Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 55[and] retrogressive’ precisely because of the neo-Lamarckian belief thatbiological traits and social improvements could quickly be passed fromgeneration to generation. In practical terms, this belief found widerexpression in the eugenics movement (eugenics means the science of ‘racialimprovement’).The popularity of eugenic thinking and practice in Europeand North America in the early twentieth century no doubt gave succourto the likes of Semple (Box 2.1). Aside from its contradictions, environmentaldeterminism was blatantly racist and imperialist at times. It rankedsocieties worldwide on a scale of development that equated ‘uncivilised’societies with ‘harsh environments’, and it implied (illogically) that mostCaucasians had somehow escaped the determining force of their ownenvironments in a virtuous cycle of biological and social evolution.Box 2.1 THE EUGENICS MOVEMENTNarrowly conceived, eugenics is the theory and practice ofhuman biological ‘improvement’. More broadly, it is the belief thatthere are certain ‘imperfections’, ‘problems’ or ‘flaws’ – mental andphysical – that should be engineered out of existence for the greatergood of society. Such ‘engineering’, these days, can in principlebe achieved at the genetic level. In the past, though, it was morelikely to be achieved by controlling which individuals and groupscould procreate (through sterilisation programmes for instance).Eugenics became popular in the early twentieth century in bothWestern Europe and North America. It arose in the wider contextof social Darwinism and was coincident with the discoveryof ‘rules of heredity’ in both plant and animal breeding andhybridisation. At its worst, eugenics was racist, ethnically elitistand socially exclusionary. For instance, by the 1920s, many Westerngovernments had introduced sterilisation policies in order toprevent people suffering physical deformities, mental retardation,epilepsy, schizophrenia and other chronic illnesses from havingchildren. The idea was that a national population could ‘iron out’these biological flaws over time. In Nazi Germany eugenics became