Science Vs - How Science Created Morons

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

REBROADCAST: This episode looks at how one of the worst ideas in science got a big push from a bad study… and intellectuals of the day lapped it up. We speak to science writer Carl Zimmer and Prof. J. David Smith, whose research helped get to the bottom of this messed-up story. Check out the full transcript here: https://bit.ly/3sZ3m8P This episode was produced by Kaitlyn Sawrey, Wendy Zukerman, and Romilla Karnick with help from Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler, Shruti Ravindran and Nick DelRose. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell, extra editing help from Alex Blumberg and PJ Vogt. An extra thanks to Phoebe Flanagan as well as Emily Ulbricht for help with German translations. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Nick DelRose. Mix and sound design by Emma Munger and Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord and Emma Munger. We also spoke to Professor Peter Visscher for this episode. Thank you. A huge thanks to all the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. Recently, we've been watching a lot of science happen in real time. And sometimes, it got messy. During the pandemic, we've seen experts tell us things about whether we should wear masks or how dangerous surfaces are. And then, seemed to flip-flop as more evidence came in. And this back and forth, it can be confusing, but it's also how science is supposed to work. Scientists pushing each other, making sure that the evidence really holds up. And as confusing as it is to be in the middle of it, what's worse is when science doesn't work this way.

And that's the story we're telling you about today. It's a cautionary tale of what happens when the nerds fall down on the job. When one voice, a scientist with a very bad idea, gets amplified and goes basically unchallenged. And there are terrible consequences. It all starts here, more than 100 years ago. They should put a plaque up here.

Here lies bad science I think we'll just walk around the perimeter, right? Like, I don't know if today's the day to get arrested Well, let's see, right? I mean, maybe today is the day I'm with Caitlin Sori, our former senior producer And we're at what's left of this old boarding school in New Jersey It was called the Vineland Training School.

Let's get closer. That looks like the dormitory for all the kids. Oh, it's so, it's so creepy looking. Oh, there's a no trespass sign. Inside, graffitied on the wall, it says, Forever Trapped in Red Paint. There's overgrown weeds and smashed windows. But you can imagine what this school would have been like 100 years ago. Look how imposing this school is.

Like, when you approach it from the front, can you imagine being eight years old and being dropped off here? You'd be like, what is this place? What happened in this place would echo all across America and then around the world. And it would be used to justify some of the greatest horrors of the 20th century. We first published this episode just a few years ago,

but it feels like it's never been more relevant. And it's coming up just after the break. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey, no, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick that's why bumble is changing how you start conversations you can now make the first move or not with opening moves you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches then sit back and let your matches start the chat download bumumble and try it for yourself. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jana Levin. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is...

Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology, and what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI,

with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Welcome back. Our story today centers on a little girl called Emma Wolverton. She was dropped off at the Vineland Training School in the late 1890s when she was just eight years old. Science writer Carl Zimmer has written about what happened here.

In his book, she has her mother's laugh. And he's helping us tell this story. And the more you think about it, the more elusive it gets. Carl told us that Emma's life before being dropped off at this school was pretty chaotic. She was really poor. Her mom struggled to keep a job. She lived in a very difficult environment. Her mother drank a lot and had a series of lovers

and was sort of basically moving around from house to house in a very unstable way. And then Emma's mum found a new boyfriend. He agreed to marry her. The evidence suggests if she just got rid of her other children somehow. So Emma's mum brought her to Vineland. It was a school for special needs kids. And it's not exactly clear why Emma's mum chose this school. Her daughter wasn't severely disabled. But still, at the time, Vineland was kind of cutting edge. It was actually, you know, for its time, a very humane place in some ways.

I mean, these children were not warehoused. They were kept in clean cottages and got a lot of fresh air. And, you know, the patrons built a zoo on the ground. A zoo? What kind of animals did they get? Oh, they got, you know, nothing too exotic. Maybe some pheasants and maybe a wolf or something like that. There were no rhinoceroses or anything, but still, you know, it was nice. As Emma grew up in this school, she acted in plays, learned this instrument called the cornet and did woodworking.

And life was humming along until she was about 17. That's when Emma met a man named Henry Goddard. He came to work at the school and this man, Henry, would go on to make Emma world famous. Can you tell us about him? Like, what did he look like? So Henry Goddard was a fairly short, bespectacled man, and he was a psychologist.

And he was actually one of the first child psychologists in the United States. And Henry is the scientist at the centre of this story. You see, he came to Emma's school because he had a very particular research interest, intelligence. Henry basically wanted to know why are some people smarter than others? And he thought that at this special school at Vineland, it was the perfect place to study intelligence, because the kids here were thought of as feeble-minded. That was the perfect place to study intelligence because the kids here were thought of as feeble-minded. That was the medical terminology of the day. He felt as if there was almost like a laboratory because these feeble-minded children were not developing

as ordinary children were. And he was thinking that if he could just understand these more slowly developing children, that he would discover some of the fundamental rules for how all children learn. So Henry tries to figure out what made these feeble-minded kids so dim. And his first step was to measure just how feeble-minded they were.

He wanted to measure their how feeble-minded they were. He wanted to measure their intelligence with a number in the same way you'd measure someone's height with a tape measure. So Henry uses this test. It's one of the first IQ tests on Emma and the other kids. And in it, there are questions like, count backwards from 20. Use the words money, river, and Philadelphia in a sentence. You know, I have five cents in one pocket,

and I have five cents in the other pocket. How much money do I have? You know, just questions like that. And then he would categorize the children by intelligence using a scale. So at the bottom, the least intelligent was an idiot. Further up, an imbecile. And finally, a category that Henry had just invented. A moron.

Children who were below average, but were not quite as bad as the children, not quite as low scoring as the children who were called idiots or imbeciles. In Henry's mind, imbeciles and idiots were obviously stupid. But morons, although they were a bit dumb, they could still pass as normal. And by the way, we know by today's standards, this is straight up offensive. But 100 years ago, this was science. So guess who Henry puts in that category of moron? So Emma was a moron, according to Henry's judgment. Yeah, the little girl abandoned at Vineland as a child, she was a moron. And now that Henry had neatly categorized the children

and Emma into a taxonomy of idiocy, he had to figure out the question of why. Why were they so stupid? So Henry discovers this newfangled kind of science in the early 1900s, genetics. And suddenly, the way he understands it, this answers everything. Genetics. Scientists at the time had this really basic understanding of what genes were. So they knew that certain traits were passed down through generations, like how tall you were, and they were starting to suspect that other things were linked through genes as well. Why would it be that, you know, a father who was a horse thief would have a son who, you know,

had trouble learning how to count? Or, you know, like, somehow they were sure that these things were connected under the name feeblemindedness, but they had no explanation why. And this was Henry's theory, that there was a gene for feeblemindedness that was carried on from one generation to the next. And he decides that he's going to use the kids at Vineland to make his case. He figured, I just need to go out and do some research, and I can prove to you that feeblem-mindedness is just genetic and that you just inherit it the way you might inherit your eye color. Henry ends up zeroing in on Emma as the key to his theory. So one of his assistants had started tracking down Emma's family to see how many morons were in her family tree. And the assistant comes back with some very exciting news. News that would send Henry's ideas into the scientific stratosphere.

Emma Wolverton's family is actually one big giant experiment. Here's what the assistant found. There's this big split in Emma's family tree. And it all started when one man had children with two different women. The man who started this whole thing, Emma's great, great, great granddad, was a revolutionary soldier. Joins a militia and they stay one night in a tavern. He gets drunk, has sex with a tavern wench, and then goes off on his merry way. And that tavern wench, she was feeble-minded.

She gets pregnant with a kid that grew up to be known as Old Horror. You've got to be really bad news to get a nickname like Old Horror. So Old Horror, among other things, liked to get drunk, and people would buy him drinks if he would go vote for wherever the candidate was, and he was very happy to vote early and vote often. And in fact, that tavern wench didn't just spawn one degenerate. Her descendants were feeble-minded as well. She spawned a dynasty of morons. There were horse thieves, brothel keepers, criminals,

all in all, more than a hundred degenerates going all the way down to little Emma Wolverton. But that wasn't the end of the story here. Because you see, there was another branch of the family tree. After the revolutionary soldier left the tavern wench behind, he then went on to marry another woman. The right kind of woman. He goes off and has a very, you know, upstanding life. He marries a woman of good Quaker stock, the way it's described. And then they have lots of kids who have kids of their own, and they're all upstanding citizens and people of prominence and so on and so forth. On the good side of the family tree,

there were all kinds of successful people, doctors, lawyers, judges, and they married into the best families in their state, including a family where someone signed the Declaration of Independence. So to Henry Goddard, this is proof positive that he was right, that feeble-mindedness is totally genetic. And if you just happen to inherit this feeble-mindedness gene, then forget it.

You're done for. And that Emma Wolverton was just the latest in a long line of feeble-mindedness gene, then forget it. You're done for. And that Emma Wolverton was just the latest in a long line of feeble-minded people. Henry realized that his findings were groundbreaking. Feeble-mindedness really was passed down from generation to generation. And it struck him. Oh no. All these morons. They're just going to keep having babies. It was just going to keep going up and up and up. And something had to be done to stop the rising tide of fuel mininus or the whole country was done for.

Henry now had this sense of urgency. And no one else could see how big this problem was becoming. And he needs a way to get the word out quickly. And so what he decides to do is to make Emma Wolverton his iconic example. He's going to tell her story and publish a book. In 1912, Henry publishes a book about Emma's family. And it was a book not just for scientists, but for the lay public too. Now, to protect Emma's identity, always a sensitive guy,

Henry changes her name to Deborah. Deborah Calicac. Calicac being a mixture of two Greek words that mean beautiful and bad. So you had this family where you had the good on one side and the bad on the other. Ooh. The book is called The Calicak Family, and it goes viral. Well, you know, viral for 1912.

You know, somebody tries to make a Broadway show out of it. I mean, it really... Wow. It totally penetrates popular culture and also high culture. And one of the reasons that the Calicak story went viral was that it really hit on a nerve. You see, in the beginning of the 20th century, America was kind of coming into its own. It was a promise of a great new nation. Cities were industrializing.

Businessmen like Henry Ford were reshaping America. And as many American intellectuals and Henry Goddard saw it, this dream was being dragged down by the feeble-minded. For someone like Henry Goddard, it was a very disturbing time in places like New Jersey and Pennsylvania and New York, a real turbulent kind of change happening. You had white families who had been there since colonial times shifting from farms into the cities. And as they were going there trying to get work in the factories, there was a huge amount of poverty that they were suffering from.

On top of this, there were waves of immigration. New people coming in from Asia and Eastern Europe that many Americans were worried about. Waves of immigration that new people coming in from Asia and Eastern Europe that many Americans were worried about. Waves of immigration that were starting to come not just from England, but from other countries like Italy or Russia and so on. And I, you know, I can't tell you how many people felt that there was this rising tide of feeble-mindedness in the country that had to be controlled if the country itself was going to survive. In Henry's book, The Kalakak Family, he wrote,

quote, There are Kalakak families all about us. They are multiplying at twice the rate of the general population. And not until we recognize this fact and work on this basis will we begin to solve these social problems. End quote. How is it a bestseller? It sounds like a bit of a dud read. This is an explanation for, you know, my own prejudices. And it's science. And it's science, right.

Something had to be done to stop this bloated class of morons from breeding. But what? Soon, the idea spread that morons and imbeciles shouldn't be allowed to have children. Yeah, this is eugenics, selectively breeding the human race. Now, eugenics had been bubbling along for years before the Calicak story was published. In fact, Charles Darwin's half-cousin came up with eugenics about 30 years before. But by 1912, it had become really popular. Many highly respected intellectuals, men of science, were mad for it.

All the leading universities had very prominent outspoken eugenicists among their ranks. You know, presidents of universities like David Jordan, president of Stanford University, ardent eugenicist. Henry Osborne from president of the American Museum of Natural History, full out eugenicist. So, yeah, so you can't say that this was some odd little perverse idea that just a few people had. This was mainstream. When you go through the list of notable eugenicists, it reads like a who's who of the early 1900s. Like Alexander Graham Bell, the guy who painted the first telephone. He was a eugenicist. Margaret Sanger, who led the fight for birth control. She was a eugenicist. And even Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf,

she was a eugenicist. And all this popular support to stop the morons from breeding. It wasn't just talk amongst highfalutin intellectuals. It led to real laws where the so-called morons were actually sterilized by the state. And that meant for men, vasectomies, and for women, cutting or tying fallopian tubes. And while some of these laws kicked in before the Kalakak family was published, after the book came out, more and more states started passing laws to make sure that some morons couldn't have babies. So this book was actually extremely influential. And Henry Goddard himself actually lobbied state governments to put sterilization laws on the books.

And when some questioned what was happening in the highest court, the Calicak story showed up there too. In the 1920s, a case challenging these sterilization laws went all the way to the Supreme Court. The case focused on an 18-year-old woman from Virginia called Carrie Buck. Carrie was raped and then got pregnant. She ended up having the baby out of wedlock and was deemed feeble-minded and sexually promiscuous. The state wanted to sterilize her.

The state of Virginia, you know, defending sterilization actually presented the Kalakak family, the Buck, as part of their evidence to the Supreme Court. Carrie lost the case. The justice wrote, it is better for all the world if society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. Carrie's mother and baby were also considered feeble-minded.

And so the justice finished up by saying, quote, three generations of imbeciles are enough, end quote. And the Supreme Court said, yeah, go ahead, go off and sterilize. Carrie was sterilized. And as a result of this judgment, now states could just keep on sterilizing so-called feeble-minded women and men. And all this would pave the way for the mass sterilization of Black, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Native Americans, which went on for decades. And back in the 1920s,

while Henry's book was being brandished by politicians and lawyers and used to justify sterilising America's poor and unwell, the story of the Kalakak family had become world famous. And it even makes its way across the Atlantic, where by the 1930s it reaches an up-and-coming group of populists, the Nazis. That's coming up, just after the break. Welcome back. So we've heard the story of Emma Wolverton's family tree, aka the Calicak family. It's a tale of how one bad apple, one feeble-minded wench,

rotted the entire family tree, spawning generations of morons and freaking out America. The story supported sterilization laws and spread across the Atlantic into Nazi Germany. This was a Nazi propaganda film, Das Erbe, or The Inheritance, and it was broadcast just after the Nazis got into power. In the film, we can see a man in a lab coat showing us all the branches of the Kalikak family tree, from the tavern wench all the way down to Emma. Kalikak had became an iconic example of why the Nazis wanted to control reproduction,

how they wanted to improve the master race through all sorts of increasingly horrific ways. This is science writer Carl Zimmer again. And back in the US, the Kalakak family was also used to pass immigration laws that ended up making it harder for Jewish people fleeing the Nazis to reach the US. After the Nazis' eugenics program and the horrors of World War II became common knowledge, eugenicists in the US were kind of shoved to the fringes. And even before then, as scientists realized that intelligence was more complicated than

a feeble-minded gene, eugenics had started to fall out of favor within the scientific community. You know, you have eugenics sort of disappearing from the names of societies, disappearing from the names of journals. And Henry, after he wrote this hugely influential book supporting these now taboo ideas, what became of him? Well, he also stepped away from eugenics, but he always defended his great study of the Calicak family. He keeps insisting, no, no, no, no, this was good, solid psychology, science, good genetics, this is important stuff. But then after World War II, he just, he was very old by that point, just, you know, quieted down and, you know, and then died in relative obscurity.

You know, his obituaries basically note, this is the, this is the guy who came up with the word moron. But the Kalakak story didn't fade away completely. And in the mid-1960s, something happened that twisted everything on its head. It started when a college kid called David Smith heard about it at his school. I was taught about the Kalicak family in college. It was sort of the prime example of heredity being destiny. And it just stuck with me. Why was that? Because it just sounded a little bit shaky. David started thinking that this story was a bit too tidy. Could one wench really spawn all these morons? Could Jeans be solely responsible for tainting generations of people? It just didn't make sense to him.

That's exactly right. It didn't make sense to me, and I was driven, I might say driven, to see what I could find out about it. And part of the reason why David couldn't quite believe this idea about your genes being the one thing that made you smart or successful or not was because he looked at his own life and he knew things were more complicated than that. I came from a family who had no opportunity for education. My mother was a housewife. My father was a machinist at a railroad company. And sometimes I felt

all I could hope to do was work for the railroad like my father had. David saw his family in the Calicacs, and it felt kind of personal. David ultimately became an academic. He's now an emeritus professor at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. And back in the 1980s, he wanted to know more about this Calicac family. His first step was uncovering who Deborah Calicak actually was, because back then her identity wasn't public knowledge.

So David went searching for clues at Vineland Training School in New Jersey, that place where we started the show. I went to the institution where she had been institutionalized and getting leads there. But then as I left that town, I stopped into a little diner, and the people at the table next to me saw that I had Virginia tags on my car, and they wanted to know why was I in Vineland, New Jersey. I told them what I needed to know, and they said, well, we know her. We've been volunteers at the institution for years. And they gave me her real name, and my journey began unraveling the story. By the time he knew that Deborah Kalakak was actually Emma,

she'd already died. But now, David wanted to see what else he could find about her family tree. Once I had the name, then I could go to courthouses and historical societies. He ends up tracking down a lot of Emma's relatives. And I found that the story of the calicax was a myth. So the idea of the calicax was that one branch of this family tree, the good side, were full of upstanding citizens and the other side were full of horrors. But once David could really track down who was who,

he saw a much more complicated family tree. Some of the so-called good Calicacs were not so good and all of the bad Calics were not so bad. There were lots of people with respectable jobs on the so-called bad side of Emma's family. Bank treasurers, policemen, and school teachers. Like, take for example that guy Old Horror, the illegitimate child of the revolutionary soldier in the tavern wench. Well, David worked out that he actually owned property, and according to the

census of 1850, his whole family could read, which was a pretty good lot for back then. He was not a horror. It was not so much old horror as the horror that was placed on this family. Not only did Henry Goddard call people feeble-minded when there wasn't the evidence for it, but he actually totally messed up the family tree. Like, old horror wasn't even the revolutionary soldier's kid. He was his second cousin.

So this whole thing, it was nonsense. That's right. I think it is pretty incredible, but it's true. So it turned out that the so-called science that people were using to justify these sterilization and anti-immigration laws, it was garbage to begin with. And on top of all this, we now know that intelligence doesn't just flow through our genes. Yes, having smart parents helps,

but scientists have come to realize that our environment, like where we go to school, it plays an important role too. David managed to learn even more about the life of Emma Wolverton, aka Deborah Kalakak. When she was in her mid-20s, she got too old for the Vineland Training School to keep her, so they sent her to another facility across the road

for feeble-minded women, and she stayed there for the Vineland Training School to keep her. So they sent her to another facility across the road for feeble-minded women. And she stayed there for the rest of her life. Do we know, was she even, was she feeble-minded? No, she wasn't. Well, feeble-minded is a pretty meaningless label to begin with. But still, when we look at school records, it's said that Emma, while she struggled with reading and numbers, she was good at other things, like carpentry

and taking care of kids. Sometimes she'd even be put in charge of kindergarten classes. The more I looked into it, I saw that she had been needlessly institutionalised for most of her life. Emma never saw Henry again after she grew up. From what we can tell, she didn't seem to have any hard feelings, though. She actually named one of her cats after him. And Henry sent her a Christmas card where he wrote to her about his theories of intelligence. And it seems Emma appreciated that he could share such complicated ideas with her. She told a staff member, quote, the nicest thing

about it is that he thought I have the brains to understand it, which of course I do. Poor Emma, And she was caught in a trap of ideas at the time and had no chance of getting out. Emma died at the age of 89, and she was buried on the institution grounds. The story of the Kalakak family is like this fable of how even the smartest people of the day, the scientists, the intellectuals, can get swept up by their own fears and prejudices. This study fed into people's worst instincts and gave them evidence, science, to back up what they wanted to hear.

And so many people just went along for the ride. And it's easy to sit back now and think, well, if this happened today, I wouldn't have fallen for it. I wouldn't have bought into these ideas. But I do wonder, if we were making science verses back in 1912, would we have shot down the story of the Calicak family? Would we have seen this for what it was? I don't know.

Nah, of course we would have gotten it right. That's Science Versus. If you want to know more about anything that we talked about on this episode, check out our transcript. It's fully cited, of course. Just look at the show notes and there'll be a link to the transcript right there. Plus, if you want to see photos of Deborah Kalakak, aka Emma Wolverton, head over to our Instagram.

It's science underscore VS. Carl Zimmer's book where he talks about the Kalakak family is called She Has Her Mother's Laugh. head over to our Instagram. It's science underscore VS. Carl Zimmer's book, where he talks about the Calicak family, is called She Has Her Mother's Laugh. It's all about genetics and heredity, and it is really, really fascinating. Carl also has a new book out right now. It's called Life's Edge, The Search for What It Means to Be Alive.

Check it out. This episode was produced by Caitlin Sorey, me, Wendy Zuckerman, and Romila Karnik, with help from Meryl Horne, Rose Rimler, Shruti Ravindran, and Nick Delrose. We're edited by Blythe Terrell, extra editing help from Alex Bloomberg and PJ Vogt. An extra thanks to Phoebe Flanagan,

as well as Emily Ulbricht for German translations. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Nick Delrose. Mix and sound design by Emma Munger and Bumi Hiraka music written by Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord and Emma Munger we also spoke to Professor Peter Vischer for this episode thank you and a huge thanks to all the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson I'm Wendy Zuckerman

back to you next time