Sunday, February 12, 2012

AMERICAN EUGENICS MOVEMENT

Eugenics is the genetic thought of "improvement", eugenics is the study of methods to improve the human race by controlling reproductions. It is a breeding technique used on humans, in the past this was only used on the creation of new varieties of crops and domestic animals. Animals such as horses or cows, their sperms or eggs are frozen as soon as they are consumed and took all over the world to produce the "perfect" animal. Farmers want the best or strongest animal. For example, people that race on horses try to breed the "best" horse for when it gets older to race with to be number one. With this genetic technique they hope to succeed. Now, the thought process is can we now do some what the similiar thing but on humans? I am talking about sending sperms and eggs but I am also talking about another technique when you can specialize a certain cell to make it obtain to your desires.  Rearranging our genetics and controlling the human species, selective breeding. That birth should be controlled for desirable human characteristics in the offspring. In 1883, Francis Galton formed the word eugenics in science history. In the beginning Mendel explained that every visible trait is governed by a pair of "factors" now known as genes. Their are two types of genes such as recessive or dominant. Recessive is when you get a gene or copy from each parent. Dominant is when a gene is inherited from both parents. This scientific idea was a way of choosing genes, kind of like segregation. This eugenicists were often pervaded with prejudice against racial, ethnic, and disabled groups. He saw it as helping improve humanity by encouraging the ablest and healthiest people to have more children. In his eyes this was very positive but this can be taken any other way, with people having opinions it was hard to get this going. Scientists that studied eugenics had some type of background in farming. Like when people breed horses or chickens, they want the best and the strongest to be produced. Even in the fields they wanted to grow the tastiest crops so they could sell good.  Also medication got into this debate. When medicine failed to fix the psychotic and the retarded some scientists turned to eugenics, sterilizing them. This thought of eugenics in America caused people to create perfection and the "best" out their. Of having the perfect teeth or smile, the perfect hair or eye color. The idea of this affected a lot of things such as religion, people felt offended when they heard the thought of such a thing. Personally, i feel that when you are with someone and have a baby, you should just let destiny occur and its crazy how people would what to do this. But it could be amazing to take out diseases from being passed on or even to help make a child not special-ed. All in all, eugenics is the American society having the desire and the possibility of making the human population perfect.

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