The embarrassingly strong belief that human behavior is solely determined by genetic structures (more of that good ol' faith in science).

This English idea was coined in 1883 by Sir John Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin and an early pioneer of statistics, as he attempted to understand the 'genius' that ran through his family.

In the states, Charles Davenport, Galton's disciple, contributed to our interest in eugenics. Later develpoments in the U.S. drew conclusions that some immigants (Jewish, Hungarian, Polish, Italian, and Russian) were 'defective' and 'feebleminded' and influenced the passage of The Johnson Act in 1924 which restricted annual immigratioin from any region to 2 percent of the number of residents from that region already living in the states.

The worst example of eugenics was of couse in Germany during WW2 as they belived some humans were "useless eaters" or "lives not worth living".

Eugenics influenced the development of psychometrics, the psychological theroy of mental measurement, which was used in developing standardized IQ tests.

See also the Pioneer Fund and the Human Genome Project