cacogenics

Boas (1986: 111) brings forth examples from "cacogenics," the history of defective families: the families of alcoholics or criminals: heredity here is not the determining factor, an argument being the fact that "all complex activities are socially determined, not hereditary." Boas (1986: 114) then reproaches radical eugenicists also the fact that they treat the question of procreation from a purely rationalistic point of view: they state that the ideal of human evolution coincides with the "complete rationalization of human life." But he shows that from the study of mankind's customs and traditions we conclude that such an ideal is out of reach: the emotions constellated around the act of procreation are the most deeply enrooted and impossible to annihilate.

Davenport, The Nam Family: A Study in Cacogenics (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: Eugenics Record Office, 1912); A.H.

Surely we have come a long way from the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when "eugenics" (the movement devoted to improving the human species through the control of hereditary factors relating to the bearing of healthy children) was fueled by pseudoscientific claims that the human race consisted of 'two classes' the eugenic and the cacogenic (or poorly born).