Inhuman Designs

Eugenics Old & New

To most 21st-century ears, “eugenics” is a dreadful word, calling to mind racism, sterilization, and the horrors of Nazi extermination programs. We would like to think that society has moved on from eugenics, but the truth is we have only abandoned the term, not the underlying ethos. Many developments we see today are implicitly eugenic; some go so far as to promote a new eugenics to ensure the future of humanity.

Eugenics Comes to America

The “science” of eugenics originated with the work of Francis Galton, a 19th-century British anthropologist and cousin of Charles Darwin. Its meaning is “good in birth,” and its origin traces directly back to Darwin’s theory of...