Understanding Eugenics: Concepts and Applications

Eugenics Definition: Eugenics definition states that it is a collection of ideas and practises aimed at improving the genetic quality of a human population, traditionally by eliminating or encouraging individuals and groups considered inferior or superior.

Plato proposed applying the concepts of selective breeding to individuals around 400 BC, well before the term was coined. Early proponents of eugenics saw it as a means of changing classes of people in the nineteenth century. The eugenics meaning has come to be synonymous with scientific racism and white supremacy in modern use. Modern bioethicists who endorse new eugenics describe it as a means of improving human characteristics irrespective of a group membership.

Although eugenic ideas have been practised since ancient Greece, the modern history of eugenics started in the late nineteenth century, when a widespread eugenics movement arose in the United Kingdom and quickly spread to many other countries, such as the United States, Australia, Canada, and much of Europe. During this time, eugenic ideas were promoted by people from all walks of life. As a result, several countries implemented eugenic policies to boost the genetic stock of their populations.

When the prosecution of several of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials of 1945 to 1946 tried to explain their human-rights violations by arguing there was no distinction between Nazi eugenics programmes and U.S. eugenics programmes, the eugenics movement got synonymous with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

What is Eugenics Movement?

Eugenics Movement

The past of the United States is marred by flaws. Slavery, the annihilation of Native American populations, and massacres committed during our various wars are only a few of our darker chapters. A fast poll would show that the majority of Americans are aware of, or have heard of, these cases. However, if you consider the average citizen about the "eugenics campaign," you would most likely get blank stares. The Genetics Generation claims that it is beyond time to draw attention to this tragic moment in our country's history.

In the early 1900s, Charles Davenport (1866-1944), an influential scientist, and Harry Laughlin, a retired instructor and principal involved in genetics, founded the eugenics movement in the United States. Davenport created the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island in 1910 with the mission of “improving the organic, physical, emotional, and temperamental values of the human family” (Norrgard 2008). The first director was Laughlin. The ERO's field workers gathered a variety of "evidence," including family pedigrees depicting the inheritance of physical, emotional, and moral characteristics.

They were especially interested in how “undesirable” characteristics like impoverishment, mental deficiency, dwarfism, promiscuity, and crime were passed down over the centuries. For 3 decades, the ERO was in service.

Eugenics was not only a subject for academics; it developed into a mainstream mass phenomenon in the 1920s and 1930s. The American Eugenics Society was established around this period, as were several other local societies and organisations around the world (PBS 1998). At fairs and exhibits, participants participated in “fitter family” and “better baby” tournaments (Remsberg 2011). Eugenics-themed movies and books became very common. The Black Stork is a storey about a black stork (1917), based on a true storey, a psychiatrist who permitted a syphilitic boy to die after persuading the child's parents that it was best to save humanity another outcast is portrayed as courageous.

Modern Eugenics

At the turn of the twenty-first century, advancements in genetic, genomic, and reproductive technology posed various concerns about the ethical status of eugenics, effectively reigniting interest in the subject. Modern genetics, according to others, is a backdoor to eugenics, as sociologist Troy Duster of UC Berkeley has proposed. 

Tania Simoncelli, then-White House Assistant Director for Forensic Sciences, claimed in a 2003 publication by Hampshire College's Population and Development Program that developments in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) are ushering in a "new age of eugenics," and that, unlike Nazi eugenics, this eugenics is not focused on race." Children are gradually viewed as made-to-order commercial goods," according to contemporary eugenics, which is consumer-driven and market-based. 

In a 2006 newspaper report, Richard Dawkins claimed that the shadow of Nazi misuse had stifled debate on eugenics to the point where some scientists refused to believe that breeding humans for certain abilities were even feasible. He claims it is no different physically from breeding domestic animals for characteristics like speed or herding ability. Dawkins believed that enough time had passed to consider the ethical distinctions in breeding for talent and teaching athletes or requiring children to take music lessons.

Meanings and Types

Francis Galton invented the word "eugenics" and its current area of research in 1883, based on his half-cousin Charles Darwin's recent work. Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Progress was written by Galton, and it included his findings and conclusions.

The origins of the idea can be traced back to some conceptions of Mendelian inheritance and August Weismann's theories.

The term "eugenics" is derived from the Greek word Eu ("good" / "well") and the suffix -gens ("born"); Galton meant it to replace the term "stirpiculture," which he had originally used but was ridiculed for its supposed sexual overtones. Eugenics, according to Galton, is "the study of all human-controlled agencies that can boost or impair the genetic standard of future generations."

The concept of eugenics has been used in the past to justify a wide range of policies, from fertility treatment for genetically suitable mothers to involuntary sterilisation and execution of those considered unfit.

The concept has been applied to the prevention of inbreeding without modifying allele levels by population geneticists; for example, J. B. S. Haldane wrote that "the motor bus, by splitting up inbred village populations, was a strong eugenic force." The controversy over what constitutes eugenics is still going on today.

Eugenics is the study of what is also viewed as a pseudoscience, according to Edwin Black, journalist and author of War Against the Poor, since what is described as a genetic enhancement of a desirable phenotype is a cultural preference rather than a matter that can be decided by rigorous scientific inquiry. The concept of "advancement" of the human gene pool, such as what is an advantageous trait and what is a flaw, has become the most controversial component of eugenics. This part of eugenics has been corrupted by scientific bias and pseudoscience in the past.