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Eugenics (/juːˈdʒɛnɪks/ yoo-JEN-iks; from Ancient Greek εύ̃ (eû) 'good, well' and -γενής (genḗs) 'born, come into being, growing/grown')[1] is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population.[2][3][4] Historically, eugenicists have altered various human gene frequencies by inhibiting the fertility of people and groups purported to be inferior or promoting that of those purported to be superior.[5]
The contemporary history of eugenics began in the late 19th century, when a popular eugenics movement emerged in the United Kingdom,[6] and then spread to many countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia,[7] and most European countries (e.g. Sweden and Germany). In this period, people from across the political spectrum espoused eugenic ideas. Consequently, many countries adopted eugenic policies, intended to improve the quality of their populations' genetic stock.
While it originated as a progressive social movement,[8][9][10][11] in contemporary usage, the term is closely associated with scientific racism.[12]
Historically, the idea of eugenics has been used to argue for a broad array of practices ranging from prenatal care for mothers deemed genetically desirable to the forced sterilization and murder of those deemed unfit.[5] To population geneticists, the term has included the avoidance of inbreeding without altering allele frequencies; for example, British-Indian scientist J. B. S. Haldane wrote that "the motor bus, by breaking up inbred village communities, was a powerful eugenic agent."[13] Debate as to what exactly counts as eugenics continues today.[14] Early eugenicists were mostly concerned with factors of measured intelligence that often correlated strongly with social class.
The aforementioned eugenic programs included both positive measures, such as encouraging individuals deemed particularly "fit" to reproduce, and negative measures, such as marriage prohibitions and forced sterilization of people deemed unfit for reproduction.[5][19][20]: 104–155
In other words, positive eugenics is aimed at encouraging reproduction among the genetically advantaged, for example, the eminently intelligent, the healthy, and the successful. Possible approaches include financial and political stimuli, targeted demographic analyses, in vitro fertilization, egg transplants, and cloning.[21] Negative eugenics aimed to eliminate, through sterilization or segregation, those deemed physically, mentally, or morally "undesirable". This includes abortions, sterilization, and other methods of family planning.[21] Both positive and negative eugenics can be coercive; in Nazi Germany, for example, abortion was illegal for women deemed by the state to be fit.[22]
Euthenics (/juːˈθɛnɪks/) is the study of improvement of human functioning and well-being by improvement of living conditions.[23] "Improvement" is conducted by altering external factors such as education and the controllable environments, including environmentalism, education regarding employment, home economics, sanitation, and housing, as well as the prevention and removal of contagious disease and parasites.[citation needed]
In a New York Times article of May 23, 1926, Rose Field notes of the description, "the simplest [is] efficient living".[24] It is also described as "a right to environment",[25] commonly as dual to a "right of birth" that correspondingly falls under the purview of eugenics.[26]
Euthenics is not normally interpreted to have anything to do with changing the composition of the human gene pool by definition, although everything that affects society has some effect on who reproduces and who does not.[27]The influential historian of education, Abraham Flexner questions its scientific value in stating:
[T]he “science” is artificially pieced together of bits of mental hygiene, child guidance, nutrition, speech development and correction, family problems, wealth consumption, food preparation, household technology, and horticulture. A nursery school and a school for little children are also included. The institute is actually justified in an official publication by the profound question of a girl student who is reported as asking, “What is the connection of Shakespeare with having a baby?” The Vassar Institute of Euthenics bridges this gap![28]
Eugenicist, Charles Benedict Davenport, noted in his article "Euthenics and Eugenics," found reprinted in the Popular Science Monthly:
Along similar lines famously argued psychologist and early intelligence researcher Edward L. Thorndike some two years later for an understanding that better integrates eugenic study:Thus the two schools of euthenics and eugenics stand opposed, each viewing the other unkindly. Against eugenics it is urged that it is a fatalistic doctrine and deprives life of the stimulus toward effort. Against euthenics the other side urges that it demands an endless amount of money to patch up conditions in the vain effort to get greater efficiency. Which of the two doctrines is true?
The thoughtful mind must concede that, as is so often the case where doctrines are opposed, each view is partial, incomplete and really false. The truth does not exactly lie between the doctrines; it comprehends them both.
[...] [I]n the generations to come, the teachings and practice of euthenics [...] [may] yield greater result because of the previous practice of the principles of eugenics.[29]
The more rational the race becomes, the better roads, ships, tools, machines, foods, medicines and the like it will produce to aid itself, though it will need them less. The more sagacious and just and humane the original nature that is bred into man, the better schools, laws, churches, traditions and customs it will fortify itself by. There is no so certain and economical a way to improve man's environment as to improve his nature.[30]
According to Plutarch, in Sparta, every proper citizen's child was inspected by their council of elders, the Gerousia, which determined whether or not the child was fit to live.[31] If the child was deemed incapable of living a Spartan life, the child was usually killed in a chasm near the Taygetus mountain known as the Apothetae.[32][33] Further trials intended to discern a child's fitness included bathing them in wine and exposing them to the elements to fend for themselves. To Sparta, this would ensure only the strongest survived and procreated.[34]And so selective infanticide seems to have been comparably widespread in Ancient Rome[35] as it had already long been in Athens.[36]
Furthermore, according to Tacitus (c. 56 – c. 120), a Roman of the Imperial Period, the Germanic tribes of his day killed any member of their community they deemed cowardly, unwarlike or "stained with abominable vices", usually by drowning them in swamps.[37][38]
The characteristic practice of selective infanticide in the Roman Empire did not subside until its Christianization, which however also mandated negative eugenics, e.g. by the council of Adge in 506, which forbade marriage between cousins.[39]
For the parallel case of medieval China, as mediated by its meritocratic system of imperial examinations, a study analyzing genealogical records of 36,456 men from six Chinese lineages between 1350 and 1920 found that the literati (degree and office holders) had more than double the number of surviving sons compared to non-degree holders;[40] ceteris paribus indicating stable and persistent eugenic pressures towards the associated traits.[41]
The term eugenics and its modern field of study were first formulated by Francis Galton in 1883,[42][43][44][a] directly drawing on the recent work delineating natural selection by his half-cousin Charles Darwin.[46][47][48][b] He published his observations and conclusions chiefly in his influential book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. Galton himself defined it as "the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations".[50] The first to systematically apply Darwinism theory to human relations, Galton believed that various desirable human qualities were also hereditary ones, although Darwin strongly disagreed with this elaboration of his theory.[51] And it should also be noted that many of the early geneticists were not themselves Darwinians.[48]
Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities and received funding from various sources.[52] Organizations were formed to win public support for and to sway opinion towards responsible eugenic values in parenthood, including the British Eugenics Education Society of 1907 and the American Eugenics Society of 1921. Both sought support from leading clergymen and modified their message to meet religious ideals.[53] In 1909, the Anglican clergymen William Inge and James Peile both wrote for the Eugenics Education Society. Inge was an invited speaker at the 1921 International Eugenics Conference, which was also endorsed by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York Patrick Joseph Hayes.[53]
Three International Eugenics Conferences presented a global venue for eugenicists, with meetings in 1912 in London, and in 1921 and 1932 in New York City. Eugenic policies in the United States were first implemented by state-level legislators in the early 1900s.[54] Eugenic policies also took root in France, Germany, and Great Britain.[55] Later, in the 1920s and 1930s, the eugenic policy of sterilizing certain mental patients was implemented in other countries including Belgium,[56] Brazil,[57] Canada,[58] Japan and Sweden.
Frederick Osborn's 1937 journal article "Development of a Eugenic Philosophy" framed eugenics as a social philosophy—a philosophy with implications for social order.[59] That definition is not universally accepted. Osborn advocated for higher rates of sexual reproduction among people with desired traits ("positive eugenics") or reduced rates of sexual reproduction or sterilization of people with less-desired or undesired traits ("negative eugenics").
In addition to being practiced in a number of countries, eugenics was internationally organized through the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations.[60] Its scientific aspects were carried on through research bodies such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics,[61] the Cold Spring Harbor Carnegie Institution for Experimental Evolution,[62] and the Eugenics Record Office.[63] Politically, the movement advocated measures such as sterilization laws.[64] In its moral dimension, eugenics rejected the doctrine that all human beings are born equal and redefined moral worth purely in terms of genetic fitness.[65] Its racist elements included pursuit of a pure "Nordic race" or "Aryan" genetic pool and the eventual elimination of "unfit" races.[66][67]
Many leading British politicians subscribed to the theories of eugenics. Winston Churchill supported the British Eugenics Society and was an honorary vice president for the organization. Churchill believed that eugenics could solve "race deterioration" and reduce crime and poverty.[49][68][69]
As a social movement, eugenics reached its greatest popularity in the early decades of the 20th century, when it was practiced around the world and promoted by governments, institutions, and influential individuals. Many countries enacted[70] various eugenics policies, including: genetic screenings, birth control, promoting differential birth rates, marriage restrictions, segregation (both racial segregation and sequestering the mentally ill), compulsory sterilization, forced abortions or forced pregnancies, ultimately culminating in genocide. By 2014, gene selection (rather than "people selection") was made possible through advances in genome editing,[71] leading to what is sometimes called new eugenics, also known as "neo-eugenics", "consumer eugenics", or "liberal eugenics"; which focuses on individual freedom and allegedly pulls away from racism, sexism or a focus on intelligence.[72]
Early critics of the philosophy of eugenics included the American sociologist Lester Frank Ward,[73] the English writer G. K. Chesterton, and Scottish tuberculosis pioneer and author Halliday Sutherland.[c] Ward's 1913 article "Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics", Chesterton's 1917 book Eugenics and Other Evils,[75] and Franz Boas' 1916 article "Eugenics" (published in The Scientific Monthly)[76] were all harshly critical of the rapidly growing movement.
Several biologists were also antagonistic to the eugenics movement, including Lancelot Hogben.[77] Other biologists who were themselves eugenicists, such as J. B. S. Haldane and R. A. Fisher, however, also expressed skepticism in the belief that sterilization of "defectives" (i.e. a purely negative eugenics) would lead to the disappearance of undesirable genetic traits.[78]
Among institutions, the Catholic Church was an opponent of state-enforced sterilizations, but accepted isolating people with hereditary diseases so as not to let them reproduce.[79] Attempts by the Eugenics Education Society to persuade the British government to legalize voluntary sterilization were opposed by Catholics and by the Labour Party.[80] The American Eugenics Society initially gained some Catholic supporters, but Catholic support declined following the 1930 papal encyclical Casti connubii.[53] In this, Pope Pius XI explicitly condemned sterilization laws: "Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects; therefore, where no crime has taken place and there is no cause present for grave punishment, they can never directly harm, or tamper with the integrity of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason."[81]
In fact, more generally, "[m]uch of the opposition to eugenics during that era, at least in Europe, came from the right."[20]: 36 The eugenicists' political successes in Germany and Scandinavia were not at all matched in such countries as Poland and Czechoslovakia, even though measures had been proposed there, largely because of the Catholic church's moderating influence.[82]