John Fredrick Parker
Donor
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?
Racism did, in fact, exist in places beyond America.A succesful reconstuction might make racism a lot less popular
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.Racism did, in fact, exist in places beyond America.
Maybe make euthenics stronger - improve living conditions. (As per @Miguel Lanius' post.)
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?
We’re not even sure where some traits, like artistic ability or genius level intellegnce come from.