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I’m surprised I’ve never heard this before: Francis Galton was Charles Darwin’s first cousin, and based on Darwin’s work Origin of the Species, he was pretty much the pioneer of modern eugenics:

Galton devised techniques such as composite photography in order to establish racial and social ‘types’ which could aid the management of society. He was a proponent of the idea of selective breeding amongst humans in order to halt what he saw as the decline of the British race. His ideas would go on to influence the sterilisation movements in countries such as Sweden, the United States and Germany. His work on eugenics was later adpoted by the Nazi party as a justification for the systematic elimination of the Jews and other races.

Galton’s idea seems to have sprung from the observation that civilization disrupts “pure” natural selection. Paradoxically, his solution for overcoming the “unnaturalness” of civilized behavior was to further regulate it:

Galton noticed an interpretation of Darwin’s work whereby the mechanisms of natural selection were potentially thwarted by human civilization. His reasoning followed that since many human societies sought to protect the underprivileged and weak, those societies were at odds with the natural selection responsible for extinction of the weakest. Only by changing these social policies, Galton thought, could society be saved from a “reversion towards mediocrity”, a phrase he first coined in statistics and later changed to the now common, “regression towards the mean.”

Wild stuff. It definitely does seem like an obvious extension of Darwin’s theories though, in a way. Though I certainly don’t advocate eugenics, I have often thought in the past about how many people in civilization have genetic traits which would be completely unviable in wild nature. For example, poor eyesight is an obvious and uncontroversial one. The other sticky argument around eugenics is that it’s essentially selective breeding. But really, all breeding is selective to some degree. Mates are chosen, not assigned randomly. Of course, they are not chosen by the state, and certain people are not forbidden from breeding based on their genetic disposition. Oh wait, yes they were. That same thing happened here:

No where were the principles of eugenics more accepted than America. Eugenics was adopted by the Oneida Community in the mid-19th century. The first American eugenics law was passed in Indiana in 1907 and by 1936 there were 35 states that had such laws. As a result, large numbers of individuals in America were forcibly sterilized–primarily poor children taken in by state institutions. We do not have an estimate yet of the actual number of people sterilized. As these operations were sometimes conducted covertly, an accurate assessment is probably not possible. The mentally ill and retarded were the most frequent victims of this program. There were also, however, children and youths sterilized. These included unwed mothers and boys in reformatories and orphanages, especially if they were judged to be retarded. The extent of the sterilizations varied widely from state to state, but was most pronounced in states that were largely Protestant because of the opposition of the Catholic Church. There were also large numbers of sterilizations conducted on blacks in the South by the largely white medical establishment. These were known as Mississippi appendectomies. An outgrowth of the eugenics movement was the popularity of beautiful baby competitions in the early 20th century.

This isn’t even conspiracy theory. It’s all true. Another passage on this:

American eugenic crusades proliferated into a worldwide campaign, and in the 1920s came to the attention of Adolf Hitler. Under the Nazis, American eugenic principles were applied without restraint, careening out of control into the Reich’s infamous genocide. During the pre-War years, American eugenicists openly supported Germany’s program. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the work of its central racial scientists. Once WWII began, Nazi eugenics turned from mass sterilization and euthanasia to genocidal murder. One of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute doctors in the program financed by the Rockefeller Foundation was Josef Mengele who continued his research in Auschwitz, making daily eugenic reports on twins. After the world recoiled from Nazi atrocities, the American eugenics movement — its institutions and leading scientists — renamed and regrouped under the banner of an enlightened science called human genetics.

For more reading about eugenics in the US:

1. Yale Study: U.S. Eugenics Paralleled Nazi Germany
2. American Eugenics Programs
3. Eugenics in the United States
4. War Against the Weak

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