Eugenics Essay, Research Paper
?Eugenics
is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn
qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage?1. The word eugenics was
derived from a Greek root meaning ?good in birth? or ?noble heredity?.? Darwin?s Origin
of the Species initiated eugenics in Europe and spiked Sir Francis Galton?s
interest.? Galton was first credited
with developing the theory of eugenics in the nineteenth century although Karl
Pearson assisted the theory.? Galton?s
idea of eugenics evolved from the science of the Victorian period, and used the
science of mathematics and statistics.?
The science of genetics and heredity were relatively new to the people
of the 19th century as the science of heredity was in its infancy.? Galton turned to mathematics, instead of
biology, to support his theories.? Much
of Galton?s mathematical calculations and assumptions are now proven to be
wrong, but he did what he could with the knowledge of the time.? The eugenics movement in Britain was
post-Darwinian in conception and derived from the best science of the time. There is a
variety of books written on eugenics.?
Some sources, mainly on the internet, dismiss eugenics as a racist
attempt to control society.? There are
few books written objectively and with the purpose of showing both sides or
eugenics such as Daniel Kevles In the
Name of Eugenics.? Members of the
eugenics society have put out books on sciences that helped to develop
eugenics, for example, Genetics and
Eugenics by W.E. Castle.?
Governments supporting eugenics also put out books and pamphlets that
explain the pros and cons of eugenics.?
There are various extremes on to which side the authors are on which
allows a wide variety of information and views.? ??????????? Francis
Galton was born on February 16th 1822 and died on January 17th
1911.? Sir Francis Galton actually
coined the word eugenics in 1883.2? The purpose of eugenics for
Galton was for ?the more suitable races or strains of blood to have a better
chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.?3? There were two methods of achieving this.? One was positive eugenics and the other,
negative eugenics.? Positive eugenics
was the more human friendly method but was the harder type to implement.? Negative eugenics was the easier working
type but infringed on human rights.? In positive
eugenics, the procreation of the fit and able is encouraged.? This could be accomplished a variety of
ways.? One such way is by personal
choice.? A fit and able person chooses
to marry and procreate with another fit and able person.? Another way involves the government giving
money for people of ability to produce offspring.? This has already been done during times of war to increase the
country?s population except that any family was encouraged, not just people of
ability.? Positive eugenics is much
harder to do because it relies on personal choice; however, it does not
infringe on a human being?s rights.Negative eugenics
is much easier to initiate.? The idea of
negative eugenics involves the prevention of procreation by the unfit.? This is also done in many ways.? The unfit could be segregated from the
population.? By placing them in asylums
or special care centres.? In this
method, they would not be able to reproduce due to a lack of a partner.? Another technique that is used is
sterilisation.? The government could
sterilise the people deemed to be unfit, thereby preventing them from having
children.? The social repercussions of
negative eugenics are severe.? The right
to produce offspring is a very sacred right and careful consideration must be
taken.The initial
foundation of eugenics was that like
produces like.4? This was taken from the experiments of
Gregor Mendel in 1866 where he first developed Mendel?s Law.? Mendel performed experiments on many
different species of plants.? He found
that the offspring of the parent plants contained many of the same
characteristics.? One example was that
of a plant with high resistance to disease.?
Most of the progeny of this plant would have this same resistance.? Mendel then concluded that like produces like.? He stated that farmers of both crops and
animals could improve their crop and stock by selecting plants and animals with
desired characteristics and breed them to produce hybrids with these characteristics.? This was good news for farmers; they could
now produce crops with higher yields and more beneficial stock.? Galton could also use Mendel?s Law to found
eugenics.Galton wanted to
apply this technique to humans.? He
published his first eugenical ideas in Macmillan
Magazine in 1865.? In this article
he was inquiring into the origins of natural ability.? To Galton, natural ability involved ?those qualifications of
intellect and disposition which? lead to reputation.?5? To determine the origin of natural ability, he looked back two
centuries at a variety of jurists, statesmen, military commanders, scientists,
poets, painters, and musicians.? He
discovered that many of these men had blood relations to each other.? This inforced the ideas of like producing like.? From his analytical evidence, he determined
that families of reputation had a much greater chance of producing offspring
with natural ability.? He stated in his
book Hereditary Genius that men of
genius would still have natural ability and would be able to perform well in
society even if they had social disadvantages.?
Take Beethoven for example, his mother was very ill when she was
pregnant with him and his family was poor, but he still came to be recognised.? This stemmed from the Victorian middle-class
view that you can do anything you want as long as you work hard enough.6? Once again European thoughts were spawning eugenics.? Galton and now many others believed that
natural ability was inherited.The theories of
Galton and Darwin were supplemental, yet on the other hand, were topics of
conflict.? Francis Galton and Charles
Darwin were actually cousins.? Through
Galton?s mother they were related; they shared the same grandfather, Erasmus
Darwin.? Upon reading Charles Darwin?s Origin of the Species, Galton?s interest
was sparked.? Galton had struggled with
religion because of his Quaker heritage and the fact that his father had
converted to the Anglican Church.? After
reading Origin of the Species, Galton
complemented his cousin by saying, ?your book drove away the constraint of my
old superstition, as if it had been a nightmare.?7? Most likely when he mentioned his old superstition, he probably
meant religious beliefs.? The old church
belief that man was falling from grace, was to Galton, disproved in the
book.? What he derived from the book was
that man was rising rapidly from a low state.?
What Galton hoped to achieve in eugenics was to accelerate this process.? Galton had replaced his parents? religious
beliefs with the science of eugenics.? Theories of these
two men were complemented with the idea of natural selection.? Eugenics could be seen as a form of
artificial selection, but it is not.? In
nature, it is ?survival of the fittest?, that meant the most well equipped
organisms survive.8? In society, charity organisations have been
set up to support the unfit.? By doing
this, natural selection does not occur.?
With eugenics, the fit people will procreate and the unfit will not,
thus allowing natural selection to occur.?
Darwin and Galton also opposed each other with the argument of nature
vs. nurture.? Galton supported the
argument for nature.? Nature can be
defined as heredity and the way things are before environmental
interaction.? Some theories concerning
inheritance that came about during Galton?s time were Weismann?s germ plasm
theory, Lamarck?s theory, and Darwin?s pangenesis.? Lamarck?s theory first said the effects of the environment were
cumulative.? Next, need determined an
adaptation and use and disuse of organs determined how efficient it was.? Finally, he said that all variations are
inherited.9? Darwin was on the side of nurture.? Nurture is what happened after birth, the
adaptations that occurred.? Darwin
argued that it was the environment that influenced traits.? Galton set out to find what really
determined the attributes of a species.Galton wanted to
understand how natural ability was transferred.? One hypothesis that had been circulating was the theory of
pangenesis.10? This was one of Darwin?s hypotheses.? It stated that each cell of the body gives
off extremely small particles called gemmules.?
These gemmules floated freely throughout the body and ended up
collecting near the reproductive cells of the body.? Thus when reproduction occurred, the gemmules would be transferred
along with the traits.? This hypothesis
could be applicable both to plants and animals.? It could also explain the processes of sexual and asexual
reproduction, and the regeneration of lost limbs.? Galton decided to test this hypothesis.? He did this by using rabbits as his sample and using the process
of blood transfusion, another field of science in which he contributed.? The two breeds of rabbits he used were the
silver-grey and the common lop-eared rabbit.?
He transfused the blood of the lop-eared rabbits to the blood of a
silver-grey; he replaced nearly half of the silver-grey?s blood.? When he mated the silver-greys together,
they did not produce mongrel rabbits, but normal silver-greys.11? He concluded that traits were not transferred by gemmules but by
something else.? In 1883, the year of
Darwin?s death, a man by the name of August Weismann developed a new theory on
heredity with the idea of the germ plasm.?
It stated that there are two groups of cells, the soma
germ cells.? Germ cells are
undifferentiated cells that are transformed into reproductive cells.? Weismann reasoned that acquired characters
in the soma would not affect the germ cells, therefore acquired characteristics
could not be transferred.12? Galton was no longer interested
in the biology of heredity.To prove his
theories Galton decided to turn his attention concerning heredity, toward
mathematics, more specifically statistics.?
The amalgamation of biology and statistics is called biometrics.? During the mid 19th century
statistics in Britain were gathered using a census, but no attempt at analysis
was made.? Analysing the information is
exactly what Galton had planned on doing.?
From his background in meteorology, he used a different approach to
statistics called Gaussian distribution.?
At the time this was known as the law of error.? Carl Friedrich Gauss developed this form of
statistics by the analysis of errors in measurement of true physical
quantities.? When Gaussian distribution
is displayed on a graph, a bell curve is formed.? The peak of the curve is termed the mean.? The mean was the true physical
quantity.? Galton?s interest lay in the
deviations from the mean.13? Originally the distribution
was used to determine right and wrong values, but Galton used it to measure
variations in the population.?
Variations could be in height, weight, or intelligence.? In 1860, Galton tried to use the law of
error to estimate the number of geniuses and in his words, ?men of exceptional
stupidity?.? Galton found a method to dissect
statistical data, but he had no data.? First he tried to
gather information on plants in 1876.?
He decided to use the sweet pea for a variety of reasons.? First of all sweet peas had differentiating
characters that he could measure, easy artificial pollination, protection from
foreign pollination, and they are natural to the area of northern Europe.14? He sent an unknown number of packets to friends in various parts
of Europe with instructions on what to do.?
They were to return the plants after they had flowered.? When he received the sweet peas, he found
that the weights of the daughter seeds of the plants were evenly distributed in
a Gaussian fashion.? Because of this, he
determined that heredity could be treated mathematically using units of deviation.? A unit of deviation is the distance along
the horizontal axis, or baseline, of the bell curve where a vertical line would
divide the area to one side of the bell?s centre into two equal parts.? He calculated the ratios of units of
deviation between the weight of daughter and parent seeds, and found that the
ratios were about the same.? This added
to another feature from the data, that each daughter seed?s weight reverted to
the mean of the population.? From this
Galton concluded that characteristics of offspring not only came from the
parents, but from the many ancestors.?
Galton termed the tendency of the offspring to revert toward the mean
the coefficient of reversion.? He had used the new science of statistics to
scientifically backup eugenics.In 1884, Galton
published The Record of Family Faculties
in which he offered rewards of up to 500£ for extremely detailed sets
of family information.15? In the same year, he established the
Anthropometric Laboratory, which was used to collect data on families, so that
he could use the information to confirm his mathematics.? He used his newfound knowledge of plant
heredity and applied it to human beings.?
When he received the information from the families, he began to analyse
the information.? He decided he would
focus on the height of parents and children.?
He developed a new measure of the average between the parents and the
children called the midparent.? He used
the midparent and the other results, to make a graph that he could
analyse.? After he had graphed the
statistics, he had a series of concentric ellipses.? To discover what this meant he had to use analytical geometry and
laws of probability.? Galton, not truly
a mathematician, called on the help of an actual mathematician, J.D. Hamilton
Dickson.? With the assistance of
Dickson, Galton determined that the coefficient of reversion was not linked
with inheritance.? Galton therefore
decided to rename the coefficient of reversion to the coefficient of regression
and continued his search for the key to connect heredity with statistics.? Galton then
looked at Alphonse Bertillon?s system of identification of criminals.16? Bertillon too had gather data on human beings and Galton was
looking to compare his results.?
Scientists in Bertillon?s field were called criminal
anthropologists.? Bertillon was not the
only person looking at the characteristics of criminals.? One other person was the Italian, Cesare
Lombroso.? Lombroso had found that
criminals were mostly products of heredity.?
He found that most criminals resembled, in his opinion, savages or
animals.? He termed this atavism.17? Some traits he observed were primitive brains, an odd cephalic
index, long arms, prehensile feet, scanty beards with a hairy body, large
incisors, flattened noses, furtive eyes, and angular skulls.? He also proposed that different types of
criminals looked different such as thieves who had small restless eyes, thick
eyebrows,? crooked noses, thin beard,
and a narrow receding forehead.? When
Galton was asked to look at pictures of criminals, he and many other scientists
disagreed.? Reasons for the disagreement
include that descriptions of criminals? eyes could not truly be measured, and
that many of these characteristics were greatly overlapped in the general
population.? Although Galton did say
?fairly distinct types of criminals breeding true to their kind have become
established.?? The main purpose of
Galton studying criminal anthropology was to use his method of manipulating
data to see if it worked on another sample.?
He discovered that when the data was plotted in the same way he had
previously used, it formed the same concentric ellipses from the sets of family
data.? From this he found the
coefficient of correlation.? This
measured the degree of one variable depending on another.? What this meant was that one variable alone
did not determine another characteristic.?
Not only was Galton using the science of the time to create eugenics, he
was pioneering discovery into new areas of statistics. ??????????? For all his
brilliance, Galton had come to a halt in developing a working theory of
eugenics.? His coefficient of regression
stated the degree to which an offspring would regress to the previous
generation.? This went completely
against evolution, which is not what Galton wanted.? If the bell curve of the parents was the same as the bell curve
of the children, then how did anything ever change in civilisation.? Each generation would have the same number
of variations as the last one so no evolution would occur.? With all his analysis of heredity, Galton
could only conclude, that with eugenics very little could be changed.? Eugenics had to develop at the same rate of
the science.? Luckily for Galton, Karl
Pearson came to the aid of eugenics.? ??????????? Karl
Pearson was a much more established mathematician than Galton was.? Pearson focused on the eugenic point of
regression.? Galton?s law of ancestral
heredity stated that each generation would regress to the mean of the ancestral
population.? Pearson said that the
regression depended on the immediate ancestors, in other words, the
parents.? If this is true, then eugenics
could truly work in the way they wanted it to.?
Eugenics could point evolution in the direction it wanted to.? Pearson did have some mathematical backing
with his new theory.? He supported his
theory with detailed statistical analysis.?
He also reworked Galton?s theory so it predicted a population would
breed for the desired characteristic.?
He presented to Galton, his paper on the revision of his theory in 1898.18? Pearson continued to work on Galton?s theories and rework
them.? Eugenics now had an actual
scientific background made with the new scientific field known as biometrics.??????????? Eugenics
had Darwinian origins and evolved with the science of the time.? Darwin?s Origin
of the Species was the starting point for Galton.? Galton was influenced by the theories of Darwin and this fired
the science of eugenics.? The theories
of both Galton and Darwin were complementary.?
One of these theories is natural selection, which states that the most
fit live to procreate thereby ensuring enhanced selection.? Darwin also hypothesised on how traits were
transferred and he called it pangenesis. Gregor Mendel put forth another theory
that showed the inheritance of traits. Eugenics was evolving with new areas of
science.? One new area of science called
biometrics was created to deal with eugenics. The use of Gaussian distribution
and the bell curve was essential to analysing the collected data.? The discovery of the coefficient of
reversion was another example of using the best science of the time.? Galton did prove that intelligence was
inherited even if in a crude fashion.?
He developed new scientific methods of looking at statistics.? Eugenics has many failings though.? First Galton and others believed nature to
have complete dominance over nurture.?
They also believed that certain characteristics were controlled by one
hereditary factor only.? Now we know
that such factors are controlled by more than one characteristic.? The scientists of the 19th century
did not know what we know now.? The aims
of the scientists were in the right place but their science and methods were
just too crude to truly work.