Why is eugenics a pseudoscience

After the horrors of the Nazi regime in WWII, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of unrepentant eugenicists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Hernstein's and Charles Murray's title, The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races.

Scientific research has struggled with concepts of race for centuries, often proposing misleading or erroneous explanations of racial differences.

Human fossils in Europe provided the first data points in the budding field of paleoanthropology, but the region was in reality just where European archaeologists happened to start looking. Fossils, as well as cave art, DNA samples and other evidence later uncovered around the world pointed to a more complex picture of human origins : Elements of modern humans emerged throughout Africa, and those people migrated east and then north and west in waves.

Rather than distinct races, groupings or borders, the continually mixing populations produced only gradients, with some traits slightly more common in some regions than others. Lighter skin color in northern climates emerged late; some Britons were shocked to learn that Cheddar Man , the remains of a man who lived in southwest England almost 10, years ago, would today have been considered black.

Despite this evidence, those eugenicists still practicing sought to prevent their supposedly superior race from being overrun by immigration, miscegenation and higher birth rates among other ethnicities.

Ventana al Conocimiento Knowledge Window. Estimated reading time Time 4 to read. Logo of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, Source: Wikimedia The tragedy of the Nazi genocide can divert attention from the true origins of the racial hygiene policies that were not only implemented in the Germany of the Third Reich, but also in many other countries; in fact, the Nazi legislation was directly inspired by the American model.

Francis Galton coined the term eugenics. Source: National Portrait Gallery Thus, it was not uncommon to find progressive intellectuals like the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw or the biologist and socialist writer H.

Eugenics Protest circa in Darwin: The Evolution of a Theory. Do you want to stay up to date with our new publications? Receive the OpenMind newsletter with all the latest contents published on our website Find out more here.

Comments on this publication Login to comment Log in Subscribe. Thank you for collaborating with the OpenMind community! Your comment will be published after validation. John Harvey Kellogg. In essence, eugenics offered Americans in positions of power an authoritative scientific language to substantiate their biases against those they feared as dangerous.

How many millions of them died or lived tortured lives in their native lands because of this stringent and prejudiced policy is difficult to enumerate. One of the biggest fans of the American eugenics movement was Adolf Hitler, the chancellor of Nazi Germany. Once the theory of an armchair population biologist, eugenics too quickly transmogrified into a racist and harmful evidence base for ridding nations of those the dominant society did not like or feared.

The problem, of course, was that the evidence base was false and poorly constructed. If Francis Galton is remembered at all, it should be poorly, despite his many other intellectual contributions. Some consider eugenics to be merely the weird, step-uncle of modern, scientifically-grounded genetics. Yet this bit of history reminds us to constantly evaluate and test our theories for evidence of racism and prejudice before implementing them and harming the innocent. It laid the groundwork for forced sterilization laws in the U.

While Galton is primarily remembered today, years after his death, as the father of the shameful pseudoscience of eugenics, during his life he was considered one of the most influential thinkers of his day. He made seminal contributions in fields as diverse as statistics, geology, meteorology, anthropology, psychology, biology and psychometrics.

Galton was a pioneer in meteorology, the study of weather. He developed instruments for measuring different weather parameters, described the use of barometric pressure in weather prediction, and devised systems for recording weather information.

Nearly people participated. When Galton looked at their estimates, he found that while almost all the guesses were wrong, both the middle guess and the average of the guesses were almost exactly correct. From such observations he helped to develop the concepts of mean and variation, leading him to formulate the essential statistical concept of standard deviation. Galton helped forge a new science of forensics.