Anthro2050 1st Edition Lecture 10 Outline of Last Lecture I Examples of Mendelian Genetics at Work Outline of Current Lecture II The American Eugenics Movement Current Lecture When Genetic Research and Ideas go Terribly Wrong When Mendel s work was rediscovered in the early 1900 s some American scientists used his methods and ideas to try to breed superior human beings to make Americans genetically superior and to try to solve some social problems in America While the idea seems like it would be very controversial and mad scientist like it was actually very supported by various scientific communities and the population at large Using Mendelian ideas and family pedigrees they believed that they could track superior genes and inferior genes through a family line Superior genes tended to be thought of as people with high intelligence high morals and generally of North Western European descent Whereas people with inferior genes were thought to be the poor mentally and physically disabled drunkards and people with lose morals feeble minded folk and people with low intelligence and usually people who were not of North Western European descent People with believed superior genes were encouraged to have many children whereas people with believed inferior genes were encouraged not to breed and many areas in the country passed sterilization laws marriage laws and immigration restrictions to keep people with inferior genetics from breeding and polluting the superior genetic population These ideas were very strict on women and if there was ever a flaw in a family s genetics it was blamed on the women At local fairs the American Eugenics Society would hold contests called Better Babies Fitter Families and would judge the genetic quality of a family Remnants of this practice can be still seen with beautiful baby contests at fairs in news papers and even online These notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor s lecture GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes not as a substitute Sterilization Laws began in 1907 in Indiana and spread throughout the country Anybody who was determined inferior could be forced to get surgery to keep them from reproducing They would even go to orphanages believing that children left in orphanages came from genetically inferior families and they would lie that a child needed their appendix out and would actually tie their tubes or perform other similar procedures In 1927 these laws were challenged in court in the case of Buck v Bell A woman named Carrie Buck had epilepsy and a child out of wedlock The court decided that she her mother and her child were feeble minded folk and she and her child were sterilized Like Ms Buck a total of around 66 000 people were legally sterilized through the 1970s The ideas of leaders of the American Eugenics Movement were often published in popular books Some of these books inspired greatly a man named Adolf Hitler and the third reich in Germany Hitler based a lot of his ideas of racial purity on the American Eugenics Movement and the actions of the Nazi Party showed the world the eventual end point of eugenics As a result eugenics lost popularity in America as the country did not want to become like Nazi Germany Modern scientists and geneticists see that time period as an ignorant time Modern genetics does good work however there are still remnants of eugenic thoughts and ideas in society so we need to be careful not to get carried away and let history repeat itself
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