1877: Study of the Juke family released in the U.S.
The early eugenics movement seized onto Richard Dugdale’s 1877 study of a family of social "misfits," the Jukes, whose history he traced for seven generations to a single couple in upstate New York. Though Dugdale actually recognised that much of the Jukes’ behaviour was due more to adverse social conditions than to inherited traits, his conclusions were ignored and the Jukes family name was long synonymous with biologically based criminal behaviour, and used as an excuse to sterilise or incarcerate countless unfortunates. Today however, the Jukes Study has become a textbook example of biased, incompetent science.
