Term

eugenics

The doctrine of “improving” the human race by selecting people. Hannay calls it a monumentally bad idea.

This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress, John Brockman (editor)

Explained in

• This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress, John Brockman (editor)
• Nervous Ills: Their Causes and Cure, Boris Sidis

  A doctrine popular in the early twentieth century that aimed to “improve” people through control of marriage and birth rates. Sidis considered it superstition. Later, eugenic ideas were used to justify forced sterilizations.

• Love and Marriage, Ellen Key

  A movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that called for “improving” humanity by controlling who has children and with whom. Today it is rejected.

• Little Essays of Love and Virtue, Havelock Ellis

  A doctrine of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on «improving» human heredity through selection. The term was coined by Francis Galton in 1883.

All terms