Eugenics

Australian eugenicist A.O. Neville's plan to racially assimilate the Aborigines.

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“”We must, if we are to be consistent, and if we're to have a real pedigree herd, mate the best of our men with the best of our women as often as possible, and the inferior men with the inferior women as seldom as possible, and bring up only the offspring of the best.

—Plato, The Republic, Book V, Pt. VI

“”Nothing ever changes, except man. Your technical accomplishments? Improve a mechanical device and you may double productivity, but improve man and you gain a thousandfold. I am such a man.

—Khan Noonien Singh, Star Trek, "Space Seed"

Eugenics is the purported study of applying the principles of artificial selection and selective breeding through altering human reproduction with the goal of changing the relative frequency of traits in a human population. As Francis Galton put it in a 1909 essay, "the aim of Eugenics is to bring as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause the useful classes in the community to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation." It was the most dangerous form of biological determinism in modern history.

In its disturbing heyday, eugenics was a popular cause for "experts" during the Progressive Era in an appeal to "science". Liberal mainline Protestants, whose rank-and-file members later comprised the Second Ku Klux Klan, were wont to promotions of eugenics, opposed by Catholics and conservative evangelicals. Eugenics found some support among prominent African-American civil rights activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who desired to create an elite class of African-Americans dubbed "The Talented Tenth".

Most eugenicists believe that the goal of humanity is to achieve racial purity and exterminate people they deem not racially pure. This can be through several programs, including abortion, forced sterilization, and mass murder, for the betterment of humanity and a better future for their children.

Origins

Eugenics was first developed in the 19th century, a misguided outgrowth of an intellectual milieu influenced by the popularity of early evolutionary theory and which included a spate of works on genetic disorders (many of which are incurable horrors), "scientific racism", and the Social Darwinism of the likes of Herbert Spencer. The term "eugenics" was coined by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, in his 1883 book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. Galton was responsible for many of the early works of eugenics, including attempts to connect genetics with a most prized trait known as intelligence. In order to collect and analyze the data, Galton more or less created the field of statistics. Galton's protege (and biographer) Karl Pearson also made major advances in statistics.

In the United States, it was the biologist Charles Davenport who laid the groundwork for the establishment of eugenics programs. Eugenics gained traction as it was championed in the nascent Progressive Era of the late 19th century into the early 20th century, finding prominent political proponents in presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson. However, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Winston Churchill and Alexander Graham Bell were also fans of eugenics.

For some reason, there is the trope that Darwin's theory of natural selection based on undirected variations ("chance") resulting in reproductive success (growth in numbers of descendants) has some connection with eugenics. Of course, eugenics is based on the need for purposeful intervention ("intelligent design", so to speak) needed to prevent the supposed natural deterioration (not what we would like, rather than what nature "selects"). One of the important concepts which Darwin realized which made evolution work was that there was no direction upward to evolution. (So that, for example, megafauna like powerful dinosaurs and mammoths could go extinct. That is difficult to understand in any theory of "improvement".) The early 20th century, the era known as the "Eclipse of Darwinism", when it was little understood how natural selection could, and did, work in the changes of variation in the world of life, saw the greatest popularity of eugenics.

Uses

The state of Virginia classifies "mental defectives".

Policy

Some eugenics-based ideas were implemented both in the United States and in Europe. In the U.S., this strongly influenced immigration policy, as in the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which showed a preference for Northern Europeans, as they were believed to be somehow superior to Asians and South and Eastern Europeans. It was heavily influenced by racist theorists such as Madison Grant, who promoted immigration reform and forced sterilization.

The first U.S. state to implement eugenics was Indiana, in 1907, in which those housed in penal and mental institutions could be forcibly sterilized. The first European country to implement forced sterilization was Denmark, in 1929. California was the third U.S. state to implement eugenics, in 1909. California would go on to become responsible for a third of all of the forced sterilizations conducted in the United States (~20,000 out of ~60,000).

North Carolina had a eugenics policy from 1929 through 1977, and no, no bonus points will be awarded for guessing which race (and gender) it was more likely to apply to. In 2012, a gubernatorial committee proposed a settlement of USD$50,000 to each of the remaining living victims of this policy.

The Supreme Court gave legal backing to forced sterilization using eugenic ideas in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, a eugenics proponent, wrote in a notorious decision, "Three generations of imbeciles is enough." The Buck v. Bell decision encouraged more states to enact eugenics legislation. 23 states had such legislation prior to Buck v. Bell and 32 after. 18 states never had eugenics legislation.

Ireland had a similar program, with the so-called Magdalene Laundries, which lasted until 1996. While it in theory was for any mentally ill woman, the definition of "mentally ill" was both vague and easily corruptible enough to be anything from "single mother" to "sexual assault survivor who won't keep quiet".

Fun with eugenics!

One way eugenics was popularized was through "Better Baby" contests. These contests were sponsored by hospitals to determine the most "fit" baby, who all happened to be WASPs, naturally. This was spun off into "Fitter Family" contests, which would be held at state fairs, carnivals, and churches to allow entire families to compete.

Nietzschean influences on eugenics

Mussolini along with co-writer Giovanni Gentile in their work Doctrines of fascism attempted to define their ideology in a coherent manner, borrowing Nietzsche's ideas of a "Super man" or 'Übermensch'. They attempted to justify, using a misreading of Nietzsche, the creation of stronger and better human beings, which no doubt had some influence on eugenic policies. Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazis also cited Nietzsche's work to justify their policies (including eugenics) despite Nietzsche condemning German nationalism and antisemitism (his sister had edited his last unpublished book, The Will To Power, to fit such views when he was incapacitated).

Nazi Germany

Nazi "race scientist" Robert Ritter (far right) interviews a Romani woman during his "research" into "gypsy" racial history, 1936.

Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he approved of the eugenics policy going on in America at the time, to the point where one could say he was inspired by the idea. When he came to power, Nazi Germany saw the most sweeping application of a eugenics program, which is unsurprising, given the Nazis' maniacal obsession with racial purity, or "racial hygiene" as they called it. The "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" was implemented within half a year of his rise to power, and resulted in the forced sterilization of up to 400,000 people that were diagnosed with hereditary mental or physical disabilities. This was praised by eugenicists from the US.

After the outbreak of the war, this policy was carried to another extreme: people bearing hereditary defects were designated as "unfit to live", and the eugenics program moved from sterilization to extermination. Within the scope of "Aktion T4," an estimated 200,000 children and adults were systematically killed in order to avoid having to bear the costs of institutional care. The groups targeted by Aktion T4 were the incurably ill, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught, and elderly people. Achieving racial purity through eugenics on a grand scale can also be seen as an important motivation behind the Holocaust, which saw the murder of millions of "undesirables," such as Jews, gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, and the disabled. As always, the emotionally damaged psychopaths who created the policy escaped being marked as "undesirable".

Godwin's Law and the types of eugenics

Because of eugenics' association with Nazi Germany, a common bullshitting tactic is to declare some historical figure that endorsed eugenics a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer (see, e.g., Margaret Sanger). This is ahistorical, as not every eugenics proponent supported the measures of Nazi Germany (or were even around to see it). Indeed, if this were the case, that would make Teddy and Silent Cal Nazis as well.

Galton divided eugenic practice into "positive" and "negative eugenics". The positive variety consisted of political and economic incentives (such as tax breaks and sex education) for the "fit" to reproduce, and the negative type consisted of disincentives such as birth control or forced sterilization. "Dysgenics" refers to the deterioration of the human stock — many eugenicists concentrated on "improvement" of the human race by reversing alleged dysgenic forces. There is also a split between "liberal eugenics" and "authoritarian eugenics". Liberal eugenics promotes consensual eugenic practice while authoritarian eugenics promotes state-mandated and enforced programs. Proponents personally emphasized different aspects of eugenics, positive, negative, dysgenic forces, etc. Thus, they often disagreed on matters of policy, much less were they all Nazis.

Religion and irreligion

File:Eugenics Society Poster (1930s).png

Eugenics Society poster from the 1930s.

Eugenics for Jesus

Some Christian churches, particularly the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Episcopalians, embraced the eugenics movement. The Methodist Church would host Fitter Family contests and Methodist Bishops endorsed one of the first eugenics books circulated to the US churches. The professor of Christian ethics and founder of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, Rev. Harry F. War, writing in Eugenics, the magazine of the American Eugenic Society, said eugenics and Christianity were both compatible because both pursued the “challenge of removing the causes that produce the weak.”

The very first experiment in positive eugenics came about at the hands of the utopian Christian communist sect the Oneida Community. It was done through selective breeding, and termed "stirpiculture" by its leader and inventor John Humphrey Noyes (the term "eugenics" had yet to be coined). This lasted from 1869-79, with the birth of 58 children (some "unfit" accidental conceptions occurred too).

However, other Christian churches were strongly opposed to eugenics, particularly the Catholic Church and conservative Protestants. Catholics disliked eugenic laws that allowed for sterilization; Protestants viewed eugenics as a threat to a reliance on God to cure social ills.

Eugenics and humanism

Francis Galton.

The key figure in the birth of eugenics was Thomas Robert Malthus, a Protestant vicar. Robert Malthus’s “Essay on the Principle of Population” (originally published in 1798, but constantly revised by Malthus during his lifetime) was, and continues to be, fundamental in the field. Writing before the full onslaught of the industrial revolution and its impact upon agricultural production, Malthus argued that in any population the rate at which humans reproduce will grow faster than the rate of food production until there is a population crash, as humans are culled by hunger and disease. The only way to avoid this inevitable disaster was active intervention to limit population sizes. These ideas enjoyed a new lease of life with the development of evolutionary theory. Charles Darwin publicly acknowledged the debt he owed to Malthus in the development of his own theory of natural selection.

While Darwin’s theories are not eugenicist themselves, it was a combination of evolutionary theory and Malthus’s ideas about population control that gave rise to eugenics, a discipline which is intimately connected with Darwin’s family, primarily through Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, who became the acknowledged founder of the eugenics movement. While his cousin’s anti-clerical feelings are still debated, there can be no doubt at all about Galton’s credentials as a proto-humanist. He was openly irreligious in an age when it was unpopular and even dangerous. He saw eugenics – a term he derived from the Greek for good (eu) and born (-genes) – as a secular alternative to religion. Drawing upon the new science of statistics, to which he made notable contributions, he set out to encourage the procreation of eugenic, “well-born”, individuals and to discourage, or actively prevent, the “dysgenic” populations from breeding at all.

A major factor in the discrediting of mainline eugenics was the development of Gregor Mendel’s work by geneticists in the 1930s. A key aspect of this development was the discovery of recessive genes and the consequent recognition that breeding out undesirable characteristics in large, fluid human populations would be very difficult, if not impossible. There was also a growing appreciation of the influence of environment, which ensured that many of the various characteristics dumped into the “feeble-minded” box could no longer be regarded as simply the result of heredity. All this gave rise to a movement known as “reform” eugenics, which stressed personal choice in procreation rather than coercion. In this new form, it attracted a number of other serious scientists and rationalists.

It would be incorrect to suggest that mainline eugenics completely disappeared from the rationalist community after the 1930s. For example, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA and an RPA Associate Member, was both virulently anti-religion and pro-mainline eugenics. At one point, he suggested enforced sterilization via the use of doctored food, and as late as the 1960s he was advocating that couples should apply for a breeding license if they wanted to procreate.

The absurdity of eugenics

"Criminal brains" exhibit by the Massachusetts Department of Mental Diseases.

Whilst eugenics depends, in theory, on the perfectly valid science of genetics and appeals to the practice of animal husbandry, historically, its application has always been far from scientific. Whereas it is (relatively) easy to, for example, breed cattle for higher milk yield, defining what is meant by a "better" human being becomes a very difficult question. At this point, eugenics stops being scientific and starts being normative and political, and a rather nasty type of politics at that; Eugenics drew heavily from various racist and racialist tracts of its heyday. To say nothing of the fact that any form of experimentation, well, let's just say that ethics boards exist for a reason.

The most obvious flaw with the application of eugenics is that its proponents have tended to conflate phenotypical (read: superficial) traits with genotypical traits. Any species that looks fit on the outside may carry recessive traits which don't exhibit themselves but which will be passed on, and vice versa. The development of the field of epigenetics, i.e. heritable environmental factors in genetic expression that occur without change to underlying DNA structures, poses further problems for eugenics.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins claimed in a tweet that:

It's one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It's quite another to conclude that it wouldn't work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn't it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology."

It may be true that a selective breeding plan to encourage certain physical traits in humans could achieve some results that plant- and animal-breeders (who were without specific knowledge of the genes they were selecting in and out) have achieved over the centuries. But the odds are that the purebred humans with distinguishing features would be less healthy than the offspring of unconstrained mating would be, for the same reason that kennel-club purebred dogs are often less healthy than mutts. This concept of "purity" is flawed in that it gives rise to many of the same problems as inbreeding — a loss of genetic biodiversity can in fact lead to increased susceptibility to a common concentrated weakness. A classic example of concentration is haemophilia, which became the plague of the European royal families. (Ironically, a common element in eugenicist works was that "inferior races" and or "race mixing" would produce an overall correlation with genetic disorders.) Furthermore, changes in the environment can cause traits that were once advantageous to become liabilities virtually overnight. An example of this occurred in deer populations. For millions of years, natural selection favored male deer with large antlers as fitter specimens, as they could use those antlers to protect themselves and to fight other males for access to females. However, upon the rise of sport hunting, bucks with large antlers suddenly found themselves targeted specifically because of those antlers, as they made great trophies with which to establish the human hunter's prowess. The size of antlers among deer populations plunged down fast. Among humans, being a carrier for sickle-cell anemia would normally result in fewer surviving offspring and eventually cause the genes to die off... except that being a carrier grants resistance to malaria, the deadliest disease in human history.

The extreme reductionism of eugenics often crossed into what is now comical territory. Nearly every social behavior, including things such as "pauperism" and the vaguely defined "feeble-mindedness", could be traced back to a single genetic disorder — according to eugenicists, while we now know that the bulk of the 19th-century disorders were the result of poor sanitation, nutrition, and healthcare. Many works of eugenics recall the similar trend evident in phrenology (indeed, there was some overlap between eugenics and phrenology).

In short, eugenics could become a legitimate science... if virtually everything about how it has been applied were changed. Any "ubermensch" would need the widest possible selection of "superior" genes, meaning that any resulting super-human would be very much mixed race, something most self-proclaimed Eugenicists would abhor. It's also important to remember that as humans are a social species, the most productive society would be one where the humans all have a strong sense of empathy, something that does have a genetic component and is probably lacking in anyone that would openly advocate for the forcible sterilization and/or murder of others. This means that a proper eugenics program would begin with the sterilization of the eugenicists themselves.

While eugenics gained widespread support in the early 20th century (even within the scientific community) in a number of countries, there was also strong opposition during this period.

• The biologist Raymond Pearl, once a supporter of the eugenics movement, turned against it in the late 1920s.
• The geneticist Lancelot Hogben argued that eugenics relied on a false dichotomy of "nature vs. nurture" and that it infected science with political value judgments. William Beveridge (the director of the London School of Economics from 1919 to 1937) asked Hogben to promote eugenics on campus; Hogben gave Beveridge the finger and prevented any of his eugenic ideas from being taken seriously in the formation of the British welfare state.
• Clarence Darrow (1857-1938) famously denounced eugenics as a "cult."
• The Carnegie Institute, which initially funded the Eugenics Record Office, withdrew its funding after a review of its research, leading to its closing in 1939 (before the Holocaust).

Liberal Eugenics or New Eugenics (modern revival)

Nicholas Agar is considered the founder of liberal eugenics who wrote Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement (2004).

There has been a modern revival of eugenics over the past two decades under the terms "liberal eugenics", "new eugenics", "neo-eugenics", "moderate eugenics", "private eugenics", and euphemisms such as "genetic enhancement" and "procreative beneficence". Supporters of so-called liberal eugenics often attempt to distinguish their form of eugenics to traditional eugenics, for example, arguing that the latter was essentially a public concern, with eugenic policies imposed by governments, while liberal eugenics "is a private concern: parental choice over their offspring’s characteristics." Liberal eugenicists usually include preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), prenatal screening tests, carrier testing, polygenic embryo screening (PES), and antenatal genome editing as forms of "liberal eugenics". For example, some companies have recently begun to sell a new service to patients considering in vitro fertilization: embryo selection based on polygenic scores. Critics of these argue they are tools of discrimination and ableism as well as open to misuse. In 2021, the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics published a statement expressing concern over the offering of PES services for psychiatric conditions and concluded "polygenic embryo screening raises many ethical, legal, and social issues that can potentially lead to harm". Supporters of liberal eugenics tend to highlight technologies that can screen against Tay-Sachs Disease an incurable disorder that leads to a fatality around age five. However, this argument overlooks issues of unequal access to these technologies which would arguably "exacerbate existing disparities in health owing to factors such as economic inequality". Furthermore, disability rights activists tend to argue against prenatal screening tests for genetic disorders such as Down Syndrome. The systematic screening of fetuses for Down syndrome already takes place in many countries and this has led to the vast majority of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome being aborted, although the number differ by country as high as 99% in Iceland, 90% in the UK and 67% in the US. The high number of aborted fetuses has led some disability rights groups to organize campaigns against prenatal screening. For example, the “Don’t Screen Us Out” campaign. The increasingly widespread termination of fetuses with Down syndrome have been argued to fit some definitions of genocide.

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and polygenic embryo screening (PES) can allow parents to estimate the presence of not only genetic and psychiatric disorders (although screening for some psychiatric disorders is unlikely to be feasible due to their highly polygenic nature) but determine IQ, skin colour, eye colour, and height. Subsequently these aspects have been criticised for eugenics concerns because of a slippery slope towards "designer babies." Katie Hasson, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society has noted “These directly echo eugenic efforts... We are talking about deciding who should be born based on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ genes." Another major concern is polygenic embryo screening is currently expensive which has led to concerns about perpetuating wealth inequalities. Furthermore, the application of PES to mental illnesses has been described as recalling "the ugly history of early 20th century eugenics" contrary to its supporters trying to distinguish "liberal eugenics" to traditional eugenics such as under the Nazis. CRISPR-Cas 9 gene editing may also controversially become a way of genetic therapy or "enhancement" in the future. The He Jiankui affair as actual editing of two female human embryos in China led, however, to widespread outcry and a de facto moratorium on the practice. A survey conducted by the Mayo Clinic in the Midwestern United States in 2017 saw that most of the participants had negative views of "designer babies" by genetic editing. In 2024, a public survey in the US showed only a third of respondents approved of using reproductive technology to predict traits unrelated to disease. However, the same study showed an overall 78% approval among respondents for screening embryos for physical health conditions including heart disease.

PGD and PES have both been criticised on medical grounds. Each require an intervention of embryo biopsy and cryopreservation but these may cause harm such an increase in the "prevalence of preterm birth and pregnancy complications such as preeclampsia and hypertensive disorders". A recent study on the impact of cryopreservation suggested that frozen-thawed embryo transfer is associated with an increased risk of cancer in the offspring. Ethical issues include the discarding of surplus embryos and the fact these technologies arguably lead to stigmatization and discrimination of the disabled.

Supporters of liberal eugenics claim they oppose coercive or involuntary eugenics, unlike traditional eugenics: "old eugenics was involuntary. The state used all the coercive means at its disposal to achieve eugenic objectives, from laws to forced sterilisations. Liberal eugenics, on the other hand, is deemed to be voluntary." Critics, however, point out that there are sometimes pressures surrounding "choice" in PGD and prenatal screening tests and therefore choices are not being freely made to abort fetuses diagnosed with genetic disorders because of cultural attitudes toward disability. Thomas and Rothman (2016) argue that by "even making screening available for Down syndrome and other genetic conditions is already, by definition, suggesting that they are not valued reproductive outcomes." Similarly, in Iceland where almost 100% of Down syndrome fetuses are aborted, the geneticist Kari Stefansson remarked: “We try to do as neutral counselling as possible, but some people would say that just offering the test is pointing you towards a certain direction.” Some disability rights activists have gone further to argue coercion is involved when inaccurate and overly negative information about certain non-fatal genetic disorders is provided to a woman when deciding whether to terminate her pregnancy. A survey of American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Fellows and Junior Fellows, conducted in 2007-2008 found that 40% of respondents felt their residency training about the screening for Down syndrome "was less than adequate." In 2020, it was reported in the UK that expectant parents for unborn babies diagnosed with Down's syndrome were "routinely given outdated advice and encouraged to have a termination."

Another criticism of liberal eugenics is based on the subjective disagreements about what traits are considered to be "positive" and "negative" as well as difficulty in deciding what is the "best" life. While few people would disagree that a fatal or life-threatening genetic disorder is a negative (not least because of increased risk of fetuses with these conditions dying at stillbirth and the short life-spans for babies born with disorders like Tay-Sachs and Edwards syndrome), when it comes to non-fatal genetic disorders, there are different perspectives and disability rights activists argue disabilities such as Down Syndrome should be understood as a "legitimate, respectable form of human variation". The National Down Syndrome Society for example, has pointed out that "People with Down syndrome attend school, work, participate in decisions that affect them, and contribute to society" and notes that the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome is on average 60 years of age. Related to this criticism is the harmful effects liberal eugenics is likely to have on existing people with non-fatal disabilities since it conveys the message their lives are not worthy or are a net-negative. Disability theorists have argued the screening of embryos or fetuses for certain genetic disorders which result in a high percentage of abortions sends a negative message – "It is better not to exist than to have a disability".

A final criticism of liberal eugenics is the slippery slope to an older style of coercive and racist eugenics. In recent years, the alt-right has adopted eugenics but many white nationalists have tried to disguise their racist eugenic policies through so-called liberal eugenics to make them seem more palatable to the ordinary public (see below). Donald Trump is apparently a eugenicist. He once told a group of all white supporters that they have "good genes". Other contemporary far-right advocates for eugenics include Helmuth Nyborg (who encourages childbearing among intelligent people but dissuading those with low intellectual ability in order to "improve the coming generations and avoid degenerates in the population") the Ulster Institute for Social Research (owned by white supremacist Richard Lynn until his death), Anders Behring Breivik, Richard Spencer's publication Radix Journal (which also supports abortion for eugenic reasons rather than choice-related ones) and most of the writers associated with Aporia Magazine. The founder of 8chan Frederick "Hotwheels" Brennan is another noteworthy eugenics supporter, having written an article for the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer advocating in its favor.

Defining eugenics

A poster by the American Eugenics Society, with rhetoric not dissimilar from that used by eugenics apologists today.

Supporters of liberal eugenics use very broad behaviour or practices to pass as eugenics. This is presumably done in an attempt to try to normalise eugenics by arguing “it is hard to find people who don’t endorse any form of eugenics". This has been criticised by Wilson (2021) who notes that a definition of eugenics (true to its etymology from ἐΰς [eǘs, “good”] + γίγνομαι [gígnomai, “breeding”]), must acknowledge "the distinction between better and worse traits" (or positive/desired and negative/undesired traits) in reproduction or it is too far removed from the traditional understanding of eugenics, for example, he criticises Jonathan Anomaly's (2018) definition of eugenics as "any attempt to harness the power of reproduction to produce people with traits that allow them to thrive" for being a half-truth which excludes the undesired or negative traits. Thomas and Rothman (2016), in contrast, more reasonably define eugenics as "practices and policies designed to promote the reproduction of people with desired attributes—and, thus, avert the reproduction of people with undesired attributes." The aim of traditional eugenicists in the 19th and 20th centuries was to encourage people with "desirable" traits to reproduce ("positive eugenics") and discourage those with "undesirable" traits from reproducing ("negative eugenics"). For this reason, Garland-Thompson (2012) describes “eugenic logic” as any practice aiming to “eliminate disability and, by extension, disabled people from the world”. Liberal eugenicists often exclude the latter aspect of eugenics from their definitions e.g., Veit et al (2021) cherry-picked their definition of eugenics from a 2016 book The Ethics of the New Eugenics as the "strategies or decisions aimed at affecting, in a manner which is considered to be positive, the genetic heritage of a child, a community, or humanity in general". The most obvious reason why liberal eugenicists like Anomaly exclude "negative eugenics" from their definition of eugenics is the historical baggage so to speak such as old sterilization laws and segregation. Cavaliere (2018) notes definitions by liberal eugenicists like Anomaly, "strives for neutrality in that it tries not to presuppose any explicit negative or implicit built-in value-judgment."

Nicholas Agar's paper "Liberal Eugenics" (1998) and book Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement (2004) also avoids "negative eugenics" in its definition and states in the book preface (p. vii) "The eugenics defended here differs in being primarily concerned with the protection of reproductive freedom". Agar emphases the liberal in liberal eugenics and goes on to claim this new type of eugenics does not want to restrict human reproductive freedom and instead "adds to the choice of your children's characteristics." Agar at great length tries to distance liberal eugenics to its "authoritarian predecessor" and distinguishes between traditional eugenics and liberal eugenics by arguing the latter is individual and private (without state or government interference not at the population level) and is optional or voluntary. These arguments have been criticised by disability rights activists and some bioethicists. In his book, Agar defends prenatal screening and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (p. 27) as well as uncritically quotes Nick Bostrom on the "elimination" of Down syndrome (p. 141). Disability rights activists argue prenatal diagnosis is morally problematic for disorders like Down syndrome because it results in selective abortion which expresses negative or discriminatory attitudes not only about the genetic disorder but also about those who have it: "a liberal eugenic mentality will reinforce the image of the disabled person as an individual to be excluded from society, thereby causing harm to the child." In disability rights and bioethics literature the expressionist objection "refers to the notion that using reproductive (genetic) technologies to prevent the birth of future would-be disabled people contain, and express, a negative valuation of life with disability." This argument as an ethical concern against prenatal testing for genetic disorders is still debated.

In 2023, the eugenicist Diana Fleischman published an article on her blog, "You're Probably a Eugenicist" which tries to normalise eugenics by arguing if you oppose incest you must be a eugenicist because inbreeding results in much higher frequency of genetic disorders. Fleischman lists some other practices or behaviours as eugenics, many will question or take issue with. The article was republished by Colin Wright (a transphobe affiliated to the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine and Manhattan Institute). Fleischman's article was also crossposted on the Effective Altruism Forum under the title: "Most people endorse some form of eugenics". In 2024, it was republished by Aporia. Fleischman's blog post completely ignores the fact a large number of people do not oppose incest foremost for reproductive concerns, rather they oppose it because is is almost synonymous with rape and sexual abuse. This is because the vast majority of incestual relationships are non-consensual; in fact 80% occur between a parent and child (underage victim). Fleischman's argument has been expanded by Edward Dutton (see below) and Anatoly Karlin to misleadingly argue everybody practices eugenics. According to Karlin, "when you marry your college sweetheart instead of the crackwhore by the club dumpster, you are practicing eugenics." This argument has been phrased less crudely by other eugenicists to claim everyone who marries does so for eugenic concerns to produce the "best" offspring. This is clearly false since people marry for different reasons and voluntary childfree couples do not marry to reproduce.

Diana Fleischman eugenicist

The geneticist Adam Rutherford published Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics in 2022 and criticises polygenic embryo screening for non-diseases. On the other hand, Rutherford favours the potential for PES and genetic therapy to eradicate specific life-threatening diseases such as cystic fibrosis. Rutherford narrowly defines eugenics as only "top-down, state-imposed sanctioning of reproductive rights" and in an interview said "I’m pretty clear about this: routinely screening pregnancies for conditions such as Down’s syndrome, and offering women the choice of terminating that pregnancy, doesn’t count as eugenics." This has led to criticism from disability rights activists including Down syndrome rights activists. On page 189 of his book, Rutherford again said he does not think prenatal screening for Down syndrome is eugenics. Despite this, he has elsewhere commented that "Down’s syndrome has effectively dropped to zero in those countries [Iceland and Denmark]. That does indeed begin to look like a eugenics project." Rutherford's book has been criticised by Dutton and Fleischman for using a too narrow definition of eugenics. However, there are positive reviews.

Whether prenatal screening tests for fatal or life-threatening genetic disorders are actually eugenics is less-clear-cut than disorders that are not fatal or life-threatening like Down syndrome; Lisa and Dive (2006) in an article in Journal of Medical Ethics argue screening "for conditions that are very severe and/or life limiting is less likely to be subject to concerns related to eugenics." The reason for this is fetuses diagnosed with fatal or life-threatening genetic disorders have an increased risk of dying at stillbirth as well as pose a risk to the mother's health during pregnancy and babies born with these conditions have low life-spans (to provide one example, 70% of pregnancies diagnosed with Edwards' syndrome from screening tests end in miscarriage or stillbirth and fewer than 10% of babies with Trisomy 18 live beyond 1 year). Arguably a pregnant woman who aborts their fetus to prevent a stillbirth or to prevent complications to their own health is not doing so for eugenic reasons. When it comes to abortion, this distinction between fatal/life-threatening genetic disorders and non-fatal/non-life-threatening disorders is seldom made by liberal eugenicists. Fleischman (2023) fails to make this distinction and claims prenatal screening tests for all diseases and syndromes is eugenics which is questionable to say the least.

Use by far-right and white nationalists

Numerous far-right activists have adopted so-called liberal eugenics as a way to subtly promote more extreme forms of eugenics and to relabel their nasty views. Examples include:

• Jonathan Anomaly: author of the book Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement (2020). Anomaly popularised the term "genetic enhancement" as a euphemism for eugenics after he was criticised the previous year for openly defending eugenics in a co-authored paper titled "Defending Eugenics." In his own words in 2019, "I should’ve just said defending genetic enhancement." Post-2019, Anomaly has been using "genetic enhancement" to disguise his hardcore racialist eugenics ideology which includes negative eugenics. Anomaly wants to decrease birth rates of Sub-Saharan African countries while increasing fertility rates in "developed countries". Anomaly has also been criticised for encouraging certain populations such as Ashkenazi Jews he considers "most intelligent" to reproduce more while implying the "least intelligent" do the opposite. Anomaly is associated with far-right websites to promote eugenics including Aporia Magazine and The Unz Review.
• Emil Kirkegaard: a Danish white supremacist and activist for legalising child pornography who has described himself as a "big supporter of liberal eugenics". However, Kirkegaard has made tweets sympathetic to sterilising the disabled and has defended old sterilisation laws so it is clear he holds much more extreme eugenics views such as negative eugenics for certain groups. Kirkegaard also promotes a racialist form of eugenics in which he only encourages European populations to increase their fertility while has written: "Dysgenics is real. Eugenics or Western civilization dies. Choose wisely." In January 2024, investigative journalism linked Kirkegaard to a far-right circle in Potsdam, Germany. The main aim of the group is mass deportations of non-white immigrants. Kirkegaard has made videos promoting eugenics on YouTube. In 2017, he appeared on video to discuss eugenics with neo-Nazi Tara McCarthy.

Eugenicist Anatoly Karlin on The Unz Review describing people with Down syndrome as "retards".

• Anatoly Karlin: a Russian white nationalist and neo-fascist who on a far-right website in the mid-2010s promoted increasing fertility rates and "raising IQs" by genetic editing as well as adopting "transhuman" technologies or radical life extension to "preserve White majorities in Europe" In 2018, Karlin suggested genetic editing in developed countries to increase fertility rates among "breeders as a percentage of the population". In 2024, Karlin began relabelling his hardcore eugenics views by using the euphemisms "genetic enhancement" and "intelligence enhancement". He was influenced by Jonathan Anomaly whose book he promotes. Most controversially and disturbingly Karlin (using a similar argument to Peter Singer) supports killing infants with Down syndrome and other disabilities. Karlin describes himself as a "an outspoken eugenicist" and attended the pro-eugenics London Conference on Intelligence. His recent blog post supports "genomic enhancement for intelligence, cyborgism, psychonautics".
• Diana Fleischman: anti-vegan activist who promotes eugenics in blog posts and on podcasts as well as attended the far-right Natal Conference. Fleischman has attempted to distance her support for eugenics cosmetically from Nazism by pointing out her her grandfather was Jewish. Any pretense she is a moderate is undermined by her actual offensive comments and frequent association with white nationalists. For example, she has been quoted suggesting "some children are indeed biologically better than others" and only encourages "smart and conscientious" people to reproduce. She is the podcast host for Aporia whose editors Bo Winegard and Noah Carl espouse "white identity politics" and the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Fleischman supports "designer babies" including PES for intelligence.

An alternative strategy among some far-right eugenicists is to deny they are eugenicists because of the stigma attached to the label despite they are clearly espousing eugenics:

• Edward Dutton: a pseudointellectual popular in alt-right and white nationalism circles. Despite openly promoting eugenics for many years including even abortion for eugenic reasons (as recent as 2022) Dutton suddenly in September 2023 said he was "opposed" to eugenics to the confusion of some of his own followers on Twitter. Dutton's claim to not be a eugenicist is contradicted by numerous bizarre statements in his books, for example, in Breeding the Human Herd (2023) Dutton argues that "everyone is a eugenicist" seemingly copying this dubious argument from Diana Fleischman's blog post "You're probably a eugenicist". In the same book, Dutton defends prenatal screening for genetic disorders and criticises disability rights activists and bioethicists who oppose prenatal screening. Dutton criticises polygenic embryo screening (PES) not because of eugenic concerns but because of its high costs noting it is unlikely to be ever practiced on a large scale because few can afford it.
• Michael A. Woodley of Menie: cryptozoologist who has co-authored several papers and a book with Dutton. Around the same time, Dutton started to deny being a eugenicist, Woodley did the same thing and in a book chapter denied being a eugenics supporter. The scholar John Jackson in a blog post points out that Woodley's denial of being a eugenicist is contradicted by statements he has made as recently as 2021 in an encyclopedia. For example, Jackson notes: "In his entry on “Dysgenic concerns” in that same encyclopedia, Woodley concludes, 'It is clear also that patterns of selection and mutation accumulation, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, may justify dysgenic concerns with respect to several traits.' This is clearly a eugenic idea." Woodley also defended eugenics in online videos.
• Richard Hanania: white nationalist, misogynist and virulent racist who used to post on various neo-Nazi websites in the late 2000s to early 2010s such as Counter-Currents and Occidental Observer (under the pseudonym "Richard Hoste"). In August 2023, immediately after Hanania was exposed as Hoste by the Huffpost, he suddenly claimed to have renounced his racist beliefs. This was taken seriously by almost no one since Hanania was continuing to post racist comments on his social media accounts. As "Hoste", Hanania defended the most extreme form of eugenics including sterilizing low IQ individuals and removing what he called "retards" from society. As recent as 2022, Hanania was still supporting eugenics albeit now disguised under euphemisms such as "genetic enhancement" having spoken with Jonathan Anomaly on a podcast on the topic of "Building Better People". However, in 2024 he deleted the discussion from YouTube and his website. Hanania has recently published a blog post titled "Why I Oppose Eugenics." This is despite the fact he remains an outspoken eugenicist. In a nutshell, Hanania's argument is semantics and he defends eugenics under different names while simultaneously claiming he is against eugenics. Many of his followers have said this is an attempt at trolling. Hanania supports reproductive technologies and describes embryo selection as "cool".
• Noah Carl: self-described conservative who opposed the coronavirus lockdowns and is a Reform UK supporter who promotes "white identity politics" with Bo Winegard at the Aporia Magazine where he is an editor. Carl has made numerous tweets sympathetic to eugenics including retweeting a eugenics article by Diana Fleischman while the webzine he edits has a strong pro-eugenics slant. In 2021, Carl published a blog post defending another post made by Fleischman on eugenics. Despite his history of defending eugenics and associating with staunch eugenicists like Fleischman, Carl has claimed not to be a eugenicist^{Do You Believe That?} (despite he blatantly is) writing: "I certainly do not consider myself a 'eugenicist'." Carl has promoted Aporia's articles which support embryo selection.

High IQ sperm banks

Since these days sterilizing or killing stupid people is frowned upon, the emphasis is more on getting clever people to have more children, and thanks to artificial insemination you no longer need to get Nobel laureates to actually fuck lots of women.

One of the most famous was Robert K. Graham's Repository for Germinal Choice in California, active from 1980 to 1999, and apparently responsible for 215 babies. Graham pondered various eugenic methods, such as paying college graduates to have children. After initially considering West Point graduates as the ideal fathers, Graham decided to collect sperm from Nobel Prize winners, elite athletes, and people with incredibly high IQs. Most donors were anonymous, but racist physicist William Shockley and nicer polio dude Jonas Salk were reportedly involved. Curiously, there was no restriction on the women who purchased the sperm - they could be as stupid as they wished. Also there was apparently little or no screening for mental health issues, y'know, something a proper eugenics program would be extremely interested in accounting for. Author David Plotz wrote a book, The Genius Factory, which followed up on some of the births, and found that the clinic wasn't any worse than other sperm banks of the time, which often offered no screening even for the most serious genetic conditions (at least Graham had some basic screening). Nick Isel, a child of the program, wrote about how he got in contact with his father, who turned out to have exaggerated his credentials as a published author (self-published); his biological father's family had a history of mental illness, and the father wasn't exactly a success in life, later being struck off as a doctor and jailed for spousal rape. This shows the difficulty in selecting a model sperm donor, although it's not clear how much of that was inheritable.

Graham's sperm bank model has influenced modern sperm banks today, which allow couples to have greater choice in determining their sperm donors, and seek "really high quality guys" as donors.

Miscegenation

Those who support eugenics often believe that miscegenation is dysgenic due to the genetic differences between human races. They often claim that race-mixing produces less fit offspring who aren't adapted to any environment and are thus weaker than their single-race counterparts. They claim that mixed-race people are more prone to health problems and birth defects due to outbreeding. They claim that the lower intelligence in developing countries, and the mental health of mixed-race Americans is not due to environment or upbringing, but rather genetics.

Of course, some race realists believe that race-mixing is "eugenic" relative to the non-white race, and improves the non-white race. This is where the idea of racial whitening came about during colonial times in South America. However, this idea maintains that mixed-race people are inferior to their white parent, but better than their non-white parent.

The view of miscegenation largely varies, with some viewing mixed-race people as inferior to everyone else, while others view them as better than non-whites due to their white ancestry.

Supporters of eugenics

• Anders Behring Breivik
• Frederick Brennan
• Winston Churchill
• Ronald Fisher
• Francis Galton
• Robert Gayre
• Madison Grant
• Christopher Langan
• Charles Lindbergh
• Pentti Linkola
• Richard Lynn
• James Randi
• Bertrand Russell
• Margaret Sanger
• Herbert Spencer
• Marie Stopes
• The Urantia Book
• Marian Van Court
• Woodrow Wilson
• Toby Young

See also

• PolygenX
• The Bell Curve
• Castration
• Genetic modification
• Hitler and evolution
• Miscegenation
• Useless eaters
• Charles Darwin#Was Darwin racist?

External links

• Image archive on the American Eugenics Movement and the archive of criticisms of eugenics
• Bibliography of works related to eugenics
• Eugenics and bioethics project, Georgetown University
• Eugenics and Its Shadow, New York University
• Eugenics and the German Medical Establishment, Humanitas International
• David Micklos and Elof Carlson. Engineering American Society: The Lesson of Eugenics. Nature Reviews, vol. 1, Dec. 2000.
• Paul A. Lombardo. Disability, Eugenics, and the Culture War. Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law and Policy.
• Diane B. Paul and Hamish G. Spencer. The Hidden Science of Eugenics. Nature, 374, 302-304 (23 March 1995)
• Kenneth L. Garver and Bettylee Garver. The Human Genome Project and Eugenic Concerns. American Journal of Public Health. 54: 148-158, 1994
• Barron H. Lerner. The Black Stork: Eugenics and the death of “defective” babies in American medicine and motion pictures since 1915. New England Journal of Medicine. 1996; 335: 527.
• Rob Baker. Top Ten Unlikely and Surprising Eugenicists, Flashbak.com, (18 March 2015)
• Tomorrow's Children, a 1934 anti-eugenics flick

References

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