PRIMARY DOCUMENTATION of what people said is always preferable to going with secondary texts and even more so the tertiary and lesser texts that are largely based on anything but the primary documentation that comes directly from the sources of ideas and issues. I have not read Daniel Okrent's 2019 book allegedly dealing with eugenics because it was not close to primary documentation. I listened to his interview with Terri Gross and found it contained enormous distortions of the fact that Darwin, himself, in the first edition of On the Origin of Species not only inspired Francis Galton's eugenics, as Galton himself said he did but that Darwin almost immediately began to endorse Galton's developing eugenics starting with the letter he sent Galton when his wife read Galton's Hereditary Genius to the typically ailing Darwin (his son George had read it earlier and encouraged him to read it) and he continued to endorse it and the even more extreme eugenics of Ernst Haeckel as sound science in his second most important book on the topic of evolution, The Descent of Man. In the Descent of Man, Darwin began to claim that due to natural selection superior races of people would naturally wipe out "lesser races" and inhabit the land they had once lived in and that it was biologically disastrous to provide medical care and other aid to those he deemed inferior, not infrequently based on the totally artificial class differences within a group. Darwin's thinking was as proto-Nazi as the writings of Ernst Haeckel which he endorsed as good science and was certainly as eugenic as the thinking of Galton which he endorsed as science in his second most important book.
Okrent also lied when he claimed that eugenics is not science, it was taken as science BY EMINENT SCIENTISTS SUCH AS DARWIN, GALTON, HAECKEL ALL WERE from the start. The history of eugenics was and still is an idea held by professional scientists and claimed to be true based on Darwin's theory of natural selection, there isn't much else to base a scientific claim of eugenics on. Eugenics hardly left science with the exposure of the crimes of the Nazis, it may have kept its head down for a while but it was always there, even espressed by scientists such as Darwin's grandson, Charles Galton Darwin, reemerging publicly out of scientists in the 1970s and gaining influence and power as a political force since then. Virtually every neo-Darwinist that I'm aware of holds eugenic beliefs based on their belief in natural selection, you hardly ever find a strong holder of the belief in natural selection which is far removed from assertions of eugenics. Eugenics, not so called has been casually expressed among the lay public for the entire period, even during the all too brief eclipse after its consequences in Nazism were exposed.
Eugenics is alive, newly politically and legally influential, and still part of science today, science is whatever scientists say it is in the period in which they control science, eugenics started out as science, it continues as science, even as the scientific basis of it is not only flawed but a mistaken insertion of class-interest and ideology into science in language that makes it hardly noticeable to scientists that that's what it is, even as it cannot do the first thing that science requires, observe the actual evolution of species and what led to the divergence of species, never mind coming up with actual data that would be necessary to demonstrate that natural selection was the reason for that. It is bad science which, nevertheless, is the controlling ideology of biological science and a required belief in most of the respectable educated population. It can hardly be a shock that the bigotry against Muslims and Latin Americans which Okrent and Gross discussed has risen in ways that now leads to the the revival of antisemtism in the Republican-fascist right follows on the popularization of neo-eugenics as best exemplified in The Bell Curve by Herrenstein and Murray, as popularized in publications like The New Republic in the period of the racist Andrew Sullivan and the other noted racist, Marty Perez. That follows on the assertions of other social scientists like Arthur Jensen with the behind the scenes support of as eminent a scientist as the "Twentieth-Century Darwin" Francis Crick and others.
As I have demonstrated here, the anti-semitism that the Nazis put into their "final solution" and their earlier expression of it as the biological necessity of expelling "eastern Jews" not to mention Slavic people from Germany and where they asserted Germans had a right to replace other people, was being published as science by as eminent a Darwinist scientist as Karl Pearson, and that the Nazis quoted his paper in which he claimed to have demonstrated that scientifically.
As for Okrent having priority over me, hardly. I wrote the first posts I did on this subject in 2008 at Echidne of the Snakes and I always give credit for my sources. From what I've read and heard of him I doubt Okrent has looked much at the primary documentation. Having looked at the primary documentation, from the pre-Origin of Species period till the seemingly passing neo-Darwinist hegemony of the post-war period, I don't think natural selection is anything but that ideological insertion into science, I don't think it's even logically coherent. One of the things I find most remarkable is how people can assert that Darwin was opposed to the concept of Lamarckian inheritance when he was the author of a theory of Lamarckian inheritance and all of the first generation of Darwinists seems to have believed in it, as well. Haeckel certainly did, noting that Darwin and he agreed on the topic as documented by Francis Darwin, Darwin's son. I have never heard someone as philosophically astute - atypical of modern scientists - as the geneticist H. Allen Orr address that fact in light of his claim that unblending genetic inheritance is an absolute necessity for the claim of natural selection to work - especially in light of the scientific support of epigenetic inheritance in the last couple of decades, but I'd love to have an explanation as to how that can be true without it fatally damaging the fragile belief in natural selection already demoted by other non-adaptationist concepts such as genetic drift. But as a political blogger, that's not exactly central to my theme.
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