Eugenics Part Two: The Murderous Science

Origin Story

In part two of the history of eugenics, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey explain how the pseudo-science of “racial hygiene” seduced everyone from feminist birth-control pioneers and social democrats to the ardent white supremacists whose screeds shaped US immigration laws and influenced Hitler. Then they turn to the rise of eugenics in Germany and how it enabled the Nazis to introduce massive programs of sterilisation and extermination.

After the Second World War, the name of eugenics was discredited but many of its leading thinkers and institutions kept going under the more acceptable guise of genetics. How was eugenics quietly rehabilitated by IQ fetishists and population-control advocates? Why has it become so popular in Silicon Valley? And does it even make scientific sense or is it really a pseudo-science designed to formalise bigotry? Despite its association with historic atrocities, the belief that biology is destiny and procreation is political has not gone away.

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Reading list:

Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds) - The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (2010)

Edwin Black — War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003)

Elof Axel Carlson — The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (2001)

GK Chesterton — Eugenics and Other Evils (1922)

Charles Darwin — The Descent of Man (1871)

Lyndsay Andrew Farrall — The Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement 1865-1925 (1969)

Francis Galton – Hereditary Genius (1869)

Henry H Goddard – The Kallikak Family (1912)

Stephen Jay Gould — The Mismeasure of Man (1981/1996)

Madison Grant – The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

Philippa Levine — Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction (2017)

Gina Maranto — Quest for Perfection: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings (1996)

Adam Rutherford — Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics (2022)

Lothrop Stoddard – The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920)

HG Wells – Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901)

Online:

Quinn Slobodian — ‘The rise of the new tech right’, The New Statesman (2023)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

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