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Definition: eugenics from Philip's Encyclopedia

Study of human improvement by selective breeding, founded in the 19th century by English scientist Sir Francis Galton. It proposed the genetic 'improvement' of the human species through encouraging parents who are above average in certain traits to have more children, while ensuring those who are below average have fewer. It was discredited in the early 20th century, owing to its ethical implications and its racist and class-based assumptions.


Eugenics

From Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Communication
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a belief in biological determinism became the basis for the movement known as eugenics. For many, eugenics was seen as a secular religion, providing the modern world with a new, biologically based Ten Commandments. Eugenicists planned to create this better world by controlling and improving the inheritance of society's next generation. Despite this rhetoric of social improvement, 20th-century eugenics was associated with racism and ethnic bias, maintenance of the social status quo, support for the powerful over the powerless, and putting the interests of the native born over those of the newcomer. Before it was rejected as poor science and unacceptable social policy, eugenics was used against the interests of large numbers of Americans and against democracy. More contemporary advances in genetics and genomics are at the heart of a number of public policy issues currently being debated as to how this knowledge should be used; this entry…
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Full text Article Eugenics

From World of Sociology, Gale
Eugenics, the scientific project of improving the human race through the study of heredity and control of human reproduction, can be traced to nineteenth-century ideas, particularly Darwinism. The term eugenics, from the Greek root meaning “good in birth,” was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, …
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Full text Article eugenics

From The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology
A term coined by F. Galton in 1883 to refer to the improvement of the human race by the use of a ‘genetic policy’ based on the principles of HEREDITY . As a social movement, it was influential in the United States between 1890 and 1920, where it was associated with SOCIAL DARWINISM . The American…
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Full text Article EUGENICS

From The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
The term ‘eugenics’ was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton who defined it as the science dedicated to the improvement of the human RACE . Influenced by Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory, eugenicists thought that the ideal of human development was possible through the complete rationalisation of…
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Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term and concept of eugenics in 1883. Eugenics, often defined as “well-born,” was an effort to apply Darwinian evolution and Gregor Mendel's recently recognized genetic discoveries to the physical, mental, and moral improvement of human…
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Full text Article eugenics

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
(yōjĕn'ĭks), study of human genetics and of methods to improve the inherited characteristics, physical and mental, of the human race. Efforts to improve the human race through bettering housing facilities and other environmental conditions are known as euthenics. Sir Francis Galton , who introduced…
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Full text Article EUGENICS

From Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations
English anthropologist, explorer, and statistician [Eugenics] must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion. It has, indeed, strong claim to become an orthodox religious tenet for the future, for Eugenics co-operates with the workings of Nature by securing that humanity shall…
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Full text Article Eugenics

From The Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of American Science, Medicine, and Technology
As the 2010 publication of the 586-page Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics attests, eugenic ideology captured a global following in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And since the 1960s, scholars have vigorously debated the impact, meaning, practice, and legacies of a…
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Full text Article eugenics

From Encyclopedia of Women and American Politics
The word eugenics was first used in 1883 by Sir Frances Galton, the distant cousin of Charles Darwin, to refer to the study or use of selective breeding to improve a species over time. Eugenics became entangled with claims for women's rights and access to birth control when white feminists, …
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Full text Article Eugenics

From Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology
Eugenics is the systematic attempt to increase the incidence of desirable genetic traits and to decrease the incidence of undesirable genetic traits in a population. Eugenics is a relatively recent development in the history of human anthropology (the systematic study of humankind), emerging only in…
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Full text Article Eugenics

From The SAGE Encyclopedia of the Sociology of Religion
Eugenics was a pseudoscientific White supremacist movement popular in the first half of the 20th century. Eugenicists saw themselves as dedicated to improving the genetic makeup of the human race. They believed that humans could engineer a better form of humanity by harnessing natural selection, …
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