Charles Darwin, a biologist in the 1800s, established the foundation of one of the most well-developed fields of science today: evolutionary biology. Ironically, Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, coined the term eugenics in 1883. It was a year after Darwin passed away.
Eugenics is the "study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally." Galton proposed that different health problems and human characteristics were based on heredity, specifically race. As a result of these theories, many people were segregated based on their behavioral, physical, and racial characteristics.
This idea of scientific racism is often used to justify the superiority of white Europeans and their inferiority to others. The concept of eugenics spread to marginalize a wide variety of minorities and is, still to this day, cited to support xenophobic, antisemitic, and sexist beliefs. By the 1920s eugenics had become a global movement. Statisticians, economists, anthropologists, sociologists, social reformers, geneticists, public health officials, and members of the general public from Germany, the United States, Great Britain, Italy, Mexico, and Canada supported eugenics through a variety of popular literature.
One of the most severe applications of eugenics was in Nazi Germany during WWII. Nazi Germany believed in a single superior Aryan race. They "cleansed" Germany from those they deemed inferior and decimated the Jewish population. Their justification was based purely on eugenics.
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