Human Perfection and Contemporary Enhancement Technologies

Background

The last third of the 19th century was characterized by the extension of eugenics thinking in the scientific, political, and social fields of the Victorian United Kingdom. It was the British anthropologist and geographer Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, who in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (Galton, 1907) proposed “eugenics” as the only science capable of achieving the desired enhancement of human abilities.¹ Following this ideology, several countries around the world—especially Great Britain, the United States, and Germany—began in the first half of the 20th century a chain of negative eugenic policies based on segregation, racism, and the sterilization of immigrants or disabled people with the fundamental objective of preventing the racial degeneration of their people.