Randy's Science Blog: Eugenics

Eugenics is and has been a controversial topic ever since it started in the late 1800’s in Great Britain. During 1883, the term “eugenics” was founded by British scientist Francis Galton whose philosophy was to encourage the ablest and healthiest people to make more children in order to improve his race as a whole. However, eugenics is not entirely based off of his philosophy, there are actually two types of eugenics which are positive eugenics and negative eugenics. The type of eugenics that Francis Galton encouraged is referred to as positive eugenics, on the other hand, negative eugenics is discouraging those with undesirable traits from making children. Negative eugenics has even gone as far as sterilizing and preventing undesirable humans from making children.

Negative eugenics have occurred throughout history, a main example is what Charles Fremont Dight, a physician in Minneapolis campaigned for and received. In 1923, Dight organized the Minnesota Eugenics society which campaigned for a sterilization law which was eventually passed in 1925. This law allowed sterilization of residents within state institutions who were considered insane. Later in the 1930’s 25,000 Americans were sterilized due to physical or mental disabilities, this could be blamed on the movement Dight started.

There are many reasons as to why this is a controversy. For example, If someone is a criminal or a drug addict, it does not mean they have genes with those traits embedded into them because that is not possible. Therefore whenever certain types of eugenics such as sterilizing criminals occur, it is senseless because personalities have nothing to do with genes. Identical twins share identical DNA, however their personalities can be totally different. When observing human DNA, we are all very similar unlike other animals such as monkeys, two randomly chosen monkeys from the same tribe would most likely have very distinct DNA from each other unlike humans who all share similar DNA. Since the human gene pool is already small to begin with, if a form of eugenics were to occur, biodiversity among humans would shrink to almost none. Lastly, the typical characteristic people wish for their children to have is intelligence. If two of the most intelligent people on earth were to have a child together, that child would be born intelligent but they would also be receiving all the undesirable traits their parents may have had, so to create the perfect human would be almost impossible.

A positive point about eugenics is that it will create a healthier and more desirable population over time. For example, If only the athletic and intelligent are allowed to reproduce, the future generations will contain those “desirable” genes more than if eugenics were to not occur. Also, eugenics allows the future generations to have less genetic diseases and to have more sane people. Heart problems and obesity are some of the problems that would be less apparent in our world further improving the human race. Most people would be physically more appealing increasing the overall self-esteem of earth as people wouldn’t be ashamed of themselves as they would be at a similar level of attractiveness as others.

After researching about the ethics behind this topic, in my opinion eugenics should not occur due to multiple reasons. In my opinion negative eugenics goes against human rights as people should have the right to reproduce if they wanted to, it’s not as if a criminal creates a child, their child would also become a criminal. Emotionally, I believe that preventing certain people from producing children could really affect them, it’s just not fair. Equality is a law that has a major impact in our world today, especially in the United States, so then why do they have restrictions on who can become a sperm donor? You must meet certain physical and intellectual requirements in order to be a sperm donor in the United States, this in a sense defies their equality law. For those of you who don’t know, the holocaust of World War 2 where many people were deprived of their lives due to their religion and shade of skin was eugenics, it was an extreme form but it is still eugenics. If eugenics were to be allowed to a small extent, who knows what it could turn out to be? As we know, when something is allowed to a small extent people take advantage of it and it easily turns into something much larger than it started out as.