The Haters: Introduction to Eugenics

Send us Fan MailMandy takes back the reigns for this laundry session, and there's gonna be several loads to get through. We're talking about eugenics - which is basically the idea that natural selection of the fittest could be accelerated through deliberate selection of the "fittest" and, even uglier, "deselection" of the "non-fit" or "degenerate" subsets of the human population.  In this first episode we remind ourselves of our Darwinian evolutionary theory and Mendelian genetics (think peas and monks, guys), and then we introduce the dad and mom of American eugenics - Charles and Gertrude Davenport. They saw themselves as a model couple and template for good marriage, but, well...let's just say, no one was doing the laundry in that house.