Eugenics is the study of attempting to improve the human race by selective breeding. Its rationale is to remove bad or deleterious genes from the population, increasing the genetic fitness of humanity as a result. Campaigns to stop the criminal, the poor, the handicapped, and the mentally ill from passing on their genes were supported in the past by such notable people as British feminist Marie Stopes and Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. In the United States in the early 1900s, enforced sterilization was sometimes carried out on those deemed unfit to reproduce.
One ethical problem with practical eugenics is empowering a governmental or individual body to decide what a desirable characteristic is, and what is not. Nazi Germany had a eugenics program in place prior to and during World War II. Initially, targeted citizens were inmates of mental institutions, but quickly the reasons for sterilization became increasingly arbitrary. After the Second World War, there was a backlash against eugenics and most of the world's anthropologists championed the opposite view, the tabula rasa. This view favored the theory that humans are born with a blank slate, or empty mind, which is filled by experience. American anthropologist Margaret Mead conducted research of the native peoples of Samoa that many anthropologists accept as confirmation of the tabula rasa idea. Mead attempted to demonstrate that people are programmed by their environment, not only by their genetic makeup, and that providing an nurturing environment produces people who posses fewer sociopathic behavioral tendencies. Modern work suggests that it is a subtle interaction of both the genetic make-up and environmental conditions that shape an individual.
Eugenics happens to a minor degree in modern society, most notably when a couple with a family history of a genetic disorder decides not to have children or to terminate a pregnancy, based on genetic screening. In 1994, China passed restrictions on marriages which involved individuals with certain disabilities and diseases.
There is evidence that the practice of eugenics could never be truly effective. When one calculates the frequency of deleterious alleles in the population, it is found humans all carry at least 1% of alleles which, if present in homozygous form, would prove fatal. When scientists predict the effects that might be achieved by preventing all individuals possessing a given allele from breeding, it is found that the effect would be minimal. One problem associated with this prediction is the difficulty in detecting certain alleles when they are present in the heterozygous form.
This is the complete article, containing 410 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
