Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History.

Eugenics, talk about Eugenics, they were the very brilliant Adam Rutherford, he's a brilliant

science writer, he is a geneticist, he is a broadcaster, he's one of the best in the

business, he's been on the podcast many times before and I'm very grateful for him coming

on again.

You talk about Eugenics.

Eugenics is basically the idea that we should control who is having sex and pro-creating

with who ancient impulse for some reason.

We humans are very strange.

Anyway, Eugenics has been used to assert control throughout history and Eugenics's ideas

discipline was started by Victorian academics who embraced philosophies of things like

social Darwinism, strangely, strangely as Victorian academics thought that only people

a bit like them should be able to have children, funny, old thing.

These ideas were incorporated into local and national law in various countries and they

were certainly embraced by politicians and thinkers across the world, famously, infamously,

the Nazis, major genetics of cornerstone, their ideology, culminating the Holocaust,

but involving the mass sterilization of unfit, quote, unquote, people and the murder of

people who are mentally and physically disabled, or also didn't fit with Hitler's idea

of a pure superior race of Aryans.

In the US as well, there were 32 recorded, federally funded sterilization programmes.

So I'm going to talk about all that kind of stuff with that in Rutherford now.

It is very interesting indeed.

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