British scientists framed eugenics as applied genetics analogous to engineering

Evidence

Eugenics was pioneered simultaneously in several European countries; as in many other areas of modern intellect, English scholars vied for pride of place with their German colleagues. The Eugenics Education Society was founded in Britain in the nineteenth century (Galton established the highly successful journal Eugenics in 1883) and was given a tremendous boost by the panic caused by the poor physical and mental quality of army recruits discovered during the Boer war. British eugenists were not short of engineering ambitions. They posited in front of the educated public a truly breathtaking vista: … Would it not be possible to “breed out” certain grave hereditary ailments in the way that Mendelian geneticists had learned to breed “rustiness” out of wheat, and perhaps also to develop mental or physical faculties in men that were generally regarded as desirable?… Eugenics would then stand to genetics in rather the same relationship that engineering does to mathematics. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 404

Would it not be possible to “breed out” certain grave hereditary ailments in the way that Mendelian geneticists had learned to breed “rustiness” out of wheat, and perhaps also to develop mental or physical faculties in men that were generally regarded as desirable?… Eugenics would then stand to genetics in rather the same relationship that engineering does to mathematics. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 405

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The ‘engineering as applied mathematics’ framing parallels the tree-infrastructure framing of ‘Grafting & Growth’ — selective breeding as infrastructural design over living matter, and the Boer War army-recruit panic parallels how perceived national threats legitimize technocratic interventions.
• XREF: Directly exemplifies Bauman’s thesis that the Holocaust’s distinctiveness lay in the social-engineering/administrative-modernity mindset, connecting to the vault’s racial formation content.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 404; David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 405