432: Eugenics -- a legacy of progressive experts and the intelligensia

The boys drink and review Pigweed's Seal Team 6 -- a homebrewed Black IPA -- then discuss eugenics. Humans have been breeding animals and plants for a very long time. Most of the foods we eat are the result of thousands of years of careful breeding by farmers, and "man's best friend" was bred from wild dogs. Why shouldn't we do the same with humans? Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin who was very influenced by The Origin of Species, proposed just such a plan and called it "eugenics." Darwinism convinced Galton that an organism’s most important characteristics must be biological rather than shaped by environment or experience. The idea caught fire with the intellectual elite. John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger and Alexander Graham Bell all promoted the idea to one degree or another. The Supreme Court even weighed in. In upholding a Virginia law that permitted compulsory sterilization of individuals thought unfit to reproduce, Oliver Wendell Holmes said in Buck v. Bell, "three generations of imbeciles are enough." 38 States adopted some form of eugenics laws and more than 60,000 Americans were sterilized without their consent. Adolf Hitler read about this and thought, "gee, what a good idea." After the horrors of World War II, the west turned away from eugenics. It still stands as a reminder that fine-sounding ideas approved by intelligent people can still be horribly stupid.