Bibliographic record
Abstract
Remembering Buck v. Bell THREE GENERATIONS OF IMBECILES ARE ENOUGH. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes AT THE END of nineteenth century, as Charles Darwin's theories of evolution were making their way to all levels of society, scientists and general public began to consider how selective breeding could improve a species's chance of survival. The theories were applied to human species as well. A number of selective breeding enthusiasts asked: to eliminate undesirable characteristics in humans, should some people be considered so defective or inferior that they should not be allowed to reproduce? Out of this climate eugenics movement grew. First coined by Sir Francis Galton, term is derived from Greek word meaning well-born or good in birth. Galton, a cousin of Darwin, incorporated Darwinian idea of survival of fittest into his notion of eugenics. The goal of eugenics was improvement of human species through careful selection of parents. Galton identified two primary processes to achieve this end. Positive eugenics encouraged individuals who were above average both mentally and physically to produce more offspring. Negative eugenics proposed that individuals who were below average should have fewer or no children. This second proposal could be achieved through institutional segregation, marriage restrictions, or sterilization. Who were early eugenicists? Some scholars believe that they were well intentioned and progressive, concerned with bettering humanity.(1) After all, this was Progressive Era, a time of hope and reform. Gerald Grob points out that eugenics advocates were persuaded that they were acting on behalf of a noble cause that would benefit humanity. They believed that medical and scientific knowledge, combined with a new technology, had reached a point in time in which eradication of inherited defects was possible.(2) Despite these idealistic beginnings, eugenics movement had devastating--and in some cases lasting--world-wide effects. The most obvious and extreme example is use of eugenics in Nazi Germany. Other, perhaps less known, practices include those in Great Britain, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Austria, Brazil, Japan, Canada, and China. The movement had substantial support in United States as well, from citizen and charity groups, politicians, physicians, scientists, and mental health professionals. Proposed policies ranged from segregation laws to marriage prohibitions to immigration restrictions to sterilization, culminating in Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell. The upcoming seventy-fifth anniversary of this momentous legal case presents an occasion to introduce students to history of eugenics, its practice in United States and throughout world, and its lasting legacy. Although topic is tempting to ignore, instructors should welcome opportunity to familiarize students with a movement that reminds us that our quest for improvement can never be divorced from ethical questions underlying those ideals. Eugenics in United States The U.S. eugenics movement was most active between 1870s and World War I. In addition to Darwin's and Galton's influences, movement benefited from 1877 publication of Richard Dugdale's study examining criminality, insanity, and poverty of a family nicknamed the Jukes. While interviewing prisoners during an inspection of a jail, Dugdale realized that six prisoners were related. He eventually tracked down 709 relatives who were related, either by marriage or by blood, through five generations. Although Dugdale's study stressed that Jukes's misfortune could be blamed as much on environmental factors as on heredity, it facilitated inaccurate beliefs that behaviors are genetically inherited. Many people concluded that crime, poverty, and disease were both innate and closely associated with sexual promiscuity, mental illness, and idiocy. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".