I think they were wrong - just as wrong as some of the most celebrated Creationists who were for sterilization and eugenics (e.g. several of the founders of the Creation Research Society, William Tinkle, Frank Marsh, etc).
The big push for eugenics wasn’t from Darwinism, but from Mendelism. It’s no coincidence that the heydey of the eugenics movement was the 1920s with the emergence of Mendelism.
AS Charles Davenport, a leading eugenicist, put it:
“Formerly, when we believed that factors blend, a characteristic in the germ plasm of a single individual among thousands seemed not worth considering: it would soon be lost in the melting pot. But now we know that unit characters do not blend; that after a sore of generations the given characteristic may still appear, unaffected by repeated unions. . . . So the individual, as the bearer of a potentially immortal germ plasm with innumerable traits, becomes of the greatest interest.”
But, strangely, I rarely hear anyone blame Mendel for eugenics.
Regarding: “I think they were wrong - just as wrong as some of the most celebrated Creationists who were for sterilization and eugenics (e.g. several of the founders of the Creation Research Society, William Tinkle, Frank Marsh, etc).”
Nevadan: I agree with you that anyone, whether Darwinian or Creationist, that advocates eugenics on humans is wrong.
What I’m wondering though, concerning Darwinism and eugenics, is - if materialistic evolution is the mechanism by which the universe “came into being” and evolved to its present state - then isn’t morality also a part of that evolutionary process? Isn’t it just another random element of the purposeless (non-designed, non-directed) mechanism of materialistic evolution?