Eugenics

A 1930s exhibit by the Eugenics Society. Some of the signs read "Healthy and Unhealthy Families", "Heredity as the Basis of Efficiency" and "Marry Wisely".

Eugenics (/juːˈdʒɛnɪks/ yoo-JEN-iks; from Ancient Greek εύ̃ (eû) 'good, well' and -γενής (genḗs) 'born, come into being, growing/grown') is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have altered various human gene frequencies by inhibiting the fertility of people and groups they considered inferior, or promoting that of those considered superior.

The contemporary history of eugenics began in the late 19th century, when a popular eugenics movement emerged in the United Kingdom, and then spread to many countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, 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.

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. 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 in 1940 that "the motor bus, by breaking up inbred village communities, was a powerful eugenic agent." Debate as to what exactly counts as eugenics continues today. Early eugenicists were mostly concerned with factors of measured intelligence that often correlated strongly with social class.

Although it originated as a progressive social movement in the 19th century, in contemporary usage in the 21st century, the term is closely associated with scientific racism. New, liberal eugenics seeks to dissociate itself from old, authoritarian eugenics by rejecting coercive state programs and relying on parental choice.

Common distinctions

Lester Frank Ward wrote the early paper: "Eugenics, Euthenics and Eudemics", making yet further distinctions.

Having presented papers at eugenics conferences alongside fellow Nobel prize winners in Physiology or Medicine, Hermann J. Muller and Francis Crick, as late as 1963 and equally concerned over the civilizational prospect of dysgenics, Jewish geneticist Joshua Lederberg would nonetheless go on to coin the contrasting term Euphenics.

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.

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. 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. 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.

As opposed to "euthenics"

See also: Nature-nurture debate

Ellen Swallow Richards (left), the first female student and instructor at MIT, was one of the first to use the term, while Julia Clifford Lathrop (right) continued to promote it in the form of an interdisciplinary academic program later to be mostly absorbed into the field of home economics.

Euthenics (/juːˈθɛnɪks/) is the study of improvement of human functioning and well-being by improvement of living conditions. "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.

In a New York Times article of May 23, 1926, Rose Field notes of the description, "the simplest [is] efficient living". It is also described as "a right to environment", commonly as dual to a "right of birth" that correspondingly falls under the purview of eugenics.

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.

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!

Eugenicist Charles Benedict Davenport noted in his article "Euthenics and Eugenics," reprinted in Popular Science Monthly:

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.

Along similar lines argued psychologist and early intelligence researcher Edward L. Thorndike some two years later for an understanding that better integrates eugenic study:

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.

Historical eugenics

Main article: History of eugenics

Ancient and medieval origins

This section is an excerpt from History of eugenics § Ancient eugenics.[edit]

Giuseppe Diotti's The selection of the infant Spartans (1840)

According to Plutarch, in Sparta every proper citizen's child was inspected by the council of elders, the Gerousia, which determined whether or not the child was fit to live. 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. Further trials intended to discern a child's fitness included bathing them in wine and exposing them to the elements to fend for themselves, with the intention of ensuring that only those considered strongest survived and procreated. And so selective infanticide seems to have been as widespread in Ancient Rome as it had already long been in Athens.

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.

Academic origins

See also: Galton Laboratory and Eugenics Record Office

Francis Galton (1822–1911) was a British polymath who coined the term "eugenics".

The term eugenics and its modern field of study were first formulated by Francis Galton in 1883, directly drawing on the recent work delineating natural selection by his half-cousin Charles Darwin. 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". 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. And it should also be noted that many of the early geneticists were not themselves Darwinians.

Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities and received funding from various sources. 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. 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.

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. Eugenic policies also took root in France, Germany, and Great Britain. Later, in the 1920s and 1930s, the eugenic policy of sterilizing certain mental patients was implemented in other countries including Belgium, Brazil, Canada, 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. 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. Its scientific aspects were carried on through research bodies such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, the Cold Spring Harbor Carnegie Institution for Experimental Evolution, and the Eugenics Record Office. Politically, the movement advocated measures such as sterilization laws. 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. Its racist elements included pursuit of a pure "Nordic race" or "Aryan" genetic pool and the eventual elimination of "unfit" races.

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.

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 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, 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.

Early opposition

Early critics of the philosophy of eugenics included the American sociologist Lester Frank Ward, the English writer G. K. Chesterton, and Scottish tuberculosis pioneer and author Halliday Sutherland. Ward's 1913 article "Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics", Chesterton's 1917 book Eugenics and Other Evils, and Franz Boas' 1916 article "Eugenics" (published in The Scientific Monthly) were all harshly critical of the rapidly growing movement.

Several biologists were also antagonistic to the eugenics movement, including Lancelot Hogben. 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.

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. Attempts by the Eugenics Education Society to persuade the British government to legalize voluntary sterilization were opposed by Catholics and by the Labour Party. The American Eugenics Society initially gained some Catholic supporters, but Catholic support declined following the 1930 papal encyclical Casti connubii. 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."

In fact, more generally, "[m]uch of the opposition to eugenics during that era, at least in Europe, came from the right." 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.

Concerns over human devolution

The Lamarckian backdrop

"Any new set of conditions which renders a species' food and safety very easily obtained, seems to lead to degeneration"

Ray Lankester (1880)

"We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic; of a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria, and it is natural that we should ask anxiously on all sides: 'What is to come next?"

Max Simon Nordau (1892)

Morel for one, clearly influenced by Lamarck, claimed that environmental factors such as drugs or alcohol would revert one's offspring to an evolutionarily more primitive stage.

The idea of progress was at once a social, political and scientific theory. The theory of evolution, as described in Darwin's The Origin of Species, provided for many social theorists the necessary scientific foundation for the idea of social and political progress. The terms evolution and progress were in fact often used interchangeably in the 19th century.

The rapid industrial, political and economic progress in 19th-century Europe and North America was, however, paralleled by a sustained discussion about increasing rates of crime, insanity, vagrancy, prostitution, and so forth. Confronted with this apparent paradox, evolutionary scientists, criminal anthropologists and psychiatrists postulated that civilization and scientific progress could be a cause of physical and social pathology as much as a defense against it.

According to the theory of degeneration, a host of individual and social pathologies in a finite network of diseases, disorders and moral habits could be explained by a biologically based affliction. The primary symptoms of the affliction were thought to be a weakening of the vital forces and willpower of its victim. In this way, a wide range of social and medical deviations, including crime, violence, alcoholism, prostitution, gambling, and pornography, could be explained by reference to a biological defect within the individual. The theory of degeneration was therefore predicated on evolutionary theory. The forces of degeneration opposed those of evolution, and those afflicted with degeneration were thought to represent a return to an earlier evolutionary stage. One of the earliest and most systematric approaches along such lines is that of Bénédict Morel, who wrote:

"When under any kind of noxious influence an organism becomes debilitated, its successors will not resemble the healthy, normal type of the species, with capacities for development, but will form a new sub-species, which, like all others, possesses the capacity of transmitting to its offspring, in a continuously increasing degree, its peculiarities, these being morbid deviations from the normal form – gaps in development, malformations and infirmities"

Accordingly, degeneration theory owed more to Lamarckism than Darwinism, for only the former knew a "use it or lose it" lemma so characteristically intuitive as to enter the public such as artistic imagination at the unprecedented scale that it did.

Dysgenics

This section is an excerpt from Dysgenics.[edit]

Dysgenics refers to any decrease in the prevalence of traits deemed to be either socially desirable or generally adaptive to their environment due to selective pressure disfavouring their reproduction.

In 1915 the term was used by David Starr Jordan to describe the supposed deleterious effects of modern warfare on group-level genetic fitness because of its tendency to kill physically healthy men while preserving the disabled at home. Similar concerns had been raised by early eugenicists and social Darwinists during the 19th century, and continued to play a role in scientific and public policy debates throughout the 20th century.

More recent concerns about supposed dysgenic effects in human populations have been advanced by the controversial psychologist Richard Lynn, notably in his 1996 book Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, which argued that changes in selection pressures and decreased infant mortality since the Industrial Revolution have resulted in an increased propagation of deleterious traits and genetic disorders.

Despite these concerns, genetic studies have shown no evidence for dysgenic effects in human populations. Reviewing Lynn's book, the scholar John R. Wilmoth notes: "Overall, the most puzzling aspect of Lynn's alarmist position is that the deterioration of average intelligence predicted by the eugenicists has not occurred."

Compulsory sterilization

This section is an excerpt from Compulsory sterilization.[edit]

Anglo-Spanish political poster

Compulsory sterilization, also known as forced or coerced sterilization, refers to any government-mandated program to involuntarily sterilize a specific group of people. Sterilization removes a person's capacity to reproduce, and is usually done by surgical or chemical means.

Purported justifications for compulsory sterilization have included population control, eugenics, limiting the spread of HIV, and ethnic genocide.

Several countries implemented sterilization programs in the early 20th century. Although such programs have been made illegal in much of the world, instances of forced or coerced sterilizations still persist.

Eugenic feminism

This section is an excerpt from Eugenic feminism.[edit]

Marie Stopes in her laboratory, 1904

Eugenic feminism was a current of the women's suffrage movement which overlapped with eugenics. Originally coined by the Lebanese-British physician and vocal eugenicist Caleb Saleeby, the term has since been applied to summarize views held by prominent feminists of Great Britain and the United States. Some early suffragettes in Canada, especially a group known as The Famous Five, also pushed for various eugenic policies.

Eugenic feminists argued that if women were provided with more rights and equality, the deteriorating characteristics of a given race could be averted.

North American eugenics

American eugenicists generally pursued more public-facing work and accordingly became widely known for their racism in particular. Along these lines, they were often harshly criticized by their British counterparts.

This section is an excerpt from Eugenics in the United States.[edit]

While its American practice was ostensibly about improving genetic quality, it has been argued that eugenics was more about preserving the position of the dominant groups in the population. Scholarly research has determined that people who found themselves targets of the eugenics movement were those who were seen as unfit for society—the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill, and specific communities of color—and a disproportionate number of those who fell victim to eugenicists' sterilization initiatives were women who were identified as African American, Asian American, or Native American. As a result, the United States' eugenics movement is now generally associated with racist and nativist elements, as the movement was to some extent a reaction to demographic and population changes, as well as concerns over the economy and social well-being, rather than scientific genetics.

Eugenics in Mexico

This section is an excerpt from Eugenics in Mexico.[edit]

Following the Mexican Revolution, the eugenics movement gained prominence in Mexico. Seeking to change the genetic make-up of the country's population, proponents of eugenics in Mexico focused primarily on rebuilding the population, creating healthy citizens, and ameliorating the effects of perceived social ills such as alcoholism, prostitution, and venereal diseases. Mexican eugenics, at its height in the 1930s, influenced the state's health, education, and welfare policies.

Mexican elites adopted eugenic thinking and raised it under the banner of “the Great Mexican family” (Spanish: la gran familia mexicana).

Unlike in other countries, the eugenics movements in Latin America were largely founded on the idea of neo-Lamarckian eugenics. Neo-Lamarckian eugenics stated that the outside effects experienced by an organism throughout its lifetime changed its genetics permanently, allowing the organism to pass acquired traits onto its offspring. In the Neo-Lamarckian genetic framework, activities such as prostitution and alcoholism could result in the degeneration of future generations, amplifying fears about the effects of certain social ills. However, the supposed genetic malleability also offered hope to certain Latin American eugenicists, as social reform would have the ability to transform the population more permanently.

Nazism and the decline of eugenics

See also: Nazi eugenics, Racial hygiene, Life unworthy of life, and Scientific racism

Schloss Hartheim, a former center for Nazi Germany's Aktion T4 campaign

The scientific reputation of eugenics started to decline in the 1930s, a time when Ernst Rüdin used eugenics as a justification for the racial policies of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler had praised and incorporated eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf in 1925 and emulated eugenic legislation for the sterilization of "defectives" that had been pioneered in the United States once he took power. Some common early 20th century eugenics methods involved identifying and classifying individuals and their families, including the poor, mentally ill, blind, deaf, developmentally disabled, promiscuous women, homosexuals, and racial groups (such as the Roma and Jews in Nazi Germany) as "degenerate" or "unfit", and therefore led to segregation, institutionalization, sterilization, and even mass murder. The Nazi policy of identifying German citizens deemed mentally or physically unfit and then systematically killing them with poison gas, referred to as the Aktion T4 campaign, is understood by historians to have paved the way for the Holocaust.

"All practices aimed at eugenics, any use of the human body or any of its parts for financial gain, and human cloning shall be prohibited."

Hungarian Constitution

"Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority."

The first and most fundamental article of German basic law

By the end of World War II, many eugenics laws were abandoned, having become associated with Nazi Germany. H. G. Wells, who had called for "the sterilization of failures" in 1904, stated in his 1940 book The Rights of Man: Or What Are We Fighting For? that among the human rights, which he believed should be available to all people, was "a prohibition on mutilation, sterilization, torture, and any bodily punishment". After World War II, the practice of "imposing measures intended to prevent births within [a national, ethnical, racial or religious] group" fell within the definition of the new international crime of genocide, set out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union also proclaims "the prohibition of eugenic practices, in particular those aiming at selection of persons".

In Singapore

Main article: Population control in Singapore § Demographic transition and the Graduate Mothers Scheme

Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, actively promoted eugenics as late as 1983. In 1984, Singapore began providing financial incentives to highly educated women to encourage them to have more children. For this purpose was introduced the "Graduate Mother Scheme" that incentivized graduate women to get married as much as the rest of their populace. The incentives were extremely unpopular and regarded as eugenic, and were seen as discriminatory towards Singapore's non-Chinese ethnic population. In 1985, the incentives were partly abandoned as ineffective, while the government matchmaking agency, the Social Development Network, remains active.

Modern eugenics

See also: New eugenics

Developments in genetic, genomic, and reproductive technologies at the beginning of the 21st century have raised numerous questions regarding the ethical status of eugenics, sparking renewed interest in the topic.

Liberal eugenics, also called new eugenics, aims to make genetic interventions morally acceptable by rejecting coercive state programs and relying on parental choice. Bioethicist Nicholas Agar, who coined the term, argues for example that the state should only intervene to forbid interventions that excessively limit a child’s ability to shape their own future. Unlike "authoritarian" or "old" eugenics, liberal eugenics draws on modern scientific knowledge of genomics to enable informed choices aimed at improving well-being. Julien Savulescu further argues that some eugenic practices like prenatal screening for Down syndrome are already widely practiced, without being labeled "eugenics", as they are seen as enhancing freedom rather than restricting it.

However, some critics, such as UC Berkeley sociologist Troy Duster, have argued that modern genetics is a "back door to eugenics". This view was shared by then-White House Assistant Director for Forensic Sciences, Tania Simoncelli, who stated in a 2003 publication by the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College that advances in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) are moving society to a "new era of eugenics", and that, unlike the Nazi eugenics, modern eugenics is consumer driven and market based, "where children are increasingly regarded as made-to-order consumer products". The United Nations' International Bioethics Committee also noted that while human genetic engineering should not be confused with the 20th century eugenics movements, it nonetheless challenges the idea of human equality and opens up new forms of discrimination and stigmatization for those who do not want or cannot afford the technology.

Contested scientific status

Further information: Sociobiology § Reception, and Criticism of evolutionary psychology

In the decades after World War II, the term "eugenics" had taken on a negative connotation and as a result, the use of it became increasingly unpopular within the scientific community. Many organizations and journals that had their origins in the eugenics movement began to distance themselves from the philosophy which spawned it, as when Eugenics Quarterly was renamed Social Biology in 1969.

One general concern that many bring to the table, is that the reduced genetic diversity some argue to be a likely feature of long-term, species-wide eugenics plans, could eventually result in inbreeding depression, increased spread of infectious disease, and decreased resilience to changes in the environment.

Arguments for scientific validity

See also: Selective breeding, De novo domestication, List of domesticated animals, List of domesticated plants, and Self-domestication

The elongated berry formed by various plants of the genus Musa we know as banana before (left) and after (right) purposeful human domestication

Teosinte (left) was cultivated and eventually evolved into modern corn (right).

In his original lecture "Darwinism, Medical Progress and Eugenics", Karl Pearson claimed that everything concerning eugenics fell into the field of medicine. Similarly apologetic, Czech-American Aleš Hrdlička, head of the American Anthropological Association from 1925 to 1926 and "perhaps the leading physical anthropologist in the country at the time" posited that its ultimate aim "is that it may, on the basis of accumulated knowledge and together with other branches of research, show the tendencies of the actual and future evolution of man, and aid in its possible regulation or improvement. The growing science of eugenics will essentially become applied anthropology."

More recently, prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins stated of the matter:

The spectre of Hitler has led some scientists to stray from "ought" to "is" and deny that breeding for human qualities is even possible. But if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as "these are not one-dimensional abilities" apply equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice.
I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler's death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons.

Scientifically possible and already well-established, heterozygote carrier testing is used in the prevention of autosomal recessive disorders, allowing couples to determine if they are at risk of passing various hereditary defects onto a future child. There are various examples of eugenic acts that managed to lower the prevalence of recessive diseases, although not negatively affecting the heterozygote carriers of those diseases themselves. The elevated prevalence of various genetically transmitted diseases among Ashkenazi Jew populations (e.g. per Tay–Sachs, cystic fibrosis, Canavan's disease and Gaucher's disease), has been markedly decreased in more recent cohorts by the widespread adoption of genetic screening (cf. also Dor Yeshorim).

Objections to scientific validity

Amanda Caleb, Professor of Medical Humanities at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, says "Eugenic laws and policies are now understood as part of a specious devotion to a pseudoscience that actively dehumanizes to support political agendas and not true science or medicine."

The first major challenge to conventional eugenics based on genetic inheritance was made in 1915 by Thomas Hunt Morgan. He demonstrated the event of genetic mutation occurring outside of inheritance involving the discovery of the hatching of a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) with white eyes from a family with red eyes, demonstrating that major genetic changes occurred outside of inheritance. Additionally, Morgan criticized the view that certain traits, such as intelligence and criminality, were hereditary because these traits were subjective.

Pleiotropy occurs when one gene influences multiple, seemingly unrelated phenotypic traits, an example being phenylketonuria, which is a human disease that affects multiple systems but is caused by one gene defect. Andrzej Pękalski, from the University of Wroclaw, argues that eugenics can cause harmful loss of genetic diversity if a eugenics program selects a pleiotropic gene that could possibly be associated with a positive trait. Pękalski uses the example of a coercive government eugenics program that prohibits people with myopia from breeding but has the unintended consequence of also selecting against high intelligence since the two go together.

While the science of genetics has increasingly provided means by which certain characteristics and conditions can be identified and understood, given the complexity of human genetics, culture, and psychology, at this point there is no agreed objective means of determining which traits might be ultimately desirable or undesirable. Some conditions 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, so eliminating these genes is undesirable in places where such diseases are common. Such cases in which, furthermore, even individual organisms' massive suffering or even death due to the odd 25 percent of homozygotes ineliminable by natural section under a Mendelian pattern of inheritance may be justified for the greater ecological good that is conspecifics incur a greater so-called heterozygote advantage in turn.

Edwin Black, journalist, historian, and author of War Against the Weak, argues that eugenics is often deemed a pseudoscience because what is defined as a genetic improvement of a desired trait is a cultural choice rather than a matter that can be determined through objective scientific inquiry. Indeed, 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. Historically, this aspect of eugenics is often considered to be tainted with scientific racism and pseudoscience.

Logo from the Second International Eugenics Conference, 1921. The bottom text reads: "Like A Tree, Eugenics Draws Its Materials From Many Sources And Organizes Them Into An Harmonious Entity" (such sources, i.e. roots, purportedly including e.g. genetics, physiology, mental testing, anthropology, statistics, medicine, politics and sociology).

Regarding the lasting controversy above, himself citing recent scholarship, historian of science Aaron Gillette notes that:

Others take a more nuanced view. They recognize that there was a wide variety of eugenic theories, some of which were much less race- or class-based than others. Eugenicists might also give greater or lesser acknowledgment to the role that environment played in shaping human behavior. In some cases, eugenics was almost imperceptibly intertwined with health care, child care, birth control, and sex education issues. In this sense, eugenics has been called, "a 'modern' way of talking about social problems in biologizing terms".

Indeed, granting that the historical phenomenon of eugenics was that of a pseudoscience, Gilette further notes that this derived chiefly from its being "an epiphenomenon of a number of sciences, which all intersected at the claim that it was possible to consciously guide human evolution."

Contested ethical status

Contemporary ethical opposition

See also: Larry Arnhart, Leon Kass, and Preimplantation genetic diagnosis § Religious objections

Noted critic of eugenics, Thomas Shakespeare (middle) appearing on TV show in 1994

In a book directly addressed at socialist eugenicist J.B.S. Haldane and his once-influential Daedalus, Betrand Russell, had one serious objection of his own: eugenic policies might simply end up being used to reproduce existing power relations "rather than to make men happy."

Environmental ethicist Bill McKibben argued against germinal choice technology and other advanced biotechnological strategies for human enhancement. He writes that it would be morally wrong for humans to tamper with fundamental aspects of themselves (or their children) in an attempt to overcome universal human limitations, such as vulnerability to aging, maximum life span and biological constraints on physical and cognitive ability. Attempts to "improve" themselves through such manipulation would remove limitations that provide a necessary context for the experience of meaningful human choice. He claims that human lives would no longer seem meaningful in a world where such limitations could be overcome with technology. Even the goal of using germinal choice technology for clearly therapeutic purposes should be relinquished, he argues, since it would inevitably produce temptations to tamper with such things as cognitive capacities. He argues that it is possible for societies to benefit from renouncing particular technologies, using Ming China, Tokugawa Japan and the contemporary Amish as examples.

The threat of perfection

This section is an excerpt from Bioconservatism § Michael Sandel.[edit]

Michael J. Sandel is an American political philosopher and a prominent bioconservative. His article and subsequent book, both titled The Case Against Perfection, concern the moral permissibility of genetic engineering or genome editing. Sandel compares genetic and non-genetic forms of enhancement pointing to the fact that much of non-genetic alteration has largely the same effect as genetic engineering. SAT tutors or study drugs such as Ritalin can have similar effects as minor tampering with natural born intelligence. Sandel uses such examples to argue that the most important moral issue with genetic engineering is not that the consequences of manipulating human nature will undermine human agency but the perfectionist aspiration behind such a drive to mastery. For Sandel, "the deepest moral objection to enhancement lies less in the perfection it seeks than in the human disposition it expresses and promotes.” For example, the parental desire for a child to be of a certain genetic quality is incompatible with the special kind of unconditional love parents should have for their children. He writes “[t]o appreciate children as gifts is to accept them as they come, not as objects of our design or products of our will or instruments of our ambition.”

Michael Sandel in 2012

Sandel insists that consequentialist arguments overlook the principle issue of whether bioenhancement should be aspired to at all. He is attributed with the view that human augmentation should be avoided as it expresses an excessive desire to change oneself and 'become masters of our nature.' For example, in the field of cognitive enhancement, he argues that moral question we should be concerned with is not the consequences of inequality of access to such technology in possibly creating two classes of humans but whether we should aspire to such enhancement at all. Similarly, he has argued that the ethical problem with genetic engineering is not that it undermines the child's autonomy, as this claim "wrongly implies that absent a designing parent, children are free to choose their characteristics for themselves." Rather, he sees enhancement as hubristic, taking nature into our own hands: pursuing the fixity of enhancement is an instance of vanity. Sandel also criticizes the argument that a genetically engineered athlete would have an unfair advantage over his unenhanced competitors, suggesting that it has always been the case that some athletes are better endowed genetically than others. In short, Sandel argues that the real ethical problems with genetic engineering concern its effects on humility, responsibility and solidarity.

Contemporary ethical advocacy

See also: Perfectionism (philosophy) and Peter Sloterdijk § Reprogenetics dispute

"If the use of cochlear implants means that there are fewer Deaf people, is this 'genocide'? Does our acceptance of prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion mean that we are 'drifting toward a eugenic resurgence that differs only superficially from earlier patterns'. [...] [This] overlooks the crucial fact that cochlear implants do not have victims."

Australian bioethicist Peter Singer (2003), some of whose own relatives were killed in the Holocaust.

Some, for example Nathaniel C. Comfort of Johns Hopkins University, claim that the change from state-led reproductive-genetic decision-making to individual choice has moderated the worst abuses of eugenics by transferring the decision-making process from the state to patients and their families. Comfort suggests that "the eugenic impulse drives us to eliminate disease, live longer and healthier, with greater intelligence, and a better adjustment to the conditions of society; and the health benefits, the intellectual thrill and the profits of genetic bio-medicine are too great for us to do otherwise." Others, such as bioethicist Stephen Wilkinson of Keele University and Honorary Research Fellow Eve Garrard at the University of Manchester, claim that some aspects of modern genetics can be classified as eugenics, but that this classification does not inherently make modern genetics immoral.

In their book published in 2000, From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice, bioethicists Allen Buchanan, Dan Brock, Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler argued that liberal societies have an obligation to encourage as wide an adoption of eugenic enhancement technologies as possible (so long as such policies do not infringe on individuals' reproductive rights or exert undue pressures on prospective parents to use these technologies) in order to maximize public health and minimize the inequalities that may result from both natural genetic endowments and unequal access to genetic enhancements.

In his book A Theory of Justice (1971), American philosopher John Rawls argued that "[o]ver time a society is to take steps to preserve the general level of natural abilities and to prevent the diffusion of serious defects". The original position, a hypothetical situation developed by Rawls, has been used as an argument for negative eugenics. Accordingly, some morally support germline editing precisely because of its capacity to (re)distribute such Rawlsian primary goods.

Status quo bias and the reversal test

Main article: Status quo bias

Bostrom and Ord introduced the reversal test to provide an answer to the question of how one can, given that humans might suffer from irrational status quo bias, distinguish between valid criticisms of a proposed increase in some human trait and criticisms merely motivated by resistance to change. The reversal test attempts to do this by asking whether it would be a good thing if the trait was decreased: An example given is that if someone objects that an increase in intelligence would be a bad thing due to more dangerous weapons being made etc., the objector to that position would then ask "Shouldn't we decrease intelligence then?"

"Reversal Test: When a proposal to change a certain parameter is thought to have bad overall consequences, consider a change to the same parameter in the opposite direction. If this is also thought to have bad overall consequences, then the onus is on those who reach these conclusions to explain why our position cannot be improved through changes to this parameter. If they are unable to do so, then we have reason to suspect that they suffer from status quo bias." (p. 664)

Ideally the test will help reveal whether status quo bias is an important causal factor in the initial judgement.

A similar thought experiment in regards to dampening traumatic memories was described by Adam J. Kolber, imagining whether aliens naturally resistant to traumatic memories should adopt traumatic "memory enhancement". The "trip to reality" rebuttal to Nozick's experience machine thought experiment (where one's entire current life is shown to be a simulation and one is offered to return to reality) can also be seen as a form of reversal test.

The utilitarian perspective of Procreative Beneficence

See also: Eradication of suffering

Julian Savulescu, a bioethicist and former PhD student of Peter Singer

Savulescu coined the phrase procreative beneficence. It is the controversial moral obligation, rather than mere permission, of parents in a position to select their children, for instance through preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and subsequent embryo selection or selective termination, to favor those expected to have the best possible life.

An argument in favor of this principle is that traits (such as empathy, memory, etc.) are "all-purpose means" in the sense of being instrumental in realizing whatever life plans the child may come to have.

Philosopher Walter Veit has argued that because there is no intrinsic moral difference between "creating" and "choosing" a life, eugenics becomes a natural consequence of procreative beneficence. Similar positions were also taken by John Harris, Robert Ranisch and Ben Saunders respectively.

Transhuman perspectives

The term directed evolution is used within the transhumanist community to refer to the idea of applying the principles of directed evolution and experimental evolution to the control of human evolution. Law professor Maxwell Mehlman has said that "for transhumanists, directed evolution is likened to the Holy Grail".

Riccardo Campa of the IEET wrote that "self-directed evolution" can be coupled with many different political, philosophical, and religious views within the transhumanist movement.

Problematizing the therapy-enhancement distinction

This section is an excerpt from Philosophy of medicine § Demarcating therapy.[edit]

Leg prostheses may allow double-amputee Paralympic sprinters to run faster than their Olympic counterparts.

Self-described opponents of historical eugenics first and foremost, are known to insist on a particularly stringent treatment-enhancement distinction (sometimes also called divide or gap). This distinction, naturally, "draws a line between services or interventions meant to prevent or cure (or otherwise ameliorate) conditions that we view as diseases or disabilities and interventions that improve a condition that we view as a normal function or feature of members of our species". And yet the adequacy of such a dichotomy is highly contested in modern scholarly bioethics. One simple counterargument is that it has already long been ignored throughout various contemporary fields of scientific study and practice such as "preventive medicine, palliative care, obstetrics, sports medicine, plastic surgery, contraceptive devices, fertility treatments, cosmetic dental procedures, and much else". This is one way of conducting ostensively what has been coined the "moral continuum argument" by some of its critics.

Granting these assertions' validity, one may, once more, call this first and foremost a moral collapse of the therapy–enhancement distinction. Without such a clear divide, restorative medicine and exploratory eugenics also invariably become harder to distinguish; and accordingly might one explain the matter's relevance to ongoing transhumanist discourse.

In science fiction

See also: Speculative evolution, Evolution in fiction, and Genetics in fiction

Incomplete pedigree chart of House Atreides from which one half of the Kwisatz Haderach had been strategically bred

In the movie, "Gattaca" also refers to the futuristic building complex that hosts the astronauts for an ongoing space colonization program.

The novel Brave New World by the English author Aldous Huxley (1931), is a dystopian social science fiction novel which is set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy.

Various works by the author Robert A. Heinlein mention the Howard Foundation, a group which attempts to improve human longevity through selective breeding.

Among Frank Herbert's other works, the Dune series, starting with the eponymous 1965 novel, describes selective breeding by a powerful sisterhood, the Bene Gesserit, to produce a supernormal male being, the Kwisatz Haderach.

The Star Trek franchise features a race of genetically engineered humans which is known as "Augments", the most notable of them is Khan Noonien Singh. These "supermen" were the cause of the Eugenics Wars, a dark period in Earth's fictional history, before they were deposed and exiled. They appear in many of the franchise's story arcs, most frequently, they appear as villains.

The film Gattaca (1997) provides a fictional example of a dystopian society that uses eugenics to decide what people are capable of and their place in the world. The title alludes to the letters G, A, T and C, the four nucleobases of DNA, and depicts the possible consequences of genetic discrimination in the present societal framework. Relegated to the role of a cleaner owing to his genetically projected death at age 32 due to a heart condition (being told: "The only way you'll see the inside of a spaceship is if you were cleaning it"), the protagonist observes enhanced astronauts as they are demonstrating their superhuman athleticism. Nonetheless, against mere uniformity being the movies key theme, it may be highlighted that it also includes a twelve fingered concert pianist nonetheless taken to be highly esteemed. Even though it was not a box office success, it was critically acclaimed and it is said to have crystallized the debate over human genetic engineering in the public consciousness. As to its accuracy, its production company, Sony Pictures, consulted with a gene therapy researcher and prominent critic of eugenics known to have stated that "[w]e should not step over the line that delineates treatment from enhancement", W. French Anderson, to ensure that the portrayal of science was realistic. Disputing their success in this mission, Philim Yam of Scientific American called the film "science bashing" and Nature's Kevin Davies called it a "surprisingly pedestrian affair", while molecular biologist Lee Silver described its extreme determinism as "a straw man". In an even more pointed critique, in his 2018 book Blueprint, the behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin writes that while Gattaca warned of the dangers of genetic information being used by a totalitarian state, genetic testing could also favor better meritocracy in democratic societies which already administer a variety of standardized tests to select people for education and employment. He suggests that polygenic scores might supplement testing in a manner that is essentially free of biases. Along similar lines, in the 2004 book Citizen Cyborg, democratic transhumanist James Hughes had already argued against what he considers to be "professional fearmongers", stating of the movie's premises:

1. Astronaut training programs are entirely justified in attempting to screen out people with heart problems for safety reasons;
2. In the United States, people are already being screened by insurance companies on the basis of their propensities to disease, for actuarial purposes;
3. Rather than banning genetic testing or genetic enhancement, society should simply develop genetic information privacy laws, such as the U.S. Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, that allow justified forms of genetic testing and data aggregation, but forbid those that are judged to result in genetic discrimination. Enforcing these would not be very hard once a system for reporting and penalties is in place.

See also

• Ableism – Discrimination on grounds of disability
• Bioconservatism – Cautious stance towards modifying human nature
• Culling – Process of segregating organisms in biology
• Dor Yeshorim – Jewish genetic screening organization
• Dysgenics – Decrease in genetic traits deemed desirable
• Eugenic feminism – Areas of the women's suffrage movement which overlapped with eugenics
• Genetic engineering – Manipulation of an organism's genome
• Genetic enhancement – Technologies to genetically improve human bodiesPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Hereditarianism – View that genetics plays a major role in determining human behavior
• Heritability of IQ – Percent of variation in IQ scores in a given population associated with genetic variation
• New eugenics – Liberal use of reprogenetics in human enhancement
• Mendelian traits in humans
  • Simple Mendelian genetics in humans
• Moral enhancement – Use of biotechnology to improve one's character
• Project Prevention – American non-profit organization
• Social Darwinism – Group of pseudoscientific theories and societal practices
• Wrongful life – Civil law action which alleges that a defendant has wrongfully caused a child to be born

Further reading

• Agar, Nicholas (2004). Liberal Eugenics: In Defense of Human Enhancement. Wiley-Blackwell.
• Agar, Nicholas (2019). "Why we Should Defend Gene Editing as Eugenics". Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. 34 (1): 9–19. doi:10.1017/S0963180118000336. PMID 30570459. S2CID 58195676.
• Anomaly, Jonathan (2018). "Defending eugenics: From cryptic choice to conscious selection." Monash Bioethics Review 35 (1–4):24-35. doi:10.1007/s40592-018-0081-2
• Anomaly, Jonathan (2024). Creating Future People The Science and Ethics of Genetic Enhancement. Routledge, 2nd Edition. ISBN 978-1-032-63657-3, doi:10.4324/9781003464266
• Buchanan, Allen (2017). Better than Human: The Promise and Perils of Deliberate Biomedical Enhancement. "Philosophy in Action" series. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190664046.
• Cavaliere, Giulia (2018). "Looking into the Shadow: Eugenics arguments in debates about reproductive technologies". Monash Bioethics Review. 36 (1–4): 1–22. doi:10.1007/s40592-018-0086-x. PMC 6336759. PMID 30535862.
• Paul, Diane B.; Spencer, Hamish G. (1998). "Did Eugenics Rest on an Elementary Mistake?" (PDF). In: The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate, SUNY Press (pp. 102–118)
• Galton, David J. (2002). Eugenics: The Future of Human Life in the 21st Century. London: Abacus. ISBN 9780349113777.
• Gantsho, Luvuyo (2022). "The principle of procreative beneficence and its implications for genetic engineering." Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 43 (5):307-328. doi:10.1007/s11017-022-09585-0
• Harris, John (2009). "Enhancements are a Moral Obligation." In J. Savulescu & N. Bostrom (Eds.), Human Enhancement, Oxford University Press, pp. 131–154
• Kamm, Frances (2010). "What Is And Is Not Wrong With Enhancement?" In Julian Savulescu & Nick Bostrom (eds.), Human Enhancement. Oxford University Press.
• Kamm, Frances (2005). "Is There a Problem with Enhancement?", The American Journal of Bioethics, 5(3), 5–14. PMID 16006376 doi:10.1080/15265160590945101
• Lynn, Richard (1997). Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations (PDF). Praeger Publishers. ISBN 9780275949174.
• Lynn, Richard (2001). Eugenics: A Reassessment (PDF). Praeger Publishers. ISBN 9780275958220.
• Maranto, Gina (1996). Quest for perfection: the drive to breed better human beings. New York: Scribner. ISBN 9780684800295.
• Ranisch, Robert (2022). "Procreative Beneficence and Genome Editing", The American Journal of Bioethics, 22(9), 20–22. doi:10.1080/15265161.2022.2105435
• Robertson, John (2021). Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technologies. Princeton University Press, doi:10.2307/j.ctv1h9dhsh.
• Rosenkranz, E. Joshua (1987). "Custom kids and the moral duty to genetically engineer our children". High Technology Law Journal. 2 (1): 1–53. JSTOR 24122379. PMID 11659156.
• Saunders, Ben (2015). "Why Procreative Preferences May be Moral – And Why it May not Matter if They Aren't." Bioethics, 29(7), 499–506. doi:10.1111/bioe.12147
• Savulescu, Julian; Kahane, Guy (2009). "The Moral Obligation to Have Children with the Best Chance of the Best Life" (PDF). Bioethics. 23 (5): 274–290. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8519.2008.00687.x. PMID 19076124. Archived from the original (PDF) on 25 February 2021.
• Savulescu, Julian (2001). Procreative beneficence: why we should select the best children. Bioethics. 15(5–6): pp. 413–26
• Shaw, David (2006). Genetic Morality. Bern: Peter Lang. ISBN 9783039111497.
• Singer, Peter (2010). "Parental Choice and Human Improvement." In Julian Savulescu & Nick Bostrom (eds.), Human Enhancement. Oxford University Press.
• Veit, Walter; Anomaly, Jonathan; Agar, Nicholas; Singer, Peter; Fleischman, Diana; Minerva, Francesca (2021). "Can 'eugenics' be defended?" (PDF). Monash Bioethics Review. 39 (1): 60–67. doi:10.1007/s40592-021-00129-1. PMC 8321981. PMID 34033008.
• Wikler, Daniel (1999). "Can we learn from eugenics?" (PDF). J Med Ethics. 25(2):183-94. doi: 10.1136/jme.25.2.183. PMID 10226926; PMCID: PMC479205.
• Wilson, Robert A. (2019). "Eugenics undefended". Monash Bioethics Review. 37 (1): 68–75. doi:10.1007/s40592-019-00094-w. PMID 31325149. S2CID 198131924.

External links

• Embryo Editing for Intelligence: A cost-benefit analysis of CRISPR-based editing for intelligence with 2015-2016 state-of-the-art
• Embryo Selection For Intelligence: A cost-benefit analysis of the marginal cost of IVF-based embryo selection for intelligence and other traits with 2016-2017 state-of-the-art
• Eugenics: Its Origin and Development (1883–Present) by the National Human Genome Research Institute (30 November 2021)
• Eugenics and Scientific Racism Fact Sheet by the National Human Genome Research Institute (3 November 2021)