The ‘Science’ of Eugenics: America’s Moral Detour
By Marilyn M. Singleton,
Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons
| 12. 15. 2014
[For references and the original pdf format, see here.]
When most people think of eugenics, they think of the unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler and Dr. Josef Mengele. But history tells us that some of America’s best and brightest promoted eugenics as settled science and necessary for the preservation of society. Within 100 years, our deep thinkers went from declaring that in our new country “all men are created equal” to espousing the idea that “some animals men are more equal than others.”
Untitled Document
Eugenics was popularized in the in the United States in the 1890s. High school and college textbooks from the 1920s through the 1940s often had chapters touting the scientific progress to be made from applying eugenic principles to the population. Many early scientific journals focusing on heredity in plants and lower organisms were published by eugenicists and included “scientific” articles on human eugenics-promoting studies of heredity. When eugenics fell out of favor after World War II, most references to eugenics were removed from textbooks and subsequent editions of relevant journals. We cannot erase history....
Related Articles
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a major focus of news recently, as it should have been, under the appropriately ridiculous name of Hugging Face, “a leading collaboration platform and community hub for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science.” In July, Hugging Face was hacked. The platform itself responded:
Earlier this week, we detected and responded to an intrusion into part of our production infrastructure. This one was different from anything we had handled before in one important way...
By Miryam Naddaf, Nature | 09.21.2026
A wave of epigenetic therapies is offering hope as ways to cure chronic hepatitis B — a lingering liver infection that is caused by the hepatitis B virus (HBV) and affects more than 250 million people around the world. Currently...
By Karen Weintraub, Endpoints News | 09.16.2026
To better understand certain neuropsychiatric disorders, researchers at Stanford University have bred rodents that lack a cortex and hippocampus and then replaced those missing brain cells with human ones.
The altered mice, a scientific first, provided insights that would not...
By Ryan Cross, Endpoints News | 09.02.2026
The deaths of two children who received CRISPR therapies in China have rattled scientists who work on similar genetic medicines in the US, adding new fuel to a yearslong debate about the danger of the gene therapy field’s most-used delivery...