Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
capable were producing the largest families. Thus, the best were being
swamped by the worst. If mental and moral traits were inborn, and civ-
ilization becoming increasingly complex, the future was ominous.
The effects of artificial civilization would therefore have to be coun-
tered by artificial selection. This process could take the form of negative
measures intended to prevent or at least discourage mental defectives
and other undesirables from breeding, or positive measures intended to
encourage breeding by those superior in intellect, talent, and character.
Among negative measures, segregation or sterilization of the unfit were
considered most effective since they did not require the cooperation of
the subjects. As Watson Davis noted, “It is almost impossible to make
human beings improve their breed.”
11
But the dissemination of birth
control information and devices was a negative measure that did depend
on cooperation. The eugenic rationale was that middle-class women
already had access to contraception, whereas poor women (assumed to
be hereditarily inferior) were unable to limit their births. Eugenicists
assumed that the poor would do so, for their own social, economic, and
health reasons, if they could. It was only necessary to provide them the
means.
But a negative approach could only achieve so much. While prevent-
ing further deterioration, negative measures could not create what
Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her 1899
Women and Economics
called
“the ever nobler forms of life toward which social evolution tends.”
12
Eugenicists with more ambitious goals, then, generally favored a posi-
tive approach. Among them was Francis Galton. Although we know
from the surviving fragment of his eugenic utopia
Kantsaywhere
that
Galton imagined a future society in which, à la Plato, the state controlled
breeding, segregating inferior specimens in labor colonies, his published
works emphasized positive measures. As Galton wrote, “The possibility
of improving the race of a nation depends on the power of increasing
the productivity of the best stock. This is far more important than that
of repressing the productivity of the worst.”
13
In Galton's perspective, humans were enormously varied in their
inborn capacities and dispositions. By breeding from the good-tempered,
brave, intelligent, and muscular, we could not only stem degeneration
but create a new breed. For that to happen, eugenics would have to
become a new religion, and such active efforts as providing dowries for
