Dan Snow's History Hit - Eugenics with Adam Rutherford

Episode Date: January 16, 2022

Eugenics has been used in attempts throughout history, and across continents, to gain power and assert control.In this episode, we trace Eugenics from its intellectual origins in Victorian Britain to the actual policies put into action to control populations birthrates in Nazi Germany and 20th Century America.Dan is joined by broadcaster and geneticist Adam Rutherford who helps him understand this complicated legacy as well as what the troubling future of gene editing has to hold.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Eugenics, talking about eugenics today with the very brilliant Adam Rutherford. He's a brilliant science writer, he is a geneticist, he is a broadcaster, he's one of the best in the business, he's been on the podcast many times before and I'm very grateful for him coming on again. He's talking about eugenics. Eugenics is basically the idea that we should control who is having sex and procreating with who, an ancient impulse for some reason. We humans are very strange. Anyway, eugenics has been used to assert control throughout history. And eugenics as an idea, as a discipline, was started by Victorian academics who embraced philosophies

of things like social Darwinism. Strangely, these Victorian academics thought that only people a bit like them should be able to have children. Funny old thing. These ideas were incorporated into local and national law in various countries, and they were certainly embraced by politicians and thinkers across the world. Famously, infamously, the Nazis made eugenics a cornerstone in their ideology, culminating the Holocaust but involving the mass sterilization of unfit quote-unquote people and the murder of people who are mentally and

physically disabled also didn't fit with Hitler's idea of a pure superior race of Aryans. In the US as well though there were 32 recorded federally funded sterilization programs. So I'm going to talk about all that kind of stuff with Adam Rutherford now. It is very interesting indeed. It was a great treat to have him back on. You can hear more from Adam Rutherford. You can watch interviews he's done or programs he's taken part in on History Hit TV. It's the digital history channel available on all digital devices, wherever the internet is available. That includes, of course, your smart TVs, your projectors, all that other kind of stuff. You're not just watching on your smartphone anymore, folks. We're all growns up here.

We're available on telly, all sorts of different channels. So please go and check us out. Or you can follow the link in the description of this podcast. Just click on there, you get two weeks for free. You can check the whole thing out. It's like Netflix for history. You're going to absolutely love it. Works anywhere in the world. Probably not North Korea, but unless you're there, try it. Give it a login. Tap that little old link with your thumb. See what happens. In the meantime, though, here is Adam Rutherford. Enjoy. Adam, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. You've been on loads of times. I'm very grateful. Well, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, Dan. I can't remember the last time it was.

Must have been talking about race a couple of years ago. I think we were talking about race. And since then, you pick your topics very cleverly, buddy, because they're very current and you're always in the thick of it. You're always in the swing of it in the media and on the social media. It's exciting. You're writing about stuff people are talking about and arguing about. Yeah, I guess so.

I don't pick it for those reasons. I pick these things because I think they're interesting. And then I think I've been lucky multiple times by sort of slightly anticipating global events. I was about, you know, three months earlier. The return of ethno-nationalism. Yay. Lucky, lucky Adam that we're now living in a world where white nationalism is back. That's so good. Yeah. Oh, this is terrible, isn't it? But listen, speaking of which, eugenics. Yeah. First of all, dude, what is eugenics?

Well, it's a good question. It's not easy to answer that, but it is the formalisation of something which I argue has been a perpetual aspect of human civilisation for the last several thousand years, which is our attempts to control reproduction. So the interface of biology and society and trying to control who lives, who dies, trying to purify races, trying to reduce suffering and enhance good qualities in populations. One of the things that I lecture about and I've been talking about for a while now, and is where the book starts, is that this is something that Plato describes in Republic, and Plutarch've been talking about for a while now and is where the book starts is that this is something that Plato describes in Republic and Plutarch describes when talking about the Spartans and Seneca talks about it in Rome. But eugenics itself gets formalised in the late 19th

century by Francis Galton, who is Charles Darwin's cousin. It's exactly the sort of formalisation, the pseudo-scientific formalisation of this idea that's been around for thousands of years, which is that how we, and by we I mean the powerful, can impose control over unruly biology. You know, how two parents or a population can produce the healthiest or the least defective, and that's the Victorian term for it, children and stock. Presumably there's a parallel thing going on, right? You're in the 19th century and to this day, we're trying to produce chickens with the biggest breasts

and sheep with the biggest yield. Is that a kind of parallel but related movement? Yeah, and in fact, agriculture has been an analogy for eugenics and for breeding humans since Republic, since Plato's talking about it. And then when it becomes formalized in this sort of pseudoscientific ideology in the late 19th century, farming and specifically broiler chickens and, you know, big beefy Holsteins. They're used as examples, but people say, you know, the founders of this whole movement say, we can breed animals. So therefore, now that Darwin showed that humans are animals

and they are not immutable, then why shouldn't we also breed humans? It's an argument which has perpetuated not just since Plato into the 19th century, but even persists today. Richard Dawkins last year said in one of his well-regarded tweets, he said, if this works for roses or sheep or goats, then why wouldn't it work for humans? And I deal with that question at the end of the book, because it's a decent question to ask. Farming and breeding humans are not the same thing for some technical reasons, but also some practical reasons. I think a lot of people who've quoted or cited agriculture as an example of how breeding might work in a eugenics way really haven't spent any time talking to farmers because farming is a very inefficient and sort of

bloody, wasteful process. And it's fine for producing specific characteristics, like a sheep with really meaty legs, or roses that are very beautiful, but they are bred to exist in very specific circumstances. Roses are entirely unnatural, and they're nothing like the flowers from which they've been bred over the last several thousand years by us.

But they can only exist in the right soil. They can only exist when they're fed the right foods. And that's where the analogy for humans falls apart. Because when we talk about eugenics, we talk about breeding for humans, people are generally trying to make them better, generally healthier, fitter, stronger, and smarter. And not only within the context of agriculture where you have to have very specific criteria and very specific how you treat those animals and those plants so it's an analogy which is universal in eugenics and i don't think it works i don't think it's a good analogy so i may have once accidentally tweeted i think we should have a hereditary monarchy but it should be we should make katrina johnson thompson the great great British heptathlete, marry Chris Hoy and their offspring could be monarchs

for the rest of eternity. That was a eugenicist tweet. And I fully apologize for that and any harm that it caused. But I mean, obviously now that you say that, it makes sense. Like if you did want to produce humans with particularly long calf bones, you could do that, right? Sure. But it wouldn't make them nicer, happier, better citizens. All the things that we vaguely refer to, we say better humans. What the hell does that mean? Better at programming?

Better at scientific communication? Like, it doesn't make sense. I see what you're saying. Yeah, so you're absolutely right. I mean, humans are mutable, right? We can change over time. We are evolved beings. If we wanted to, me mean you could design a program which

might include chris hoy and whoever you like and over several generations we could create a population where they had longer calves or they had a particular characteristic that is not impossible however there's a couple of things going on there one is it would have to be incredibly well controlled in such a way that a farmer, a shepherd breeds sheep so that they have particular characteristics. So free will, human rights and overall health of the population, we'd have to completely disregard that. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, and this is where the science is important. So I write all of my books, many of which deal with historical ideas, but I have to be really clear that I'm writing them

from a scientific point of view. I'm a scientist, I'm not a historian, but I work at the interface of science and history. When you address the question of, could we breed humans to have particular characteristics, you can't avoid what's going on in the complexities of our genomes and the genetics inherent in that breeding program. I think that one of the mistakes that the eugenics ideology didn't engage with well in the 19th century and all the way through the 20th century is that we simply don't know nearly enough about how human genetics actually works. What we don't know is if you were breeding Chris Hoy with Dina Asher-Smith or whatever for particular characteristics, what you're breeding into the next population, you don't know what you're also breeding into or breeding out. So you might be selecting for a particular characteristic, but you might be selecting against other desirable characteristics or indeed breeding in other undesirable characteristics.

So, for example, you know, we know that IQ or various measures of intelligence also positively correlate with anorexia or ADHD or bipolar disorder. So we could definitely breed humans to be more cleverer if we wanted to do that and we were going to set ethics aside but we'd also be breeding in a bunch of stuff that you definitely don't want your children to have as well so the whole thing is a busted flush and it always was but it was so attractive as an idea in the 19th century and then into the 20th century and indeed today that i think a bunch of people who really don't know enough about genetics were just you know bewitched by the politics of it i just really hope so chris is not listening to this podcast where we have to discuss chris are you numerate what is your linguistic aptitude

anyway spatial awareness hoy okay anyway he just has to write in a straight line it's not that difficult okay i hop me over as low as... Listen to Chris. I love you, man. So what characteristics were these bonkers Victorians privileging? Almost exclusively intelligence. As measured like how? By being white and male?

Sort of just knowing about Latin. Absolutely that. And, you know, we're the byproducts of the same system that generated this sort of power hegemony where eugenics comes from they all follow exactly the same pattern they all come from upper middle class families they're all men at least in the late 19th the first wave feminism does join in the eugenics program in the 1910s and 20s but that's a slightly different story they all go to the top public schools are either're either Eton or Harrow or King Edward's Birmingham is Francis Galton. And then they go off to Oxbridge

where they all read maths with classics. Now, I'm not saying this in a sort of, you know, anti-public school or class warrior type way. I just think that there is something relevant about the way education was structured in those days. One of the reasons the eugenics movement takes off in this country, not in America and not in Germany, but one of the reasons it takes off in this country so vigorously is because they're all obsessed with classical civilization. Francis Galton and all of the other protagonists, and Winston Churchill, who was one of the main eugenicists of the early 20th. They've all read Gibbon, or at least I think they've probably read the title of Gibbon, and they're all obsessed with declinism, which is very part of the popular discourse at this time. They all regard Greek civilization and

secondarily Roman civilization as the pinnacle of what humans can achieve. Then they go off and do maths. You've got this huge classical basis which fetishises Rome and Greece with a very simplistic and 19th century understanding of the concept of the fall of Rome, which I think is mostly derived from a very superficial reading of Gibbon. They work out all of these mathematical and statistical means of changing the current society in order to model what happened in Rome and particularly to prevent what they perceive happened in Rome and they perceive The working classes are becoming more visible with the urbanisation and the repeal of poor laws. criminality by undesirable people combined with, you know, this is a time of great immigration from the colonies into Britain, and this is a more significant idea in America. So basically, the undesirables are having too many children, and we're not having enough, and this is how we need to fix it. You listen to Dan Snow's History, we're talking about eugenics. More coming up.

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by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. What was the practical impact of this eugenicist thinking on policy, real-world impact? Well, in the UK, it's really fascinating because the idea is really developed here in the 19th century and many people take it on board. Well, in the UK, it's really fascinating because the idea is really developed here in the 19th century. And many people take it on board. It becomes very, very widely adopted in a bipartisan way.

So the socialists and right-wing people, conservatives, embrace eugenics as a means of changing society. There's a sort of response to having our asses handed to us in the Boer War, which is that we have to breed better people in order to control the colonies. And Churchill's a big driver of this. And so in a sort of post Malthusian way, there's this recognition that as industrialisation continues and cities are getting bigger and there's a more visible poor class and poverty and mental health issues are becoming more present in our society. You know, this is what Dickens is writing about in A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is specifically a Malthusian figure in that. So it's part of the culture.

Now, with that urbanisation and with that expanding underclass, you also see an increase in institutionalisation as a sort of trend. The state is going to take care or, well, I mean, take care is pretty generous in that way, but it's going to park the undesirables and the people considered with mental health issues or whatever. And there are several attempts in the legislation to generate policy which will deal with the underclasses using a specific tool, which is involuntary sterilisation. And the main driver of that is Winston Churchill using a specific tool, which is involuntary sterilisation. And the main driver of that is Winston Churchill, a young Churchill, when he's in the Home Office in the 1910s. The really fascinating thing about the UK is that it never happened.

The enforced sterilisation, which is really the eugenics bit of specifically the 1912-1913 Mental Deficiencies Act, the 1912-1913 Mental Deficiencies Act, is removed. And it's removed after debate, primarily driven by Josiah Wedgwood, who was an MP at the time, in response to public campaigns by people like GK Chesterton, who opposed eugenics all through his life. So we get the Mental Deficiencies Act in 1913, and that includes institutionalization and it includes the introduction of a government board for controlling undesirables and people with mental health issues. But we never have the sterilization legislation. So we never have a eugenics policy in this country.

But in America, they were well ahead of the game. And in fact, Churchill was looking at the American laws, particularly from Arizona in 1907, to see what their laws were, which included involuntary sterilization, which is eugenics. And America embraces it so enthusiastically. 31 states have eugenics policies, including involuntary sterilization on their statutes. California accounts for half of the sterilizations for the first 20 years of the 20th century. And those laws last until the 60s and continue into the 21st century. The policy implications, or the real world implications, are initially policy, but it is

the tubal ligations of women and the vasectomies of men, and we estimate that 70,000 to 80,000 men and women in America were involuntarily sterilized. And we haven't even got to Nazi Germany. Yeah, let's get to the Nazis. Why were they sterilized? What was the basis in these US states? That is really the most important question and the most problematic answer. Because the trouble with the whole eugenics movement from its inception in the late 1880s is that it starts as a sort of positive thing. We want to encourage the best people to breed with the other best people, and therefore we can move society in a positive direction. But the thing is, you can't rank people without having some people at the top and some people at the bottom. So you get positive eugenics immediately coupled with very illiberal views, which are sometimes called dysgenics,

but it's negative eugenics. It's selecting people away at the bottom. Now, the initial classes are very sort of pseudo-psychiatric or pseudo-scientific definitions, like terms that we now regard as sort of generic insults as part of our language, you know, imbecile, idiot, moron. These are all words that carry specific psychiatric diagnoses, which qualify people for eugenic sterilization in the 19th and early 20th century. But they're very vague, right? You know, we're talking about feeble-mindedness as a concept, we're talking about feeble-mindedness as a concept, which lasts for 40 or 50 years as a clinical diagnosis. But they're so vague and they sort of mutate over time. They go from, here's a specific characteristic such as epilepsy, congenital epilepsy, or alcoholism,

but both categories that were specifically targeted by eugenics policies. And then it becomes, well, you know, Slavs or the Irish or sex workers or iterant criminals or just poor people. And so the categories go from being this very loose pseudoscientific or pseudopsychiatric diagnosis to, well, over the space of, I don't mean to sound melodramatic about it, but over the space of 30 or 40 years, it goes from those clinical diagnoses to the Irish, right? We need to sterilise the Irish in London because they're having too many babies. That was Mary Stopes's view. That's why she embraced reproductive autonomy of women so vigorously. And then 10 years after that, in Germany, it's the Roma, it's Slavs. Really interestingly, the eugenicists in Germany were not anti-Semitic in their original guise. It was the rise of the Third Reich, it was Hitler's

anti-Semitism that they felt that they had to adopt anti-Semitism as part of their eugenics policies in order that the broader eugenics policies would be enacted. And the only way that they could do that was getting on board with Nazism. So initially in Germany, you've got eugenicists who think that the Nordic people or Aryan people should breed with Jews because Jewish people are so successful in the various things that they think are important. But by the 1930s, the antisemitism becomes absolutely dominant in the eugenics programs of the Nazis. So this key problem is, who are we talking about? Who are the undesirables? Who are the defectives? These are all the contemporary terms. And eventually, when you sort of zoom out from it,

always eugenics is just whoever is not us, right? So it gets adopted to be racialized in America and Germany, very class-based in the UK. But it's just saying this is a hegemonic power reinforcement ideology. That is what eugenics is, with a nice twist of pseudoscience. Is it fair to say that the German state sterilization program, and in fact, I guess the euthanasia program of the Nazis, is the darkest chapter of the euthanasia program of the Nazis, is the darkest chapter of the eugenics movement? That's an interesting question. I mean,

you'd be hard-pushed to say no to that, but there are plenty of other examples which are similarly horrifying. The thing about the Nazis' euthanasia program, which starts in 1933, so almost immediately after Hitler comes to power, one of his first bits of legislation is a sterilization program, which starts with children and then rapidly includes many, many different types and classes of people. The shocking thing is the relationship between the Nazi eugenics and euthanasia programs and the Americans. eugenics and euthanasia programs and the Americans. So the Nazis were not only heavily and specifically influenced by legislation in the States, US organizations funded the research into eugenics and euthanasia programs throughout the 1930s in Berlin. So there's this really, really strong tie. And in the Nuremberg trials, in the doctor's trials, which is a second wave of the Nuremberg trials in 45-46, many of the people on trial, the German eugenicists, they cite the American eugenics policies as their inspiration. One particular set of, well,

it was sort of a legal statute guideline, which was written by a chap called Harry Loughlin in 1920. He wrote this in order to standardise the legal process of eugenics across the states because he felt that many states were coming out with sort of ad hoc bits of eugenics legislation, and if you wanted this to be a national policy, it should be federalised effectively. Now that document, the 1920 document by Harry Loughlin, becomes the template for the 1933 law for the Third Reich. They translate it and turn the legislation, American legislation, into Nazi policy. You know this better than almost anyone. Nazi ideology is deranged, right? It draws from dozens of sources.

It's very incoherent apart from its sort of genocidal antisemitism. So eugenics is a sort of beating heart of the sterilisation and euthanasia programmes of the Nazis. But it becomes incorporated into a much more psychotic and genocidal approach to Nazism. They're horrific stories. What happens in the concentration camps and how that is adjudged as part of the Nuremberg trials, eugenics is part of that. It's a sort of core to a much broader and much more deranged and psychotic policy. Improving babies, right? Design of babies today feels like it's in the spirit of eugenicists, doesn't it? I think that some of the language is similar, and I think some of the techniques are similar.

I try not to get bogged down in sort of semantic arguments and I think that eugenics and eugenicist gets thrown around as an insult to many branches of science and psychology that are clearly not, but are interested in studying heredity, which is fundamentally the sort of scientific core of eugenics. What I say in the book, and I don't think this is controversial, is that we study heredity and human genetics is the sort of formalised modern study of heredity. Eugenics is the politicised bastard child of the study of heredity because it is always a political ideology. So when it comes to thinking about, well, designer babies or, you know, gene editing in order to change specific characteristics in individuals. I think it has eugenics as part of its DNA, but I think there is a slight distinction.

And I think the distinction, although I sort of want to talk about this with historians and with ethicists to help work out what I think about it, eugenics historically was state-imposed, right? So it's the state deciding what the structure of a population should be like, and by enforced sterilization or by encouraging specific breeding classes. Whereas I think today, certainly in the West, arguably less so in both China and India, the types of interventions that we're talking about, most of which are positive interventions to alleviate suffering, so medical reproductive interventions, I don't think they qualify as eugenics because I don't think they're either state-imposed or they're sort of at a

population level. So they're individual choices by individual parents, almost all for medical reasons. When it comes to designer babies, I mean, it's a slightly different question because I think that even though we talk about it quite a lot and it's part of the sort of general public discourse about genetic engineering, I just don't think they're scientifically informed conversations. I mean, we don't really understand the genetics of eye colour well enough to actually sort of intervene in a way where you could select eye colour in a baby. So you were suggesting in the article I read the other day on the internet, which is President Xi is designing a race of DNA-enhanced super warriors for future wars against the West. That's not accurate.

It may be that they think that that is a reasonable supposition. It may be that they think there's research going into this. There are plenty of companies in the States where they're beginning to offer embryo selection as part of the IVF process for traits and complex disorders. We are in an era where this type of conversation is slightly scientifically informed. But one of the things I argue in the book towards the end of the book is, I just don't think that we have enough knowledge to be able to even have this conversation seriously. I think that part of the problem is, and this is much broader than just eugenics and genetics,

is that there's expertise in science which sort of filters out to a broader public and then gets adopted by people who don't have that expertise. And politicians always turn to scientists to validate their ideologies. And that's just part of the game. So the problem here is that, without meaning to blow my own trumpet, I've been doing genetics, human genetics now for 25 years. I feel like I've got a decent grasp of the subject and I spend almost all my time talking to other geneticists. And we're almost unified in our understanding of how little we know about genetics, heredity,

the ability to change traits over time, pick for eye colour and stuff like that. Governments and politicians and journalists and the general public have got a different view of this. It's a sort of science communication problem more than anything. I'm standing there going, we don't know. We don't know and I can't endorse this view because I really don't know what the answer is. You've got Dominic Cummings, when he was advisor to the PM, saying, we do know. There's a real fundamental problem here where you're going,

I don't know, but these people think they know, and they're the people who are beginning to talk about this as policy. All I need to know about genetics, buddy, is that I married a gigantic Viking woman and I've got three gigantic Viking-like children. That's the only anecdotal information I need to know about. Yeah, but that's true. I mean, we do know that kind of stuff about genetics, but trying to unpick that at the molecular level is really hard. Okay, well, I'll let you do that. Okay, so interesting in state-led

stuff, like when the clever pill is available, should we pump it into the water supply? If we are able to improve this shambolic species of which you and I are a part of, is that a terrible ambition? No, absolutely not. Well, let me put it like this. I wrote a book about race a couple of years ago, and certain corners of the internet and certain people regard, when a scientist writes about things which are clearly political, they get angry with that and say, you know, science should be amoral and apolitical. It's about a higher truth and it should be separate from politics. Well, I just think that's a complete fantasy, right? Anyone who thinks that has not been paying

attention to science for the last 500, possibly 1,000 years. Science is inherently political. The ideal of science is that it is above the world of grubby politics or our psychological biases and all that. But as long as science is done by people, it's always going to be political. It's always going to have a political bent to it. The invention of biology is synonymous with the invention of racial categories in the 17th and 18th century. So the foundations of my subject are fundamentally politicised. Eugenics is another branch of science as ideology. The problem here is not that we don't want to improve society or improve the quality of lives for our family or our nations or our compatriots or whatever. The problem is that people turn to science for solutions, for easy fix solutions, for things that we fundamentally don't understand.

We know how to make society better, right? It's through better education. It's through better opportunities, equal opportunities, regardless of privilege. better education. It's through better opportunities, equal opportunities, regardless of privilege. It's through better nutrition and reducing the colossal wealth gap between the richest and the poorest in society. And so, you know, you come to these conclusions by going, well, yeah, obviously I have a political view on these and it's not difficult to work out roughly where my politics lie. My problem is when people turn to science that they simply don't understand to say, oh, when people turn to science that they simply don't understand to say, oh, we should do it like this,

right? If we want to make people clever in society, we should start tinkering with the DNA of our children. No, we shouldn't. We should read books more. We should open more libraries. We know what the answers to these questions are. If we want to improve society, just open more libraries. It has an absolute positive correlation reading with intelligence. We don't need to mess around with DNA, but that's what the eugenics movement was always about. It was looking for biological solutions to things that are actually achievable through cultural means. I agree with you. I'll tell you why. Because my kids showed no natural aptitude for anything. And I read them every single goddamn day for the first five years of their life, and now they're pretty smart. There you go. Yeah. There is a correlation between the meterage of

books that people have in their houses and academic attainment. And you're sitting in front of an excellent corner bookshelf there. I've got some of my books to my right there. If people read more, kids would be smarter. This stuff is not rocket science. Yeah, absolutely. Well, listen, Adam, thanks so much. I feel like I know about eugenics now. And what's the book called? It's called Control. I wanted to have a simple, powerful, Joy Division-related title, which is about our attempts to control the unruly biology. Thank you very much, Adam Rutherford, for coming on to this pod. Thanks, Dan.

This is not how I thought it was going to go. Chris Hoy was much more present than I planned. Love it. I feel we have the history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours,'s History as I say all the time I love doing these podcasts they are the best thing I do professionally I feel very lucky to have you listening to them

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