Eugenics is a dirty word, so why is it making a comeback?
Dr Adam Rutherford traces the toxic policies of the past and warns against a revival
Eugenics made a big comeback this week. That might seem like a surprising sentence to read in the 21st century, given its toxic past, the genocides of the 20th century and the hope that it had been consigned to a historic midden. Yet there it was in every newspaper, current affairs programme and the swamp of social media. The primary reason was the resignation of Dominic Cummings’s controversial new adviser, Andrew Sabisky, following the discovery of some of his musings on race, IQ research, forced contraception of the poor, and embryo selection for desirable traits. That, by any other name, is eugenics.
In the social media melee, Richard Dawkins chimed in, writing on Twitter: “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.”
Professor Dawkins made it as clear as vodka in a follow-up tweet that he deplores the idea of eugenics, a fact lost on the nuance-free Twitter mob. But his imprecise wording on such a delicate topic failed to recognise that eugenics is a poorly defined term, policy and scientific idea.
Did he mean the policy enacted in the US for most of the 20th century, where up to 80,000 people were involuntarily sterilised to remove undesirable traits from the collective gene pool, things such as criminality, alcoholism, mental health problems and homosexuality? Or did he simply mean that humans, biological organisms to the core, are susceptible to evolutionary change? He implies the second, by comparison to agricultural breeding. Farming has indeed deliberately, obviously and radically changed animals to enhance characteristics desirable to us. It’s worth noting that, as farmers well know, this process has also produced both monsters, and many undesirable spin-off traits, en route – anyone who has ever loved a pedigree dog knows that pure breeds come with a host of unintended, often tragic side-effects.
Would eugenics work? It depends on what you mean by “work”. More than 200,000 people with schizophrenia were murdered during the Holocaust, which resulted in a huge decline in numbers for a few decades after the war – but by the Seventies, numbers had returned to pre-war levels. What does this mean?
Well, complex diseases are mediated by both genetics and the environment in ways we poorly understand, and only a permanent extermination programme would eradicate such complex disorders from a population.
Sabisky, meanwhile, suggested in a 2016 interview that modern eugenics might work, via selection of embryos during IVF for traits such as intelligence – chiming with Cummings’s own suggestion, in a blog post written two years earlier, that “a national health system should fund everybody to do this” to avoid an unfair advantage for rich would-be parents. This is both historically and scientifically illiterate. We use embryo selection for serious diseases already, but these tend to be ones for which the biology is straightforward and well understood, such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s disease. When it comes to traits such as intelligence, the picture is infinitely more complex, with a significant genetic component, and a roughly equal environmental element. There are hundreds of genes involved, and these do many things in many tissues. There are no genes “for” intelligence, and so what would you be selecting, alongside? What would you be selecting against?
Geneticists argue about whether embryo selection for intelligence would “work” because genetics is really hard and genomes wickedly complex. But Cummings and Sabisky seem to know better.
Though the public conversation about eugenics and race might feel new and startling, it’s very much typical within the academy. Genetics is a field that is only a century old, but it also is intrinsically linked to the birth of eugenics. Next month, I will be teaching biology and medical students at UCL about eugenics and race. This is not unusual, particularly at the university where the concept of eugenics was born, under the midwifery of Francis Galton. He was one of the greatest scientists of the Victorian era, overshadowed by his half-cousin Charles Darwin. Galton was also profoundly racist. In a letter to The Times in 1874, he described the “inferior Negro race” as lazy savages, the “Hindoo” as inferior “in strength, industry… business habits”, and the “Arab” as a “destroyer rather than a creator”. An important principle in history is not to judge people of the past by modern standards, but Galton was racist even for his time, and part of the eugenics project was for the enhancement of British stock, at the expense of other inferior peoples.
Galton set up a lab and funded a chair at UCL, which was initially dedicated to eugenics, but subsequently evolved into genetics. The most beautiful irony is that his intentions were not met by his legacy: Galton instigated a field in order to demonstrate the hierarchy of so-called races, but that same field ultimately demonstrated that, from a biological point of view, race is not a meaningful concept.
But don’t get too comfortable, because the conversation about eugenics is far from over. In the next few weeks, UCL will conclude its inquiry into its own past, enmeshed with eugenics and scientific racism as it is. I provided expert testimony, and we shall see how this great university plans to expose and account for its own pernicious past, and build a future fit for all. Part of the motivation was the revelation in 2018 that there had been a series of private conferences held on campus in the past few years that featured, among other things, discussions about race and intelligence.
The participants at these conferences are a small, fringe group of weirdos and misfits who are well outside the scientific mainstream, none of them geneticists, many outside of academia, and many for whom race science is the enduring passion of their lives. In 2015, one of the attendees was Andrew Sabisky.
Why does this matter? Well, maybe Sabisky was there with youthful ignorance. Maybe his opinions have changed – we don’t know because neither he nor Downing Street deemed it necessary to qualify either his recruitment or his odious views. But there is precisely the problem. Cummings’s stated aim is to bring more science into governance. So far, we have seen no evidence for that, nor evidence that he understands the science he claims to be entranced by.
If he wants scientific advice, he would do well to recruit scientists. There’s plenty of weirdos and misfits in my squad, but ones who have done the work to know their songs well before they start singing. Without solid, nuanced, qualified and expert scientific evidence, the UK will evolve into a state akin to Soviet Russia, where science was shamelessly co-opted into ideology. Those scientifically illiterate policies lethally crippled an empire.
There are no genes ‘for’ intelligence, so what would you be selecting?