to 400 B.C. but was not popularized until the mid-1800s by an English scientist, Francis Galton. He researched and published the theory that aimed to improve the genetic quality of the human population through selective breeding (NC Office of Archives and History). As the half-cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton applied the Darwinism science (survival of the fittest) to heredity characteristics. Two types of Eugenics stemmed from the theory, positive and negative. Positive eugenics is encouraging the “best” people in the society based on financial and personal features to have more children while negative eugenics is picking people with flaws and defects from the population