The origins of the British eugenics movement have often been investigated with reference to social, political and economic questions. Eugenics has been seen as a pseudo-scientific explanation for social problems--a response to the perceived imperial and economic decline of Britain in the late nineteenth century--concealing a number of class, racial and other prejudices. But eugenics can also be understood as the product of a certain type of scientific philosophy, derived in part from a Newtonian model of explanation and from scientific discoveries and advances in evolutionary theory, genetics and statistics. This thesis suggests that the credibility of eugenics rested on an interpretation of these scientific findings guided by a concept of scientific explanation which denied the legitimacy of teleological and non-physicalist approaches to the explanation of social life.

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