[T]here is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations.
George Bernard Shaw
The term 'eugenics' was first created by Francis Galton in 1883. It would appear that there …show more content…
WIKIPEDIA (2013) states that Malthus became widely known for his theories about change in population. His ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ (1826), stated that sooner or later population will be checked by famine and disease, leading to what is known as a Malthusian catastrophe.
He was significantly concerned about the dangers of population growth. He said "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man". His views became leading in his field. Most importantly is that the forerunner of evolutionary biology Charles Darwin read his works pre ‘On the Origons of the Species’. Coincidences between the two men’s thinking is undeniably apparent.
Not directly related to this but relevant is the philosopher Herbert Spencer. Who further developed a conception of evolution as being the ‘Progressive Development of the Physical World. Spencer is best known for creating the expression "survival of the fittest", in ‘Principles of Biology’ (1864), after reading Charles Darwin's Scientific (1859) book. Frances Galton read both these famous books at the time and was greatly influenced by what he read, which led to the science of eugenics being …show more content…
Churchill was a Vice-President of the Congress, and Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, was one of its directors, as was Charles Eliot, a former President of Harvard, and the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, Sir William Osler. Churchill discussed the proposed laws with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who wrote in his diary: "Winston is also a strong eugenics. "‘The improvement of the British breed is my aim in life," Winston Churchill wrote to his cousin Ivor Guest on 19 January 1899. As a young politician in Britain entering Parliament in 1901, Churchill saw what were then known as the "feeble-minded" and the "insane" as a threat to the prosperity, vigor and virility of British society”. Historians of the eugenics movement have long been undecided on their examination of the links between British hereditary researchers and Nazi Germany, HART (2012).After the Second World War British eugenicists had to push back against the accusation that their science was basically heavy handed some even said or