AHC: Curb the Rise of Eugenics

With no PoDs prior to 1880, how can the rise of eugenics as a “respectable” science and basis for social policy, that OTL saw over roughly the next half century, he prevented or as diminished as possible?
 
Have Mendel's work be widely known earlier, so that genetics is more advanced at the time. Not sufficient, but a clearer understanding of stuff like alleles, recessive characters, mutations, and the role of "chance" would undercut part of the (now known to be bullshit) theories upon which eugenics of the time was based.
On the other side, you need the Superior Aryan Race (TM) be taught an object lesson in racial equality under the terms they could understand at the time, one clearer than Adowa and Tsushima. A more successful Japan earlier (hard to do; OTL in the period was quite the wank), or a successfully reforming China that then beats the Powers thoroughly, would, of course, raise the volume of the "Yellow Peril" screams, but in combination with other factors might make some Europeans rethink their assumptions about racial superiority.
 
Racism did, in fact, exist in places beyond America.
It also exists in all peoples and multi dimensional outside of just race. Racism is a subset of xenophobia. The idea that "me and mine are better than you and yours" has its roots in our very nature. The amount of mental resources nature has given man for the express purpose of keeping ourselves from melancholy reveals how psychologically frail we are. In other words, every tribe and clan, in that stage of humanity, would have failed without utmost faith in themselves bordering on arrogant entitlement.
 
Maybe earlier germ theory?

Here in Brazil, racism and eugenics fell out of fashion with the rise of the "Sanitarists", who believed the real problem wans't that the population was "racially degenerate", but that the population was full of sickness and parasites.

They did far more to help people than any eugenist ever did.

As a side effect, you can also eliminate a lot of racism.
 
I think its a bit hard to curb eugenics because, when you think about it, its just what we do to animals, but with humans instead. It does work with animals. Its such a simple concept, cavemen could understand it

I wonder how much of a bad rep it got because of association with racism. Maybe non-racist eugenics would have gotten more acceptance and today we would all be multi-racial peak human eugeno-babies? Weird food for thought.

Hmmm... if eugenics = racism, and eugenics = bad because racism = bad...

So another way of making eugenics be bad earlier, is making racism taboo earlier.
The collorary is that you would need the concept of eugenics to pop up earlier, because OF COURSE people can't think something is bad if the concept doesn't exist yet.

So, we need earlier eugenics.
Earlier Theory of Evolution?
How we can racism = bad earlier?
 
Leaving the morality aside for a moment, eugenics might be discredited because of how massively inefficient it is compared to selectively breeding non-human animals.

It could take decades for desirable traits to be become obvious due to the long gestation period and time to maturity, long beyond the lifespan of researchers. Not to mention, said traits may not even be inheritable in the first place, in which case you have wasted a lot of time.

Whereas you can create a new breed of dog or pigeon in a single human lifespan, using traits that you know are inheritable. Consider the Soviet experiment selectively breeding foxes to become more dog-like - it took only a few generations. The domestication of the wolf might have only taken a few human lifetimes at most, even without scientific understanding of selective breeding.
 
Leaving the morality aside for a moment, eugenics might be discredited because of how massively inefficient it is compared to selectively breeding non-human animals.

It could take decades for desirable traits to be become obvious due to the long gestation period and time to maturity, long beyond the lifespan of researchers. Not to mention, said traits may not even be inheritable in the first place, in which case you have wasted a lot of time.

Whereas you can create a new breed of dog or pigeon in a single human lifespan, using traits that you know are inheritable. Consider the Soviet experiment selectively breeding foxes to become more dog-like - it took only a few generations. The domestication of the wolf might have only taken a few human lifetimes at most, even without scientific understanding of selective breeding.

So, the solution to make Eugenics be practical is extending the human life-span? Could eugenics be practical if the average human lived 150 or 200 years?
 
So, the solution to make Eugenics be practical is extending the human life-span? Could eugenics be practical if the average human lived 150 or 200 years?

Not until you know (a) what traits are actually inheritable and (b) whether those traits actually have some significant downsides. By the time you do, genetically engineering the population would probably be more efficient anyway.
 
Top