• who deserves help?
• people who can't support themselves because of injury... things that are not their fault
• veterans, people who lost some function as a result of serving their country
• children (shouldn't suffer extremely because their parents are incompetent)
  
• generally today government helps people who are deserving in some way, those who don't quality for such programs may die from lack of medical treatment but generally don't starve to death because they go to church and community charity programs
• not quite social darwinism but our society tends to say only some people deserve government help
• early 20th century eugenics is obviously wrong to us, but we struggle with related issues
• eugenic ideas are being talked about again and there is increasing use of genetic testing and selection of embryos or abortion. One key issue is who decides who is better? History shows us that can be full of bias.
  
• who could be sterilized without their consent?
• medical procedures without consent are now unacceptable
• some people feel it would be fair to require sterilization as a condition for welfare payments
• others would say ethically that is forced consent
• others would say you shouldn't take away people's rights to make their own decisions about their life
• it is not legal to sterilize someone who is unable to give consent
  

• desirable human traits are inherited
• we can speed up evolution and make the human race better by selecting for desirable traits
• therefore intelligent/successful people should have more children
• Galton did not focus on negative eugenics--the idea that those with undesirable genetic traits should not have children--because the dominant theories of blending inheritance would tend to cause those traits to average out again
• instead he wanted superior people to marry so that they would not be pulled back towards the norm
  
• he did study twins raised separately to try to separate the effects of genetics and environment
• he was interested in improving the white race, not in what would happen to the races he considered inferior

20th century Eugenics poster based loosely on Dugsdale's work:    

Negative eugenics was developed first in the United States

• Richard Dugdale studied families of criminals and "degenerates," including a white family in the upstate New York mountains he called the Jukes
• He found 709 related people (some by blood, some by marriage) of whom more than half were criminals, prostitutes, or destitute
  
• Dugdale argued that the solution was to remove children from their families and raise them in a healthy environment
• He saw the issues as environment, but his research was used by people who saw the issue as genetics
  
• Mendelian genetics made the case much stronger after 1900

Social Darwinism:

• the idea of competition was already established in theories of capitalism
• Malthus wrote before Darwin of the "struggle for existence"
  
• urbanization and industrialization in the late 19th century meant more competition
• should the unfit be supported by the government or allowed to starve to death?
  
• Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection of small variations held out hope of actually improving the human race
• Herbert Spencer argued that the unfit should be allowed to die out
• some such as Haeckel focused on competition between races and nations instead of individuals

This was elaborated into scientific racism particularly in the American South
it was not good science because Darwin emphasized that evolution was branching, not linear and progressive
we now know traits such as intelligence and criminal behavior are not primarily genetic

In the US (predominantly in the northeast) eugenics focused on preventing the "feeble-minded" from reproducing, because low intelligence was assumed to be linked with anti-social behavior

• the Eugenics Record Office advocated marriage restrictions, forced segregation and mandatory sterilization
• a proposal in 1919 to sterilize 1/10 of each generation
  
• state institutions for the insane and mentally retarded were built partly on eugenic grounds, to prevent people from reproducing
  
• between 1900 and 1935, 32 states passed compulsory-sterilization laws (click on map to see article with larger version of map)
• Virginia's Eugenical Sterilization Act of 1924 was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927--the law allowed sterilization of "any patient afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity, imbecility, &c..." without the consent of the patient (many people were not told that they had been sterilized--some other excuse was given for the operation).  About 7600 Virginians were sterilized under the law between 1927 and 1979
  
• the Nordic countries did too, and Germany's included mental illness and alcoholism as reasons for sterilization
  
• the most organized opposition came from the Catholic Church

Eugenics never had broad support except in Germany
It faded out in the US by the 1930s

• low IQ scores were common in testing soldiers in WWI, but those soldiers were not inferior either morally or as soldiers
• The Great Depression made it clear that not all poor people were inferior
• Eugenics came to be identified with Nazi efforts to eradicate Jews, Gypsy's, and the mentally ill--the Allies saw themselves as better than that

This is an example of how prejudice can creep into science--scientists need to be careful.

• These examples are just plain bad science (or the misuse of good science)
• Other examples (such as the influence of imperialism on Darwin) may end up being good science--the idea came from an odd place but the results were carefully checked.
• Other examples may be incomplete science--eg. much more medical research has been done on men than on women, and the assumption that women's bodies will respond the same way as men's is often not true.