“Eugenics” was first defined by Sir Francis Galton in his “Human Faculty” in 1884, and was subsequently developed into a science and into an educational effort.  Galton’s ideal was the rational breeding of human beings.  The aim of Eugenics, as defined by its founder, is to bring as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause the useful classes of the community to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation.  Eugenics thus concerns itself with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.  It is, in short, the attempt to bring reason and intelligence to bear upon heredity.  But Galton, in spite of the immense value of this approach and his great stimulation to criticism, was completely unable to formulate a definite and practical working program.  He hoped at length to introduce Eugenics “into the national conscience like a new religion....  I see no impossibility in Eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind, but its details must first be worked out sedulously in the study.  Over-zeal leading to hasty action, would do harm by holding out expectations of a new golden age, which will certainly be falsified and cause the science to be discredited.  The first and main point is to secure the general intellectual acceptance of Eugenics as a hopeful and most important study.  Then, let its principles work into the heart of the nation, who will gradually give practical effect to them in ways that we may not wholly foresee."(1)

Galton formulated a general law of inheritance which declared that an individual receives one-half of his inheritance from his two parents, one-fourth from his four grandparents, one-eighth from his great-grandparents, one-sixteenth from his great-great grandparents, and so on by diminishing fractions to his primordial ancestors, the sum of all these fractions added together contributing to the whole of the inherited make-up.  The trouble with this generalization, from the modern Mendelian point of view, is that it fails to define what “characters” one would get in the one-half that came from one’s parents, or the one-fourth from one’s grandparents.  The whole of our inheritance is not composed of these indefinitely made up fractional parts.  We are interested rather in those more specific traits or characters, mental or physical, which, in the Mendelian view, are structural and functional units, making up a mosaic rather than a blend.  The laws of heredity are concerned with the precise behavior, during a series of generations, of these specific unit characters.  This behavior, as the study of Genetics shows, may be determined in lesser organisms by experiment.  Once determined, they are subject to prophecy.