Term Papers on Eugenics

Term Paper Title	Eugenics
# of Words	1339
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	5.36

Eugenics

     Throughout the course of time, science has been somehow
responsible nearly every time a major concept in society was
changed.  The early twentieth century is no exception.  This
was a period of novelty; new inventions, new luxuries, and
new ideas.  One of these new ideas was the concept of
“eugenics,” or genetically improving the overall quality of
the human race.  It started out seeming like a practical way
to eradicate certain genetic deficiencies, but became a full
blown revolution in the attitude of many towards those with
even slight deficiencies.  The impact of the eugenics
movement started small, but within a few years it had spread
worldwide and defined many of the political ideas of the
time.
     The concept behind eugenics was not a new concept in
the early 1900s, but had never been given a name before.
Even early societies put eugenics into practice.  For
instance, in ancient Sparta, sickly children were killed or
abandoned.  They filtered out the “undesirable” traits in
children, a practice which has come to be called “negative
eugenics.”  In the late nineteenth century, a man named
Francis Galton gave eugenic thought great emphasis.  Yet it

was not until Gregor Mendel’s theories on genetics were
rediscovered by Charles Davenport in 1901 that the ideas of
modern eugenics was given any credibility.  Davenport
conducted experiments that proved what Mendel had said years
before in his laws of genetics.  Davenport, however, took it
another step.  He extended Mendel’s laws to include
characteristics such as pauperism, alcoholism, and the
popular term of the day, “feeblemindedness.”  Davenport
also connected behavior to race, class, and pedigree.  While
all of Davenport’s ideas were up to date with all current
research, such as his conclusion that characteristics such
as what he called “thalassophilia,” or the love of the sea,
were sex-linked recessive traits given that they were almost
always in males.  This conclusion and many others made by
Davenport are grossly oversimplified, and often even
ludicrous.  However in the early twentieth century, people
believed it, and they used it to their advantage.
     To people in the early 1900s, eugenics seemed perfectly
logical because they wanted the ideas to be correct.
Eugenics gave a “scientific veneer”7 to racist arguments,
and people used it to support the concept of a “master

race.”  Eugenics held that everything was determined by
DNA, and that by altering DNA, or otherwise controlling what
is passed on in DNA, a perfect race will eventually be
attained.  The methods of controlling what is passed on in
DNA is what is known as positive and negative eugenics.
Positive eugenics was simply filtering out only desirable
traits.  This was done in many ways, the most common of
which was in marriages.  In 1905, Indiana passed a law that
“forbade the marriage of the mentally deficient, persons
having a transmissible disease, and habitual drunkards;
required a health certificate of all persons released from
institutions, and declared void all marriages contracted in
another state in an effort to avoid the Indiana law.”
Negative eugenics was much more prevalent in society, as it
seemed much more practical to eliminate defects than to try
to isolate positive characteristics.  The critics of the
movement called negative eugenics “artificial selection,”
in contrast to Darwinian natural selection theory.  The
selection was practiced in several forms, the most common of
which was restricting marriages.  The other most common
method was through sterilization of those who carried

“genetic handicaps.”  Like marriage, there were
sterilization laws passed in states, the first one being in
1907, again in Indiana.  Within 10 years, 15 more states had
passed sterilization laws.  These laws gave states the power
to “compel the sterilization” of criminals, rapists, drug
addicts, epileptics, the insane, and “idiots in state
institutions.”  Other methods of this artificial selection
included induced a...

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