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The publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 challenged humanity's notion of divine creation and separation from the animal world by claiming that human beings are animals with an evolutionary link to all life on earth. For many people, this linkage to the animal world provided a scientific explanation for humanity's "immorality." Human beings could no longer consider immoral traits to represent punishment from God or temptation from the Devil. Instead, Darwin provided a natural explanation that these traits were our evolutionary inheritance. Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, took this explanation further and concluded that most of society's ills, such as a propensity for violence and promiscuity, resulted from inherited animalistic behaviors. As natural rather than divinely-given traits, they should be correctable in future generations. In 1883, Galton proposed a system of selective breeding for human beings, which he termed "eugenics," that he believed could eradicate our bestial inheritance and ameliorate the social problems it created.
While Galton's ideas have consistently appealed to scientists and social reformers over the last 120 years, eugenics has been hindered by a lack of knowledge about our heritable material and a limited technological capacity for manipulating human heredity.1 However, developments in genomics, genetic engineering, and reproductive biology in the 1980s and 1990s have placed the eugenic goal of correcting and perfecting the human genome within our reach. As the technology develops further, many contemporary scientists and social commentators are now beginning to publicly champion eugenics as a legitimate social and scientific pursuit. In his influential book, Redesigning Humans, for example, Gregory Stock comes to the technologically deterministic conclusion that for genomic enhancement, "The question is no longer whether we will manipulate embryos, but when, where, and how."2 It is clear that, while the term "eugenics" may conjure up images as radically different as "better baby contests" and nazi plans for a "master race," scholars such as Stock have moved eugenics as a desirable scientific and social goal from the edges back into the mainstream.
Not surprisingly, the recent social and scientific resurrection of eugenics has been accompanied by a spate of science fiction films addressing the ethical issues and ideological underpinnings of a eugenics movement based on emerging genomic enhancement technologies.3 However, as I will show in this...