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Question2: Explain the basic assumptions of the eugenics movement?

Eugenics the science of improving the human race by scientific control of breeding was viewed by a large segment of scientists for almost one hundred years as an important, if not a major means of producing paradise on earth. These scientists concluded that many human traits were genetic, and that persons who came from genetically 'good families' tended to turn out far better than those who came from poor families. The next step was to encourage the good families to have more children, and the poor families to have few or no children. Eugenics arose out of the Darwinian theory of evolution and attempted to apply that theory to mankind eugenics, involved the application or misapplication to man of the discoveries in genetics that were then transforming scientific understanding of living organisms and the ways that evolution operated.

The reason that the eugenics movement caught on so rapidly was because of the failures of the many innovative reformatory, other programmes designed to help the poor, the criminal, and people with mental and physical problems.

From these simple observations developed one of the most far-reaching movements, which culminated in the loss of millions of lives. It discouraged aiding the sick, building asylums for the insane, or even aiding the poor and all those who were believed to be in some way 'genetically inferior', which included persons afflicted with an extremely wide variety of unrelated physical and even psychological maladies. Their end goal was to save society from the 'evolutionary inferior'. The means was sexual sterilization, permanent custody of 'defective' adults by the state, marriage restrictions, and even the elimination of the unfit through means which ranged from refusal to help them to outright killing. This movement probably had a greater adverse influence upon society than virtually any other that developed from a scientific theory in modern times....