and, i'll reiterate the basic point: the inheritance of personality was, at best, ever a speculative hypothesis. it was never upheld by any actual science.

if you care to look at the actual record, rather than be manipulated by dishonest religious and conservative groups, what you will find is that, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the actual scientific consensus was caution. the period between mendel and watson/crick was one where biology was reaching towards but ultimately grappling with something that it didn't fully understand. mayr's modern evolutionary synthesis came quite a bit later, and still has some unresolved problems around the species concept and the role of selection v the role of drift, so we're still not entirely there yet. and, the recent change in attitudes around the heritability of homosexuality is instructive in getting to the point - a popular consensus, even amongst working scientists, is not science itself. you have to actually do the research.

the politicians were saying one thing, it is true - often with the support of the church and often broadcast over mainstream media. there was a developing popular consensus around the inheritance of personality, precisely because it upheld the existing protestant religious doctrines. further, a specific interpretation of social darwinism was used to justify a specific concept of competition within capitalism. let us not forget that classical liberal economics predates natural selection, and that the influence flowed from the field of economics into the field of biology, and not the other way around.

but, what the scientists were saying the whole time was "hold your horses. let's back this up. these hypotheses are interesting, and may be right, in the end. but, we need to do the actual research, first. we can't jump to these conclusions like this. and, we don't have the data to draw the inferences you're drawing."

it turns out, in the end, that what we've learned by actually studying dna at a molecular level is that genetics code for proteins, which in turn code for your body chemistry. so, your dna defines the chemistry in your body, including how it produces and reacts to hormones, which have some effect on your behaviour. but, dna does not do things like create ancestral memories or control for behaviours, and we are not genetically predetermined in the way that the calvinists and other protestant groups believed we were. these things are determined primarily by the environment, and at least provide for the illusion of free will.

what that means is that these hypotheses were mostly wrong, and you can't abort the reprobates, after all.