Eugenics

Eugenics is a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through social intervention. The goals have variously been to create more intelligent people, save society resources, lessen human suffering and reduce health problems. Proposed means of achieving these goals most commonly include birth control, selective breeding, and genetic engineering. Critics argue eugenics has been applied as a pseudoscience, that it has a potential for objectifiying human characteristics and note that historically it has been a means whereby social thinking culminated in coercive state-sponsored discrimination and human rights violations, even genocide.

References

• Elazar Barkan, The retreat of scientific racism: changing concepts of race in Britain and the United States between the world wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). (On the changing attitudes towards race and biology in the 20th century academic community)
• Francis Galton, Eugenics: Its definition, scope, and aims. The American Journal of Sociology, Volume X; July, 1904; Number 1
• Francis Galton, Hereditary genius: an inquiry into its laws and consequences (London: Macmillan, 1869). (Galton's first comprehensive work on eugenics)
• Francis Galton, Hereditary talent and character," Macmillan's Magazine 12 (1865), 157-166 and 318-327. (Galton's first article on heredity and eugenics)
• Francis Galton, Inquiries into human faculty and its development (London, Macmillan, 1883). (Galton coins the word "eugenics")
• Stephen J. Gould, The mismeasure of man (New York: Norton, 1981). (Looks at the history of using science for racist purposes)
• Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian attitudes in American thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963). (Early work on the history of eugenics)
• Daniel Kevles, In the name of eugenics: Genetics and the uses of human heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985). (Most recent survey work on the history of eugenics)
• Stefan Kühl, The Nazi connection: Eugenics, American racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). (On the connections between U.S. and Nazi eugenics and eugenicists)
• Dieter Kuntz, ed., Deadly medicine: creating the master race (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004). (On the use of science for eugenics in the U.S. and the Holocaust) online exhibit
• Donald A. MacKenzie, Statistics in Britain, 1865-1930: The social construction of scientific knowledge (Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 1981). (On the development of 19th century eugenics and theories of heredity)
• Diane B. Paul, "Darwin, social Darwinism and eugenics," in Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 214-239. (Darwin's assessment of Galton)
• Robert Proctor, Racial hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). (On the mobilization of the medical community under the Nazi state and the development of the racial hygiene movement)
• Tom Shakespeare, Genetic Politics: from Eugenics to Genome, with Anne Kerr (New Clarion Press, 2002).
• Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America. Basic Books, 1981. ISBN 0465020755
• James D. Watson, A passion for DNA: Genes, genomes, and society (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2000). (Co-discoverer of DNA talks about genes and ethics)
• Paul Weindling, Health, race and German politics between national unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). (On the development of hygiene movements in Germany)
• "Sterilisation of the unfit", The Guardian, July 26, 1933. (Reporting on the passage of the German sterilization law)
• Richard Lynn, Eugenics: A Reassessment (Human Evolution, Behavior, and Intelligence) (Praeger Publishers, 2001).
• Robert L. Hayman, Presumptions of justice: Law, politics, and the mentally retarded parent. Harvard Law Review 1990, 103, 1202-71. (p. 1209)
• H. L. Kaye, The social meaning of modern biology 1987, New Haven, CT Yale University Press. (p. 46)