Cacogenics

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The branch of study concerned with the factors that lead to the deterioration of the hereditary quality of a human population over generations
2. The science investigating how conditions can cause a people or species to decline in genetic fitness across successive generations
3. A field of inquiry into the causes that degrade the inherited traits of a human population, often associated with eugenic thinking

Etymology: Cacogenics is the study of how to make a population worse, the mirror image of eugenics. The word is built from Greek "kakos", meaning bad, and "genos", meaning birth or race, the same root that gives English "genetic" and "genus". Its coinage belongs to the same family of ideas that produced eugenics, in which the aim of improving human stock was turned around to describe deliberately lowering it. The term is formed from the adjective "cacogenic", which describes something that produces or tends toward poor offspring or poor heredity, combined with the suffix "-ics", used in English for fields of study such as "genetics" and "eugenics". So the noun names a body of knowledge or a practice, not a single act. Its use is rare and almost entirely confined to discussions of eugenics and its history.

Synonyms: dysgenics

Antonyms: eugenics