What is Eugenics?

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-Eugenics was a pseudoscience, albeit for a time a very widely accepted one, that was founded by Sir Francis Galton. It was characterized by the attempt to improve human genetic qualities through selective breeding. Later Galton's ideas would be mixed with segregation, forced sterilization, and execution in a radical attempt to achieve a master race. These ideas were practiced in America where many states passed eugenic laws that banned interracial marriage and forcibly sterilized prisoners and the mentally handicapped. This was achieved thanks to the support of such influential figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Alexander Graham Bell. Following its most extreme manifestation in Nazi Germany, the ideas of forcibly controlling the lives and reproduction of a population became distasteful, and the "science of eugenics" was widely abandoned