We can’t discuss eugenics without looking at its atrocious history

Andrew Sabisky, a UK government adviser, recently resigned over comments supporting eugenics. Around the same time, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins – best known for his book The Selfish Gene – provoked controversy when tweeting that, while eugenics is morally deplorable, it “would work”. Eugenics can be described as the science and practice of improving the human race through the selection of “good” hereditary traits. Eugenics inevitably brings to mind the atrocities committed by the Nazis, who used eugenic ideology as the rationale for large-scale forced sterilization, involuntary euthanasia and the Holocaust. Given this sinister history, it’s bound to be…

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