Eugenics During The 1920's, Science And Social Legislation

The Eugenics Movement
During the 1920’s, science and social legislation came to be intertwined, and the study of human genetic variation was born; this was known as the term eugenics. Eugenics is the improvement of a species by emphasizing the characteristics that are beneficial. Positive eugenics it is the act of improving a species by emphasizing the propagation of those traits that are seen as beneficial. Negative Eugenics is the act of improving the species by preventing the spread of those traits that are seen as dysgenic or harmful.
Scientists elucidated on subjects they knew little about, as they used the “objectivity of science” to validate their drawn up conclusions, which resulted in continuous fallacies and common errors based
The law was overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1921. However, involuntary sterilization was still an underground practice among the majority of mental patients up until the 1960’s. In a famous case titled Buck vs. Bell, a woman was accused of being feebleminded and of promiscuity after it was known that she was seventeen and pregnant. She was seen as to be unfit person and to prevent her from further passing on her dysgenic condition it was determined that she would be involuntarily sterilized and was found guilty in an 8 to 1 decision. In 1933, Nazi Germany similarly passed sterilization laws, and even used actual wording from the US legislation for the foundation of these new laws. The concepts behind eugenics fit well for their intentions tocreate a better world for themselves by improving the Aryan race. As a result, more than 400,000 Jews were involuntarily sterilized among other atrocities which were committed. Other countries like Canada, Japan, China and Sweden also used some form of eugenics on their
Family trees were studied and it was believed that aside from the obvious of gene sharing, that the lineage could be efficacious in how an individual’s characteristics turned out. Rather the truth is that the individual can be influenced by their environment, culture, diet and customs, which presents the whole nature vs. nurture argument. Eugenicists believed if a person was a criminal, their children would be criminals as well, when in fact there is much more of a correlation . Eugenicists were seeking to solve non-genetic problems through genetic means, which tt was evident that social problems were caused by environments and circumstances, not by genetics. A common glorified reference point that scientists had used to model eugenics was animal breeding, yet had they taken the time to study the outcomes of animal breeding they would have seen that it was not all that it had cracked up to be. Pure-bred strains experienced heavy inbreeding and a loss of genetic variation and they had to be outbred, or created hybrid vigor to regain variation. H.L. Mencken said that “superiority” was highly dependent on the time and the place of birth. Examples of this would be Beethoven who was the grandson of a cook and the son of a