How Eugenics Shaped Statistics

A century ago Europeans took it for granted that some races—most notably the white race—were inherently superior to others. After 1945 such views increasingly became anathema. Racism was seen not only as morally abysmal but also as scientifically bankrupt. Life scientists, and in particular geneticists, have produced very strong scientific evidence

Moreover, Civic Biology was a monstrously racist text, which ranked humanity in five categories of evolutionary development (with blacks at the bottom and whites at the top), advocated eugenic cleansing of the race, denounced intermarriage and the perpetuation of ‘degenerate’ stock and suggested ‘humane’ steps for the elimination of social ‘parasit

Le racisme traditionnel s’enracinait solidement dans des théories biologiques. Dans les années 1890 ou 1930, il était largement admis en Grande-Bretagne, en Australie ou aux États-Unis que certains traits biologiques héréditaires rendaient les Africains ou les Chinois naturellement moins intelligents, moins entreprenants et moins moraux que les Eur

a judgmental science that categorized and ranked some humans as biologically better than others.

Eliminating disability, particularly congenital disability, was part of the “war against the

phrenology not only ‘introduced the “average” to the masses, no matter how little factual basis it had. It provided, both in the United States and in the United Kingdom, a new way for white middle-class men and women to position themselves in an imagined statistical collective’.