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/* Social Darwinism */ improved
Intellectuals began expanding the "survival of the fittest" theory of evolution to social issues, and advocated that the "unfit" should be eliminated from mankind just as Darwin claimed they were naturally eliminated from the animal world. This led to the "eugenics" movement, which taught that those with the highest IQ or other advantageous traits should be favored, and those with low IQ or undesirable traits should be prevented from having children, or even eliminated themselves. These ideas became very popular in England and Germany.
In the United States, the eugenics movement and social Darwinism found its biggest following at universities like Harvard, which were had already been drifting away from their Christian roots. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who served on the High Court for over 30 years, studied at Harvard and became a big believer in Darwinism. He Previously he had fought against slavery in the Civil War, but then he abandoned his youthful morality and instead embraced the Darwinian utilitarianism, including eugenics. Justices Holmes thereby moved away from morality and logic, and towards his own view of the teachings of "experience". "The life of the law has not been logic, but experience," he famously said.
The State of Virginia implemented eugenics by forcibly sterilized sterilizing a women woman without her knowledge or consent, rendering her incapable of having children, because she supposedly had a low IQ (actually, historians now say it was not very low by today's standards). A lawyer sued on her behalf, and the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Holmes wrote the decision, in which he declared, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." ''Buck v. Bell'', 274 U.S. 200 (1927). Every other Justice, except one, agreed with this horrific decision. Even today Justice Holmes is treated like a saint in atheistic law schools.
One person who stood up to the eugenics movement and the teaching of Darwinism in schools was William Jennings Bryan. The conflict reached its peak at the Scopes Trial in 1925, also known as the Monkey Trial.
