As promised, I'll now try to add a little social perspective to last week's installment.
Eugenics is the study of human heredity and its application to the improvement of the human species through selective breeding, and by more advanced definitions, genetic engineering. Sir Francis Galton, drawing on the insight of his cousin Charles Darwin, coined the term and effectively established the field in 1865, thus inaugurating a social and political movement which persisted until the mid-20th century. Galton and Darwin were members of a "genetic cooperative" of elite British families whose members, like the members of many other elite families the world over, practiced exclusive interbreeding for reasons that are now understood to involve not only economic advantage, but eugenic principles as well. Indeed, Galton possessed genius-level intelligence and strongly emphasized the heritability of intelligence in his work.