What is the origin of eugenics?
Charles Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, was the person who began to put a genetic component onto Spencer’s idea of survival of the fittest. Galton reasoned that different types of people had different reproductive proclivities. And what Galton was worried about was that those individuals who were least intelligent and least industrious were the ones who were reproducing the most, whereas the more industrious and more highly intelligent and more socially desirable individuals were reproducing the least. Sir Francis Galton argued that society should step in, and in particular should support the increased reproduction of those individuals with desirable social traits, and that they should, whenever possible, retard the reproduction of individuals with the least desirable traits. The term Galton coined for this was “eugenics.” The eugenics idea caught on amongst all of the leading Euro-American intellectuals and politicians in America. It caught on amongst right-wing political figures
