Eugenics - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Applied science

Applied science is the application of scientific knowledge transferred into a physical environment. Examples include testing a theoretical model through the use of formal science or solving a practical problem through the use of natural science....

or the bio-social movement

Social movement

Social movements are a type of group action. They are large informal groupings of individuals or organizations focused on specific political or social issues, in other words, on carrying out, resisting or undoing a social change....

which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population

Population genetics

Population genetics is the study of allele frequency distribution and change under the influence of the four main evolutionary processes: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow. It also takes into account the factors of recombination, population subdivision and population...

", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance

Mendelian inheritance

Mendelian inheritance is a scientific description of how hereditary characteristics are passed from parent organisms to their offspring; it underlies much of genetics...

, and the theories of August Weismann

August Weismann

Friedrich Leopold August Weismann was a German evolutionary biologist. Ernst Mayr ranked him the second most notable evolutionary theorist of the 19th century, after Charles Darwin...

. Historically, many of the practitioners of eugenics viewed eugenics as a science, not necessarily restricted to human populations; this embraced the views of Darwin and Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism is a term commonly used for theories of society that emerged in England and the United States in the 1870s, seeking to apply the principles of Darwinian evolution to sociology and politics...

.

Eugenics was widely popular in the early decades of the 20th century. The First International Congress of Eugenics in 1912 was supported by many prominent persons, including: its president Leonard Darwin

Leonard Darwin

Major Leonard Darwin , a son of the English naturalist Charles Darwin, was variously a soldier, politician, economist, eugenicist and mentor of the statistician and evolutionary biologist Ronald Fisher.- Biography :...

, the son of Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

; honorary vice-president Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...

, then First Lord of the Admiralty and future Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; Auguste Forel, famous Swiss pathologist; Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell was an eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone....

, the inventor of the telephone; among other prominent people. The National Socialists' (NSDAP) approach to genetics and eugenics became focused on Eugen Fischer

Eugen Fischer

Eugen Fischer was a German professor of medicine, anthropology and eugenics. He was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics between 1927 and 1942...

's concept of phenogenetics and the Nazi twin study

Nazi twin study

The methodology of twin study has been used for fraudulent purposes by many scientists. Two famous examples are the "Burt Affair" and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer's work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics....

methods of Fischer and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer

Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer

Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer was a German human biologist and eugenicist concerned primarily with "racial hygiene" and twin research...

.

Eugenics was a controversial concept even shortly after its creation. The first major challenge to eugenics was made in 1915 by Thomas Hunt Morgan

Thomas Hunt Morgan

Thomas Hunt Morgan was an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and embryologist and science author who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for discoveries relating the role the chromosome plays in heredity.Morgan received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in zoology...

, who demonstrated the event of genetic mutation

Mutation

In molecular biology and genetics, mutations are changes in a genomic sequence: the DNA sequence of a cell's genome or the DNA or RNA sequence of a virus. They can be defined as sudden and spontaneous changes in the cell. Mutations are caused by radiation, viruses, transposons and mutagenic...

occuring outside of inheritance involving the discovery of the birth of a fruit fly

Fruit fly

Fruit fly may refer to several organisms:* Tephritidae, a family of large, colorfully marked flies including agricultural pests* Drosophilidae, a family of smaller flies, including:** Drosophila, the genus of small fruit flies and vinegar flies...

with white eyes from a family and ancestry of the red-eyed Drosophila melanogaster
Drosophila melanogaster
Drosophila melanogaster is a species of Diptera, or the order of flies, in the family Drosophilidae. The species is known generally as the common fruit fly or vinegar fly. Starting from Charles W...

species of fruit fly. Morgan claimed that this demonstrated that major genetic changes occurred outside of inheritance and that the concept of eugenics based upon genetic inheritance was severely flawed.

By the mid-20th century eugenics had fallen into disfavor, having become associated with Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

. Both the public and some elements of the scientific community have associated eugenics with Nazi

Nazism

Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

abuses, such as enforced "racial hygiene

Racial hygiene

Racial hygiene was a set of early twentieth century state sanctioned policies by which certain groups of individuals were allowed to procreate and others not, with the expressed purpose of promoting certain characteristics deemed to be particularly desirable...

", human experimentation

Nazi human experimentation

Nazi human experimentation was a series of medical experiments on large numbers of prisoners by the Nazi German regime in its concentration camps mainly in the early 1940s, during World War II and the Holocaust. Prisoners were coerced into participating: they did not willingly volunteer and there...

, and the extermination

Genocide

Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...

of "undesired" population groups. However, developments in genetic

Genetic engineering

Genetic engineering, also called genetic modification, is the direct human manipulation of an organism's genome using modern DNA technology. It involves the introduction of foreign DNA or synthetic genes into the organism of interest...

, genomic

Genetic testing

Genetic testing is among the newest and most sophisticated of techniques used to test for genetic disorders which involves direct examination of the DNA molecule itself. Other genetic tests include biochemical tests for such gene products as enzymes and other proteins and for microscopic...

, and reproductive technologies

Human cloning

Human cloning is the creation of a genetically identical copy of a human. It does not usually refer to monozygotic multiple births nor the reproduction of human cells or tissue. The ethics of cloning is an extremely controversial issue...

at the end of the 20th century have raised many new questions and concerns about the meaning of eugenics and its ethical and moral status in the modern era, effectively creating a resurgence of interest in eugenics.

Overview

As a social movement, eugenics reached its greatest popularity in the early decades of the 20th century. By the end of World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

eugenics had been largely abandoned. Although current trends in genetics have raised questions amongst critical academics concerning parallels between pre-war attitudes about eugenics and current "utilitarian" and social theories allegedly related to Darwinism, they are, in fact, only superficially related and somewhat contradictory to one another. At its pre-war height, the movement often pursued pseudoscientific notions of racial supremacy and purity.

Eugenics was practiced around the world and was promoted by governments, and influential individuals and institutions. Its advocates regarded it as a social philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

for the improvement of human

Human

Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...

hereditary traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of certain people and traits, and the reduction of reproduction of other people and traits.

Today it is widely regarded as a brutal movement which inflicted massive human rights

Human rights

Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...

violations on millions of people. The "interventions" advocated and practiced by eugenicists involved prominently the identification and classification of individuals and their families, including the poor, mentally ill, blind, deaf, developmentally disabled, promiscuous women, homosexuals and entire racial groups -- such as the Roma and Jews

Jews

The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...

-- as "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.

The practices engaged in by eugenicists involving violations of privacy, attacks on reputation, violations of the right to life, to found a family, to freedom from discrimination are all today classified as violations of human rights

Human rights

. The practice of negative racial aspects of eugenics, after World War II, fell within the definition of the new international crime of genocide

Genocide

, set out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948 as General Assembly Resolution 260. The Convention entered into force on 12 January 1951. It defines genocide in legal terms, and is the culmination of...

.

The modern field and term were first formulated by Sir Francis Galton

Francis Galton

Sir Francis Galton /ˈfrɑːnsɪs ˈgɔːltn̩/ FRS , cousin of Douglas Strutt Galton, half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath: anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician...

in 1883, drawing on the recent work of his half-cousin Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

. At its peak of popularity eugenics was supported by a wide variety of prominent people, including Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill

, Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger

Margaret Higgins Sanger was an American sex educator, nurse, and birth control activist. Sanger coined the term birth control, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established Planned Parenthood...

, Marie Stopes

Marie Stopes

Marie Carmichael Stopes was a British author, palaeobotanist, campaigner for women's rights and pioneer in the field of birth control...

, H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...

, Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States . He is noted for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his "cowboy" persona and robust masculinity...

, George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...

, John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes of Tilton, CB FBA , was a British economist whose ideas have profoundly affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, as well as the economic policies of governments...

, John Harvey Kellogg

John Harvey Kellogg

John Harvey Kellogg was an American medical doctor in Battle Creek, Michigan, who ran a sanitarium using holistic methods, with a particular focus on nutrition, enemas and exercise. Kellogg was an advocate of vegetarianism and is best known for the invention of the corn flakes breakfast cereal...

, Linus Pauling

Linus Pauling

Linus Carl Pauling was an American chemist, biochemist, peace activist, author, and educator. He was one of the most influential chemists in history and ranks among the most important scientists of the 20th century...

and Sidney Webb. Many members of the American Progressive Movement supported eugenics, seduced by its scientific trappings and its promise of a quick end to social ills. Its most infamous proponent and practitioner was, however, Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...

who praised and incorporated eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf

Mein Kampf

Mein Kampf is a book written by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. It combines elements of autobiography with an exposition of Hitler's political ideology. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and Volume 2 in 1926...

and emulated Eugenic legislation for the sterilization of "defectives" that had been pioneered in the United States.

The American sociologist Lester Frank Ward

Lester Frank Ward

Lester F. Ward was an American botanist, paleontologist, and sociologist. He served as the first president of the American Sociological Association.-Biography:...

and the English writer G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, KC*SG was an English writer. His prolific and diverse output included philosophy, ontology, poetry, plays, journalism, public lectures and debates, literary and art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics, and fiction, including fantasy and detective fiction....

were early critics of the philosophy of eugenics. Ward's 1913 article "Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics" and Chesterton's 1917 book Eugenics and Other Evils were harshly critical of the rapidly growing eugenics movement.

Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities, and received funding from many sources. Three International Eugenics Conference

International Eugenics Conference

Three International Eugenics Congresses took place between 1912 and 1932 and were the global venue for scientists, politicians, and social leaders to plan and discuss the application of programs to improve human heredity in the early twentieth century....

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

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. Later, in the 1920s and 30s, the eugenic policy of sterilizing

Compulsory sterilization

Compulsory sterilization also known as forced sterilization programs are government policies which attempt to force people to undergo surgical sterilization...

certain mental patients was implemented in a variety of other countries, including Belgium

Belgium

Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

, Brazil

Brazil

Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

, and Sweden

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

, among others. The scientific reputation of eugenics started to decline in the 1930s, a time when Ernst Rüdin

Ernst Rüdin

Ernst Rüdin , was a Swiss psychiatrist, geneticist and eugenicist. Rüdin was born in St. Gallen, Switzerland...

used eugenics as a justification for the racial policies

Racial policy of Nazi Germany

The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of policies and laws implemented by Nazi Germany, asserting the superiority of the "Aryan race", and based on a specific racist doctrine which claimed scientific legitimacy...

of Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

, and when proponents of eugenics among scientists and thinkers prompted a backlash in the public. Nevertheless, in Sweden the eugenics program continued until 1975.

Since the postwar

World War II

period, both the public and the scientific communities have associated eugenics with Nazi

Nazism

Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

abuses, such as enforced racial hygiene

Racial hygiene

, human experimentation

Human experimentation

Human subject research includes experiments and observational studies. Human subjects are commonly participants in research on basic biology, clinical medicine, nursing, psychology, and all other social sciences. Humans have been participants in research since the earliest studies...

, and the extermination

Genocide

of "undesired" population groups. However, developments in genetic, genomic, and reproductive technologies at the end of the 20th century have raised many new questions and concerns about what exactly constitutes the meaning of eugenics and what its ethical and moral status is in the modern era.

Meanings and types

The word eugenics derives

Etymology

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...

from the Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

word eu (good or well) and the suffix -genēs (born), and was coined by Sir Francis Galton in 1883 to replace the word stirpiculture (also see: Oneida stirpiculture

Oneida stirpiculture

Stirpiculture is a word coined by John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, to refer to eugenics, or the breeding of humans to achieve desired perfections within the species...

) which he had used previously but which had come to be mocked by people of culture due to its perceived sexual overtones. Galton defined eugenics as "the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations". Eugenics has, from the very beginning, meant many different things to many different people. Historically, the term has referred to everything from prenatal care for mothers to forced sterilization and euthanasia

Euthanasia

Euthanasia refers to the practice of intentionally ending a life in order to relieve pain and suffering....

. To population geneticists

Population genetics

the term has included the avoidance of inbreeding

Inbreeding

Inbreeding is the reproduction from the mating of two genetically related parents. Inbreeding results in increased homozygosity, which can increase the chances of offspring being affected by recessive or deleterious traits. This generally leads to a decreased fitness of a population, which is...

without necessarily altering allele

Allele

An allele is one of two or more forms of a gene or a genetic locus . "Allel" is an abbreviation of allelomorph. Sometimes, different alleles can result in different observable phenotypic traits, such as different pigmentation...

frequencies; for example, J. B. S. Haldane

J. B. S. Haldane

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS , known as Jack , was a British-born geneticist and evolutionary biologist. A staunch Marxist, he was critical of Britain's role in the Suez Crisis, and chose to leave Oxford and moved to India and became an Indian citizen...

wrote that "the motor bus, by breaking up inbred village communities, was a powerful eugenic agent". Much debate has taken place in the past, as it does today, as to what exactly counts as eugenics. Some types of eugenics deal only with perceived beneficial and/or detrimental genetic traits. These are sometimes called "pseudo-eugenics" by proponents of strict eugenics.

The term eugenics is often used to refer to movements and social policies influential during the early 20th century. 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

Gene pool

In population genetics, a gene pool is the complete set of unique alleles in a species or population.- Description :A large gene pool indicates extensive genetic diversity, which is associated with robust populations that can survive bouts of intense selection...

. Some forms of infanticide

Infanticide

Infanticide or infant homicide is the killing of a human infant. Neonaticide, a killing within 24 hours of a baby's birth, is most commonly done by the mother.In many past societies, certain forms of infanticide were considered permissible...

in ancient societies, present-day reprogenetics

Reprogenetics

Reprogenetics is a term referring to the merging of reproductive and genetic technologies expected to happen in the near future as techniques like germinal choice technology become more available and more powerful. The term was coined by Lee M...

, preemptive abortions and designer babies have been (sometimes controversially) referred to as eugenic. Because of its normative

Norm (philosophy)

Norms are concepts of practical import, oriented to effecting an action, rather than conceptual abstractions that describe, explain, and express. Normative sentences imply “ought-to” types of statements and assertions, in distinction to sentences that provide “is” types of statements and assertions...

goals and historical association with scientific racism

Scientific racism

Scientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to sanction the belief in racial superiority or racism.This is not the same as using scientific findings and the scientific method to investigate differences among the humans and argue that there are races...

, as well as the development of the science of genetics

Genetics

Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....

, the western scientific community has mostly disassociated itself from the term "eugenics", although one can find advocates of what is now known as liberal eugenics
Liberal eugenics
Liberal eugenics is an ideology which advocates the use of reproductive and genetic technologies where the choice of enhancing human characteristics and capacities is left to the individual preferences of parents acting as consumers, rather than the public health policies of the state.-History:The...

. Despite its ongoing criticism in the United States, several regions globally practice different forms of eugenics.

Eugenicists advocate specific policies that (if successful) they believe will lead to a perceived improvement of the human gene pool. Since defining what improvements are desired or beneficial is perceived by many as a cultural choice rather than a matter that can be determined objectively (e.g., by empirical, scientific inquiry), eugenics has often been deemed a pseudoscience

Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...

. The most disputed aspect of eugenics has been the definition of "improvement" of the human gene pool, such as what is a beneficial characteristic and what is a defect. This aspect of eugenics has historically been tainted with scientific racism

Scientific racism

.

Early eugenicists were mostly concerned with perceived intelligence factors that often correlated strongly with social class

Social class

Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...

. Many eugenicists took inspiration from the selective breeding

Selective breeding

Selective breeding is the process of breeding plants and animals for particular genetic traits. Typically, strains that are selectively bred are domesticated, and the breeding is sometimes done by a professional breeder. Bred animals are known as breeds, while bred plants are known as varieties,...

of animals (where purebred

Purebred

Purebreds, also called purebreeds, are cultivated varieties or cultivars of an animal species, achieved through the process of selective breeding...

s are often strived for) as their analogy for improving human society. The mixing of races (or miscegenation

Miscegenation

Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation....

) was usually considered as something to be avoided in the name of racial purity. At the time this concept appeared to have some scientific support, and it remained a contentious issue until the advanced development of genetics

Genetics

Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....

led to a scientific consensus that the division of the human species into unequal races is unjustifiable.

Eugenics has also been concerned with the elimination of hereditary diseases such as hemophilia

Haemophilia

Haemophilia is a group of hereditary genetic disorders that impair the body's ability to control blood clotting or coagulation, which is used to stop bleeding when a blood vessel is broken. Haemophilia A is the most common form of the disorder, present in about 1 in 5,000–10,000 male births...

and Huntington's disease

Huntington's disease

Huntington's disease, chorea, or disorder , is a neurodegenerative genetic disorder that affects muscle coordination and leads to cognitive decline and dementia. It typically becomes noticeable in middle age. HD is the most common genetic cause of abnormal involuntary writhing movements called chorea...

. However, there are several problems with labeling certain factors as genetic defects. In many cases there is no scientific consensus on what a genetic defect is. It is often argued that this is more a matter of social or individual choice. What appears to be a genetic defect in one context or environment may not be so in another. This can be the case for genes with a heterozygote advantage

Heterozygote advantage

A heterozygote advantage describes the case in which the heterozygote genotype has a higher relative fitness than either the homozygote dominant or homozygote recessive genotype. The specific case of heterozygote advantage is due to a single locus known as overdominance...

, such as sickle-cell disease

Sickle-cell disease

Sickle-cell disease , or sickle-cell anaemia or drepanocytosis, is an autosomal recessive genetic blood disorder with overdominance, characterized by red blood cells that assume an abnormal, rigid, sickle shape. Sickling decreases the cells' flexibility and results in a risk of various...

or Tay-Sachs disease

Tay-Sachs disease

Tay–Sachs disease is an autosomal recessive genetic disorder...

, which in their heterozygote

Zygosity

Zygosity refers to the similarity of alleles for a trait in an organism. If both alleles are the same, the organism is homozygous for the trait. If both alleles are different, the organism is heterozygous for that trait...

form may offer an advantage against, respectively, malaria

Malaria

Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease of humans and other animals caused by eukaryotic protists of the genus Plasmodium. The disease results from the multiplication of Plasmodium parasites within red blood cells, causing symptoms that typically include fever and headache, in severe cases...

and tuberculosis

Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...

. Although some birth defects are uniformly lethal, disabled persons can succeed in life. Many of the conditions early eugenicists identified as inheritable (pellagra

Pellagra

Pellagra is a vitamin deficiency disease most commonly caused by a chronic lack of niacin in the diet. It can be caused by decreased intake of niacin or tryptophan, and possibly by excessive intake of leucine. It may also result from alterations in protein metabolism in disorders such as carcinoid...

is one such example) are currently considered to be at least partially, if not wholly, attributed to environmental conditions. Similar concerns have been raised when a prenatal diagnosis

Prenatal diagnosis

Prenatal diagnosis or prenatal screening is testing for diseases or conditions in a fetus or embryo before it is born. The aim is to detect birth defects such as neural tube defects, Down syndrome, chromosome abnormalities, genetic diseases and other conditions, such as spina bifida, cleft palate,...

of a congenital disorder

Congenital disorder

A congenital disorder, or congenital disease, is a condition existing at birth and often before birth, or that develops during the first month of life , regardless of causation...

leads to abortion

Abortion

Abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo prior to viability. An abortion can occur spontaneously, in which case it is usually called a miscarriage, or it can be purposely induced...

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis

In medicine and genetics pre-implantation genetic diagnosis refers to procedures that are performed on embryos prior to implantation, sometimes even on oocytes prior to fertilization. PGD is considered another way to prenatal diagnosis...

).

Eugenic policies have been conceptually divided into two categories. Positive eugenics is aimed at encouraging reproduction among the genetically advantaged. Possible approaches include financial and political stimuli, targeted demographic analyses, in vitro fertilization, egg transplants, and cloning. Negative eugenics is aimed at lowering fertility among the genetically disadvantaged. This includes abortions, sterilization, and other methods of family planning. Both positive and negative eugenics can be coercive. Abortion by fit

Fitness (biology)

Fitness is a central idea in evolutionary theory. It can be defined either with respect to a genotype or to a phenotype in a given environment...

women was illegal in Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

and in the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

during Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...

's reign.

During the 20th century, many countries enacted various eugenics policies and programs, including:
genetic screening, birth control

Birth control

Birth control is an umbrella term for several techniques and methods used to prevent fertilization or to interrupt pregnancy at various stages. Birth control techniques and methods include contraception , contragestion and abortion...

, promoting differential birth rates, marriage restrictions, segregation (both racial segregation

Racial segregation

Racial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home...

and segregation of the mentally ill from the rest of the population), compulsory sterilization

Compulsory sterilization

Compulsory sterilization also known as forced sterilization programs are government policies which attempt to force people to undergo surgical sterilization...

, forced abortions or forced pregnancies and genocide

Genocide

. Most of these policies were later regarded as coercive and/or restrictive, and now few jurisdictions implement policies that are explicitly labeled as eugenic or unequivocally eugenic in substance. However, some private organizations assist people in genetic counseling

Genetic counseling

Genetic counseling or traveling is the process by which patients or relatives, at risk of an inherited disorder, are advised of the consequences and nature of the disorder, the probability of developing or transmitting it, and the options open to them in management and family planning...

, and reprogenetics

Reprogenetics

may be considered as a form of non-state-enforced liberal eugenics.

Implementation methods

There are three main ways by which the methods of eugenics can be applied. One is mandatory eugenics or authoritarian eugenics, in which the government mandates a eugenics program. Policies and/or legislation are 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. The third is private eugenics, which is practiced voluntarily by individuals and groups, but not promoted to the general population.

Pre-Galtonian philosophies

The philosophy was most famously expounded by Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

, who believed human reproduction should be monitored and controlled by the state. However, Plato understood this form of government control would not be readily accepted, and proposed the truth be concealed from the public via a fixed lottery. Mates, in Plato's Republic, would be chosen by a "marriage number" in which the quality of the individual would be quantitatively analyzed, and persons of high numbers would be allowed to procreate with other persons of high numbers. In theory, this would lead to predictable results and the improvement of the human race. However, Plato acknowledged the failure of the "marriage number" since "gold soul" persons could still produce "bronze soul" children. Plato's ideas may have been one of the earliest attempts to mathematically analyze genetic inheritance, which was not perfected until the development of Mendel

Gregor Mendel

Gregor Johann Mendel was an Austrian scientist and Augustinian friar who gained posthumous fame as the founder of the new science of genetics. Mendel demonstrated that the inheritance of certain traits in pea plants follows particular patterns, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance...

ian genetics and the mapping of the human genome

Human genome

The human genome is the genome of Homo sapiens, which is stored on 23 chromosome pairs plus the small mitochondrial DNA. 22 of the 23 chromosomes are autosomal chromosome pairs, while the remaining pair is sex-determining...

.

Other ancient civilizations, such as Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

, Athens

Athens

Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...

and Sparta

Sparta

Sparta or Lacedaemon, was a prominent city-state in ancient Greece, situated on the banks of the River Eurotas in Laconia, in south-eastern Peloponnese. It emerged as a political entity around the 10th century BC, when the invading Dorians subjugated the local, non-Dorian population. From c...

, practiced infanticide

Infanticide

through exposure as a form of phenotypic selection. In Sparta, newborns were inspected by the city's elders, who decided the fate of the infant. If the child was deemed incapable of living, it was usually exposed in the Apothetae near the Taygetus

Taygetus

Mount Taygetus, Taugetus, or Taigetus is a mountain range in the Peloponnese peninsula in Southern Greece. The name is one of the oldest recorded in Europe, appearing in the Odyssey. In classical mythology, it was associated with the nymph Taygete...

mountain. It was more common for boys than girls to be killed this way in Sparta.
Trials for babies included bathing them in wine and exposing them to the elements. To Sparta, this would ensure only the strongest survived and procreated. Adolf Hitler considered Sparta to be the first "Völkisch

Völkisch movement

The volkisch movement is the German interpretation of the populist movement, with a romantic focus on folklore and the "organic"...

State", and much like Ernst Haeckel

Ernst Haeckel

The "European War" became known as "The Great War", and it was not until 1920, in the book "The First World War 1914-1918" by Charles à Court Repington, that the term "First World War" was used as the official name for the conflict.-Research:...

before him, praised Sparta for its selective infanticide policy, though the Nazis believed the children were killed outright and not exposed.

The Twelve Tables of Roman Law

Twelve Tables

The Law of the Twelve Tables was the ancient legislation that stood at the foundation of Roman law. The Law of the Twelve Tables formed the centrepiece of the constitution of the Roman Republic and the core of the mos maiorum...

, established early in the formation of the Roman Republic

Roman Republic

The Roman Republic was the period of the ancient Roman civilization where the government operated as a republic. It began with the overthrow of the Roman monarchy, traditionally dated around 508 BC, and its replacement by a government headed by two consuls, elected annually by the citizens and...

, stated in the fourth table that deformed children must be put to death. In addition, patriarchs in Roman society were given the right to "discard" infants at their discretion. This was often done by drowning undesired newborns in the Tiber River. The practice of open infanticide in the Roman Empire

Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....

did not subside until its Christianization

Christianity

Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...

Galton's theory

Sir Francis Galton

Francis Galton

systematized these ideas and practices according to new knowledge about the evolution of man and animals provided by the theory of his half-cousin Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

during the 1860s and 1870s. After reading Darwin's Origin of Species, Galton built upon Darwin's ideas whereby the mechanisms of natural selection

Natural selection

Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....

were potentially thwarted by human civilization

Civilization

Civilization is a sometimes controversial term that has been used in several related ways. Primarily, the term has been used to refer to the material and instrumental side of human cultures that are complex in terms of technology, science, and division of labor. Such civilizations are generally...

. He reasoned that, 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; and only by changing these social policies could society be saved from a "reversion towards mediocrity", a phrase he first coined in statistics and which later changed to the now common "regression towards the mean".

Galton first sketched out his theory in the 1865 article "Hereditary Talent and Character", then elaborated further in his 1869 book Hereditary Genius. He began by studying the way in which human intellectual, moral, and personality traits tended to run in families. Galton's basic argument was "genius" and "talent" were hereditary traits in humans

Inheritance of intelligence

The study of the heritability of IQ investigates the relative importance of genetics and environment for variation in intelligence quotient in a population...

(although neither he nor Darwin yet had a working model of this type of heredity). He concluded since one could use artificial selection

Artificial selection

Artificial selection describes intentional breeding for certain traits, or combination of traits. The term was utilized by Charles Darwin in contrast to natural selection, in which the differential reproduction of organisms with certain traits is attributed to improved survival or reproductive...

to exaggerate traits in other animals, one could expect similar results when applying such models to humans. As he wrote in the introduction to Hereditary Genius:

I propose to show in this book that a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy, notwithstanding those limitations, to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.

Galton claimed that the less intelligent were more fertile than the more intelligent of his time. Galton did not propose any selection methods; rather, he hoped a solution would be found if social mores

Mores, in sociology, are any given society's particular norms, virtues, or values. The word mores is a plurale tantum term borrowed from Latin, which has been used in the English language since the 1890s....

changed in a way that encouraged people to see the importance of breeding. He first used the word eugenic in his 1883 Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, a book in which he meant "to touch on various topics more or less connected with that of the cultivation of race, or, as we might call it, with 'eugenic' questions". He included a footnote to the word "eugenic" which read:

That is, with questions bearing on what is termed in Greek, eugenes namely, good in stock, hereditary endowed with noble qualities. 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.

In 1904 he clarified his definition of 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".

Galton's formulation of eugenics was based on a strong statistical

Statistics

Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....

approach, influenced heavily by Adolphe Quetelet

Adolphe Quetelet

Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet was a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist. He founded and directed the Brussels Observatory and was influential in introducing statistical methods to the social sciences...

's "social physics". Unlike Quetelet, however, Galton did not exalt the "average man" but decried him as mediocre. Galton and his statistical heir Karl Pearson

Karl Pearson

Karl Pearson FRS was an influential English mathematician who has been credited for establishing the disciplineof mathematical statistics....

developed what was called the biometrical

Biometrics

Biometrics As Jain & Ross point out, "the term biometric authentication is perhaps more appropriate than biometrics since the latter has been historically used in the field of statistics to refer to the analysis of biological data [36]" . consists of methods...

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

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.

Eugenics eventually referred to human selective reproduction with an intent to create children with desirable traits, generally through the approach of influencing differential birth rates. These policies were mostly divided into two categories: positive eugenics, the increased reproduction of those seen to have advantageous hereditary traits; and negative eugenics, the discouragement of reproduction by those with hereditary traits perceived as poor. Negative eugenic policies in the past have ranged from attempts at segregation

Racial segregation

to sterilization

Compulsory sterilization

Compulsory sterilization also known as forced sterilization programs are government policies which attempt to force people to undergo surgical sterilization...

and even genocide

Genocide

. Positive eugenic policies have typically taken the form of awards or bonuses for "fit" parents who have another child. Relatively innocuous practices like marriage counseling had early links with eugenic ideology. Eugenics is superficially related to what would later be known as Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism

. 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

Dysgenics

Dysgenics is the study of factors producing the accumulation and perpetuation of defective or disadvantageous genes and traits in offspring of a particular population or species. Dysgenic mutations have been studied in animals such as the mouse and the fruit fly...

" if no welfare policies were in place (for example, the poor might reproduce more but would have higher mortality rates).

Charles Davenport

Charles Benedict Davenport was a prominent American eugenicist and biologist. He was one of the leaders of the American eugenics movement, which was directly involved in the sterilization of around 60,000 "unfit" Americans and strongly influenced the Holocaust in Europe.- Biography :Davenport was...

, a scientist from the United States, stands out as one of history's leading eugenicists. He took eugenics from a scientific idea to a worldwide movement implemented in many countries. Davenport obtained funding to establish the Biological Experiment Station at Cold Spring Harbor in 1904 and the Eugenics Records Office in 1910, which provided the scientific basis for later Eugenic policies such as enforced sterilization. He became the first President of the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations

International Federation of Eugenics Organizations

The International Federation of Eugenic Organizations was founded in 1925. Most members of this organization united eugenics with racism with political propaganda for the enhancement of the 'white race'." Charles Davenport founded the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations and was its...

(IFEO) in 1925, an organization he was instrumental in building. While Davenport was located at Cold Spring Harbor and received money from the Carnegie Institute of Washington, the organization known as the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) started to become an embarrassment after the well-known debates between Davenport and Franz Boas. Instead, Davenport occupied the same office and the same address at Cold Spring Harbor, but his organization now became known as the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, which currently retains the archives of the Eugenics Record Office. However, Davenport's racist views were not supported by all geneticists at Cold Spring Harbor, including H. J. Muller, Bentley Glass, and Esther Lederberg

Esther Lederberg

Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg was an American microbiologist and immunologist and pioneer of bacterial genetics...

.

In 1932 Davenport welcomed Ernst Rüdin

Ernst Rüdin

Ernst Rüdin , was a Swiss psychiatrist, geneticist and eugenicist. Rüdin was born in St. Gallen, Switzerland...

, a prominent Swiss eugenicist and race scientist, as his successor in the position of President of the IFEO. Rüdin, director of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Institute for Psychiatry, located in Munich), a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute

Kaiser Wilhelm Institute

The Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science was a German scientific institution established in 1911. It was implicated in Nazi science, and after the Second World War was wound up and its functions replaced by the Max Planck Society...

, was a co-founder (with his brother-in-law Alfred Ploetz

Alfred Ploetz

Alfred Ploetz was a German physician, biologist, eugenicist known for coining the term racial hygiene and promoting the concept in Germany. Rassenhygiene is a form of eugenics.-Biography:...

) of the German Society for the Racial Hygiene. Other prominent figures in Eugenics who were associated with Davenport included Harry Laughlin (United States), Havelock Ellis

Havelock Ellis

Henry Havelock Ellis, known as Havelock Ellis , was a British physician and psychologist, writer, and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He was co-author of the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and...

(United Kingdom), Irving Fischer (United States), Eugen Fischer

Eugen Fischer

Eugen Fischer was a German professor of medicine, anthropology and eugenics. He was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics between 1927 and 1942...

(Germany), Madison Grant

Madison Grant

Madison Grant was an American lawyer, historian and physical anthropologist, known primarily for his work as a eugenicist and conservationist...

(United States), Lucien Howe

Lucien Howe

Lucien Howe was an American physician who spent much of his career as a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Buffalo. In 1876 he was instrumental in the creation of the Buffalo Eye and Ear Infirmary....

(United States), and Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger

(United States, founder of Planned Parenthood).

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, eugenics never received significant state funding, but it was supported by many prominent figures of different political persuasions before World War I, including: Liberal

Liberal Party (UK)

The Liberal Party was one of the two major political parties of the United Kingdom during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a third party of negligible importance throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, before merging with the Social Democratic Party in 1988 to form the present day...

economists William Beveridge

William Beveridge

William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge KCB was a British economist and social reformer. He is best known for his 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services which served as the basis for the post-World War II welfare state put in place by the Labour government elected in 1945.Lord...

and John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes

; Fabian socialists

Fabian Society

The Fabian Society is a British socialist movement, whose purpose is to advance the principles of democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist, rather than revolutionary, means. It is best known for its initial ground-breaking work beginning late in the 19th century and continuing up to World...

such as Irish author George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

, H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells

and Sidney Webb; the future Prime Minister Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill

; and Conservatives

Conservative Party (UK)

The Conservative Party, formally the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a centre-right political party in the United Kingdom that adheres to the philosophies of conservatism and British unionism. It is the largest political party in the UK, and is currently the largest single party in the House...

such as Arthur Balfour

Arthur Balfour

Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, KG, OM, PC, DL was a British Conservative politician and statesman...

. The influential economist John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes

was a prominent supporter of Eugenics, serving as Director of the British Eugenics Society, and writing that eugenics is "the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists".

Its emphasis was more upon social class

Social class

, rather than race. Indeed, Francis Galton

Francis Galton

expressed these views during a lecture in 1901 in which he placed British society into groups. These groupings are shown in the figure and indicate the proportion of society falling into each group and their perceived genetic worth. Galton suggested that negative eugenics (i.e. an attempt to prevent them from bearing offspring) should be applied only to those in the lowest social group (the "Undesirables"), while positive eugenics applied to the higher classes. However, he appreciated the worth of the higher working classes to society and industry.

Sterilisation programmes were never legalised, although some were carried out in private upon the mentally ill by clinicians who were in favour of a more widespread eugenics plan. Indeed, those in support of eugenics shifted their lobbying of Parliament from enforced to voluntary sterilization, in the hope of achieving more legal recognition. But leave for the Labour Party

Labour Party (UK)

The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...

Member of Parliament

A Member of Parliament is a representative of the voters to a :parliament. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, the term applies specifically to members of the lower house, as upper houses often have a different title, such as senate, and thus also have different titles for its members,...

Major A. G. Church, to propose a Private Member's Bill

Private Member's Bill

A member of parliament’s legislative motion, called a private member's bill or a member's bill in some parliaments, is a proposed law introduced by a member of a legislature. In most countries with a parliamentary system, most bills are proposed by the government, not by individual members of the...

in 1931, which would legalise the operation for voluntary sterilization, was rejected by 167 votes to 89. The limited popularity of eugenics in the UK was reflected by the fact that only two universities established courses in this field (University College London

University College London

University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...

and Liverpool University). The Galton Institute, affiliated to UCL, was headed by Galton's protégé, Karl Pearson

Karl Pearson

Karl Pearson FRS was an influential English mathematician who has been credited for establishing the disciplineof mathematical statistics....

United States

One of the earliest modern advocates of eugenics (before it was labeled as such) was Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell was an eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone....

. In 1881 Bell investigated the rate of deafness on Martha's Vineyard

Martha's Vineyard

Martha's Vineyard is an island located south of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, known for being an affluent summer colony....

, Massachusetts

Massachusetts

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...

. From this he concluded that deafness was hereditary in nature and, through noting that congenitally deaf parents were more likely to produce deaf children, tentatively suggested that couples where both were deaf should not marry, in his lecture Memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race presented to the National Academy of Sciences

United States National Academy of Sciences

The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...

on 13 November 1883. However, it was his hobby of livestock breeding which led to his appointment to biologist David Starr Jordan

David Starr Jordan

David Starr Jordan, Ph.D., LL.D. was a leading eugenicist, ichthyologist, educator and peace activist. He was president of Indiana University and Stanford University.-Early life and education:...

's Committee on Eugenics, under the auspices of the American Breeders Association. The committee unequivocally extended the principle to man.

Another scientist considered the "father of the American eugenics movement" was Charles Benedict Davenport. In 1904 he secured funding for the The Station for Experimental Evolution, later renamed the Carnegie Department of Genetics. It was also around that time that Davenport became actively involved with the American Breeders' Association (ABA). This let to Davenport's first eugenics text, "The science of human improvement by better breeding", one of the first papers to connect agriculture and human heredity. Davenport later went on to set up a Eugenics Record Office (ERO), collecting hundreds of thousands of medical histories from Americans, which many considered having a racist and anti- immigration agenda. Davenport and his views were supported at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is a private, non-profit institution with research programs focusing on cancer, neurobiology, plant genetics, genomics and bioinformatics. The Laboratory has a broad educational mission, including the recently established Watson School of Biological Sciences. It...

as late as 1963, when his views began to be de-emphasized (racism was no longer popular). Davenport was ultimately replaced as the head of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1969 by James D. Watson

James D. Watson

James Dewey Watson is an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953 with Francis Crick...

, who himself was removed in 2007 as a consequence of his racist remarks.

As the science continued in the 20th century, researchers interested in familial mental disorders conducted a number of studies to document the heritability of such illnesses as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. Their findings were used by the eugenics movement as proof for its cause. State laws were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to prohibit marriage and force sterilization of the mentally ill in order to prevent the "passing on" of mental illness to the next generation. These laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 and were not abolished until the mid-20th century. All in all, 60,000 Americans were sterilized.

In 1907 Indiana

Indiana

Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...

became the first of more than thirty states to adopt legislation aimed at compulsory sterilization

Compulsory sterilization

Compulsory sterilization also known as forced sterilization programs are government policies which attempt to force people to undergo surgical sterilization...

of certain individuals. Although the law was overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1921, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law

Buck v. Bell

Buck v. Bell, , was the United States Supreme Court ruling that upheld a statute instituting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the mentally retarded, "for the protection and health of the state." It was largely seen as an endorsement of negative eugenics—the attempt to improve...

allowing for the compulsory sterilization

Compulsory sterilization

Compulsory sterilization also known as forced sterilization programs are government policies which attempt to force people to undergo surgical sterilization...

of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.

Beginning with Connecticut

Connecticut

Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...

in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile

Imbecile

Imbecile is a term for moderate to severe mental retardation, as well as for a type of criminal. It arises from the Latin word imbecillus, meaning weak, or weak-minded. "Imbecile" was once applied to people with an IQ of 26-50, between "moron" and "idiot" .The term was further refined into mental...

or feeble-minded

Feeble-minded

The term feeble-minded was used from the late nineteenth century in Great Britain, Europe and the United States to refer to a specific type of "mental deficiency". At the time, mental deficiency was an umbrella term, which encompassed all degrees of educational and social deficiency...

" from marrying. In 1898 Charles B. Davenport, a prominent American biologist

Biology

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

, began as director of a biological research station based in Cold Spring Harbor

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

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

Eugenics Record Office

The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, United States was a center for eugenics and human heredity research in the first half of the twentieth century. Both its founder, Charles Benedict Davenport, and its director, Harry H...

(ERO) opened in 1910 while Davenport and Harry H. Laughlin

Harry H. Laughlin

Harry Hamilton Laughlin was a leading American eugenicist in the first half of the 20th century. He was the director of the Eugenics Record Office from its inception in 1910 to its closing in 1939, and was among the most active individuals in influencing American eugenics policy, especially...

began to promote eugenics.

The Immigration Restriction League

Immigration Restriction League

The Immigration Restriction League, was founded in 1894 by people who opposed the influx of "undesirable immigrants" that were coming from southern and eastern Europe. They felt that these immigrants were threatening what they saw as the American way of life and the high wage scale...

(founded in 1894) was the first American entity associated officially with eugenics. The League sought to bar what it considered dysgenic members of certain races from entering America and diluting what it saw as the superior American racial stock through procreation. They lobbied for a literacy test for immigrants, based on the belief that literacy rates were low among "inferior races". Literacy test bills were vetoed by Presidents in 1897, 1913 and 1915; eventually, President Wilson's second veto was overruled by Congress in 1917. Membership in the League included: A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard, William DeWitt Hyde, president of Bowdoin College, James T. Young, director of Wharton School and David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University. The League allied themselves with the American Breeder's Association to gain influence and further its goals and in 1909 established a eugenics committee chaired by David Starr Jordan with members Charles Davenport, Alexander Graham Bell, Vernon Kellogg, Luther Burbank, William Earnest Castle, Adolf Meyer, H. J. Webber and Friedrich Woods. The ABA's immigration legislation committee, formed in 1911 and headed by League's founder Prescott F. Hall, formalized the committee's already strong relationship with the Immigration Restriction League.

In years to come, the ERO collected a mass of family pedigrees and concluded that those who were unfit came from economically and socially poor backgrounds. Eugenicists such as Davenport, the psychologist

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

Henry H. Goddard

Henry Herbert Goddard was a prominent American psychologist and eugenicist in the early 20th century...

and the conservationist Madison Grant

Madison Grant

Madison Grant was an American lawyer, historian and physical anthropologist, known primarily for his work as a eugenicist and conservationist...

(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
The Kallikak Family
The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness was a 1912 book by the American psychologist and eugenicist Henry H. Goddard. The work was an extended case study of Goddard's for the inheritance of "feeble-mindedness," a general category referring to a variety of mental...

; Grant favored all of the above and more, even entertaining the idea of extermination.) Though their methodology and research methods are now understood as highly flawed, at the time this was seen as legitimate scientific research. It did, however, have scientific detractors (notably, Thomas Hunt Morgan

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.

Some states sterilized "imbeciles" for much of the 20th century. The U.S. Supreme Court

Supreme Court of the United States

The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...

ruled in the 1927 Buck v. Bell
Buck v. Bell
Buck v. Bell, , was the United States Supreme Court ruling that upheld a statute instituting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the mentally retarded, "for the protection and health of the state." It was largely seen as an endorsement of negative eugenics—the attempt to improve...

case that the state of Virginia

Virginia

The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...

could sterilize those it thought unfit. The most significant era of eugenic sterilization

Compulsory sterilization

Compulsory sterilization also known as forced sterilization programs are government policies which attempt to force people to undergo surgical sterilization...

was between 1907 and 1963, when over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States. A favorable report on the results of sterilization in California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

, the state with the most sterilizations by far, was published in book form by the biologist Paul Popenoe

Paul Popenoe

Paul Popenoe was an American founding practitioner of marriage counseling. In his early years, he worked as an agricultural explorer and as a scholar of heredity, where he played a prominent role in the Eugenics movement of the early twentieth century.- Biography :Born as Paul Bowman Popenoe in...

and was widely cited by the Nazi government as evidence that wide-reaching sterilization programs were feasible and humane.

There are direct links between progressive American eugenicists such as Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger

and Harry H. Laughlin

Harry H. Laughlin

and racial oppression in the US and in Europe. Harry H. Laughlin

Harry H. Laughlin

wrote the Virginia model statute that was the basis for the Nazi Ernst Rudin

Ernst Rüdin

Ernst Rüdin , was a Swiss psychiatrist, geneticist and eugenicist. Rüdin was born in St. Gallen, Switzerland...

's Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring

Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring

Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring or "Sterilization Law" was a statute in Nazi Germany enacted on July 14, 1933, which allowed the compulsory sterilization of any citizen who in the opinion of a "Genetic Health Court" Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring...

. Laughlin's assistance to Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler

's cause resulted in an honorary doctorate from Heidelburg University in 1936. Ernst Rudin

Ernst Rüdin

Ernst Rüdin , was a Swiss psychiatrist, geneticist and eugenicist. Rüdin was born in St. Gallen, Switzerland...

also wrote articles on eugenics for Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger

's Birth Control Review. Sanger stated during work related to her "Negro Project", "The minister's work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." While there are two alternatives as to the interpretation of that quotation, Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger

not only attended, but actually spoke at a New Jersey meeting of the Ku Klux Klan auxiliary.

Such legislation was passed in the U.S. because of widespread public acceptance of the eugenics movement, spearheaded by efforts of progressive reformers. Over 19 million people attended the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, open for 10 months from February 20 to December 4, 1915. The PPIE was a fair devoted to extolling the virtues of a rapidly progressing nation, featuring new developments in science, agriculture, manufacturing and technology. A subject that received a large amount of time and space was that of the developments concerning health and disease, particularly the areas of tropical medicine and race betterment (tropical medicine being the combined study of bacteriology, parasitology and entomology while racial betterment being the promotion of eugenic studies). Having these areas so closely intertwined, it seemed that they were both categorized in the main theme of the fair, the advancement of civilization. Thus in the public eye, the seemingly contradictory areas of study were both represented under progressive banners of improvement and were made to seem like plausible courses of action to better American society.

The state of California was at the vanguard of the American eugenics movement, performing about 20,000 sterilizations or one third of the 60,000 nationwide from 1909 up until the 1960s. By 1910, there was a large and dynamic network of scientists, reformers and professionals engaged in national eugenics projects and actively promoting eugenic legislation. The American Breeder's Association was the first eugenic body in the U.S., established in 1906 under the direction of biologist Charles B. Davenport. The ABA was formed specifically to "investigate and report on heredity in the human race, and emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood". Membership included Alexander Graham Bell, Stanford president David Starr Jordan and Luther Burbank.

When Nazi administrators went on trial for war crimes in Nuremberg

Nuremberg

Nuremberg[p] is a city in the German state of Bavaria, in the administrative region of Middle Franconia. Situated on the Pegnitz river and the Rhine–Main–Danube Canal, it is located about north of Munich and is Franconia's largest city. The population is 505,664...

after World War II

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 Nazis had claimed American eugenicists inspired and supported Hitler's racial purification laws, and failed to understand the connection between those policies and the eventual genocide of the Holocaust

The Holocaust

The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...

The idea of "genius" and "talent" is also considered by William Graham Sumner

William Graham Sumner

William Graham Sumner was an American academic and "held the first professorship in sociology" at Yale College. For many years he had a reputation as one of the most influential teachers there. He was a polymath with numerous books and essays on American history, economic history, political...

, a founder of the American Sociological Society (now called the American Sociological Association). He maintained that if the government did not meddle with the social policy of laissez-faire, a class of genius would rise to the top of the system of social stratification, followed by a class of talent. Most of the rest of society would fit into the class of mediocrity. Those who were considered to be defective (mentally retarded, handicapped, etc.) had a negative effect on social progress by draining off necessary resources. They should be left on their own to sink or swim. But those in the class of delinquent (criminals, deviants, etc.) should be eliminated from society ("Folkways", 1907). (Compare to ideals in Plato

Plato

's Republic.)

However, methods of eugenics were applied to reformulate more restrictive definitions of white racial purity in existing state laws banning interracial marriage

Interracial marriage

Interracial marriage occurs when two people of differing racial groups marry. This is a form of exogamy and can be seen in the broader context of miscegenation .-Legality of interracial marriage:In the Western world certain jurisdictions have had regulations...

: the so-called anti-miscegenation laws

Anti-miscegenation laws

Anti-miscegenation laws, also known as miscegenation laws, were laws that enforced racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage and sometimes also sex between members of different races...

. The most famous example of the influence of eugenics and its emphasis on strict racial segregation on such "anti-miscegenation

Miscegenation

Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation....

" legislation was Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924

Racial Integrity Act of 1924

On March 20, 1924 the Virginia General Assembly passed two laws that had arisen out of contemporary concerns about eugenics and race: SB 219, entitled "The Racial Integrity Act" and SB 281, "An ACT to provide for the sexual sterilization of inmates of State institutions in certain cases",...

. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned this law in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia

Loving v. Virginia

Loving v. Virginia, , was a landmark civil rights case in which the United States Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, declared Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute, the "Racial Integrity Act of 1924", unconstitutional, thereby overturning Pace v...

, and declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.

With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924

Immigration Act of 1924

The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson–Reed Act, including the National Origins Act, and Asian Exclusion Act , was a United States federal law that limited the annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already...

, eugenicists for the first time played an important role in the Congressional debate as expert advisers on the threat of "inferior stock" from eastern and southern Europe. This reduced the number of immigrants from abroad to 15 percent from previous years, to control the number of "unfit" individuals entering the country. While eugenicists did support the act, the most important backers were union leaders like Samuel Gompers

Samuel Gompers

Samuel Gompers was an English-born American cigar maker who became a labor union leader and a key figure in American labor history. Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor , and served as that organization's president from 1886 to 1894 and from 1895 until his death in 1924...

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

White supremacy

White supremacy is the belief, and promotion of the belief, that white people are superior to people of other racial backgrounds. The term is sometimes used specifically to describe a political ideology that advocates the social and political dominance by whites.White supremacy, as with racial...

), strengthened the position of existing laws prohibiting race-mixing. Eugenic considerations also lay behind the adoption of incest

Incest

Incest is sexual intercourse between close relatives that is usually illegal in the jurisdiction where it takes place and/or is conventionally considered a taboo. The term may apply to sexual activities between: individuals of close "blood relationship"; members of the same household; step...

laws in much of the U.S. and were used to justify many anti-miscegenation laws

Anti-miscegenation laws

Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation....

asserted that restrictions on immigration

Immigration

Immigration is the act of foreigners passing or coming into a country for the purpose of permanent residence...

passed in the United States during the 1920s (and overhauled in 1965 with the Immigration and Nationality Act) were motivated by the goals of eugenics. 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

Lothrop Stoddard

Theodore Lothrop Stoddard was an American historian, journalist, racial anthropologist, eugenicist, political theorist and anti-immigration advocate who wrote a number of books which are cited by historians as prominent examples of early 20th-century scientific racism.- Biography :Stoddard was...

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

Anglo-Saxons

Anglo-Saxon is a term used by historians to designate the Germanic tribes who invaded and settled the south and east of Great Britain beginning in the early 5th century AD, and the period from their creation of the English nation to the Norman conquest. The Anglo-Saxon Era denotes the period of...

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

Richard Herrnstein

Richard J. Herrnstein was an American researcher in animal learning in the Skinnerian tradition. He was one of the founders of quantitative analysis of behavior....

, have argued, based on their examination of the records of the congressional debates over immigration policy, Congress gave virtually no consideration to these factors. According to these authors, the restrictions were motivated primarily by a desire to maintain the country's cultural

Culture

Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...

integrity against the heavy influx of foreigners.

In the USA, eugenic supporters included Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt

, Research was funded by distinguished philanthropies and carried out at prestigious universities. It was taught in college and high school classrooms.
Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger

founded Planned Parenthood of America to urge the legalization of contraception

Contraception

Contraception is the prevention of the fusion of gametes during or after sexual activity. The term contraception is a contraction of contra, which means against, and the word conception, meaning fertilization...

for poor, immigrant women. 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

World War II

, the idea that eugenics would lead to genocide

Genocide

was not taken seriously by the average American.

Australia

The policy of removing mixed race Aboriginal

Indigenous Australians

Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....

children from their parents emerged from an opinion based on Eugenics theory in late 19th and early 20th century Australia that the 'full-blood' tribal Aborigine would be unable to sustain itself, and was doomed to inevitable extinction, as at the time huge numbers of aborigines were in fact dying out, from diseases caught from European settlers. An ideology

Ideology

An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...

at the time held that mankind could be divided into a civilizational hierarchy. This notion supposed that Northern Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

ans were superior in civilization and that Aborigines were inferior. According to this view, the increasing numbers of mixed-descent children in Australia, labeled as 'half-castes' (or alternatively 'crossbreeds', 'quadroons' and 'octoroons') should develop within their respective communities, white or aboriginal, according to their dominant parentage.

In the first half of the 20th century, this led to policies and legislation that resulted in the removal of children from their tribe.
The stated aim was to culturally assimilate

Cultural assimilation

Cultural assimilation is a socio-political response to demographic multi-ethnicity that supports or promotes the assimilation of ethnic minorities into the dominant culture. The term assimilation is often used with regard to immigrants and various ethnic groups who have settled in a new land. New...

mixed-descent

Multiracial

The terms multiracial and mixed-race describe people whose ancestries come from multiple races. Unlike the term biracial, which often is only used to refer to having parents or grandparents of two different races, the term multiracial may encompass biracial people but can also include people with...

people into contemporary Australian society. In all states and territories legislation was passed in the early years of the 20th century which gave Aboriginal protectors guardianship rights over Aborigines up to the age of sixteen or twenty-one. Policemen or other agents of the state (such as Aboriginal Protection Officers), were given the power to locate and transfer babies and children of mixed descent, from their communities into institutions. In these Australian states and territories, half-caste institutions (both government or missionary

Missionary

A missionary is a member of a religious group sent into an area to do evangelism or ministries of service, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care and economic development. The word "mission" originates from 1598 when the Jesuits sent members abroad, derived from the Latin...

) were established in the early decades of the 20th century for the reception of these separated children. The 2002 movie Rabbit-Proof Fence

Rabbit-Proof Fence (film)

Rabbit-Proof Fence is a 2002 Australian drama film directed by Phillip Noyce based on the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara...

portrays a fictional story about this system and the harrowing consequences of attempting to overcome it.

In 1922 A.O. Neville was appointed the second Western Australia State Chief Protector of Aborigines
Protector of Aborigines
The role of Protectors of Aborigines resulted from a recommendation of the report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Aborigines . On 31 January 1838, Lord Glenelg, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies sent Governor Gipps the report.The report recommended that Protectors of...

. During the next quarter-century, he presided over the now notorious 'Assimilation' policy of removing mixed-race Aboriginal children from their parents. This policy in turn created the Stolen Generations and set in motion a grieving process that has become known as the concept of trans-generational grief, and would affect many generations to come. In 1936 Neville became the Commissioner for Native Affairs, a post he held until his retirement in 1940.

Neville believed that biological absorption was the key to 'uplifting the Native race'. Speaking before the Moseley Royal Commission

Moseley Royal Commission

The Moseley Royal Commission, officially titled the Royal Commission Appointed to Investigate, Report and Advise Upon Matters in Relation to the Condition and Treatment of Aborigines was a Government of Western Australia Royal Commission established in 1934 to hear evidence regarding the treatment...

, which investigated the administration of Aboriginals in 1934, he defended the policies of forced settlement, removing children from parents, surveillance, discipline and punishment, arguing that "they have to be protected against themselves whether they like it or not. They cannot remain as they are. The sore spot requires the application of the surgeon's knife for the good of the patient, and probably against the patient's will". In his twilight years Neville continued to actively promote his policy. Towards the end of his career, Neville published Australia's Coloured Minority, a text outlining his plan for the biological absorption of aboriginal people into white Australia.

Brazil

The idea of Social Darwinism was wide spread among Brazil's leading scientists, educators, social thinkers as well as many of the elected officials in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This led to the "Politica de Branqueamento" (Whitening Policies) set in practice in Brazil, in the early part of the 20th Century. These series of laws and ideas designed to purify and enlarge the numbers of the white race in Brazil while reducing the numbers of the people descendent of the African Slaves and Asians made the ground fertile for the Eugenics theories. The first official organized movement of Eugenics in South America, Sociedade Brasileira de Eugenia was formed in São Paulo in 1913. This society participated fully with health agencies and psychiatric offices to impose their ideas. The year 1931 saw the foundation of the "Comitê Central de Eugenismo" (Central Committee on Eugenics) presided by Renato Kehl. Among its ideas were the end of the immigration of non-whites to Brazil, and the spread of policies against Miscegenation. In a way the ideas of the Central Committee on Eugenics clashed with the Whitening Policies of the beginning of the century. While the Whitening Policies advocated Miscegenation as form to reduce the large numbers of the African population in Brazil and therefore creating a generation of mulattos which in time would produce white off-spring - a policy very similar to the "uplifting the Native race" in Australia - the Central Committee on Eugenics advocated no miscegenation at all and separation between the whites and non-whites in Brazil. In fact, these racists did their job too well. When it became obvious that the future of Brazil was in industrialization (just as it was for other countries around the world), Brazil had to face whether they had a working force capable of being absorbed by an industrial society. This was a problem because racist ideology claimed that blacks were not capable of being absorbed by an advanced industrial society. A new ideology was needed to counter such racist claims. This ideology became known as Lusotropicalism

Lusotropicalism

Lusotropicalism or Luso-Tropicalism was first coined by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre,to describe the distinctive character of the Portuguese imperialism in several lectures, and is a belief and movement especially strong during the António de Oliveira Salazar dictatorship in Portugal ,...

, was associated with Gilberto Freyre

Gilberto Freyre

Gilberto de Mello Freyre was a Brazilian sociologist, anthropologist, historian, writer, painter and congressman. His best-known work is a sociological treatise named Casa-Grande & Senzala...

, and became popular throughout the Portuguese Empire: specifically, Brazil and Angola. Lusotropicalism claimed that its large population of mixed-race people made Brazil the most capable country in tropical climates to carry out a program of industrialization. Its mixed race population had the cultural and intellectual capabilities provided by the white race, which could not work in tropical climates, combined with the physical ability to work in tropical climates, provided by the African black race. This excluded the fact that white prisoners, working under penal servitude in Puerto Rico, seemed quite capable of working in a tropical environment. As late as 1976, many medical periodicals still discussed the idea of eugenics, such as Revista Brasileira de Enfermagem.

Canada

In Canada, the eugenics movement gained support early in the 20th century as prominent physicians drew a direct link between heredity and public health. Eugenics was enforced by law in two Canadian provinces. In Alberta

Compulsory sterilization

Compulsory sterilization also known as forced sterilization programs are government policies which attempt to force people to undergo surgical sterilization...

, the Sexual Sterilization Act

Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta

In 1928, the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, Canada, enacted the Sexual Sterilization Act. The Act, drafted to protect the gene pool, allowed for sterilization of mentally disabled persons in order to prevent the transmission of undesirable traits to offspring.At that time, eugenicists argued that...

was enacted in 1928, focusing the movement on the sterilization of mentally deficient individuals, as determined by the Alberta Eugenics Board

Alberta Eugenics Board

In 1928, the Province of Alberta, Canada, passed legislation that enabled the government to perform involuntary sterilizations on individuals classified as mentally deficient. In order to implement the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta in 1928, a four-person Alberta Eugenics Board was created. ...

. The campaign to enforce this action was backed by groups such as the United Farm Women's Group, including key member Emily Murphy

Emily Murphy

Emily Murphy was a Canadian women's rights activist, jurist, and author. In 1916, she became the first woman magistrate in Canada, and in the British Empire...

.

Individuals were assessed using IQ tests like the Stanford-Binet. This posed a problem to new immigrants arriving in Canada, as many had not mastered the English language, and often their scores denoted them as having impaired intellectual functioning. As a result, many of those sterilized under the Sexual Sterilization Act were immigrants who were unfairly categorized. The province of British Columbia

British Columbia

British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...

enacted its own Sexual Sterilization Act in 1933. As in Alberta, the British Columbia Eugenics Board could recommend the sterilization of those it considered to be suffering from "mental disease or mental deficiency".

Although not enforced by laws as it was in Canada's western provinces, an obscenity trial in Depression-era Ontario is a perfect example of this latter province's eugenicism. Dorothea Palmer

Dorothea Palmer

Dorothea Palmer was a Canadian who played a prominent role in the effort to legalize birth control in that country.In September 1936, Palmer was arrested and charged under section 207 of the Criminal Code, which stated that...

, a nurse working for the Parents Information Bureau - a well-funded birth control organization based out of Kitchener, Ontario

Kitchener, Ontario

The City of Kitchener is a city in Southern Ontario, Canada. It was the Town of Berlin from 1854 until 1912 and the City of Berlin from 1912 until 1916. The city had a population of 204,668 in the Canada 2006 Census...

- was arrested in the predominantly Catholic community of Eastview, Ontario

Eastview, Ontario

Eastview, Ontario can mean the following:*Eastview was the name of Vanier, Ontario before 1969. Vanier is now a neighbourhood of Ottawa.*Eastview, Frontenac County, Ontario is a community in the city of Kingston...

in 1936. She was accused of providing birth control materials and knowledge (both illegal in Canada at the time) to the poorer classes of women in the city. The defense at her trial was orchestrated by a well-heeled eugenicist, and industrialist from Kitchener named A.R. Kaufman. Due to his support, Palmer was acquitted in early 1937. The entire ordeal lasted less than a year, and later became known as The Eastview Birth Control Trial

The Eastview Birth Control Trial

The Eastview Birth Control Trial was an important event in the history of contraception in Canada. In keeping with contemporary Christian views on contraception, the dissemination of information and the possession of materials relating to birth control were illegal in Canada...

. This event had clearly indicated that eugenics was not entirely constrained to western Canada, and is itself a perfect example of the high-water mark for eugenics in Canada.

The popularity of the eugenics movement peaked during the Depression

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

when sterilization was widely seen as a way of relieving society of the financial burdens imposed by defective individuals. Although the eugenics excesses of Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

diminished the popularity of the eugenics movement, the Sexual Sterilization Acts of Alberta and British Columbia were not repealed until 1972.

Germany

Nazi Germany

under Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler

was well known for eugenics programs which attempted to maintain a "pure" German race through a series of programs that ran under the banner of racial hygiene

Racial hygiene

. 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 research for Otmar von Verschuer carried out by Karin Magnussen

Karin Magnussen

Karin Magnussen was a researcher at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics during Germany's Third Reich, known for her 1936 publication "Race and Population Policy Tools", and her studies of heterochromia iridis using iris specimens from Auschwitz concentration...

using "human material" gathered by Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele

Josef Rudolf Mengele , also known as the Angel of Death was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He earned doctorates in anthropology from Munich University and in medicine from Frankfurt University...

on twins and others at Auschwitz death camp. 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".

The Nazis went further, however, killing tens of thousands of the institutionalized disabled through compulsory "euthanasia

Euthanasia

Euthanasia refers to the practice of intentionally ending a life in order to relieve pain and suffering....

" programs such as Aktion T4.

They also implemented a number of positive eugenics policies, giving awards to Aryan

Aryan race

The Aryan race is a concept historically influential in Western culture in the period of the late 19th century and early 20th century. It derives from the idea that the original speakers of the Indo-European languages and their descendants up to the present day constitute a distinctive race or...

women who had large numbers of children and encouraged a service in which "racially pure" single women could deliver illegitimate children. Allegations that such women were also impregnated by SS

Schutzstaffel

The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...

officers in the Lebensborn
Lebensborn
Lebensborn was a Nazi programme set up by SS leader Heinrich Himmler that provided maternity homes and financial assistance to the wives of SS members and to unmarried mothers, and also ran orphanages and relocation programmes for children.Initially set up in Germany in 1935, Lebensborn expanded...

were not proven at the Nuremberg trials, but new evidence (and the testimony of Lebensborn children) has established more details about Lebensborn practices. Also, "racially valuable" children from occupied countries were forcibly removed from their parents and adopted by German people. Many of their concerns for eugenics and racial hygiene were also explicitly present in their systematic killing of millions of "undesirable" people, especially Jews who were singled out for the Final Solution

Final Solution

The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...

,this policy led to the horrors seen in the Holocaust.

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 post-war years.

Two scholars, John Glad

John Glad

John Glad is an American academic who specializes in the literature and politics of exile, especially Russian literature. Glad has written about Nazi Germany, World War II and the Holocaust. He received his Ph.D...

and Seymour W. Itzkoff of Smith College

Smith College

Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...

, have questioned the relation between eugenics and the Holocaust. They argue that, contrary to popular belief, Hitler did not regard the Jews as intellectually inferior and did not send them to the concentration camps on these grounds. They argue that Hitler had different reasons for his genocidal policies toward the Jews. Seymour W. Itzkoff writes that the Holocaust was "a vast dysgenic program to rid Europe of highly intelligent challengers to the existing Christian domination by a numerically and politically minuscule minority". Therefore, according to Itzkoff, "the Holocaust was the very antithesis of eugenic practice".

The ideas of eugenics and race were used, in part, as justification for German colonial expansion throughout the world. Germany, as well as Great Britain, sought to seize the colonial territories of other 'dying' empires which could no longer protect their possessions. Examples included China, the Portuguese Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Dutch Empire and the Danish Empire.

"Thus the colonies Germany required for her bursting population, as markets for her overproductive industries and sources of vital raw materials, and as symbols of her world power would simply have to be taken from weaker nations, so the pan-Germans asserted publicly and the German government believed secretly."

German colonies in Africa

German colonies in Africa from 1885 to 1918 included German South-West Africa

German South-West Africa

German South West Africa was a colony of Germany from 1884 until 1915, when it was taken over by South Africa and administered as South West Africa, finally becoming Namibia in 1990...

(present-day Namibia

Namibia

Namibia, officially the Republic of Namibia , is a country in southern Africa whose western border is the Atlantic Ocean. It shares land borders with Angola and Zambia to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south and east. It gained independence from South Africa on 21 March...

), Kamerun

Kamerun

German Cameroon was a West African colony of the German Empire from 1884 to 1916 in the region of today's Republic of Cameroon.-History:-1800s:...

(present-day Cameroon

Cameroon

Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon , is a country in west Central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west; Chad to the northeast; the Central African Republic to the east; and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo to the south. Cameroon's coastline lies on the...

, Togoland

Togoland

Togoland was a German protectorate in West Africa from 1884 to 1914, encompassing what is now the nation of Togo and most of what is now the Volta Region of Ghana. The colony was established during the period generally known as the "Scramble for Africa"...

(present-day Togo

Togo

Togo, officially the Togolese Republic , is a country in West Africa bordered by Ghana to the west, Benin to the east and Burkina Faso to the north. It extends south to the Gulf of Guinea, on which the capital Lomé is located. Togo covers an area of approximately with a population of approximately...

) and German East Africa

German East Africa

German East Africa was a German colony in East Africa, which included what are now :Burundi, :Rwanda and Tanganyika . Its area was , nearly three times the size of Germany today....

(present-day Tanzania

Tanzania

The United Republic of Tanzania is a country in East Africa bordered by Kenya and Uganda to the north, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west, and Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique to the south. The country's eastern borders lie on the Indian Ocean.Tanzania is a state...

. Rwanda

Rwanda

Rwanda or , officially the Republic of Rwanda , is a country in central and eastern Africa with a population of approximately 11.4 million . Rwanda is located a few degrees south of the Equator, and is bordered by Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo...

and Burundi

Burundi

Burundi , officially the Republic of Burundi , is a landlocked country in the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa bordered by Rwanda to the north, Tanzania to the east and south, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west. Its capital is Bujumbura...

). A programme of research in physical anthropology was carried out there, as well as genocide

Genocide

against the Herero

Herero

The Herero are a Bantu-speaking ethnic group inhabiting parts of Southern Africa. The majority reside in Namibia, with the remainder found in Botswana and Angola. About 240,000 members are alive today.-General:...

people of present-day Namibia.

The physical anthropologists used measurements of skull capacity, etc., in an attempt to prove that Jews, Blacks and Italians were inherently "inferior" to Whites. Examples of such activity were found from about 1928 at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics

Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927. The Rockefeller Foundation supported both the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Psychiatry and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics...

.

The rulers of German South West Africa carried out a programme of genocide against the aboriginal Herero people. One of the officials enacting this program was Heinrich Ernst Göring

Heinrich Ernst Göring

Heinrich Ernst Göring was a German jurist and diplomat who served as colonial governor of German South-West Africa. He was the father of five children including Hermann Göring, the Nazi leader and commander of the Luftwaffe....

(the father of Hermann Göring

Hermann Göring

Hermann Wilhelm Göring, was a German politician, military leader, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. He was a veteran of World War I as an ace fighter pilot, and a recipient of the coveted Pour le Mérite, also known as "The Blue Max"...

), as well as General Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha. Skulls of the Herero were collected from Rehoboth, Namibia in about 1904, for the purpose of demonstrating the supposed physical inferiority of these people. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute used the Herero skulls by 1928.

There are people who continue to act as apologists for the eugenics program, who have tried to justify what happened to the Herero as late as 1985, well after the Nazis were supposedly out of power.

The 1918 British "Bluebook" documented the genocide that took place at Shark Island, German South West Africa concentration camp and Windhoek

Windhoek

Windhoek is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Namibia. It is located in central Namibia in the Khomas Highland plateau area, at around above sea level. The 2001 census determined Windhoek's population was 233,529...

, including photographs. The Bluebook was used as a negotiating tool by the British at the end of World War I to gain control of what had been German Southwest Africa, after Germany was defeated.

German colonies in the Pacific

Eugen Fischer

Eugen Fischer was a German professor of medicine, anthropology and eugenics. He was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics between 1927 and 1942...

of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics

Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics

, and his students, did Bastard studies

Bastard studies

During both the Second Reich and the Third Reich,"bastard" studies were carried out...

(miscegenation) throughout the German colonial empire, including the colonies in Africa and the Pacific. Fischer also worked with the United States eugenicist Charles Davenport

Charles Davenport

Bismarck Archipelago
Bismarck Archipelago
The Bismarck Archipelago is a group of islands off the northeastern coast of New Guinea in the western Pacific Ocean and is part of the Islands Region of Papua New Guinea.-History:...
Caroline Islands
Caroline Islands
The Caroline Islands are a widely scattered archipelago of tiny islands in the western Pacific Ocean, to the north of New Guinea. Politically they are divided between the Federated States of Micronesia in the eastern part of the group, and Palau at the extreme western end...
German Samoa
German Samoa
German Samoa was a German protectorate from 1900 to 1914, consisting of the islands of Upolu, Savai'i, Apolima and Manono, now wholly within the independent state Samoa, formerly Western Samoa...
Jiaozhou Bay
Jiaozhou Bay
The Jiaozhou Bay is a sea gulf located in Qingdao Prefecture of Shandong Province. It was a German colonial concession from 1898 until 1914....

(Shandong Peninsula, China)
Kaiser-Wilhelmsland
Kaiser-Wilhelmsland
Kaiser-Wilhelmsland was part of the German New Guinea, the South Pacific protectorate of the German Empire. Named in honor of Wilhelm II, who was the German Emperor and King of Prussia, it included the north-eastern part of the present day Papua New Guinea. From 1884 until 1918, the territory...

(Northeast New Guinea)
Marshall Islands
Marshall Islands
The Republic of the Marshall Islands , , is a Micronesian nation of atolls and islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just west of the International Date Line and just north of the Equator. As of July 2011 the population was 67,182...
Nauru
Nauru
Nauru , officially the Republic of Nauru and formerly known as Pleasant Island, is an island country in Micronesia in the South Pacific. Its nearest neighbour is Banaba Island in Kiribati, to the east. Nauru is the world's smallest republic, covering just...
North Solomon Islands
North Solomon Islands
The Northern Solomons were the more northerly group of islands in the Solomon Islands archipelago over which Germany declared a protectorate in 1885. Initially the German protectorate included Choiseul, Santa Isabel, the Shortlands and Ontong Java Islands, but in 1900 these islands were transferred...
Northern Mariana Islands
Northern Mariana Islands
The Northern Mariana Islands, officially the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands , is a commonwealth in political union with the United States, occupying a strategic region of the western Pacific Ocean. It consists of 15 islands about three-quarters of the way from Hawaii to the Philippines...
Palau
Palau
Palau , officially the Republic of Palau , is an island nation in the Pacific Ocean, east of the Philippines and south of Tokyo. In 1978, after three decades as being part of the United Nations trusteeship, Palau chose independence instead of becoming part of the Federated States of Micronesia, a...

German European Ost (East)

As Germany under Bismarck

Bismarck

- People :* Bismarck family, a German noble family descending from Herebord von Bismarck* Otto von Bismarck , German statesman of the 19th century* Herbert von Bismarck , Secretary of State, son of Otto von Bismarck...

started to create colonies, one of the areas of ongoing interest was in the European East, referred to as "Ost". The European East comprised Poland, but Poland could also include what is now referred to as the Ukraine. This Eastern area was looked upon as a colonial frontier, available to German peasants as armed homesteaders. The time period is the late 19th century, but by 1918, this effort at colonialization received new impetus as efforts were being made to create an independent Ukraine. At the end of World War I, Germany lost its colonies (in Africa and the Pacfic), leaving German settlers in Africa and the Pacific. As National Socialism began to gather strength, people such as Paul Rorhbach (Settlement Commissioner in the lost colony of German South West Africa) began their work once again, to create a new colony in the European German Ost (East)

German Ost (East)

This article deals with German colonization of parts of Eastern Europe during the late nineteenth through twentieth centuries. For an article on the medieval migration of Germans into eastern Europe, see Ostsiedlung....

Caribbean and South America

Rita Hauschild, a doctoral student and then staff member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Human Heredity, Anthropology, and Eugenics, carried out "bastard studies

Bastard studies

During both the Second Reich and the Third Reich,"bastard" studies were carried out...

", anthropometric studies of mixed-heritage populations in Trinidad

Trinidad

Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands and numerous landforms which make up the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. It is the southernmost island in the Caribbean and lies just off the northeastern coast of Venezuela. With an area of it is also the fifth largest in...

and Venezuela

Venezuela

Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...

, in pursuit of the Nazi doctrine of "racial hygiene". Her research was at first confined to Tovar

Tovar Municipality, Aragua

The Tovar Municipality is one of the 18 municipalities that makes up the Venezuelan state of Aragua and, according to a 2007 population estimate by the National Institute of Statistics of Venezuela, the municipality has a population of 17,429...

, Venezuela, a former German colony, and was extended to Trinidad with support from the UK Foreign Office. The populations studied, in 1935 to 1937, were "Chinese-Negro hybrids" in Trinidad, "Chinese-Indian" and "Chinese-Negro" "hybrids" in Venezuela.

Japan

In the early part of the Shōwa era, Japanese governments executed a eugenic policy to limit the birth of children with "inferior" traits, as well as aiming to protect the life and health of mothers. The Race Eugenic Protection Law was submitted from 1934 to 1938 to the Diet. After four amendments, this draft was promulgated as the National Eugenic Law in 1940 by the Konoe

Fumimaro Konoe

Prince was a politician in the Empire of Japan who served as the 34th, 38th and 39th Prime Minister of Japan and founder/leader of the Taisei Yokusankai.- Early life :...

government. According to the Eugenic Protection Law (1948), sterilization could be enforced on criminals "with genetic predisposition to commit crime", patients with genetic diseases such as total color-blindness, hemophilia, albinism

Albinism

Albinism is a congenital disorder characterized by the complete or partial absence of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes due to absence or defect of an enzyme involved in the production of melanin...

and ichthyosis

Ichthyosis

Ichthyosis is a heterogeneous family of at least 28, generalized, mostly genetic skin disorders. All types of ichthyosis have dry, thickened, scaly or flaky skin...

, and mental affections such as schizophrenia

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of thought processes and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social...

, and manic-depressiveness, and those with epilepsy

Epilepsy

Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder characterized by seizures. These seizures are transient signs and/or symptoms of abnormal, excessive or hypersynchronous neuronal activity in the brain.About 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy, and nearly two out of every three new cases...

. Mental illnesses were added in 1952.

The Leprosy Prevention laws of 1907, 1931 and 1953, the last one only repealed in 1996, permitted the segregation of patients in sanitariums where forced abortions and sterilization were common, even if the laws did not refer to it, and authorized punishment of patients "disturbing peace", as most Japanese leprologists believed that vulnerability to the disease was inheritable. There were a few Japanese leprologists such as Noburo Ogasawara who argued against the "isolation-sterilization policy" but he was denounced as a traitor to the nation at the 15th conference of the Japanese Association of Leprology in 1941.

One of the last eugenic measures of the Shōwa regime was taken by the Higashikuni government. On 19 August 1945, the Home Ministry ordered local government offices to establish a prostitution

Prostitution

Prostitution is the act or practice of providing sexual services to another person in return for payment. The person who receives payment for sexual services is called a prostitute and the person who receives such services is known by a multitude of terms, including a "john". Prostitution is one of...

service for allied soldiers to preserve the "purity" of the "Japanese race". The official declaration stated: "Through the sacrifice of thousands of "Okichis" of the Shōwa era, we shall construct a dike to hold back the mad frenzy of the occupation troops and cultivate and preserve the purity of our race long into the future..."

Korea

Early in the Japanese administration of Korea

Korea under Japanese rule

Korea was under Japanese rule as part of Japan's 35-year imperialist expansion . Japanese rule ended in 1945 shortly after the Japanese defeat in World War II....

, staff at the Japanese Association of Leprology attempted to discourage marriage between Japanese women and Korean men who had been recruited from the peninsula as laborers following its annexation by Japan in 1910. In 1942, a survey report argued that "the Korean laborers brought to Japan... are of the lower classes and therefore of inferior constitution...By fathering children with Japanese women, these men could lower the caliber of the Yamato minzoku

Yamato people

is a name for the dominant native ethnic group of Japan. It is a term that came to be used around the late 19th century to distinguish the residents of the mainland Japan from other minority ethnic groups who have resided in the peripheral areas of Japan, such as the Ainu, Ryukyuan, Nivkh, Ulta, as...

". However, eugenics pioneer Unno Kōtoku of Ryukyu University influentially argued based on heterosis

Heterosis

Heterosis, or hybrid vigor, or outbreeding enhancement, is the improved or increased function of any biological quality in a hybrid offspring. The adjective derived from heterosis is heterotic....

in plants that exclusive Japanese endogamy

Endogamy

Endogamy is the practice of marrying within a specific ethnic group, class, or social group, rejecting others on such basis as being unsuitable for marriage or other close personal relationships. A Greek Orthodox Christian endogamist, for example, would require that a marriage be only with another...

might cause "degeneration" of the Japanese race. Since he regarded intermarriage with white or black people as "disastrous", he advocated intermarriage with Koreans, whose "inferior" physical characteristics would be subsumed by the "superior" Japanese, according to his thinking. Japanese-Korean intermarriage was promoted by the government in Korea using serological studies that claimed to prove that Japanese and Koreans had the same pure ancestral origin.

After independence in the late 1940s, both North

North Korea

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea , , is a country in East Asia, occupying the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. Its capital and largest city is Pyongyang. The Korean Demilitarized Zone serves as the buffer zone between North Korea and South Korea...

or South Korea

South Korea

The Republic of Korea , , is a sovereign state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the East China Sea and Republic of China to the south...

continued to perpetuate the idea of an ethnically homogeneous Korean nation based on a divine single bloodline. This "pure-blood-ism" (순혈주의) is a source of pride for many Koreans, and informs Korean nationalism

Korean nationalism

Korean nationalism refers to nationalism among the Korean people. In the Korean context, this encompasses various of movements throughout history to maintain the Korean cultural identity, history, and ethnicity.-History:...

, politics, and foreign relations. In South Korea, an ethnic nationalism tinged with pure blood ideology sustained the dictatorships of Syngman Rhee

Syngman Rhee

Syngman Rhee or Yi Seungman was the first president of South Korea. His presidency, from August 1948 to April 1960, remains controversial, affected by Cold War tensions on the Korean peninsula and elsewhere. Rhee was regarded as an anti-Communist and a strongman, and he led South Korea through the...

and Park Chung-hee

Park Chung-hee

Park Chung-hee was a Republic of Korea Army general and the leader of South Korea from 1961 to 1979. He seized power in a military coup and ruled until his assassination in 1979. He has been credited with the industrialization of the Republic of Korea through export-led growth...

, and it still serves as a unifying ideology, as Brian Reynolds Myers

Brian Reynolds Myers

Brian Reynolds Myers is an American associate professor of international studies at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea, a contributing editor for the Atlantic, and an opinion columnist for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal...

argues, in North Korea

North Korea

. Deep-seated cultural biases originating in eugenics policies result in discrimination

Racism in South Korea

Racism in South Korea stems from the common belief that Koreans are a "pure race" that have been homogenous throughout history. For most Koreans, the belief in the superiority and purity of the Korean race goes unquestioned.-Race-based discrimination and hate:...

against multiracial

Multiracial

people in South Korea, according to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

China

Eugenics was one of many ideas and programs debated in the 1920s and 1930s in Republican China, as a means of improving society and raising China's stature in the world. The principal Chinese proponent of eugenics was the prominent sociologist Pan Guangdan

Pan Guangdan

Pan Guangdan was one of the most distinguished sociologists and eugenicists of China. He was also a renowned expert on education. His wide research scope included eugenics, education policy, matrimony policy, familial problems, prostitute policy, intellectuals distributions and etc...

, and a significant number of intellectuals entered into the debate, including Gao Xisheng, biologist Zhou Jianren

Zhou Jianren

Zhou Jianren was a politician and biologist of the People's Republic of China. He was the younger brother of Zhou Shuren and Zhou Zuoren. When the office of the Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress was vacant in 1976, Zhou was one of the 20 vice chairmen who...

, sociologist Chen Da

Chen Da (sociologist)

Chen Da was a Chinese sociologist.Chen was born in Yuyao, Zhejiang Province and his sobriquet was Tongfu . From 1912-1916, he studied at Tsinghua School in Beijing. From 1916 to 1923, he studied in the United States, and obtained his doctorate degree from Columbia University. Upon graduation, he...

, and Chen Jianshan, and many others. Chen Da is notable for the link he provides to the family planning policy and One Child Policy enacted in China after the establishment of the People's Republic of China

People's Republic of China

China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...

Sweden

In Sweden

Sweden

, the Sterilization Act of 1934 provided for the voluntary sterilization of some mental patients. The law was passed while the Swedish Social Democratic Party

Swedish Social Democratic Party

The Swedish Social Democratic Workers' Party, , contesting elections as 'the Workers' Party – the Social Democrats' , or sometimes referred to just as 'the Social Democrats' and most commonly as Sossarna ; is the oldest and largest political party in Sweden. The party was founded in 1889...

was in power, though it was also supported by all other political parties in Parliament at the time, as well as the Lutheran Church and much of the medical profession. From about 1934 to 1975, Sweden

Sweden

sterilized more than 62,000 people.

In absolute figures, Sweden sterilized more people than any other European state except for Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

. More people were sterilized in 1948 than any other year. However, Finland has sterilised the most per capita

Per capita

Per capita is a Latin prepositional phrase: per and capita . The phrase thus means "by heads" or "for each head", i.e. per individual or per person...

of the Nordic countries

Nordic countries

The Nordic countries make up a region in Northern Europe and the North Atlantic which consists of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden and their associated territories, the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland...

, and California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

sterilized approximately the same percentage.

Sweden's large-scale eugenics programme targeted the deviant and the mentally ill. Most sterilizations were "voluntary" (voluntary does not necessarily mean free from persuasion or exhortation). The Swedish government inquiry found that about 30,000 of the 62,000 were sterilised under some form of pressure or coercion. As was the case in other programs, ethnicity and race were believed to be connected to mental and physical health. The Swedish government inquiry denied that the Swedish sterilisation programme targeted ethnic minorities, but did not provide any evidence for this. The Swedish government's claims are contradicted by the experiences recounted by Swedish gypsies and travellers.

There is proof that the programme targeted women. The goal of the program was to decrease deviant offspring. If one member of a family was considered deviant the whole family became the target of an investigation. It was perceived to be easier to persuade a woman to be sterilized than it was to persuade a man. For this reason women were more often sterilized than men, despite the fact that the medical procedure involved in the sterilization was simpler to carry out on a man.

Even as recently as 1996, the Swedish government rejected paying compensation to those who had been sterilized. Following a 1997 series of articles in by the Polish-born journalist Maciej Zaremba, in Sweden's largest daily Dagens Nyheter, the issue of compensation for the victims was brought to Swedish and international attention. In 1999, the Swedish government began paying compensation of USD$21,000 to the sterilized (and their families) who had "not consented" and had applied for compensation.

Singapore

Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...

practiced a limited form of eugenics that involved discouraging marriage between university

University

A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...

graduates and nongraduates through segregation in matchmaking agencies, in the hope that the former would produce better children; and paid incentives for the uneducated to undergo sterilisation, among other procedures. The government introduced the "Graduate Mother Scheme" in the early 1980s to entice graduate women with incentives to get married, which was eventually scrapped due to public criticism and the implications it had on meritocracy

Meritocracy

Meritocracy, in the first, most administrative sense, is a system of government or other administration wherein appointments and responsibilities are objectively assigned to individuals based upon their "merits", namely intelligence, credentials, and education, determined through evaluations or...

Other countries

Other countries that adopted some form of eugenics program at one time include Denmark

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

, Estonia

Estonia

Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...

, Finland

Finland

Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...

, France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, Iceland

Iceland

Iceland , described as the Republic of Iceland, is a Nordic and European island country in the North Atlantic Ocean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Iceland also refers to the main island of the country, which contains almost all the population and almost all the land area. The country has a population...

, Norway

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

, and Switzerland

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

with programs to sterilize people the government declared to be mentally deficient.

Marginalization after World War II

After the experience of Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

, many ideas about "racial hygiene" and "unfit" members of society were publicly renounced by politicians and members of the scientific community. The Nuremberg Trials

Nuremberg Trials

The Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the victorious Allied forces of World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany....

against former Nazi leaders revealed to the world many of the regime's genocidal practices and resulted in formalized policies of medical ethics and the 1950 UNESCO

UNESCO

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

statement on race. Many scientific societies released their own similar "race statements" over the years, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly . The Declaration arose directly from the experience of the Second World War and represents the first global expression of rights to which all human beings are inherently entitled...

, developed in response to abuses during the Second World War, was adopted by the United Nations

United Nations

The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...

in 1948 and affirmed, "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." In continuation, the 1978 UNESCO

UNESCO

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

declaration on race and racial prejudice states that the fundamental equality of all human beings is the ideal toward which ethics and science should converge.

In reaction to Nazi abuses, eugenics became almost universally reviled in many of the nations where it had once been popular (however, some eugenics programs, including sterilization, continued quietly for decades). Many pre-war eugenicists engaged in what they later labeled "crypto-eugenics", purposefully taking their eugenic beliefs "underground" and becoming respected anthropologists, biologists and geneticists in the postwar world (including Robert Yerkes

Robert Yerkes

Robert Mearns Yerkes was an American psychologist, ethologist, and primatologist best known for his work in intelligence testing and in the field of comparative psychology....

in the U.S. and Otmar von Verschuer in Germany). Californian eugenicist Paul Popenoe

Paul Popenoe

founded marriage counseling during the 1950s, a career change which grew from his eugenic interests in promoting "healthy marriages" between "fit" couples.

The American Life League

American Life League

The American Life League is one of the largest pro-life organizations in the United States. The organization opposes abortion under any circumstance, contraception, embryonic stem cell research, and euthanasia...

, an opponent of abortion, charges that eugenics was merely "re-packaged" after the war, and promoted anew in the guise of the population-control and environmentalism movements. They claim, for example, that Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood Federation of America , commonly shortened to Planned Parenthood, is the U.S. affiliate of the International Planned Parenthood Federation and one of its larger members. PPFA is a non-profit organization providing reproductive health and maternal and child health services. The...

was funded and cultivated by the Eugenics Society for these reasons. Julian Huxley

Julian Huxley

Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS was an English evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis...

, the first Director-General of UNESCO

UNESCO

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

and a founder of the World Wildlife Fund was also a Eugenics Society president and a strong supporter of eugenics

[E]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

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

American Eugenics Society

The American Eugenics Society was a society established in 1922 to promote eugenics in the United States.It was the result of the Second International Conference on Eugenics . The founders included Madison Grant, Harry H. Laughlin, Irving Fisher, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Henry Crampton...

(1922–94) during the second half of the 20th century included Joseph Fletcher

Joseph Fletcher

Joseph Fletcher was an American professor who founded the theory of situational ethics in the 1960s, and was a pioneer in the field of bioethics. Fletcher was a leading academic involved in the topics of abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, eugenics, and cloning. Ordained as an Episcopal priest, he...

, originator of Situational ethics; Dr. Clarence Gamble

Clarence Gamble

Clarence James Gamble, married to Sarah Merry Bradley-Gamble, was the heir of the Procter and Gamble soap company fortune. He was an advocate of birth control and eugenics, and founded Pathfinder International.-Biography:...

of the Procter & Gamble

Procter & Gamble

Procter & Gamble is a Fortune 500 American multinational corporation headquartered in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio and manufactures a wide range of consumer goods....

fortune; and Garrett Hardin

Garrett Hardin

Garrett James Hardin was an American ecologist who warned of the dangers of overpopulation and whose concept of the tragedy of the commons brought attention to "the damage that innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment"...

, a population control

Population control

Human population control is the practice of artificially altering the rate of growth of a human population.Historically, human population control has been implemented by limiting the population's birth rate, usually by government mandate, and has been undertaken as a response to factors including...

advocate and author of the essay The Tragedy of the Commons
Tragedy of the commons
The tragedy of the commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this...

.

In the United States, the eugenics movement had largely lost most popular and political support by the end of the 1930s while forced sterilizations mostly ended in the 1960s with the last performed in 1981. Many US states continued to prohibit biracial marriages with "anti-miscegenation laws" such as Virginia's The Racial Integrity Act of 1924, until they were over-ruled by the Supreme Court in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia

Loving v. Virginia

. The Immigration Restriction Act

Immigration Act of 1924

of 1924, which was designed to limit the immigration of "dysgenic" Italians, and eastern European Jews, was repealed and replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965.

However, some prominent academics continued to support eugenics after the war. In 1963 the Ciba Foundation convened a conference in London under the title "Man and His Future", at which three distinguished biologists and Nobel laureates (Hermann Muller

Hermann Joseph Muller

Hermann Joseph Muller was an American geneticist, educator, and Nobel laureate best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation as well as his outspoken political beliefs...

, Joshua Lederberg

Joshua Lederberg

Joshua Lederberg ForMemRS was an American molecular biologist known for his work in microbial genetics, artificial intelligence, and the United States space program. He was just 33 years old when he won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering that bacteria can mate and...

, and Francis Crick

Francis Crick

Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist, and most noted for being one of two co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953, together with James D. Watson...

) all spoke strongly in favor of eugenics. A few nations, notably Sweden

Sweden

and the Canadian province of Alberta

Alberta

Alberta is a province of Canada. It had an estimated population of 3.7 million in 2010 making it the most populous of Canada's three prairie provinces...

, maintained large-scale eugenics programs, including forced sterilization of mentally handicapped individuals, as well as other practices, until the 1970s.

Modern eugenics, genetic engineering, and ethical re-evaluation

Beginning in the 1980s, the history and concept of eugenics were widely discussed as knowledge about genetics

Genetics

Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....

advanced significantly, making practical genetic engineering

Genetic engineering

, which has been widely used to produce genetically modified organism

Genetically modified organism

A genetically modified organism or genetically engineered organism is an organism whose genetic material has been altered using genetic engineering techniques. These techniques, generally known as recombinant DNA technology, use DNA molecules from different sources, which are combined into one...

s, with genetically modified food

Genetically modified food

Genetically modified foods are foods derived from genetically modified organisms . Genetically modified organisms have had specific changes introduced into their DNA by genetic engineering techniques...

s being most visible to the general public. Endeavors such as the Human Genome Project

Human Genome Project

The Human Genome Project is an international scientific research project with a primary goal of determining the sequence of chemical base pairs which make up DNA, and of identifying and mapping the approximately 20,000–25,000 genes of the human genome from both a physical and functional...

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

Mendelian inheritance

Mendelian inheritance is a scientific description of how hereditary characteristics are passed from parent organisms to their offspring; it underlies much of genetics...

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. Article 23 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is an international human rights instrument of the United Nations intended to protect the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities...

prohibits compulsory sterilization of disabled individuals and guarantees their right to adopt children.

A few scientific researchers such as psychologist Richard Lynn

Richard Lynn

Richard Lynn is a British Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Ulster who is known for his views on racial and ethnic differences. Lynn argues that there are hereditary differences in intelligence based on race and sex....

, psychologist Raymond Cattell

Raymond Cattell

Raymond Bernard Cattell was a British and American psychologist, known for his exploration of many areas in psychology...

, and scientist Gregory Stock

Gregory Stock

Gregory Stock is a biophysicist, best-selling author, biotech entrepreneur, and the former director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA’s School of Medicine...

have openly called for eugenic policies using modern technology, but they represent a minority opinion in current scientific and cultural circles. One attempted implementation of a form of eugenics was a "genius sperm bank

Repository for Germinal Choice

The Repository for Germinal Choice was a sperm bank that existed in Escondido, California from 1980 to 1999. The repository is commonly believed to have accepted only donations from Nobel Prize laureates, although in fact it accepted donations from non-Nobelists, also...

" (1980–99) created by Robert Klark Graham

Robert Klark Graham

Robert Klark Graham was born in Harbor Springs, Michigan, USA. He was a eugenicist and businessman who made millions by developing shatter-proof plastic eyeglass lenses, and who later founded the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank for geniuses in the hope of implementing a eugenics...

, from which nearly 230 children were conceived (the best-known donors were Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...

winners William Shockley

William Shockley

William Bradford Shockley Jr. was an American physicist and inventor. Along with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, Shockley co-invented the transistor, for which all three were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s...

and J.D.Watson

James D. Watson

James Dewey Watson is an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953 with Francis Crick...

). 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.

The Bell Curve
The Bell Curve
The Bell Curve is a best-selling and controversial 1994 book by the Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray...

argued that immigration from countries with low national IQ is undesirable. According to Raymond Cattell

Raymond Cattell

Raymond Bernard Cattell was a British and American psychologist, known for his exploration of many areas in psychology...

, "when a country is opening its doors to immigration from diverse countries, it is like a farmer who buys his seeds from different sources by the sack, with sacks of different average quality of contents".

Cyprus

A similar screening policy (including prenatal screening and abortion) intended to reduce the incidence of thalassemia

Thalassemia

Thalassemia is an inherited autosomal recessive blood disease that originated in the Mediterranean region. In thalassemia the genetic defect, which could be either mutation or deletion, results in reduced rate of synthesis or no synthesis of one of the globin chains that make up hemoglobin...

exists in both jurisdictions on the island of Cyprus

Cyprus

Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...

. Since the program's implementation in the 1970s, it has reduced the ratio of children born with the hereditary blood disease from 1 out of every 158 births to almost zero. Tests for the gene are compulsory for both partners, prior to church wedding.

China

Carriers of certain genetic diseases could marry only if they were sterilized or chose any other form of long-term contraception.

In the Chinese province of Sichuan

Sichuan

' , known formerly in the West by its postal map spellings of Szechwan or Szechuan is a province in Southwest China with its capital in Chengdu...

in 1999, a sperm bank called Notables' Sperm Bank, opened, with professors as the only permitted donors. The semen bank was approved by the authority for family planning in the provincial capital Chengdu

Chengdu

Chengdu , formerly transliterated Chengtu, is the capital of Sichuan province in Southwest China. It holds sub-provincial administrative status...

Japan

In postwar Japan, the was enacted in 1948 to replace the National Eugenic Law of 1940. The main provisions allowed for the surgical sterilization of women, when the woman, her spouse, or family member within the 4th degree of kinship had a serious genetic disorder

Genetic disorder

A genetic disorder is an illness caused by abnormalities in genes or chromosomes, especially a condition that is present from before birth. Most genetic disorders are quite rare and affect one person in every several thousands or millions....

, and where pregnancy would endanger the life of the woman. The operation required consent of the woman, her spouse and the approval of the Prefectural Eugenic Protection Council.

The law also allowed for abortion for pregnancies in the cases of rape

Rape

Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...

, leprosy, hereditary-transmitted disease, or if the physician determined that the fetus would not be viable outside of the womb. Again, the consent of the woman and her spouse were necessary. Birth control

Birth control

guidance and implementation was restricted to doctors, nurses and professional midwives accredited by the Prefectural government. The law was also amended in May 1949 to allow abortions for economic reasons at the sole discretion of the doctor, which in effect fully legalized abortion in Japan.

Despite the unambiguous wording of the law, the law was used by local authorities as justification for measures enforcing forced sterilization

Compulsory sterilization

Compulsory sterilization also known as forced sterilization programs are government policies which attempt to force people to undergo surgical sterilization...

and abortions upon people with certain genetic disorder

Genetic disorder

s, as well as leprosy

Leprosy

Leprosy or Hansen's disease is a chronic disease caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium leprae and Mycobacterium lepromatosis. Named after physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen, leprosy is primarily a granulomatous disease of the peripheral nerves and mucosa of the upper respiratory tract; skin lesions...

, as well as an excuse for legalized discrimination against people with physical and mental handicaps.

United States

Indiana, Mississippi, and Montana require a blood test prior to marriage. While these tests are typically restricted to the detection of the sexually transmitted disease

Sexually transmitted disease

Sexually transmitted disease , also known as a sexually transmitted infection or venereal disease , is an illness that has a significant probability of transmission between humans by means of human sexual behavior, including vaginal intercourse, oral sex, and anal sex...

syphilis

Syphilis

Syphilis is a sexually transmitted infection caused by the spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum. The primary route of transmission is through sexual contact; however, it may also be transmitted from mother to fetus during pregnancy or at birth, resulting in congenital syphilis...

(which was the most common STD at the time these laws were enacted), some partners will voluntarily test for other diseases and genetic incompatibilities. Harris polls in 1986 and 1992 recorded majority public support for limited forms of germ-line intervention, especially to prevent "children inheriting usually fatal genetic disease".

Israel

Dor Yeshorim, a program which seeks to reduce the incidence of Tay-Sachs disease

Tay-Sachs disease

Tay–Sachs disease is an autosomal recessive genetic disorder...

, cystic fibrosis

Cystic fibrosis

Cystic fibrosis is a recessive genetic disease affecting most critically the lungs, and also the pancreas, liver, and intestine...

, Canavan disease

Canavan disease

Canavan disease, also called Canavan-Van Bogaert-Bertrand disease, aspartoacylase deficiency or aminoacylase 2 deficiency, is an autosomal recessive degenerative disorder that causes progressive damage to nerve cells in the brain. Canavan disease is also one of the most common degenerative...

, Fanconi anemia

Fanconi anemia

Fanconi anemia is a genetic disease with an incidence of 1 per 350,000 births, with a higher frequency in Ashkenazi Jews and Afrikaners in South Africa.FA is the result of a genetic defect in a cluster of proteins responsible for DNA repair...

, familial dysautonomia

Familial dysautonomia

Familial dysautonomia is a disorder of the autonomic nervous system which affects the development and survival of sensory, sympathetic and some parasympathetic neurons in the autonomic and sensory nervous system resulting in variable symptoms including: insensitivity to pain, inability to produce...

, glycogen storage disease

Glycogen storage disease

Glycogen storage disease is the result of defects in the processing of glycogen synthesis or breakdown within muscles, liver, and other cell types. GSD has two classes of cause: genetic and acquired. Genetic GSD is caused by any inborn error of metabolism involved in these processes...

, Bloom's Syndrome, Gaucher disease, Niemann-Pick disease

Niemann-Pick disease

Niemann–Pick disease refers to a group of fatal inherited metabolic disorders that are included in the larger family of lysosomal storage diseases .-Signs and symptoms:Symptoms are related to the organs in which they accumulate...

, and mucolipidosis IV among certain Jewish communities

Orthodox Judaism

Orthodox Judaism , is the approach to Judaism which adheres to the traditional interpretation and application of the laws and ethics of the Torah as legislated in the Talmudic texts by the Sanhedrin and subsequently developed and applied by the later authorities known as the Gaonim, Rishonim, and...

, is another screening program which has drawn comparisons with liberal eugenics

Liberal eugenics

Liberal eugenics is an ideology which advocates the use of reproductive and genetic technologies where the choice of enhancing human characteristics and capacities is left to the individual preferences of parents acting as consumers, rather than the public health policies of the state.-History:The...

. In Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

, at the expense of the state, the general public is advised to carry out genetic tests to diagnose these diseases early in the pregnancy. If a fetus is diagnosed with one of these diseases, among which Tay-Sachs is the most commonly known, the pregnancy may be terminated, subject to consent.

Most other Ashkenazi Jewish communities also run screening programs because of the higher incidence of genetic diseases. In some Jewish communities, the ancient custom of matchmaking (shidduch) is still practiced, and some matchmakers require blood tests so that they can avoid making matches between individuals who share the same recessive disease traits. In order to attempt to prevent the tragedy of infant death which always results from being homozygous for Tay-Sachs, associations such as the strongly observant Dor Yeshorim (which was founded by Rabbi Joseph Ekstein, who lost four children to the disease) with the purpose of preventing others from suffering the same tragedy test young couples to check whether they carry a risk of passing on fatal conditions.

If both the young man and woman are Tay-Sachs carriers, it is common for the match to be broken off. Judaism, like numerous other religions, discourages abortion unless there is a risk to the woman, in which case her needs take precedence. The effort is not aimed at eradicating the hereditary traits, but rather at the occurrence of homozygosity. The actual impact of this program on allele

Allele

frequencies is unknown, but little impact would be expected because the program does not impose genetic selection. Instead, it encourages disassortative mating.

New Zealand

90 percent of Down's syndrome fetuses are aborted, on the grounds of fetal abnormality, which some view as a form of eugenics. Abortions are legal in any case where "there is a great risk that the baby would be severely physically or mentally handicapped".

Ethical re-assessment

Modern inquiries into the potential use of genetic engineering have led to an increased invocation of the history of eugenics in discussions of bioethics

Bioethics

Bioethics is the study of controversial ethics brought about by advances in biology and medicine. Bioethicists are concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, law, and philosophy....

, most often as a cautionary tale. Some suggest that even non-coercive eugenics programs would be inherently unethical. This view has been challenged by such bioethicist

Bioethics

critics as Nicholas Agar

Nicholas Agar

Nicholas Agar is a professor of ethics and an associate professor at Victoria University of Wellington. Agar has a BA from Auckland University, an MA from Victoria and a PhD from the Australian National University. He has been teaching at Victoria since 1996. Agar's main research interests are in...

.

In modern bioethics literature, the history of eugenics presents many moral and ethical questions. Commentators have suggested the new eugenics will come from reproductive technologies that will allow parents to create "designer babies

Designer baby

The colloquial term "designer baby" refers to a baby whose genetic makeup has been artificially selected by genetic engineering combined with in vitro fertilisation to ensure the presence or absence of particular genes or characteristics. The term is derived by comparison with "designer clothing"...

" (which biologist Lee M. Silver

Lee M. Silver

Lee M. Silver is a professor at Princeton University in the Department of molecular biology of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs...

prominently called "reprogenetics

Reprogenetics

"). This will be predominantly motivated by individual competitiveness and the desire to create the best opportunities for children, rather than an urge to improve the species as a whole, which characterized the early 20th-century forms of eugenics. Because of its less-obviously 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. Supporters of eugenics programs note that Francis Galton

Francis Galton

did not advocate coercion when he defined the principles of eugenics. Eugenics is, according to Galton, the proper label for bioengineering of better human beings, whether coercive or not. Critics counter that conformity

Conformity

Conformity is the process by which an individual's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors are influenced by other people.Conformity may also refer to:*Conformity: A Tale, a novel by Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna...

and other social and legal pressures make eugenics programs inherently coercive; an analogous argument can be used against education

Education

Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...

on the grounds of academic inflation

Academic Inflation

Academic inflation is the process of inflation of the minimum job requirement, resulting in an excess of college-educated individuals with lower degrees competing for too few jobs that require these degrees and even higher, preferred qualifications...

.

An example of such individual motivations includes parents attempting to prevent homosexuality in their children, despite lack of evidence of a single genetic cause of homosexuality. The scientific consensus in America, which stems from the 1956 research of Dr. Evelyn Hooker

Evelyn Hooker

Evelyn Hooker was a North American psychologist most notable for her 1957 paper "The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual" in which she administered psychological tests to groups of self-identified homosexuals and heterosexuals and asked experts, based on those tests alone, to select the...

, is that homosexuality in any case is not a disorder. Therefore, it cannot be treated as a defective trait that is justifiably screened for as part of legitimate medical practice.

Daniel Kevles

Daniel Kevles

Daniel J. Kevles is an American historian of science. He is currently the Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, a position he assumed in 2001...

argues that eugenics and the conservation of natural resources are similar propositions. Both can be practiced foolishly so as to abuse individual rights, but both can be practiced wisely. James D. Watson

James D. Watson

James Dewey Watson is an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953 with Francis Crick...

, the first director of the Human Genome Project

Human Genome Project

, initiated the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications Program (ELSI) which has funded a number of studies into the implications of human genetic engineering (along with a prominent website on the history of eugenics), because:

In putting ethics so soon into the genome agenda, I was responding to my own personal fear that all too soon critics of the Genome Project would point out that I was a representative of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

that once housed the controversial Eugenics Record Office

Eugenics Record Office

. My not forming a genome ethics program quickly might be falsely used as evidence that I was a closet eugenicist, having as my real long-term purpose the unambiguous identification of genes that lead to social and occupational stratification as well as genes justifying racial discrimination.

Distinguished geneticists including Nobel Prize-winners John Sulston ("I don't think one ought to bring a clearly disabled child into the world") and Watson ("Once you have a way in which you can improve our children, no one can stop it") support genetic screening. Which ideas should be described as "eugenic" are still controversial in both public and scholarly spheres. Some observers such as Philip Kitcher have described the use of genetic screening by parents as making possible a form of "voluntary" eugenics.

Dysgenics

Research has suggested that in the modern world, the relationship between fertility and intelligence

Fertility and intelligence

Fertility and intelligence research investigates the relationship between fertility and intelligence. Demographic studies have indicated that in humans, fertility and intelligence tend to be inversely correlated, that is to say, the more intelligent, as measured by IQ tests, exhibit a lower total...

is such that those with higher intelligence have fewer children, one possible reason being more unintended pregnancies for those with lower intelligence. Several researchers have argued that the average genotypic intelligence of the United States and the world are declining which is a dysgenic effect. This has been masked by the Flynn effect

Flynn effect

The Flynn effect is the name given to a substantial and long-sustained increase in intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world. When intelligence quotient tests are initially standardized using a sample of test-takers, by convention the average of the test results is set to 100...

for phenotypic intelligence. The Flynn effect may have ended in some developed nations, causing some to argue that phenotypic intelligence will or has started to decline.

Similarly, Richard Lynn

Richard Lynn

has in the book Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations argued that genetic health

Health

Health is the level of functional or metabolic efficiency of a living being. In humans, it is the general condition of a person's mind, body and spirit, usually meaning to be free from illness, injury or pain...

(due to modern health care) and genetic conscientiousness

Conscientiousness

Conscientiousness is the trait of being painstaking and careful, or the quality of acting according to the dictates of one's conscience. It includes such elements as self-discipline, carefulness, thoroughness, organization, deliberation , and need for achievement. It is an aspect of what has...

(criminals have more children than non-criminals) are declining in the modern world. This has caused some, like Lynn, to argue for voluntary eugenics. Alternatively, Lynn and Harvey (2008) write that authoritarian states may decide to impose measures to avoid such effects, such as a licensing requirement for having a child, which would only be given to persons of a certain minimum intelligence. The Chinese one-child policy

One-child policy

The one-child policy refers to the one-child limitation applying to a minority of families in the population control policy of the People's Republic of China . The Chinese government refers to it under the official translation of family planning policy...

is an example of how fertility can be regulated by authoritarian means.

Diseases vs. traits

While the science of genetics

Genetics

Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....

has increasingly provided means by which certain characteristics and conditions can be identified and understood, given the complexity of human genetics, culture, and psychology there is at this point no agreed objective means of determining which traits might be ultimately desirable or undesirable. Some diseases such as sickle-cell disease and cystic fibrosis respectively confer immunity to malaria and resistance to cholera when a single copy of the recessive allele is contained within the genotype of the individual. Reducing the instance of sickle-cell disease in Africa where malaria is a common and deadly disease could indeed be a net negative effect. On the other hand, genetic diseases

Genetic disorder

like haemochromatosis

Haemochromatosis

Haemochromatosis type 1 is a hereditary disease characterized by excessive intestinal absorption of dietary iron resulting in a pathological increase in total body iron stores. Humans, like most animals, have no means to excrete excess iron...

can increase susceptibility to illness, cause physical deformities, and other dysfunctions.

Eugenic measures against many of these diseases are already being undertaken in societies around the world , while measures against traits that affect more subtle, poorly understood traits, such as criminality, are relegated to the realm of speculation and science fiction. The effects of diseases are essentially wholly negative, and societies everywhere seek to reduce their impact by various means, some of which are eugenic in all but name. The other traits that are discussed have positive as well as negative effects and are not generally targeted at present anywhere.

Ethics

A common criticism of eugenics is that "it inevitably leads to measures that are unethical" (Lynn 2001). A hypothetical scenario posits that if one racial minority group is perceived 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. More baldly, eugenics advocates are unlikely to support a system under which they themselves would be subject to culling. H. L. Kaye wrote of "the obvious truth that eugenics has been discredited by Hitler's crimes" (Kaye 1989). R. L. Hayman argued "the eugenics movement is an anachronism, its political implications exposed by the Holocaust" (Hayman 1990).

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author...

has stated that it is "a conventional wisdom among left-leaning academics that genes imply genocide". He has responded to this "conventional wisdom" by comparing the history of Marxism

Marxism

Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

, which had the opposite position on genes to that of Nazism:

But the 20th century suffered "two" ideologies that led to genocides. 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
Social engineering (political science)
Social engineering is a discipline in political science that refers to efforts to influence popular attitudes and social behaviors on a large scale, whether by governments or private groups. In the political arena, the counterpart of social engineering is political engineering.For various reasons,...

) and the belief that humanity advances through a struggle in which superior groups (race or classes) triumph over inferior ones.

Genetic diversity

Eugenic policies could also lead to loss of genetic diversity

Genetic diversity

Genetic diversity, the level of biodiversity, refers to the total number of genetic characteristics in the genetic makeup of a species. It is distinguished from genetic variability, which describes the tendency of genetic characteristics to vary....

, in which case a culturally accepted improvement of the gene pool could very likely, as evidenced in numerous instances in isolated island populations (e.g. the Dodo

Dodo

The dodo was a flightless bird endemic to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. Related to pigeons and doves, it stood about a meter tall, weighing about , living on fruit, and nesting on the ground....

, Raphus cucullatus, of Mauritius) result in extinction due to increased vulnerability to disease, reduced ability to adapt to environmental change and other factors both known and unknown. A long-term species-wide eugenics plan might lead to a scenario similar to this because the elimination of traits deemed undesirable would reduce genetic diversity by definition. (Galton 2001, 48).

Proponents of eugenics argue that in any one generation any realistic program would make only minor changes in a fraction of the gene pool, giving plenty of time to reverse direction if unintended consequence

Unintended consequence

In the social sciences, unintended consequences are outcomes that are not the outcomes intended by a purposeful action. The concept has long existed but was named and popularised in the 20th century by American sociologist Robert K. Merton...

s emerge, reducing the likelihood of the elimination of desirable genes. Proponents of eugenics argue that any appreciable reduction in diversity is so far in the future that little concern is needed for now. The possible reduction of autism

Autism

Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. These signs all begin before a child is three years old. Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their...

rates through selection against the genetic predisposition to autism

Heritability of autism

The heritability of autism is the proportion of autism that can be explained by genetic variation; if the heritability of a condition is high, then the condition is considered to be primarily genetic...

is a significant political issue in the autism rights movement

Autism rights movement

The autism rights movement is a social movement that encourages autistic people, their caregivers and society to adopt a position of neurodiversity, accepting autism as a variation in functioning rather than a mental disorder to be cured...

, which claims autism is a form of neurodiversity

Neurodiversity

Neurodiversity is a "controversial concept [that] ... regards atypical neurologicaldevelopment as a normal human difference". According to Jaarsma and Welin , the "neurodiversity movement was developed in the 1990s by online groups of autistic persons...

. Many advocates of Down syndrome

Down syndrome

Down syndrome, or Down's syndrome, trisomy 21, is a chromosomal condition caused by the presence of all or part of an extra 21st chromosome. It is named after John Langdon Down, the British physician who described the syndrome in 1866. The condition was clinically described earlier in the 19th...

rights also consider Down syndrome (Trisomy-21) a form of neurodiversity.

Heterozygous recessive traits

In some instances efforts to eradicate certain single-gene mutations would be nearly impossible. In the event the condition in question was a heterozygous

Zygosity

recessive trait, the problem is that by eliminating the visible unwanted trait, there are still many carriers for the genes without, or with fewer, phenotypic effects due to that gene. With genetic testing

Genetic testing

it may be possible to detect all of the heterozygous recessive traits, but only at great cost with the current technology. Under normal circumstances it is only possible to eliminate a dominant allele from the gene pool. Recessive traits can be severely reduced, but never eliminated unless the complete genetic makeup of all members of the pool was known, as aforementioned. As only very few undesirable traits, such as Huntington's disease

Huntington's disease

, are dominant, the practical value for "eliminating" traits is quite low.

However, there are examples of eugenic acts that managed to lower the prevalence of recessive diseases, although not influencing the prevalence of heterozygote carriers of those diseases. The elevated prevalence of certain genetically transmitted diseases among the Ashkenazi Jewish population (Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis

Cystic fibrosis

Cystic fibrosis is a recessive genetic disease affecting most critically the lungs, and also the pancreas, liver, and intestine...

, Canavan's disease and Gaucher's disease

Gaucher's disease

Gaucher's disease is a genetic disease in which a fatty substance accumulates in cells and certain organs.Gaucher's disease is the most common of the lysosomal storage diseases. It is caused by a hereditary deficiency of the enzyme glucosylceramidase. The enzyme acts on the fatty acid...

), has been decreased in current populations by the application of genetic screening.

In popular media

Galton and many others claimed that the less intelligent were more fertile than the more intelligent of his time. This is the basis of the movie Idiocracy
Idiocracy
Idiocracy is a 2006 American film, a satirical science fiction comedy, directed by Mike Judge and starring Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard, and Terry Crews....

, in which five hundred years in the future (2505) the dysgenic pressure has resulted in a uniformly stupid human society.

In Star Trek
Star Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...

, there are conflicts known as the Eugenics Wars (or the Great Wars) which were a series of conflicts fought on Earth between 1993 and 1996. The result of a scientific attempt to improve the Human race through selective breeding and genetic engineering, the wars devastated parts of Earth, by some estimates officially causing some 30 million deaths, and nearly plunging the planet into a new Dark Age. (TOS: "Space Seed"; ENT: "Borderland

Borderland (Enterprise episode)

"Borderland" is the name of the 80th episode from the television series Star Trek: Enterprise. It is the fourth episode from the fourth season of the series...

Sources

Histories of eugenics (academic accounts)

Elof Axel Carlson, The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (Cold Spring Harbor, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Press, 2001). ISBN 0-87969-587-0
Daniel Kevles
Daniel Kevles
Daniel J. Kevles is an American historian of science. He is currently the Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, a position he assumed in 2001...

, In the name of eugenics: Genetics and the uses of human heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985).
Dieter Kuntz, ed., Deadly medicine: creating the master race (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004). online exhibit
Ruth C. Engs
Ruth C. Engs
Ruth Clifford Engs, is Professor Emeritus, Applied Health Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. Since the mid 1990s she has been engaged in research on social movements related to health and public health issues with a focus on the Progressive Era....

, The Eugenics Movement: An Encyclopedia. (Westport CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005). ISBN 0-313-32791-2.
John Glad
John Glad
John Glad is an American academic who specializes in the literature and politics of exile, especially Russian literature. Glad has written about Nazi Germany, World War II and the Holocaust. He received his Ph.D...

, Future Human Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century. (Hermitage Publishers, 2008). ISBN 1-55779-154-6.Whatwemaybe.org

Histories of hereditarian thought

Elazar Barkan, The retreat of scientific racism: changing concepts of race in Britain and the United States between the world wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation....

, The mismeasure of man (New York: Norton, 1981).
Ewen & Ewen, Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality (New York, Seven Stories Press, 2006).

Criticisms of eugenics, historical and modern

Edwin Black
Edwin Black
Edwin Black is an American Jewish syndicated columnist, and journalist specializing in the historical interplay between economics and politics in the Middle East, petroleum policy, the abuses practiced by corporations, and the financial underpinnings of Nazi Germany, among other topics...

, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003). Waragainsttheweak.com ISBN 1-56858-258-7
Dinesh D'Souza
Dinesh D'Souza
Dinesh D'Souza is an author and public speaker and a former Robert and Karen Rishwain Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is currently the President of The King's College in New York City. D'Souza is a noted Christian apologist and conservative writer and speaker....

, The End of Racism (Free Press, 1995) ISBN 0-02-908102-5
David Galton, Eugenics: The Future of Human Life in the 21st Century (Abacus, 2002) ISBN 0-349-11377-7
Jonah Goldberg
Jonah Goldberg
Jonah Jacob Goldberg is an American conservative syndicated columnist and author. Goldberg is known for his contributions on politics and culture to , of which he is editor-at-large...

, Liberal Fascism
Liberal Fascism
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning is a bestselling book on the origins and nature of fascist movements by Jonah Goldberg, a conservative syndicated columnist and the editor-at-large of National Review Online...

: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (ISBN 0-385-51184-1)
Robert L. Hayman, Presumptions of justice: Law, politics, and the mentally retarded parent. Harvard Law Review 1990, 103, 1202–71. (p. 1209)
Joseph, J. (2004). The Gene Illusion: Genetic Research in Psychiatry and Psychology Under the Microscope. New York: Algora. (2003 United Kingdom Edition by PCCS Books)
—— (2005). The 1942 "Euthanasia" Debate in the American Journal of Psychiatry. History of Psychiatry, 16, 171–179.
—— (2006). The Missing Gene: Psychiatry, Heredity, and the Fruitless Search for Genes. New York: Algora.
H. L. Kaye, The social meaning of modern biology 1987, New Haven, CT Yale University Press
Yale University Press
Yale University Press is a book publisher founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day. It became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but remains financially and operationally autonomous....

. (p. 46)
Wahlsten, D. (1997). Leilani Muir versus the Philosopher King: eugenics on trial in Alberta. Genetica 99: 185–198
Tom Shakespeare
Tom Shakespeare
Sir Thomas William Shakespeare, 3rd Baronet , better known as Tom Shakespeare, is a geneticist and sociologist. He has achondroplasia....

, "Back to the Future? New Genetics and Disabled People", Critical Social Policy 46:22–35 (1995).
Tom Shakespeare
Tom Shakespeare
Sir Thomas William Shakespeare, 3rd Baronet , better known as Tom Shakespeare, is a geneticist and sociologist. He has achondroplasia....

, Genetic Politics: from Eugenics to Genome, with Anne Kerr (New Clarion Press, 2002).
Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...

, 2003). ISBN 0-8166-3559-5
Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and the American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005).

Historical resources

Eugenics Archive – Historical Material on the Eugenics Movement (funded by the Human Genome Project
Human Genome Project
The Human Genome Project is an international scientific research project with a primary goal of determining the sequence of chemical base pairs which make up DNA, and of identifying and mapping the approximately 20,000–25,000 genes of the human genome from both a physical and functional...

)
University of Virginia Historical Collections: Eugenics
"Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race" (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibit)
"Controlling Heredity: The American Eugenics Crusade, 1870-1940", exhibit at the University of Missouri
University of Missouri
The University of Missouri System is a state university system providing centralized administration for four universities, a health care system, an extension program, five research and technology parks, and a publishing press. More than 64,000 students are currently enrolled at its four campuses...

Libraries
"Eugenics" – National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature Scope Note 28, features overview of eugenics history and annotated bibliography of historical literature
1907 Indiana Eugenics Law

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Overview

Meanings and types

Implementation methods

Pre-Galtonian philosophies

Galton's theory

Charles Davenport

United Kingdom

United States

Australia

Brazil

Canada

Germany

German colonies in Africa

German colonies in the Pacific

German European Ost (East)

Caribbean and South America

Japan

Korea

China

Sweden

Singapore

Other countries

Marginalization after World War II

Modern eugenics, genetic engineering, and ethical re-evaluation

Cyprus

China

Japan

United States

Israel

New Zealand

Ethical re-assessment

Dysgenics

Diseases vs. traits

Ethics

Genetic diversity

Heterozygous recessive traits

In popular media

See also

Sources

Historical resources