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The flawed idea of eugenics

Eugenics was put on a pedestal by scientists in the colonial era

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4 min read Last Updated : Feb 29 2020 | 12:42 AM IST

Racists often try to justify their prejudices by pseudoscientific arguments. They will claim that kids of a certain skin colour, or kids born into a certain caste, are smarter. This leads to the cesspit known as eugenics — the selective breeding of human beings to eliminate undesirable traits and enhance desirable ones.

Eugenics was put on a pedestal by scientists in the colonial era. Francis Galton, the father of modern statistics (also Charles Darwin's cousin) was one of its earliest advocates. Various countries formulated laws to prevent the breeding of people with undesirable traits on the basis of these supposedly scientific

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