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 evolution by natural selection. Discomfited by the randomness of natural selection, scientists like Galton sought ways to take control of human evolution by applying principles used in animal breeding to produce “better” humans.

In the U.S., eugenics gained popularity in the late 19th–early 20th century. According to the tenets of eugenics, most of society’s problems, including poverty, criminality, alcoholism, sexual deviance, certain diseases, and “feeblemindedness”—a catch-all term that included mental illness, low intelligence, and diseases such as epilepsy—were caused by inferior genes. To certain moral reformers the imperative was clear: the problems of poverty and vice could be solved by improving the human gene pool. Simply aiding individuals who were of lower intelligence or trapped in poverty was not good enough, it was thought, as these efforts did not get to the root of the problem—they treated symptoms rather than the underlying cause, which was defective genes.

This tied in quite nicely with the era’s push for “scientific philanthropy”: applying the cutting-edge findings of contemporary science to charity work in order to be as efficient as possible in helping the poor and sick. What could be more efficient than eugenics, which promised to end poverty, disease, and criminality by improving the gene pool such that charity work would become unnecessary?

The American eugenics movement applied both positive and negative eugenics. Negative eugenics referred to preventing the “wrong” types of people from reproducing, such as through requiring a health certificate before two people could marry. These became popular in many states, including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. More extreme measures included sterilizing criminals, the infirm, racial minorities, or the feebleminded—anyone deemed a “threat” to the gene pool. Following the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, which upheld the right of states to sterilize individuals deemed unfit for reproduction, an estimated 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized.

Positive eugenics, on the other hand, encouraged the “right” types of people to marry and have children. In the 1920s, parents could enter their children in Better Baby competitions, where they would be judged and ranked to see which family had produced the “best” children. Pastors were enlisted to spread the message of eugenics in their congregations, and the American Eugenics Society even sponsored eugenic sermon contests.

Though eugenics was popular, it was not universally supported. Many, including evangelical Christians and Catholics, opposed eugenicists’ efforts to control human evolution as immoral and perhaps impossible. Eugenics, and the social Darwinism that lay behind it, became a key point of opposition in the fight against Darwinism and the theory of evolution more generally.

Eugenics, Scopes & “Scientific Breeding” of Humans

Concerns over eugenics and social Darwinism were at least partially responsible for the 1925 passage of the Butler Act in Tennessee, which prevented teaching human evolution in schools receiving public funds. Unlike neighboring Virginia, Tennessee had resisted eugenics and refused to pass compulsory sterilization laws. Tennesseans were suspicious of progressives and recognized that, as country people, many of them would have been grouped among those the eugenicists wanted to sterilize. The Butler Act was, at least in part, an attempt to curb the pernicious ideas of eugenics and social Darwinism.

It is largely unacknowledged that the textbook used by Scopes, George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology, did not just teach evolution, but also social Darwinism and eugenics. It divided humanity into five groups and claimed that the Caucasians were the “highest type of all.” It described families with a history of sexual immorality, illness, and feeblemindedness as “parasites” who “do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, and spreading disease,” while also being a drain on public resources. The author’s proposed solution is chilling:

If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.

The textbook explicitly promoted eugenics, positing that “it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of future generations . . . might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection.”

This was of huge concern to William Jennings Bryan, prosecutor at the Scopes trial. Bryan thought that Darwinian evolution was not just contradictory to the Bible but a threat to public morality because of the way it promoted the elimination of the weak. In a speech Bryan intended to give at the trial but that was not published until after his death, he lamented that

Darwin reveals the barbarous sentiment that runs through evolution and dwarfs the moral nature of those who become obsessed with it…. Darwin speaks with approval of the savage custom of eliminating the weak so that only the strong will survive, and complains that “we civilized men do our utmost to check the process of elimination.” How inhuman such a doctrine as this!¹

Bryan condemned evolution as having only one method for improving humanity: “scientific breeding, a system under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and the movements of the mass of mankind—an impossible system!”²

Our understanding of the Scopes trial is incomplete if we fail to recognize its connections to eugenics. There was very real fear about this dehumanizing system of thought, which saw its logical conclusion reached in the Nazi extermination programs. Fortunately, eugenics fell out of favor in the U.S. before it went down the same path. Western horror at the Nazis’ embrace of eugenics further discouraged its pursuit for several decades.

Eugenics Today

Today, however, eugenics is being quietly, or sometimes not so quietly, revived. It does not look exactly the same; few would argue for compulsory sterilization. And yet, through birth control, abortion, and prenatal genetic testing, as well as commercialized IVF and other reproductive technologies, our society continues to attempt human improvement through the elimination of the weak.

Birth control is frequently put forth as a method of poverty reduction. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote that birth control “is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or those who will become defectives.”³ Today, many claim that the best way to lift families out of poverty, both in the U.S. and globally, is to enable them to stop having children, whether through birth control or abortion on demand. Though it’s never said out loud, the implication is that it is better not to exist than to be born into poverty. Since poverty disproportionality affects minorities in the U.S., the push for poverty reduction has at times taken on racist undertones. Advocates rarely go so far as to say that birth control or abortion should be mandatory, but their approach is still essentially eugenic: attempting to improve society through limiting the reproduction of the “lower” classes.

Another commonly accepted practice that is essentially eugenic is the use of genetic testing. Couples pursuing IVF are encouraged to eliminate any embryo with a genetic defect. Even when children are conceived naturally, prenatal screening is frequently used to identify and abort children with unwanted conditions such as Down syndrome. In Iceland, for example, nearly all Down syndrome diagnoses end in abortion.

If genetic testing leads to a negative eugenics of preventing births of those with disabilities, there are those who support positive eugenics as well. Helping people create better, “designer” babies is a matter of course with IVF, which frequently encourages prospective parents to try to select for certain desirable traits in the embryos created during the process. This push is becoming more explicit as advanced genetic tests designed to rank embryos become ever more common.

Some have taken eugenics even further. Many in the pronatalist movement, concerned about declining fertility rates, have embraced a supposed duty to have as many of the “best” children possible in order to secure and improve humanity. Perhaps the best-known pronatalist is Elon Musk, who, through extensive use of IVF and surrogacy arrangements, has fathered 14 children with four different mothers.

Just as the early eugenics movement embraced “scientific philanthropy,” contemporary pronatalists use terms like “effective altruism” and “longtermism,” framing their movements as efficient philanthropic efforts seeking long-term, rather than immediate, solutions. Unsurprisingly, the eugenicists of today are often connected with transhumanism, the idea that humans should make full use of technology to direct the next stage of human evolution toward something more than merely human. The first transhumanists, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Julian Huxley, were both committed eugenicists, as have been many of their heirs, including Nick Bostrom, John Harris, Julian Savulescu, and Jeffrey Epstein.

Pronatalists and transhumanists reject the coercive and at times murderous methods of the early eugenicists. And yet, they are fully on board with the aims of guiding evolution for societal improvement. Their position has been called “hipster eugenics,” as it merely takes the attitudes and goals of the old eugenics and dresses them up in contemporary, politically correct packaging.

A Better Way

The idea that we humans can become masters of our own destiny through eugenics has appealed to many people for the past 150 years. And yet, its legacy, from forced sterilization to mass murder to the systematic elimination of the disabled through abortion, has consistently been one of coercion and suffering. The great irony of eugenics is that, in supposedly promoting humanity, it consistently dehumanizes people, ranking them against one another and declaring some unfit to be counted among the human family.

The antidote to eugenic thinking is to shift our gaze away from an abstract, utopian view of the future of humanity and focus instead on the needy who already surround us. All humans—born or unborn, healthy or disabled, rich or poor, law-abiding or criminal— possess inherent dignity and are worthy of our care and compassion. Caring for the lowest among us might not be “efficient,” but it is far more human—and can even transform us into better people.

Notes
1. John Thomas Scopes, The World’s Most Famous Court Trial: Tennessee Evolution Case (The Lawbook Exchange, 2008), 335.
2. Scopes, 334.
3. Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (1920, repr. Project Gutenberg, 2021).