The pseudoscience of eugenics, the discredited idea that selective breeding can improve humanity, is resurging in American political rhetoric, as Nautilus’s Dan Falk reports. President Trump has repeatedly invoked genetics to explain crime and immigration, telling Fox News in March that two bombing suspects had “genetics that are not exactly your genetics.” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made similarly unfounded biological claims about measles and autism.
An old idea with a long shadow
The term traces to Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, who in 1883 proposed humans “improve” their species the way farmers breed livestock, with white Europeans at the top. That thinking underwrote the 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling, the forced sterilization of up to 70,000 Americans, and eventually Nazi genocide. “In the 21st century, eugenics is experiencing a fully-fledged revival,” says Rebecca Sear, an evolutionary anthropologist at Brunel University.
Falk notes embryo-screening startups now marketing IQ and trait selection to prospective parents, reviving old questions about who counts as “fit.”
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