Eugenicists treated heredity as malleable through lived experience, not just fixed genes

Evidence

Heredity, the focus of eugenics programs, was not always deemed immutable, but also impressible, Schuller argues, that is to say, it could be transformed, reshaped, and refashioned through experiences. — Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar, “They Love Death as We Love Life”, 563

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Reframes eugenics away from the gene-as-destiny story, pointing to impressibility/social environment as a mechanism of governance — worth sitting with.
• QUESTION: What did ‘impressibility’ mean technically in early 20th-c. sciences, and how does it map onto today’s epigenetics-inflected racial discourse?