Eugenics is a “damned” science in the fortean sense if ever there was one. Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the word to describe improving the human race by controlling reproduction. The eugenics movement started with the very best intentions, but it all went horribly wrong. These days no respectable scientist will go near it… but like a submerged monster, eugenics still surfaces occasionally.

In Galton’s day, scientists already had a pretty good under­standing of how heredity operated, and selective breeding had made a great difference to livestock. It had been discovered that many conditions were hereditary, and could be avoided by con­trolled breeding. But Darwin’s theory of evolution had serious consequences when human mental traits were considered. Without some kind of control, it seemed inevitable that the unemployably idle, the incorrigibly crim­inal, the feeble-minded, the mixed race, and (horrors) the promiscuous, would multiply and take over the world. Decent hardworking folk would soon be outnumbered and overwhelmed.

In the early 20th century, eugenics societies attempted to encourage ‘fit’ people to have children, while ensuring that the worst of the ‘unfit’ were put in asylums or sterilised. Inevitably, it was picked up by the political right wing with its obsessions about breeding and pure blood, in particular the Nazis in Germany. In addition to a grotesque plan to breed pure-blooded Aryans, they removed undesirables by the most extreme method imaginable. This started with the ‘mercy killings’ of the mentally ill, homosexuals or those suffering from inherited conditions, and only later extended this to include entire ‘inferior’ races such as Gypsies and Jews.

Arguably, true eugenics has nothing to do with killing people, but the movement never recovered from association with the Nazi gas chambers. The act of defining superior people implies that others are inferior, and implicitly less worthy of life; the road from there to exterminat­ion camps is short. Eugenics took a while to disappear: some states in the US still had eugenics-based laws (including forced sterilis­ation) into the 1980s.

Eugenics never quite vanished completely. It re-appeared in the 1990s with the bestseller The Bell Curve (“Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life”) by psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray. Their thesis was that intelligence is inherited and determines how well people get on. As a result, they claimed that a ‘cognitive elite’ was evolving and becoming separated from the rest of the population. More controversially, the authors asserted that there is a racial difference in intelligence, with African-Americans at the bottom.

The Bell Curve suggested that the best thing was to recognise the existence of a mentally infer­ior underclass. Laws should be simplified, and benefits should be provided in services rather than money, as the underclass could not be trusted with cash. The book was roundly condemned by a wide range of scient­ists for flaws in its assumptions, method­ology and conclusions.

While The Bell Curve did not quite advocate eugenics, it implied that money and power were the outcome of select­ive breeding for intelligence. The book’s target audience of educated, affluent professionals were seen as genetically superior. The underclass were not victims of social inequality or racial prejud­ice, just bad genes.

More recently, economist Steven Levitt suggested in his 2005 bestseller Freakonomics that legalising abortion in the US produced a drop in the crime rate. The idea is that the children who were not born as the result of legalised abortions from 1973 onwards were more likely to have been poor and in single-parent families. Both of these are strongly correlated with crime, so the abort­ions acted as “pre-empt­ive execut­ions” of a swath of the criminal underclass, exactly as the eugenic­ists a century earlier had hoped. The theory sold a lot of books and attracted heavy criticism from other statistic­ians on its select­ive use of published figures. As writer Steve Sailer points out:

“Did the first New, Improved Generation culled by legalized abortion actually grow up to be more lawful teenagers than the last generation born before legaliz­ation? Hardly. Instead, the first cohort to survive legalized abortion went on the worst youth murder spree in American history.”

What the figures seem to show is that although the overall crime rate did go down in the period Levitt is considering, the drop-off was due to perpetrators from an older age group slacking off.

Meanwhile, some small good may have come from eugenics. A programme called Dor Yeshorim based in New York is seeking to reduce the incidence of a variety of inherited diseases – including cystic fibrosis and other killers – in certain communities, specifically Ashkenazy Jews. In some commun­ities, these are 20 to 100 times more prevalent than in the populat­ion at large. Dor Yehorim screens prospective couples and tells them if they are ‘incompatible’ in terms of carrying a high risk of genetic disease. The response is up to the couple.

Defining genetically undesirable traits is rarely so simple. There was an outcry recently about a screening programme for genetic deafness: some deaf people felt that this was an appalling attempt to wipe out the deaf community, which did not regard itself as dis­abled in any way.

Whatever your vision of a super­ior human, the chances are that someone else will disagree completely. Scientists – and anyone else – can only approach this area at their peril, and eugenics is set to remain damned and beyond the pale for the foreseeable future.