---
category: Ideology
created: 2026-06-20
location: United Kingdom; United States
summary: Eugenics is the project of improving the human species through controlled
  reproduction, named by Francis Galton in 1883, which drove sterilization and immigration
  laws and the Holocaust, was repackaged after the war as race-and-intelligence research,
  and is identified by critics as a root of the transhumanist and longtermist worldview.
tags:
- Concept
- Eugenics
- RaceScience
- HumanBiodiversity
- Transhumanism
- TESCREAL
updated: 2026-06-20
---

Eugenics is the project of improving the genetic quality of the human population through the controlled breeding of people judged superior and the prevention of reproduction by those judged inferior. The word was coined in 1883 by the Victorian polymath [Francis Galton](/people/francis-galton/), a cousin of Charles Darwin, from the Greek for "well-born." As a movement it produced compulsory-sterilization and marriage laws, racially based immigration restriction, and ultimately the Nazi program of mass murder; discredited after 1945, its hereditarian claims about race and intelligence were repackaged and sustained through the postwar decades, and critics identify the same logic operating in the contemporary [transhumanist](/concepts/transhumanism/) and longtermist movements.[^1][^2]

### Galton and the Anglo-American Movement

Galton set out the idea in *Hereditary Genius* (1869), arguing that talent and character are inherited and that the human stock could be improved by encouraging the able to have more children. The movement he founded split into "positive" eugenics, promoting reproduction among the favored, and "negative" eugenics, preventing it among the unfit, and it spread rapidly through the British and American professional classes in the early twentieth century. In Britain the Eugenics Society, founded in 1907 as the Eugenics Education Society, gathered scientists and reformers, and Galton endowed a chair and laboratory at University College London.[^1][^3]

In the United States the movement acquired the machinery of the state. The biologist Charles Davenport established the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor in 1910, funded by the Harriman and Carnegie fortunes, to catalog American family pedigrees for "defective" traits. Eugenic argument shaped the Immigration Act of 1924, which set national-origin quotas to limit southern and eastern European and Asian immigration, and underwrote compulsory-sterilization laws in more than thirty states. In *Buck v. Bell* (1927) the Supreme Court upheld the sterilization of Carrie Buck, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing "three generations of imbeciles are enough"; an estimated sixty thousand Americans were sterilized under such laws.[^2][^4]

### Nazi Germany and the Postwar Discrediting

Germany's eugenicists drew directly on the American model. The 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, which authorized the sterilization of some four hundred thousand people, was modeled in part on the California statute, and American eugenicists praised the German program before the war. The Nazi regime escalated from sterilization to the "T4" murder of disabled people and then to the racial extermination of the Holocaust, carried out in the name of racial hygiene.[^2][^5]

The association with Nazi crimes discredited open eugenics after 1945, and the field publicly dissolved: the American Eugenics Society renamed itself the Society for the Study of Social Biology in 1972, and the British Eugenics Society became the Galton Institute. [Julian Huxley](/people/julian-huxley/), who served as president of the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962, argued for a reformed "evolutionary humanist" eugenics and, in 1957, coined the modern usage of "transhumanism" for the project of the species transcending itself through deliberate effort.[^3][^6]

### Postwar Repackaging as Race Science

The hereditarian study of race and intelligence continued through a small, well-funded network. The [Pioneer Fund](/organizations/pioneer-fund/), established in 1937 to promote "race betterment," financed researchers including Arthur Jensen, whose 1969 article argued that the black-white IQ gap was substantially genetic, the physicist [William Shockley](/people/william-shockley/), who advocated paying low-IQ people to be sterilized, and later [Richard Lynn](/people/richard-lynn/) and [J. Philippe Rushton](/people/j-philippe-rushton/), and it supported the journal [Mankind Quarterly](/organizations/mankind-quarterly/). [Charles Murray](/people/charles-murray/) and Richard Herrnstein's *The Bell Curve* (1994) brought the race-and-IQ thesis to a mass audience, citing thirteen Pioneer Fund-funded scholars.[^7][^8]

The same claims circulated under the euphemism [human biodiversity](/concepts/human-biodiversity/), popularized by [Steve Sailer](/people/steve-sailer/), and through the secret [London Conference on Intelligence](/events/london-conference-on-intelligence/) held at University College London from 2014 to 2017. Mainstream genetics and psychology reject the genetic-gap thesis, holding that race is not a valid biological category for the claims made and that group differences in test scores reflect environmental and social factors.[^8][^9]

### The New Eugenics

A "liberal eugenics" reappeared in academic bioethics, framed as private parental choice rather than state coercion. The Oxford bioethicist [Julian Savulescu](/people/julian-savulescu/) argued in 2001 for "procreative beneficence," the claim that parents using in-vitro fertilization have a moral reason to select the embryo expected to have the best life, including for non-disease traits. Companies such as Genomic Prediction began offering polygenic-score screening of embryos for traits including predicted intelligence, and in 2018 the Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced the birth of the first gene-edited human babies, made with CRISPR, drawing global condemnation.[^10][^11]

### The TESCREAL Argument

The philosopher Émile P. Torres and the computer scientist Timnit Gebru argue that the bundle of ideologies they label [TESCREAL](/concepts/tescreal/), spanning transhumanism, [extropianism](/concepts/extropianism/), singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, [effective altruism](/concepts/effective-altruism/), and longtermism, descends from the same Anglo-American eugenics tradition and reproduces its logic of ranking and improving human cognitive capacity. They point to the recurrence of hereditarian and race-science claims among prominent figures in the movement, including the 1996 email in which [Nick Bostrom](/people/nick-bostrom/) asserted that black people are less intelligent than white people, and to the project, common across the bundle, of engineering a superior posthuman successor to current humanity.[^12][^13]

[^1]: Galton, Francis. *Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.* Macmillan, 1883, on the coinage of "eugenics"; and *Hereditary Genius* (1869).
[^2]: "Eugenics," *Encyclopaedia Britannica,* on the positive and negative programs, the sterilization laws, Buck v. Bell, the 1924 Immigration Act, and the Nazi program. https://www.britannica.com/science/eugenics-genetics
[^3]: "A History of Eugenics," the Galton Institute (formerly the British Eugenics Society), on Galton, the 1907 founding, and the postwar renaming. https://www.galtoninstitute.org.uk/
[^4]: *Buck v. Bell,* 274 U.S. 200 (1927), Holmes, J.; and "Three Generations, No Imbeciles," Paul A. Lombardo, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
[^5]: Black, Edwin. *War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race.* Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003, on the American model for the 1933 German sterilization law.
[^6]: Huxley, Julian. *New Bottles for New Wine.* Chatto and Windus, 1957, on "transhumanism"; and his presidency of the British Eugenics Society, 1959 to 1962.
[^7]: "Pioneer Fund," Southern Poverty Law Center, on the 1937 founding, the "race betterment" mission, and the funding of Jensen, Shockley, Lynn, and Rushton. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/pioneer-fund/
[^8]: Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. *The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.* Free Press, 1994, with the afterword acknowledging the Pioneer Fund-funded sources.
[^9]: "Bad Science Revisited: 'The Bell Curve' Turns 30," *Mad in America,* March 2024, on the scientific rejection of the hereditarian race-IQ thesis. https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/bad-science-bell-curve/
[^10]: Savulescu, Julian. "Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children." *Bioethics,* vol. 15, no. 5-6, 2001.
[^11]: "Chinese scientist who edited babies' genes jailed for three years," *The Guardian,* December 30, 2019, on He Jiankui and the 2018 CRISPR births. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/30/gene-editing-chinese-scientist-he-jiankui-jailed-three-years
[^12]: Gebru, Timnit, and Émile P. Torres. "The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence." *First Monday,* April 2024. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636
[^13]: "Prominent AI Philosopher and 'Father' of Longtermism Sent Very Racist Email to a 90s Philosophy Listserv," *Vice,* January 2023, on the Bostrom email. https://www.vice.com/en/article/prominent-ai-philosopher-and-father-of-longtermism-sent-very-racist-email-to-a-90s-philosophy-listserv/