Francis Galton, a distant cousin of Darwin, decided that civilisation, by protecting the weak from disease and famine, was stopping natural selection from doing its job. Furthermore, he believed, those who were poor and feckless got married younger, and had more children, than the careful and virtuous. Galton believed that something should be done to encourage higher quality breeding and, in 1883, he called this eugenics.

Similar ideas went back at least as far as Plato, but natural selection gave them a new authority, and Galton’s beliefs were respectable in scientific circles: he was knighted and awarded every medal the Royal Society had to offer.

At the turn of the century, many scientists and intellectuals worried that humans were "degenerating" in cities. When, during the Boer War, more than 70% of Manchester volunteers were deemed physically unfit for service, this seemed to prove the case. The government and other bodies also investigated such "problems" as hereditary feeble-mindedness, alcoholism and criminality, and eugenic solutions were regularly proposed.

Positive eugenicists wanted to increase breeding between those they saw as "better". Negative eugenicists wanted to restrict the breeding of those they saw as worse. It is the latter who have received most historical attention. Their problem was that they needed to measure the difference between people, and in a liberal society, drawing such lines is difficult. It is one thing to argue that criminality is hereditary, and hereditary criminals should not have babies, but the burden of examining and proving each particular case is huge.

Worldwide programmes

Still, many eugenic programmes were enacted in the first half of the 20th century. They tended to focus on mental deficiency, since there was already an infrastructure for defining lunacy. The United States, Sweden, Canada, Australia, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Switzerland and Iceland all sterilised the mentally deficient.

Eugenics is now most closely associated with Nazi Germany. The Holocaust was described as eugenic, because the Jews were seen to be a "lesser" race. Germany also sterilised 350,000 "unfit" in less than a decade. At war crimes tribunals, the Nazis regularly justified themselves by citing the American example, from whose laws they had borrowed, although Germany was considerably more active in its approach. To explore the Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement see www.eugenicsarchive.org

Eugenics today

Nazi associations, alongside such famous fictions as Aldous Huxley’s totalitarian eugenic future in Brave New World, have made eugenics a dirty word. In spite of this, eugenic organisations persist, claiming that it is vital to breed a better humanity. Most of these argue for positive eugenics, and some high-profile attempts have been made. Robert K Graham’s Repository for Germinal Choice, which originally tried to collect only the sperm of Nobel Prize winners, ran from 1980 to 1999. Find out more about the Nobel Prize sperm bank here

However, pro-life campaigners argue that pre-birth screening programmes for diseases such as Down's syndrome and Sickle Cell Anaemia constitute negative eugenics, and fear for the eugenic implications of enhanced genetic screening programs and "designer babies". The difficulty and question for the future, as eugenicists have always found, is where to draw the line.