Eugenics is a very interesting subject. In this post I will go through what eugenics are, what is the social and scientific origins of eugenics, How they researched it, and finally how it impacted America.
Eugenics is the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, especially by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) and encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits. This was started in the united states of America. Only instead of just trying to discourage people with genetic defects from having kids. They sterilized them so they couldn't have kids. They also wanted to improve humanity by encouraging the blessed and healthiest people to have more children.
The social origins of eugenics was it explained the causes of pauperism, feeble-mindedness, alcoholism, rebelliousness, nomadism, criminality, and prostitution as the inheritance of defective germ plasm. Eugenicists said society paid a high price by allowing the birth of defective individuals who would have to be cared for by the state and Sterilization of one defective adult could save future generations thousands of dollars. Eugenics was seen as a way to solve all of these problems because it placed the cause in the defective germ plasm of individuals and ethnic groups, and not society itself. Eugenics used the cover of science.
Francis Galton made up the word eugenics. Positive eugenics is encouraging the blessed and healthiest people to have more children. negative eugenics is when stopping the less fit people from having kids. Germany and the united states did the negative approach. Indiana law enacted in 1907 compulsory sterilization of "degenerates", the First Eugenic Sterilization Law in the United States. people caught masturbating were known as degenerates and then sterilized them to stop the degeneracy gene.
Eugenics research started with Mendel’s laws of inheritance of human traits. Also known as independent assortment which states that alleles of different genes assort independently of one another during gamete formation. By examining pedigrees eugenicist attempted to make a pattern of one of these three basic modes of inheritance either recessive, dominant, or sex-linked. They had to find big families and score each member of the family of the absence or presence of a trait. This would work but where they messed up on back then was they attempted to measure complex traits like intelligence or musical ability or complex mental illnesses like schizophrenia or manic depression.
Eugenics did many things for America. The first and biggest thing it did was bring the crime rate down. They made us more educated. Also they tried to save the future generations money. The last thing they did for a America was made us a pure race.
This was an interesting subject. I'm kind of interested to learn more about it and wonder if we or other countries still do this only smarter.
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