Eugenics

Shortly after Darwin published his Origin of Species, his cousin Francis Galton conceived the idea of applying its teachings to human development. Galton’s own description of his ideas could be summarized with the following fragment: “qualities gained by good nourishment and education never descend by inheritance, but perish with the individual; while his inborn qualities are transmitted. (…) It is therefore a waste of labor to improve a poor stock by careful feeding. (…) The question then was forced upon me: could not the race of man be similarly improved? Could not the undesirable be gotten rid of, and the desirables multiplied? The answer to this question was a decided yes. Fit humans produce fit offspring, unfit humans produce unfit offspring. As a thinking species, humans can use this to accelerate the evolutionary process through the selective breeding of humans”. This is what is now called eugenics.

Galton defended his theory with social surveys and polls that showed that ability and success run in families, while inability and failure run in other families. Of course this could just as easily be explained by the environments of those families. Galton, however, didn’t see this that way.

He linked intelligence, beauty and health with ability, and they all should be together. Ignorance, ugliness and sickness he connected with inability. In fact, he once published in a popular British journal a “beauty-map” of England. He showed where the most beautiful women of England are found so that male seeking to eugenically mate would know where to go. These beautiful women would also be the most intelligent and able.

In 1883, Galton actually coined the term eugenics. He had been writing about it for a decade before that. He used the word eugenics to designate policies and programs designed to encourage more children from the fit, and less children from the unfit.

Eugenics was sort of a cult idea for half a generation, but it gained widespread interest after the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics. Mendel made it all seem more credible. Genetics appeared to offer a physical basis for Galton’s theories. Many experts saw such traits as mental illness, retardation, epilepsy, physical defects and criminality as the products of hereditary factors. If you want to get rid of criminals, just get rid of the gene that causes criminality.

The IQ Test

This was a time when science was held in high esteem. Biology was rising in authority and credibility, and genetics seemed to offer new solutions. Here, eugenics appeared to offer a scientific methodology for the social sciences. The IQ was invented at this time as an objective measure of intelligence. They came with the idea that you could quantify intelligence through IQ tests. The IQ test was actually brought to America to be used to differentiate people by eugenicists. They considered it a good parameter for determining who should breed and who should be discouraged from breeding.

Sociologists conducted public health surveys, compiled families’ pedigrees to show hereditary basis for crime, poverty and low IQ. Since they were looking for that, they found plenty of evidence. Who they picked and how they picked seemed to support their ideas.

Although eugenics never really gained broad popular appeal among the masses in America, many scientific, professional and philanthropic organizations promoted its acceptance actively. These efforts greatly influenced public policies throughout the United States in Europe during the first third of the 20th century.

Great Leaders Who Advocated Eugenics?… How Dare You…

People don’t talk about this anymore, as it isn't politically correct, but many “great leaders” advocated eugenics. Winston Churchill was a prime proponent of eugenics in England. Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and other presidents during this period were strong proponents of eugenic policies. They openly worried that the professional classes were not reproducing in sufficient numbers. Progressive sociologist, and good friend of Teddy Roosevelt, Edward Alsworth Ross, called it race suicide. Race suicide was going on because the able women were not producing enough kids. Professional classes were going to be swamped by the inferior products of their own race, that is, the worker classes.

There were efforts to taught students the value of eugenic mating. You could go back to biology and civics textbooks of the time and you’ll see eugenic mating advice, and the importance of having large families. Organizations would hold “fitter family” contests, much like “best sheep” contests.

Eugenic fitness was proposed as a prerequisite for marriage. Many States adopted laws requiring eugenic tests before a person could get married. Some churches, such as the Episcopal Church, actively proposed that only eugenically fit people could be married. Some countries adopted tax and employment policies to encourage its able citizens to have children.

Negative Eugenics

Until now, we’ve talked about positive eugenics. Let’s go now to the dark side of eugenics. Negative eugenics is the one that seeks less children from the unfit. Every single American State, and most western countries, adopted policies of sexually segregating certain dysgenic classes, typically the mentally retarded. 35 American States, and many European countries, instituted compulsory programs of sexual sterilization for the mentally ill and retarded, for criminals and epileptics.

From 1900 to 1960, some 60000 Americans were sterilized under compulsory State programs, and many more were sterilized under voluntary programs (parents took their children to be sterilized because of some supposed eugenic defect). Such programs were even upheld as constitutional by the United States Supreme Court in 1927, in the case involving Carrie Buck, who was sterilized against her will under evidence that both her mother and grandmother had been mentally retarded.

The Supreme Court unanimously declared this sacrifice was appropriate for society because, as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “three generations of imbeciles are enough”.

Nazi Germany and the Decline of Eugenics

Germany’s programs adopted during the Weimar Republic period were later extended under the Nazi era to include Jews, Gypsies and other “disfavored” groups. Nazi Germany then moved from eugenic sterilization to euthanasia. It is interesting to note that German geneticists and biologists joined the Nazi party at a much higher rate than other professional groups. Except for the Catholic Church, opposition to eugenics was disorganized and ineffective until the 1930’s, when Nazi practices discredited it a lot. Then, gradually, social scientists and geneticists began to turn form these ideas.

By the end of World War 2, social Darwinism and eugenics was morally bankrupt. This I consider to be an amazing “moral evolution”. For a half century, “scientifically” informed governments treated their unfortunate citizens eugenically. This is a great example of how far human arrogance can go.

Racism and Darwinism

In my last article I wrote about social Darwinism, and specially remarked the historical background in which it originated. We’ve said that social Darwinism is simply a label for a group of utilitarian philosophies that attribute human progress to competition among individuals. For many late 19th century Europeans and Americans, the most important area of competition was not within a society, as I said in my last article, but the competition between races and nations. Social Darwinism was invoked to justify Western imperialism, colonialism, militarism and scientific racism. This was just the time when Europe was pushing out and colonizing Africa and Asia, and many justified their actions using social Darwinism.

Of course racism predated Darwinism. Racism has been with humans since the beginning of time. Biological evolution, however, appeared to justify racism. They called it scientific racism now. Many racist biologists of the time considered that the more civilized races were simply further along in evolutionary development from the less civilized ones. The cultural development of Western Europe expressed a basic biological difference over the aborigines of Australia, or the people of Africa. The cause of European superiority was considered biological.

Darwinists, including Darwin, saw a single line of human development, and inevitably viewed Northwestern Europeans as further along in that development. They explained this by saying that Europe has a harsher environment, and that forced humans to develop their brains further.

Darwin and Spencer believed that racial struggle contributed to human evolution by superior races replacing inferior ones. Indeed, Darwin’s book is titled: “On the Origin of Species, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life”. No one could read that title without thinking of human races.

It is really amazing that many Americans of European origin believed that Native Americans and African Americans would simply die out in the United States. They thought the European races would just naturally survive and dominate.

Beginning in the late 1800’s, Germany’s leading biologist, Ernst Haeckel, argued that nations and races advance through competition. And as an ardent nationalist, he advocated a strong united Germany that should dominate the world. Haeckel’s social Darwinism contributed to German militarism that led to World War I. Studies and interviews conducted in Germany during World War I, show that military leaders justified their actions on Darwinian terms, borrowed directly from the writings of people like Haeckel.

Germany’s defeat in that war deeply embittered Haeckel and his followers. Convinced of the biological superiority of the German people, though, some of Haeckel’s followers contributed to the rise of Nazism. It also contributed, rather sadly, to Hitler’s policies of racial purity. I think that we don’t need to go into that here; we all know what it is about. What I take from this, though, is that we should leave the job of selecting to nature, she knows better.

Social Darwinism

The term “social Darwinism” was coined by its critics. It gained currency even by its proponents, though, during the Victorian Era, as a phrase to identify various utilitarian philosophies and policies that attributed human progress to competition among individuals. Valuing competition as a great good fit the spirit of the day, and it predated Darwinian biology.

In the late 1700’s, Adam Smith argued that economic progress depended on individual initiative. Not governmental regulation, not social networks, but individual initiative. His faith in the natural harmony of human interactions gave him hope that all people would benefit from laissez-faire capitalism (unregulated capitalism).

By 1800, Thomas Malthus noted that due to natural limits on resources, there would be losers as well as winners in any social competition. This separated him from Adam Smith, but yet he embraced the idea that the struggle for existence fosters the general good by weeding out the week. As painful as this might be to some, in the long run, it was for the best. Malthus’s thinking inspired Darwin to conceive natural selection as the engine for biological evolution.

Even before Darwin published his ideas, though, Herbert Spencer popularized the Malthusian view of individual and group competition. He is the one who coined the term survival of the fittest, which was later so much associated with Darwinian thinking. He held the struggle for survival as the only sure foundation for human progress.

With the advent of Darwinism in biology, Spencer’s views on social development became known as social Darwinism, rather than “social spencerianism”, even though Darwin did not publicly endorse the ideas. This is probably because biology carries so much credibility. Tying one’s ideas to biology rather than just social sciences gives them more credibility.

Social Darwinism encouraged laissez-faire capitalism and discourages helping the “weak”. This was in an era of industrialization and urbanization. In this period, Western Europe and the United States were being transformed from an agricultural land to urbanized areas where most people were thrown together in cities. This created the world we find in Dickens’ novels, where homelessness abounded and there weren’t social networks that took care of the mentally or physically disabled.

Was government going to move in and fill the social gaps left by urbanization? Were taxes going to be raised to provide welfare and social support networks? These were important questions in Western Europe and the United States in the late 1800’s. This is where Spencer ideas had an impact.

Spencer maintained that government should never interfere in domestic, economic or social affairs. He maintained also that public health and welfare programs, over the long run, simply harmed people. How could they harm people? They harm people by taxing and holding back the rich, the able, the hard-working; and allowing the “weak” to survive and multiply without improvement. Nature eliminates efficiency, and any interference in this process was doomed to failure.

Industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and James Jerome Hill, publicly justified their cutthroat business practices in social Darwinist terms. Sure there are some losers in these practices, but there are also winners. We happened to be the winners, and that’s because we’re the most fit. Ultimately, it is not to our benefit, but to the benefit of society.

Biologists who espoused Darwinism did not necessarily accepted social Darwinism. A great example is Alfred Russell Wallace. He was a prime advocate of socialism, and was the most visible opponent of social Darwinism. He argued that humans could guide their own evolution, and were not bound by the biological processes. At the time, however, he was swimming upstream. Social Darwinists continually used biological Darwinism to justify their views, and to give them weight and authority.