Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics (Paperback)

by Adam Rutherford Description A book about eugenics - what geneticist Adam Rutherford calls "a defining idea of the 20th century." . Inspired by Darwin's ideas about evolution, eugenics arose in Victorian England as a theory for improving the British population, and quickly spread to America, where it was embraced by presidents, funded by Gilded Age monopolists, and enshrined into racist American laws that became the ideological cornerstone of the Third Reich. Despite this horrific legacy, eugenics looms large today as the advances in genetics in the last 30 years--from the sequencing of the human genome to modern gene editing techniques--have brought the idea of population purification back into the mainstream. . Eugenics has "a short history, but a long past," Rutherford writes. The first half of Control is the history of an idea, from its roots in key philosophical texts of the classical world all the way into their genocidal enactment in the 20th century. The second part of