Other ancient civilizations, such as Rome and Sparta, practiced infanticide as a form of phenotypic selection. In Sparta, newborns were inspected by the city's elders, who decided the fate of the infant. If the child
was deemed incapable of living, it was usually thrown from the Taygetus mountain. It was more common for girls than boys to be killed this way. Trials for babies which included bathing them in wine and exposing them to the elements. To Sparta, this would ensure only the strongest survived and procreated. Adolf Hitler considered Sparta to be the first "Völkisch State" and much like Ernst Haeckel before him, praised Sparta due to its primitive form of eugenics practice of selective infanticide policy which was applied on deformed children. The 12
Tables of Roman Law, established early in the formation of the Roman Republic, stated in the fourth table that deformed children would be put to death. In addition, patriarchs in Roman society were given the right to "discard" infants at their discretion. This was often done by drowning undesired newborns in the Tiber River. Sir Francis Galton initially developed the ideas of eugenics using social statistics. Sir Francis Galton systematized these ideas and practices according to new knowledge about the evolution of man and animals provided by the theory of his cousin Charles Darwin during the sands. After reading Darwin's
Origin of Species, Galton built upon Darwin's ideas whereby the mechanisms of natural selection were potentially thwarted by human civilization. He reasoned that, since many human societies sought to protect the underprivileged and weak, those societies were at odds with the natural selection responsible for extinction of the weakest and only by changing these social policies could society be saved from a "reversion towards mediocrity" a phrase he first coined in statistics and which later changed to the now common "regression towards the mean" -- Reference Wikipedia.org back to 196)
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