Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics

by Adam Rutherford

However, all science is political.

We are bound by the trappings of our fleshy hardware, and evolved to push against them. This is the human condition.

People are not born equal. They are conceived already cuffed to forces beyond their control that will shape their lives, limit their opportunities and keep their ability to fulfill those unalienable rights beyond their grasp. Class, race, wealth, nationhood, biology and randomness are all confounders to the principles of equality. You were not born free of these forces.

If the actions of our forebears only make you feel proud, and don’t sometimes baffle, upset or anger you, then you may not be doing history at all.

Recall Charles Darwin’s phrase that cannot be repeated often enough: ignorance breeds confidence more often than does knowledge.

many ducks have labyrinthine vaginas, tortuous with blind alleys.

It’s a ruse mirrored today by commercial genetic companies such as 23andMe, who provide you with ancestry and genetic information in exchange for your personal genomic data, which you pay to give to them, which they can then use (unless you opt out) to develop drugs to be sold back to the public.

It persists like a turd that won’t flush as an influence in antisemitic conspiracies today: interracial marriage with Black people, Hispanics and Muslims, coupled with low fertility rates among White people, and rights for immigrants and minority groups surely will spell the end of the White race in America, and it’s all being orchestrated by an invisible Jewish global elite. As we’ve seen, “the Jews will not replace us” was the chant of the tiki-torch-wielding racists in Charlottesville in 2017.

This type of thinking is symptomatic of a popular fallacy about genetics—we might technically call it monogenic determinism—where complex traits, diseases or behaviors are reduced to a single genetic cause, which imposes a fate on the bearer, whether it’s being gay, daring, permanently petrified, autistic or epileptic. It’s a fallacy in three dimensions: complex traits rarely have single genetic causes, they always involve the nongenetic environment and genetics is probabilistic, not deterministic.

The past is a dirty place, its protagonists are merely people—evil, genius and everything else in between.

A common response to this truth is that they were women and men “of their time.” This is vapid. All people are of their time, and it is impossible to be alive at any other time. It is perfectly possible and indeed desirable to criticize the past, and to criticize the views of people in the past through the lens of our values and those of their contemporaries. That is the definition of history.

Even the great satirist and anti-imperialist Mark Twain reserved one of his sharpest insults for Rhodes: “I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.”

Science is the pursuit of truth, and that should be enough of a justification for doing any research. We do it because it’s interesting, and if you don’t agree you can fuck off, as the editor in chief of New Scientist once said.

I want to be explicitly clear here. In my considered opinion, none of these interventions are eugenics. What they are is medical techniques specifically conceived and designed for the alleviation of suffering in individuals. They are medical treatments that reduce the risk of serious illnesses, and give options to parents who wish to have children but, for no reason other than blind luck, carry a higher risk that their kids (and by extension their family) will suffer hardships or reduced mortality well beyond that of a typical life.

But the decision to terminate a pregnancy because of a prenatal diagnosis is something that I believe is an absolute personal choice and should be an unstigmatized right for women and parents. To do so is not eugenics.

What the HGP revealed is that 20,000 protein-coding genes is the full complement of a human genome, and it is not nearly enough to satisfy that model. It’s about the same number as a cat has, but way less than a banana (around 36,000). The Lego set of Rome’s Colosseum has 9,036 pieces.

You may have noted that most of the people who knock around the idea of embryo selection tend not to be the ones who will have to endure the daily rounds of injections to induce ovarian hyperstimulation, or the needle through the vaginal wall to get access to the ovarian follicle. The people who seem most excited by the idea of eliciting molecular control over reproduction don’t tend to have wombs at all.

Homosexuality cannot be eradicated because it is natural and not maladaptive.

Genetics is the most awesome force the planet has ever seen, but we wield it like a kid who’s found their dad’s gun.