Eugenics

Genetic Enhancement and Eugenics

The word "eugenics" was coined in 1883 by the English scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. He intended it to denote the "science" of improving the human stock by giving "the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable." Since Galton's day, "eugenics" has become a word of ugly connotations -- and deservedly. Eugenic aims merged with misinterpretations of the new science of genetics to help produce cruelly oppressive and in the era of the Nazis barbarous social results. Nonetheless, eugenics continues to figure in social discourse in some proposals for human genetic engineering.[footnoteRef:-1] [-1: Daniel Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, p. xiii.]

Philip Kitcher, in The Lives to Come, describes laissez faire eugenics as the eugenics yet to come in this era of prenatal testing and genetic counseling. It is a form...
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