Eugenics is another movement that has been used as an ideological blunderbuss. Francis Galton, a Victorian polymath, first suggested that the genetic stock of humankind could be improved by offering incentives for talented people to marry each other and have more children (positive eugenics), though when the idea caught on it was extended to discouraging reproduction among the “unfit” (negative eugenics).

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, New York, 2018, p. 399