In 1883, one year after Charles Darwin’s death, Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton published a provocative book—Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development—in which he laid out a strategic plan for the improvement of the human race. Galton’s idea was simple: he would mimic the mechanism of natural selection. If nature could achieve such remarkable effects on animal populations through survival and selection, Galton imagined accelerating the process of refining humans via human intervention. The selective breeding of the strongest, smartest, “fittest” humans—unnatural selection—Galton
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