This is a book about the science, or I should say the pseudo-science, or as the Apostle Paul stated it, the "science falsely so called," of eugenics. Eugenics was the "science" developed in the latter part of the nineteenth century by combining the concepts of evolution and of genetics and applying them to social policy. In short this was the program to steer the evolutionary course of the human race by applying the science of genetics to the development of the human race. Its object was to breed a better strain of humanity and weed out the unfit. It came to be implemented in the twentieth century at first in America and later in a more drastic form in Nazi Germany.

In America it led to forced sterilizations of the unfit (the poor, the weak, epileptics, the blind, and the mentally impaired, etc.), programs of birth control, and social quarantine in camps, that were all in violation of a person's most basic rights. It came to a full development in Germany in the 30's and 40's, where it was openly based on the American and British "science" of eugenics. The author documents that the ultimate ideological foundation for the worst horrors of Nazi Germany and the holocaust was in the ideology that was espoused by America's leading intellectuals, supported by its most prestigious foundations, and taught in its most respected universities. Eugenics was very much a made in America problem.

Tracing  the origins of this pseudo-science from Darwin and British thinkers, to its development and initial implementation in the United States, the author shocks us by what was done in this country in the name of eugenics less than one hundred years ago. He shocks us even more as the Nazis justified their worst crimes by quoting the respectable eugenicists that had preached these theories for decades in America. He shows the ultimate philosophical origins of the Nazi extermination camps to lie in the highest levels of the American establishment, including American academia.

And finally, he shows that, although the "science" of eugenics" became discredited after the Nazi crimes were exposed, and went into remission, its intellectual roots are intact and continue to pose an ever present threat to a future generation of Americans.

The eugenicists meant well. They had a happy vision of an improved humanity where genetic diseases were eliminated and society would be happier, healthier, and more prosperous. Their vision came to fruition in the worst horrors of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. As Solomon stated it nearly 3000 years ago, "The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel." Eugenics has historically proven to be a cruel "science", and its future revival, armed with a better technology, and supported by more intrusive governments, and without the restraint of a rapidly disappearing Christian world view, evokes the worst nightmares of "1984" and "Brave New World" combined.