Short Wave - Control: Eugenics And The Corruption Of Science

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a book about the evolution of non-human animals by natural selection. In its wake, a political idea arose — eugenics. Reading Darwin's book, Sir Francis Galton proposed that humans should be bred to give more "suitable" characteristics a "better chance of prevailing." Today, producer Rebecca Ramirez talks to Adam Rutherford about his new book, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics, which traces the inextricable link between political ideology and science, and the enduring shadow of eugenics.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Those who confidently assert truths in science are often buoyed by ignorance rather than knowledge. Adam Rutherford is a geneticist and author of the new book, Control, the dark history and troubling present of eugenics. The book traces the origins of the field of genetics. Genetics is the study of genes and DNA, but really what it is is it's the study of sex and families and inheritance and just the way that information in biology is conveyed from generation to generation.

And this idea of inheritance that people can pass parts of themselves onto their kids, it's something humans have long observed. You know, the earliest really specific examples of what I consider to be like genetic counseling or genetic information about how, like, units of inheritance are passed from generation to generation comes from the Talmud. So third century BC, there's an instruction which says that if three of your brothers have died at birth from bleeding to death following circumcision, then the fourth brother is allowed not to be circumcised. And what we now think that is is a description of the inheritance pattern of hemophilia. The idea of biological inheritance comes to the forefront in the late 1800s with Darwin's on the origin of species published in 1859.

It's out of this scientific advancement that the idea of eugenics is created and starts to gain popularity. Eugenics is a political ideology that emerges in the 19th century that uses these new ideas of genetics to promote the idea that if animals can be bred and foods can be bred, we can shape nature to our will. If those things are true, which they are, then why can't we do the same for humans? Either specific marriage pairings or through infanticide or sterilization to remove people who are undesirable from society and to enhance the frequency of people who have desirable qualities. The name eugenics comes from British polymaths for Francis Galton. He's the granddaddy of eugenics, and he's a fascinating man. I mean, a genius in many respects, but an unbiased.

utterly loathsome figure as well. Very typical of his Victorian gentleman upper class status. But he's an extreme racist and white supremacist in a way which is not atypical for his time, but he is quite extreme. And he's Charles Darwin's half-cousin. When his half-cousin, Charles Darwin, talks about the way that evolution works and the way through selective breeding, all sorts of livestock and animals can be changed over time, Golden latches onto this idea and says, well, that's why we should do it.

It's humans. We can change the fate of the British people through selective breeding. And he gives it the name, eugenics. And it just embeds itself in British culture. And from the 1860s until the 19, sort of tens, 20s, 30s, it just grows and grows and becomes this sort of almost universally supported idea. So today's show, Adam Rutherford on eugenics, the ongoing tale. of science and politics intertwining to justify everything from dubious research to horrific crimes,

how ideas take hold to create global harm, and why people should be concerned about eugenics now. I'm Rebecca Ramirez. You're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR. This urge to formalize and systematize the selective breeding of people emerges from a specific political climate. There's a very tumultuous socio-political atmosphere. There's industrial revolutions. There's huge urbanization of cities as they expand. And there's lots of immigration from the expanding empires. This is a time when Britain is at its sort of imperial peak.

In America, you've got a slightly different but very similar situation where mass immigration at the end of the 19th century in the beginning of the 20th century is just happening by the millions every year. And it becomes part of, eugenics becomes part of this sort of overall perceived threat of immigrants coming in. And the decadent middle classes of people in America already are not having enough children, whereas the immigrants are having loads of children. At this time, it's a lot of Italians and Irish immigrants, but also descendants of the enslaved. So African Americans.

And so there's this perceived threat that we're going to be wrong. replaced, that the ruling powers are going to be swamped, using the language of the time, by immigrants. And eugenics gets really, really vigorously adopted as a means of pushing back against that. It's an idea which is sort of bolted onto science, but actually isn't very scientific. And as you point out in the book, there's so much to this history, there's so much to cover. Could you just thread the needle a little bit more for the rest of the U.S. story of eugenics? The first thing is that you've got to address this guy, Charles Davenport, who's the sort of Goulton equivalent. Charles Davenport is an American biologist.

And in the 1890s, he meets Galton in London and comes back to America and becomes obsessed with eugenics. And so he sets up the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor, upstate New York. and it's funded by some of those sort of gilded age, the first wave of those mega philanthropists, so the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation. And the intention is to do basic research on inheritance in humans, but also to spread the word. So they go out to rural, sort of county fairs, agricultural fairs,

in places like Iowa and Kansas. And so they say things like, you know, you guys are judging the Frisian cows and the Holstein cows. but you should also be judging the Joneses and the Smiths. And you can understand how good genes and bad genes flow through families. And therefore you have a pivot on which you can leverage eugenics selection. And in America, they took it on vigorously.

The first state, Indiana, passed eugenics laws in 1907. 31 other states did over the course of the 20th century. And our estimates are that somewhere like 80,000. women and men were sterilized against their will over the course of the 20th century, with one state being the most vigorous adopter. Whenever I ask students or audiences this, no one has ever got it right. And the answer is California. Wow.

California is the most vigorous adopter of eugenics, maybe accounting for half of the people who were sterilized against their will. And there's lawsuits in Canada and in California about that all women, mostly in prisons, mostly African or American. or indigenous American women who've been sterilized without their knowledge in the 21st century. So this is not just our history. This is our present. So, you know, you ask the question, does eugenics work?

It does not. Why does it not work? Why does the idea of controlling for something like intelligence or alcoholism or schizophrenia not work? The reason I can say with confidence that the ideas behind the historical sort of protocols for eugenics wouldn't work and didn't work is because we don't understand how genetics works. Now, I'm saying that as someone who is a geneticist. Right.

But if politicians or journalists talk about this kind of stuff and more and more entrepreneurs who are interested in the new reproductive technologies that come with in the post-human genome world, when they say, well, we kind of do know how this works and we should probably act on this. And that's when I'm thinking, ah, this is how historical mistakes

happen. We don't really understand the genetics of eye colour. We understand the basic genetics of some diseases that tend to have a sort of single gene cause, but we don't really understand them. When it comes to things like complex diseases or complex traits like behaviours or intelligence or diseases like, you know, hypertension or schizophrenia or things like that, we are years, maybe decades away from having a sophisticated understanding of those types of traits and humans. Yeah, at the very beginning of this conversation, I said genetics is a really young science.

But studying families and inheritance is a very old practice. And that's where that conflict lies. Because science is not here to reaffirm what you already think you know. It is there to disabuse you of your preconceptions. Science is the opposite of common sense, which sounds like an interesting. insult, but actually it's a best compliment because common sense tells us all sorts of stuff, which is just not true. Like, I don't know, the earth is flat or the sun goes around the

earth. Those are things that were corrected by decent scientific practice. Right. And eugenics has been aimed at a range of things. Poverty, illnesses, intelligence, criminality even. And it's used for population control. And birth control. And birth control. specifically is interesting because on the one hand, you know, thinking of women's birth control, it's a case where states have forced people to be sterilized. And Margaret Singer was a reproductive rights leader in the U.S., but was also a member of the American Eugenic Society. But at the same time, birth control, it gives people choices about their reproduction. It can be pretty complicated and we can't just fully write off all aspects of these things because of things

like women's rights. Yeah, that's exactly right. And the repercussions of that and the legacies of those conversations are very much part of our present. The Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas, when Roe v. Wade was overturned earlier this year, he cited eugenics as being part of the sort of whole conversation about abortion rights and that abortion was a tool of eugenics. Now, when he said that, it was an incredibly simplified and a little bit historically inaccurate. But he's not wrong in the sense that Margaret Sanger was interested and the other sort of Planned Parenthood founders also in the UK. Mary Stopes is the equivalent in the UK. And she was a, she was a horror. I mean, a real Hitler-supporting Nazi anti-Semites.

Now, you know, we don't remember that history very well because now she's associated with reproductive rights for women and the clinics that bear her name are for the medical autonomy for women. So again, this is like a conversation where, that we need to have and we need to be much, much less partisan in having this conversation because history is super complex. We've got to be able to have grown up conversations about our history and the repercussions and the legacy of those histories, which are because they're with us today. Yeah. And so having worked in this field of genetics for so long and now having written this book,

does this all read to you as a cautionary tale of how ideas, small academic ideas can balloon and become normalized? I mean, do you see parallels between the scientific advancements now and when genetics was just coming about? Yes, I do. Yeah, I do. I do. I mean, that really is exactly what it is. There's a line I use at the beginning of the book, which is that we learn our history to inoculate ourselves against it being repeated. And what I'm most fascinated by is that pathway. A little footnote in a book in the 1880s in London, an obscure and really quite dull academic book.

And we should say that book is Francis Galton's inquiries into human faculty and its development. And within 60 years, you've paved the pathway to, Auschwitz, and that is the pathway that we can't anticipate without recognizing, without understanding the history of how it's happened before. So that's the cautionary tale aspect to it. Thank you very much for talking to us. This is an enormously important topic that you just brought it to the present for me and a lot of people on the team in a way that it hasn't been. So nice to talk to you. Thank you for this opportunity. Yes, thank you.

Rutherford's book, Control, the dark history and troubling present of eugenics is on sale in the U.S. November 15th. This episode was produced and edited by me, Rebecca Ramirez, and our senior supervising editor, Giselle Grayson, with help from Burley McCoy. The audio engineer was Maggie Luthor, and our podcast coordinator is Brendan Crump. Our senior director is Beth Donovan, and Programming's senior vice president is Anya Grunman. Thanks as always for listening to Shrudeau. Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR.