First hailed as a way to promote positive attributes in humanity, eugenics quickly devolved into a racist movement that used mass sterilization and even murder to remove people with “undesirable” traits such as alcoholism, Down syndrome and schizophrenia from the human gene pool. Galton and his contemporaries were brilliant scientists, statisticians and polymaths-but also white supremacists with repugnant ideas. As readers of his book How to Argue With a Racist know, Rutherford is passionately anti-eugenics-while Francis Galton, for whom the Galton Laboratory is named, was the 19th-century scientist who coined the term eugenics and pioneered its ideology.ĭivided into two distinct parts, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics first outlines the history of eugenics, then lays out the scientific, ethical and moral arguments against it. This straightforward sentence hides a deep irony. from University College London, including several years studying in the university’s Galton Laboratory. Adam Rutherford ( A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, Humanimal) earned his undergraduate degree and Ph.D.
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