EUGENICS

What is eugenics?
Eugenics is the theory that birth should be controlled to makea more perfect child. Improving the populations’ genes and this can cause a drop in birth rate.


What were the social origins of eugenics?
The social origins of eugenics started right after the civil war period.  Major things were changing in the U.S.  Industry was becoming bigger, this causing most country people to move to the big city were the jobs could be found.  Bankruptcies became a bigger issue during the time, this is when the idea of "survival of the fittest" came about.  This idea was thrown out because the wealthy stated having a declined birth rate, while the poor people's birth rate was rising rapidly.  This is when the whole idea of eurgenics came around.  Genetics seemed to prove the cause of peoples social problems.  Eugenics argued that by stopping the "unperfect people" from having a baby could save the country thousands and make the future people perfect. 


What research methods were used in eugenics, and what were their flaws?
The start of research on eurgenics was from Mendel's research paper in 1865 on the peas.  Mendel stated that with each visible gene, one had come from the mother and one from the father.  That genes are either domanate or recessive.  A recessive trait is only seen when two recessive taits join together.  If there is a domanite trait no matter what it is the one to show up.  The scientist studing eugenics forcused on two main things, 1.finding large families that would show the traits, and 2. "scoring" each family member to see the existance or absence of a tait.  One of the flaws with this was that the scoring was hard because the tried to get into to complex traits.  The scientist were to quick to put the trait in one of Mendel's templates.


How did eugenics reseach impact American society today.
Eugenics has ipmacted America dramaticly.  It has givin us a thought that we need to be perfect.  We all have that one person in mind that we wish to be like, or look like.  When really no one is perfect.  There are traits in that person that are not noticable that we may no wish oppon ourselves to have.  There are a few cases were eugenics can be right.  I believe that we could use it to control the amout of kids haven by someone that is on disability or wellfare.  My reasoning for this is, I know many peope who use the extra money for each kid for themselves.  They abuse the system, and cheat through it.  They are perfectly fine to find a job but choose not to because they think they can make it with others money.  So we should set a sertain amount of kids that they are able to have, in order to keep the money givin down.


All of my reaseach was found at http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/list2.pl