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.

See also

• Artificial selection
• Biological determinism
• Charles Goethe
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Genetic determinism
• Human evolution
• Project Prevention
• Pioneer Fund
• Race and intelligence
• Repository for Germinal Choice
• Social Justice
• The Genographic Project
• William Shockley