Abstract
The famous words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case-"three generations of imbeciles are enough"-expressed the Supreme Court's upholding of a Virginia law, thereby signaling the general acceptability of eugenic involuntary-sterilization laws. Committed to the view that variations in human faculties and abilities were the consequence of variations in heredity, Galton envisioned eugenics as "the self-direction of evolution", the means by which the human race could harness the randomness and waste of the natural-selection process and turn its genetic mechanisms in the direction of consciously chosen and ennobling goals.