Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics

by Adam Rutherford

Biology and society are inseparable. Our biology is enacted in society. This is an obvious thing to say, but I think it’s often overlooked. Society emerges from our biology, and from the interactions between these evolved bodies that we inhabit. We often deploy the clumsy ideas of nature and nurture to describe what is innate in us, and what is extrinsic. What this really means is: genetics (that is, what is encoded in DNA), and everything else in the universe. Your genome is a script, etched into the kernel at the centre of your cells, but the film of your life is played out in the countless forces that determine how that script is performed. Nature was never versus nurture; it is and always was via.

We routinely screen pregnancies for conditions such as Down syndrome, and offer women the choice of terminating that pregnancy. In Denmark, access to early screening for Down syndrome is available to all women regardless of age, and around 95 per cent of women opt for an abortion if the syndrome can be detected in the unborn foetus. In 2019, only eighteen people with Down syndrome were born in a population of 5.8 million, compared to around 750 in the UK, and 6000 in the US. Are these techniques eugenics? I don’t believe that they are, though both eugenics and these reproductive technologies share history and scientific ancestry.

To blindly commemorate people with significant legacies is itself the erasure of history, as those tributes offer no context or analysis of their work.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century researchers reported that the killing of deformed or premature babies was common among aboriginal Australians, as well as twins, which, according to the anthropologists studying them, were believed to have been fathered by two men.

BS

This is bs and should be reported as such

very human trait of free will out of the equation, and dial up the biological imperatives of mate choice, the mechanics of sexual selection reveal themselves. The world of sex is directed by females producing a few large immobile eggs, and males generating a multitude of tiny but motile sperm. Couple that with a spectrum of parental care, mostly (though not without exception) an investment paid in majority by females over males. With these principles, many of which were described by Charles Darwin, and developed by the evolutionary biologist Ronald Fisher – from whom we will be hearing much more in the forthcoming pages – one of the cornerstones of evolution is planted in the ground.

The metrics he applies, in an era before IQ tests for cognitive abilities, are deeply questionable and reveal the inherent prejudice of men of power: they include the results achieved in university exams, and rest upon the pre-eminence of Oxford and Cambridge universities, as well as the major public schools.

IQ, for the record, is a perfectly valid test for measuring cognitive ability. It has been studied extensively for more than a century, and we have colossal data which is consistent and has predictive power for life outcomes, including educational level, longevity and professional success. Like all metrics that provide a single number as a measure for a complex set of traits, it is not absolute and is not without flaws. The oft-heard complaints about IQ include that it only measures how good you are at IQ tests, that it is culturally specific and therefore inherently biased. These are true and known by all psychologists. But these valid criticisms do not invalidate IQ as a useful scientific tool. Of course, the deployment of IQ testing as a useful and absolute metric that would determine who gets to remain free and fertile was abhorrent. There is an ongoing controversy today about the validity of IQ in psychological research and genetics, and with sound reason; these spurious actions of early eugenicists may well be the source of the animosity.

Sigh

eugenically purified, because they are invented. Tribes and lineages and families have cultural and social importance to many – today the commercial ancestry market is worth billions and relies on a weak supposition that the composition of your DNA will reveal the identities of your forebears in time and space. At best it’s a fudge, a spell to bewitch your romantic and sentimental urges – to belong to a tribe of Vikings, Anglo-Saxons or other noble warriors. But really it’s just wafty bullshit. What modern genetics has shown unequivocally is that while there are differences between people around the world, which manifest broadly as reflections of geographical clusters, the real story of humankind is one of continuous mixing, constant migration and shared ancestry.

Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany at the end of January 1933. Among his first acts was the passing of eugenics legislation. The ‘Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases’ drew directly and heavily on the sterilisation legal models written by Harry Laughlin, the zealot deputy of Charles Davenport at the ERO at Cold Spring Harbor. By this stage, the US had passed eugenics laws in eighteen states, so they were ahead of the game, and an inspiration to the German eugenicists. Laughlin was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1936.

It’s a stupid message and makes no sense scientifically. Dogs don’t want hares to not exist. They just want to eat them. Birds do not impose a cost upon the lives of cats. Cats just want to eat them. But the muddled intention of the film as propaganda is clear: nature purges the weak, and so must we.

Too often, the argument that the past was a foreign country where people did things differently, and that they were simply acting appropriately for that era, is deployed to end or avoid discussion and debates, or to reinforce a cultural history which serves only to make the powerful feel comfortable.

It is a flawed system, but we understand how it’s flawed, and it’s the best we have. IQ is a reflection of current abilities, and can change during life, including if you practise doing IQ tests. It is not immutable, nor is it absolute. It is a single metric for a complex range of abilities, but so is a driving licence, or a university degree classification. Like all behaviours, IQ is heritable. We are not blank slates for any of our behaviours, and intelligence is most certainly not exempt from that rule. One of the strengths of IQ as a metric is that it has been tested so many times over the last hundred years that we have masses of data on it, and when it comes to heritability, what we find is that about half of the variation we see in a population is down to genetic differences between people. That is not the same as saying that intelligence is half genetic and half environmental; it is that in any given population, there will be a range between the top scorers and the bottom, and we can sensibly attribute half of that difference to DNA. This is scientifically uncontroversial.

Furthermore (and this is really getting buried in the haystack of human genetics), although we have sequenced millions of people’s genomes, they do not represent a complete read. Instead, we look at the bits that are important and the variations that are common. These common variants are useful because they are informative when looking across populations. So, when we account for the influence of genetics for a trait in your sample, you’re almost certainly only looking at the common variants, the ones we know many people have.

Nowhere in the conversations we have about improvement or betterment of society do we focus on traits such as compassion or kindness. Why not? Because eugenics and the policies surrounding it are issued only by the powerful to maintain control.