In the mid-19th century a number of biological and social scientists came to believe that the genetic quality of the populations of the Western world was deteriorating due to the relaxation of natural selection, the process by which nature eliminates the unfit in each generation by reducing their fertility and by early death. Francis Galton, Darwin's young cousin, argued for consciously designed selection through which human societies would control and improve their own genetic quality. For this consciously designed selection, Galton in 1883 proposed the term eugenics. Almost a century later, William Schockley proposed the term dysgenics for the genetic deterioration that eugenics was designed to correct.