Eugenics

SIGNIFICANCE: In theory, the goal of eugenics is the improvement of humanity's genes through selective breeding; in practice, eugenics includes ideas and practices which have been widely rejected by scientists, philosophers, and other thinkers as both scientifically invalid and morally wrong. The eugenics movement, which reached its peak in the United States and other countries during the first half of the twentieth century, sought to speed up the process of natural selection through the use of selective breeding and led to the enactment of numerous laws requiring the sterilization of individuals labeled as "genetically inferior" and limiting the immigration of certain groups, particularly groups that were seen as racially inferior. Such flawed policies were based on an inadequate understanding of the complexity of human genetics, an underestimation of the role of the environment in gene expression, and the desire of certain groups to claim genetic superiority and the right to control the reproduction of others.

The Founding of the Eugenics Movement

With the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), the concept of evolution began to revolutionize the way people thought about the human condition. Herbert Spencer and other proponents of what came to be known as social Darwinism adhered to the belief that social class structure arose through natural selection, seeing class stratification in industrial societies, including the existence of a permanently poor underclass, as a reflection of the underlying, innate differences between classes.

During this era there was also a rush to legitimize all sciences by using careful measurement and quantification. There was a blind belief that attaching numbers to a study would ensure its objectivity.

Francis Galton, an aristocratic inventor, statistician, and cousin of Darwin, became one of the primary promoters of such quantification. Obsessed with mathematical analysis, Galton measured everything from physiology and reaction times to boredom, the efficacy of prayer, and the beauty of women. He was particularly interested in the differences between human races. Galton eventually founded the field of by applying statistics to biological problems.

A hereditarian, Galton assumed that talent in humans was subject to the laws of heredity. Although Galton did not coin the term “eugenics” until 1883, he published the first discussion of his ideas in 1865, in which he claimed to recognize the apparent evolutionary paradox that those of talent often have few, if any, children and that civilization itself diminishes the effects of natural selection on human populations. Fearing that medicine and social aid would lead to the propagation of weak individuals, Galton advocated increased breeding by “better elements” in the population (positive eugenics), while at the same time discouraging breeding of the “poorer elements” (negative eugenics).

Like most in his time, Galton believed in “blending inheritance,” whereby hereditary material would mix together like different colors of paint. Trying to reconcile how superior traits would avoid being swamped by such blending, he came up with the statistical concept of the correlation coefficient, and in the process connected Darwinian evolution to the “probability revolution.” His work focused on the bell-shaped curve or “normal distribution” demonstrated by many traits and the possibility of shifting the mean by selection pressure at either extreme. His statistical framework deepened the theory of natural selection. Unfortunately, the mathematical predictability he studied has often been misinterpreted as inevitability. In 1907, Galton founded the Eugenics Education Society of London. He also carefully cataloged eminent families in his Hereditary Genius (1869), wherein the Victorian world was assumed to be the ultimate level that society could attain and the cultural transmission of status, knowledge, and social connections were discounted.

Early Eugenics in Britain

Statistician and social theorist Karl Pearson was Galton’s disciple and first Galton Professor of Eugenics at the Galton Laboratory at the University of London. His Grammar of Science (1892) outlined his belief that eugenic management of society could prevent genetic deterioration and ensure the existence of intelligent rulers, in part by transferring resources from what he considered to be inferior races back into the society. According to philosopher David J. Depew and biochemist Bruce H. Weber, even attorney Thomas Henry Huxley, champion of Darwinism, balked at this “pruning” of the human garden by the administrators of eugenics. For the most part, though, British eugenicists focused on improving the superior rather than eliminating the inferior.

Another of Galton’s followers, comparative anatomist Walter Frank Weldon, like Galton before him, set out to measure all manner of things, showing that the distribution of many human traits formed a bell-shaped curve. In a study on crabs, he showed that natural selection can cause the mean of such a curve to shift, adding fuel to the eugenicists’ conviction that they could better the human race through artificial selection.

Population geneticist Ronald A. Fisher was Pearson’s successor as the Galton Professor of Eugenics. Fisher cofounded the Cambridge Eugenics Society and became close to Charles Darwin’s sons, Leonard and Horace Darwin. In a speech made to the Eugenics Education Society, Fisher called eugenicists the “agents of a new phase of evolution” and the “new natural nobility,” with the view that humans were becoming responsible for their own evolution. The second half of his book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930) deals expressly with eugenics and the power of “good-making traits” to shape society. Like Galton, he believed that those in the higher social strata should be provided with financial subsidies to counteract the “resultant sterility” caused when upper class individuals opt to have fewer children for their own social advantage.

British embryologist William Bateson, who coined the terms “genes” and “genetics,” championed the Mendelian genetics that finally unseated the popularity of Galton’s ideas in England. In a debate that lasted thirty years, those that believed in Austrian monk Gregor Mendel’s particulate inheritance argued against the selection touted by the biometricians, and vice versa. Bateson, who had a deep distrust of eugenics, successfully replicated Mendel’s experiments. Not recognizing that the two arguments were not mutually exclusive, Pearson and Weldon rejected genetics, thus setting up the standoff between the two camps.

Fisher, on the other hand, tried to model the trajectory of genes in a population as if they were gas molecules governed by the laws of thermodynamics, with the aim of converting natural selection into a universal law. He used such “genetic atomism” to propose that continuous variation, natural selection, and Mendelian genetics could all coexist. Fisher also mathematically derived Galton’s bell-shaped curves based on Mendelian principles. Unfortunately, by emulating physics, Fisher underestimated the degree to which environment dictates which traits are adaptive.

Early Eugenics in the United States

While Mendelians and statisticians were debating in Britain, in the United States, Harvard embryologist Charles Davenport and others embarked on a mission of meshing early genetics with the eugenics movement. In his effort, Davenport created the Laboratory for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The laboratory was closely linked to his Eugenics Record Office (ERO), which he established in 1910. Davenport raised much of the money for these facilities by appealing to wealthy American families who feared unrestricted immigration and marriage between different races and ethnicities. Though their wealth depended on the availability of cheap labor guaranteed by immigration, these American aristocrats feared the cultural impact of a flood of “inferior immigrants.”

Unlike the British, US eugenicists thought of selection as a purifying force and thus focused on how to stop those whom they viewed as "defective" from reproducing. Davenport wrongly felt that Mendelian genetics supported eugenics by reinforcing the effects of inheritance over the environment. He launched a hunt to identify human defects and link specific genes (as yet poorly understood entities) to specific traits. His primary tool was the family pedigree chart. Unfortunately, these charts were usually based on highly subjective data, such as questionnaires given to schoolchildren to determine the comparative social traits of various races and ethnic groups.

The Eugenics Research Association was founded in 1913 to report the latest findings. In 1918, the Galton Society began meeting regularly at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and in 1923 the American Eugenics Society was formed. These efforts paid off. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, eugenics was a topic in high school biology texts and college courses across the United States.

Among eugenics supporters was psychologist Lewis M. Terman, developer of the Stanford-Binet intelligence quotient (IQ) test, and Harvard psychologist Robert M. Yerkes, developer of the Army IQ test, who both believed that IQ test performance (and hence intelligence) was hereditary. The administration of such tests to immigrants by eugenicist Henry Goddard represented a supposedly “objective and quantitative tool” for screening immigrants for entry into the United States. Biologist Garland Allen reports that Goddard claimed to have proven that more than 80 percent of the Jewish, Hungarian, Polish, Italian, and Russian immigrants were, in his view, "mentally defective."

Fear that immigrants would take jobs away from American citizens, supported by testimony from ERO’s superintendent, Harry Laughlin, and the findings of Goddard’s IQ tests, resulted in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which severely restricted immigration. In the end, legal sterilization and immigration restrictions became more widespread in the United States than in any country other than Nazi Germany. By 1940, more than thirty states in the United States had enacted compulsory sterilization laws. Most were not repealed until during or after the 1960s.

Eugenics and the Progressive Era

During the Progressive Era, the eugenics movement became a common ground for such diverse groups as biologists, sociologists, psychologists, militarists, pacifists, socialists, communists, liberals, and conservatives. The progressive ideology, exemplified by President Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, sought the scientific management of all parts of society. Eugenics attracted the same crowd as preventive medicine, since both were seen as methods of harnessing science to reduce suffering and misfortune. For example, cereal entrepreneur John Harvey Kellogg founded the Race Betterment Foundation, mixing eugenics with hygiene, diet, and exercise. During this period, intellectuals of all stripes were attracted by the promise of “the improvement of the human race by better breeding.” The genetics research of this time focused on improving agriculture, and eugenics was seen as the logical counterpart to plant and animal husbandry.

Davenport did not hesitate to play on their sympathies by making wild claims about the inheritance of “nomadism,” “shiftlessness,” “love of the sea,” and other “traits” as if they were single Mendelian characteristics. Alcoholism, pauperism, prostitution, rebelliousness, criminality, mental illness, chess expertise, and industrial sabotage were all claimed to be determined by one or two pairs of Mendelian genes. In particular, the progressives were lured by the idea of sterilizing those whom they considered the “weak minded,” especially after the publication of articles about families in Appalachia and New Jersey that supposedly documented genetic lines cursed by a preponderance of habitual criminal behavior and mental weakness.

Having the allure of a “social vaccination,” the enthusiasm to sterilize the “defective” spread rapidly among intellectuals, without regard to political or ideological lines. Sweden’s Social Democrats forcibly sterilized some sixty thousand Swedes under a program that lasted from 1935 to 1976 organized by the state-financed Institute for Racial Biology. Grounds for sterilization included not only “feeblemindedness” but also genetic features they associated with the Roma ethnic group, criminality, and “poor racial quality.” The low class or mentally slow were institutionalized in the Institutes for Misled and Morally Neglected Children and released only if they would agree to be sterilized. Involuntary sterilization policies were also adopted in countries ranging from Switzerland and Austria to Belgium and Canada, not to be repealed until the 1970s.

Hermann Müller, a eugenicist who immigrated to the Soviet Union (and later returned to the United States), attacked Davenport’s style of eugenics at the International Eugenics Congress in 1932. Müller, a geneticist who won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the mutagenic power of x-rays, instead favored the style of eugenics envisioned by English novelist Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), with state nurseries, artificial insemination, and the use of other scientific techniques to produce a genetically engineered socialist society.

According to journalist Jonathan Freedland, the British left, including a large number of socialist intellectuals such as playwright George Bernard Shaw and philosopher Bertrand Russell, was convinced that it knew what was best for society. Concerned with the preservation of their higher intellectual capacities, they joined the fashionable and elitist Eugenics Society in the 1930s, where they advocated the control of reproduction, particularly favoring the idea of impregnating working-class women with sperm of men with high IQs.

The American Movement Spreads to Nazi Germany

The eugenics movement eventually led to grave consequences in Nazi Germany. Negative eugenics reached its peak there, with forced sterilization, euthanasia or “mercy killing,” experimentation, and ultimately genocide being used in the name of “racial hygiene.” Eugenicists in the United States and Germany formed close and direct alliances, especially after the Nazis came to power under Adolf Hitler's leadership in 1933. The ERO’s Laughlin gave permission for his article “Eugenical Sterilization” to be reprinted in German in 1928. It soon became the basis of Nazi sterilization policy. Davenport even arranged for a group of German eugenicists to participate in the three hundredth anniversary of Harvard’s founding in 1936.

Inspired by the US eugenics movement and spurred by economic hardship that followed World War I (1914–8), the Nazi Physician’s League took a stand that those living with incurable diseases caused useless waste of medications and, along with poor people, people with disabilities, and some older people posed an economic drain on society. Hereditary defects were considered to be the cause of such maladies, and these people were dubbed “lives not worth living.” In 1933, the German Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring made involuntary sterilization of such people, including the blind, deaf, epileptic, and poor, legal. The Nazis set up “eugenics courts” to decide cases of involuntary sterilization. Frederick Osborn, secretary of the American Eugenics Society, wrote a 1937 report summarizing the German sterilization programs, indicative of the fascination American eugenicists had for the Nazi agenda and the Nazi’s ability to move this experiment to a scale never possible in the United States.

The Demise of Eugenics

With the start of the Great Depression in 1929, the US eugenics movement lost much of its momentum. Geneticist and evolutionary biologist Sewall Wright, although himself a member of the American Eugenics Society, found fault with the genetics and the ideology of the movement: “Positive eugenics seems to require . . . the setting up of an ideal of society to aim at, and this is just what people do not agree on.” He also wrote several articles in the 1930s challenging the assumptions of Fisher’s genetic atomism model. In a speech to the Eugenics Society in New York in 1932, Müller pointed out the economic disincentive for middle and upper classes to reproduce, epitomized by the failure of many eugenicists to have children. Galton himself died childless. This inverse relationship between fertility and social status, coupled with the apparent predatory nature of the upper class, seemed to doom eugenics to failure.

Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould claimed that the demise of the eugenics movement in the United States was more a matter of Adolf Hitler’s use of eugenic arguments for sterilization and racial purification, as well as outright genocide, than it was of advances in genetic knowledge. Once the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities became known, eugenicists distanced themselves from the movement. Depew and Weber have written that Catholic conservatives opposed to human intervention in reproduction and progressives, who began to abandon eugenics in favor of behaviorism (nurture rather than nature), were political forces that began to close down the eugenics movement, while Allen points out that the movement had outlived its political usefulness. Russian geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky had by this time recognized the prime importance of context in genetics and consequently rejected the premise of eugenics, helping to push it into the realm of phony genetics.

Implications and Modern Applications

The term “euphenics” is used to describe human genetic research that is aimed at improving the human condition, replacing the tainted term eugenics. Euphenics deals primarily with medical or genetic intervention that is designed to reduce the impact of defective genotypes on individuals (such as gene therapy for those with cystic fibrosis). However, in this age of increasing information about human genetics, it is necessary to keep in mind the important role played by environment and the malleability of human traits.

Developments in the science of gene editing has led to speculation from some quarters that eugenics, in some form, could experience a rebirth in the twenty-first century. Emerging technologies, particularly clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) editing tools, have made it possible to edit the genomes of living organisms. Although most early experiments with CRISPR editors involved animals and other organisms, in 2018, a Chinese biophysicist named He Jiankui announced that he had successfully performed gene editing on two human embryos, inflaming debate on the ethics of gene editing in humans. After He was sentenced to three years in prison for "illegal medical practices," a multinational delegation of scientists called for a global moratorium on human gene editing.

Despite these calls for tight restrictions or outright bans on human gene editing, others have emphasized the potential value of the practice, highlighting the possibility that it could be used to eliminate inherited conditions ranging from cystic fibrosis to sickle cell anemia. Their opponents have pointed out that other gene therapies could potentially address these conditions without permanently altering human DNA or interfering with normal patterns of inheritance, and worry that making such alterations could lead to the editing of traits related to intelligence and appearance. Advocates for people with disabilities have also expressed concerns over the ethics of seeking to eliminate certain traits and conditions from the human gene pool, arguing that such an approach promotes ableism.

As part of the ethical debate around gene editing, some have argued that the eugenics movement could reappear (although probably under a different name) if economic problems again make it attractive to eliminate “unproductive” people, and worry that new technology could play a role in the application of a modern-day eugenics program. However, even proponents of gene editing are often quick to dissociate themselves from earlier advocates of eugenics, due to the concept's strong association with Nazism and other racist ideologies. Many hope that a better understanding of genetics, combined with widespread moral opposition to the inhumane practices enacted by many twentieth-century governments, will deter humans from ever again going down the path that journalist Jonathan Freedland referred to as “the foulest idea of the twentieth century.”

Key terms

• biometrythe measurement of biological and psychological variables
• negative eugenicsimproving human stocks through the restriction of reproduction
• positive eugenicsimproving human stocks by encouraging the “naturally superior” to breed extensively with other superior humans

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