We are living in a new Age of Eugenics. Yet, as we mark Darwin Day—a celebration of science and discovery—it is crucial to remember that Charles Darwin’s legacy was about understanding nature, not manipulating it to justify inequality. Time and again, however, his ideas have been twisted to serve ideological agendas, often with devastating consequences.1
This distortion is evident in today’s political rhetoric. On October 7, 2024, President Donald Trump sat down with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt and falsely claimed that 13,000 immigrants had entered the country unchecked, all of them murderers. “Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” he asserted. “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”2
This was not an isolated remark. In December 2023, during a campaign stop in New Hampshire, Trump warned that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”3 These words echo a long history of biological determinism, the same ideology that fueled past eugenics movements.
The consequences of this rhetoric have been deadly. Great Replacement Theory, a conspiracy claiming an intentional effort to diminish white political and cultural dominance, has inspired multiple terrorist attacks on immigrant communities. The gunman behind the May, 2022, Buffalo, New York shooting explicitly cited genetics research to justify his actions, illustrating how pseudoscientific ideas about heredity continue to fuel extremist violence.4
This ideological thread extends beyond immigration policy into broader attempts to shape the nation’s population. In August 2019, the Trump Administration revived the “public charge” doctrine—a series of laws first passed between 1882 and 1917 to bar immigrants with disabilities.5 Enacted at the height of the American eugenics movement, these laws reflected the belief that society should exclude those deemed genetically unfit.
Yet, while one arm of this ideology seeks to remove or exclude groups believed to have “bad genes,” another promotes expanding the population of “desirable” groups. The modern pro-natalist movement, advocating increased birth rates among certain demographics, has gained traction among figures like Vice President J.D. Vance, “special government employee” Elon Musk, Trump advisor Peter Thiel, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.6 While not all pro-natalist advocates explicitly endorse racial or nationalist agendas, the fact that the movement’s most visible champions are overwhelmingly white is surely more than coincidence.
This ideology is already shaping federal policy. On January 30, 2025, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy—himself a father of nine—issued a Department of Transportation (DOT) memo prioritizing communities with higher birth and marriage rates:
To the maximum extent permitted by law, DOT-supported or -assisted programs and activities, including without limitation, all DOT grants, loans, contracts, and DOT-supported or -assisted State contracts, shall prioritize projects and goals that … mitigate the unique impacts of DOT programs, policies, and activities on families and family-specific difficulties, such as the accessibility of transportation to families with young children, and give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.7
Duffy’s policy shifts transportation funds toward lower-density, family-friendly areas, increasing highway funding at the expense of public transit, and disproportionately benefiting white, rural communities where Trump voters and pro-natalists overlap.
Darwin’s True Legacy: Cooperation Over Eugenics
The resurgence of eugenic thinking today is particularly striking given that Charles Darwin opposed the principles now used to justify exclusion and population control. His ideas have long been misinterpreted, manipulated, and weaponized. Yet, Darwin himself argued that human evolution was based on what is now known as prosocial behavior: cooperation, moral progress, and the expansion of human sympathy—not genetic purity or social engineering.9
Darwin first introduced the idea of hierarchies of selection in On the Origin of Species to explain biological altruism in the eusocial Hymenoptera—insects like ants, bees, and wasps. His theory of natural selection held that all traits—whether physical or behavioral—evolved through gradual modifications passed down over generations. He famously wrote: “Natural selection will never produce in a being anything injurious to itself, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each.”10
This presented a “special difficulty” in eusocial Hymenoptera given that some individuals sacrificed themselves for the group (e.g., bees dying after stinging), and most gave up reproduction entirely. Darwin’s solution was “community selection,” now known as group or multilevel selection—in which some traits benefit the individual, while others persist because they benefit the family or group. Even when individual survival was compromised, a trait could persist if it helped the group thrive.
For example, a bee’s sting, though fatal, benefited the colony. If more bees survived because of this defense mechanism than died, the trait persisted. In eusocial species, where only queens reproduce, sterile workers could still carry traits that seemed “injurious to itself” because the queen’s reproductive success ultimately determined whether those traits survived. As Darwin explained: “[W]e can perhaps understand how it is that the use of the sting should so often cause the insect’s own death: for if on the whole the power of stinging be useful to the community, it will fulfill all the requirements of natural selection, though it may cause the death of some few members.”11
Darwin applied group selection not only to biological altruism but also to the origin of human sympathy. He reasoned that the “ape-like progenitors of man” would have developed instinctive sympathy like other social species: “[They] would have felt uneasy when separated from their comrades… would have warned each other of danger, and have given mutual aid in attack or defence.”12
Natural selection, he argued, could act indirectly in social animals by preserving traits that benefited the group rather than the individual. Sympathy, he believed, increased because: "Those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring."13
However, Darwin also recognized that instinctive sympathy was initially in-group focused. When early human tribes competed, those whose members were most cooperative and self-sacrificing would have “been victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.”14 Over time, however, that sympathy would have expanded beyond tribal boundaries. As small tribes united into larger communities, individuals extended their instinctive compassion to broader groups: “This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.”15
Darwin’s Rejection of Eugenics
Darwin’s vision of moral progress directly opposed the logic of eugenics. He believed that, just as sympathy expanded to different races and nations, it would also extend to the weakest members of society—the disabled, the sick, and the poor. He acknowledged that the logic of eugenics, as advocated by his contemporary Francis Galton, sounded superficially appealing and that assisting the weak might, in theory, contradict natural selection, stating that “hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”
But Darwin immediately rejected applying this logic to humans, emphasizing that we could not abandon our compassion without losing what was most essential in ourselves and which had allowed our species to thrive. “Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.”16
Ultimately, it was the power of sympathy, in which we put ourselves in the position of the sufferer, that made us human.
As we reflect on Darwin’s legacy, it is critical to remember what he actually believed. His work does not justify eugenics, exclusion, or racial hierarchy. Instead, he saw compassion, prosocial behavior, and moral progress as the true markers of human evolution. If history has taught us anything, it is that when societies embrace eugenic thinking, they betray the very progress that Darwin so deeply believed in.
References:
[1] Johnson, E. M. (2021, April 12). Ronald Fisher is not being 'cancelled', but his eugenic advocacy should have consequences. This View of Life. https://www.prosocial.world/posts/ronald-fisher-is-not-being-cancelled-but-his-eugenic-advocacy-should-have-consequence; For more on this topic see the TVOL series "Truth and Reconciliation for Social Darwinism."
[2] Trump, D. J. (2024, October 7). Former President Trump on the anniversary of the 10/7 massacre in Israel. The Hugh Hewitt Show. https://hughhewitt.com/former-president-trump-on-the-anniversary-of-the-10-7-massacre-in-israel
[3] Layne, N. (2023, December 16). Trump repeats 'poisoning the blood' anti-immigrant remark. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-repeats-poisoning-blood-anti-immigrant-remark-2023-12-16/
[4] Molteni, M. (2022, May 23). Buffalo shooting ignites debate among genetics researchers over links to white supremacist ideology. STAT News. https://www.statnews.com/2022/05/23/buffalo-shooting-ignites-debate-genetics-researchers-in-white-supremacist-ideology/
[5] Bagenstos, S. R. (2021). The new eugenics. Syracuse Law Review, 71(3), 751–763. https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles/2690/; Weber, M. C. (2004). Opening the golden door: Disability and the law of immigration. Journal of Gender, Race & Justice, 8, 153. https://via.library.depaul.edu/lawfacpubs/242/
[6] Valle, G. (2024, April 28). The far right's campaign to explode the population. Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/28/natalism-conference-austin-00150338; Branigin, A. (2025, Feb. 1). The couple who want to make America procreate again. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/of-interest/2025/02/01/malcolm-and-simone-collins-pronatalism/; Del Talbot, M. (2023, April 28). J.D. Vance and the right's call to have more babies. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/j-d-vance-and-the-rights-call-to-have-more-babies
[7] Duffy, S. (2025). Ensuring reliance upon sound economic analysis in Department of Transportation policies, programs, and activities (Government Memo). U.S. Department of Transportation. https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-01/Signed%20DOT%20Order%20re_Ensuring%20Reliance%20Upon%20Sound%20Economic%20Analysis%20in%20 Department%20of%20Transportation%20Policies%20%20Programs%20and%20Activities.pdf
[8] Wilcox, B. (2025, February 6). Secretary Duffy’s bold move to boost marriage and births. Institute for Family Studies. https://ifstudies.org/blog/secretary-duffys-bold-move-to-boost-marriage-and-births
[9] For more on this, see Chapter 5 of my dissertation. Johnson, E. M. (2019). The struggle for coexistence: Peter Kropotkin and the social ecology of science in Russia, Europe, and England, 1859-1922 (T). University of British Columbia. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0378937 (download pdf here)
[10] Darwin, Charles (1859). On the Origin of Species, 1st Edition (London: John Murray), p. 201. The quote would change slightly in the sixth, and final, edition in 1872 to read “Natural selection will never produce in a being any structure more injurious than beneficial to that being, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each.” (pp. 162-3).
[11] Darwin, On the Origin of Species, p. 242.
[12] Darwin, Charles (1871). The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Vol. 1 (John Murray, London), pp. 161-2.
[13] Darwin, The Descent of Man, p. 82.
[14] Darwin, The Descent of Man, p. 166.
[15] Darwin, The Descent of Man, pp. 100-1.
[16] Darwin, The Descent of Man, p. 168.
Header Image: American marriage counselor and eugenicist, Paul Popenoe, shows a couple a pedigree of "Black People of Artistic Ability," 1930. Credit: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
