To be fair to the people of the day, that pseudoscience was considered mainstream legitimate science at the time, strongly promoted by their equivalent of Elon Musk on their equivalent of ExTwitter.
Just part of what terrifies me about the leadership of the world’s superpower from next year being a toss up between two guys who would have been taught that eugenics was settled fact in school.
I certainly do not support eugenics applied to humans but let's note that we are absolutely apply it to all other life forms on Earth to produce advantageous variants for our various purposes. It works to the extent allowed by genetics and is in effect settled fact for plants and animals. Highly respected public intellectuals in the 1920s and 30s thought it was a good idea to apply it to humans. We all know the results.
Properly speaking the term eugenics applies exclusively to the selective breeding of humans to maximize and minimize behavioral characteristics (it turns out absolutely falsely) associated (by the ignorant) with the (it turns out nonsensical) notion of “race”.
The belief was that behavioral stereotypes (like, for example, frugality, trustworthiness, and work ethic) were inextricably linked to physical phenotypes (like skin color and hair texture) that, via some hand wavy magic around nationality and cultural origin, determined your race.
Eugenics isn’t the same as (or even a straightforward extension of) selective breeding in animals / plants, since no other known organism has ever organized around the entirely cultural artifacts of borders and tribes, nations and races.
Just part of what terrifies me about the leadership of the world’s superpower from next year being a toss up between two guys who would have been taught that eugenics was settled fact in school.