Steven Selden wrote an excellent book published in 1999 entitled Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America. The books is about the eugenics movement specifically in relation to education policies and practices in the United States.

One of the things that Selden does particularly well, especially in the latter part of the book, is talk about the moral failings of eugenics and also why eugenics was bad science. The book highlights the eugenics movement’s many failings, including but not limited to failures to examine evidence, failure to control for critical variables, drawing false conclusions, development of deeply flawed experimental designs, inculcating an insular environment that uncritically affirmed its own “findings,” statistical misrepresentations and miscalculations, procession from false assumptions, and other ways in which the eugenics movement abandoned the scientific method.

Among the pernicious legacies of the eugenics movement is contribution to the “mad scientist” cultural meme that encourages suspicion of science because history includes examples of people who claimed scientific affiliation and also perpetrated grave ills on human beings, societies, and environments.

Thank you for your work on this subject, and I hope the talk goes well. In addition to examining fascinating content, I hope your presentation will help add a little bit to the rainfall of reason and critical thinking necessary to slowly erode the stone wall of anti-science rhetoric and sentiment.

Still learning,

Robert