Proposed Measures for Race Betterment

Inbred Science ^ | 1936 | Samuel Holmes

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

The influence primarily responsible for the modern eugenics movement was the establishment of the doctrine of organic evolution following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. The great intellectual revolution which resulted has profoundly affected all the sciences dealing with man. Naturally, if man was evolved from some lower form of animal life and is subject to the same biological laws as the rest of the organic world, he must be capable of further evolutionary changes. Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, who is universally recognized as the founder of modern eugenics and to whom the name eugenics owes its origin, was greatly stimulated by the ideas set forth in the Origin of Species. His early work on Hereditary Genius, in which he brought together many evidences that human beings differ greatly in their inherited endowments of brains, inevitably implied the possibility of raising the mental level of the race by selective breeding. The idea of race betterment formed the mainspring of much of Galton's work in heredity, biometry, psychology, and anthropology.

In the United States the Eugenics Record Office, located at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, N. Y., is more or less comparable to the Galton Laboratory. It issues a series of Memoirs and Bulletins on human heredity and eugenics, and its Director, Dr. C. B. Davenport, has been a very active and productive worker in this field.

The Eugenics Record Office employs a number of field workers who have made many investigations of family pedigrees especially in New England and adjacent states. Eugenics societies have been formed in many countries, Norway, Sweden, France, Holland, Austria, Japan, Italy, Russia, and especially Germany where there is now an active and widespread interest in eugenic reform.

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

Samuel J. Holmes. American Eugenics Society, president 1938--1940. Professor of zoology at the University of California. Member of the American Society of Human Genetics. Fellow of the AAAS.

[bgill]

Maybe they’ll find out Hussein is Japanese.

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

peeng

[Fichori]

What a mess they’ve made.