Turner reported in early 2023 that Adam Rutherford’s new book takes readers on a journey into genetics' s dark past. In the Victorian era, in the shadow of Darwin's revolutionary theory of evolution, a sinister ideology took root — eugenics. It was an attempt to impose political control upon humanity’s unruly DNA by encouraging those with "desirable" traits to breed, while removing those with "undesirable" ones from the gene pool.
The idea, which enjoyed popular support among scientists, politicians and the general public for 60 years in Europe and the U.S., later became a cornerstone of Hitler’s Third Reich, taking the world on a horrific journey from forced sterilizations to the mass murder of millions in concentration camps such as Auschwitz.
Yet remnants of the now-discredited practice still haunt us to this day — glimpsed in reports of involuntary sterilizations of Uyghurs in China(opens in new tab) and detainees in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers(opens in new tab); in the claims made by new biotech companies to be able to successfully screen human egg cells for traits like intelligence(opens in new tab); or the controversial creation of gene-edited twins by a biophysicist in China.
In Adam Rutherford’s new book "Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics," (W.W. Norton & Company, 2022) the British geneticist and science writer time travels to the very beginning of what he calls "a defining idea of the 20th century" to explain its persistent hold on our present. His starting point is his own university, University College London, where Darwin’s younger half-cousin, the polymath Francis Galton, first coined the term 140 years ago.
Live Science spoke with him about how eugenics originated, why it failed, and why he believes it still lives with us now. What is the modern definition of "scientific" eugenics, and how did Charles Darwin and Francis Galton contribute to its creation? As far as we can tell, the idea of trying to control and mold populations through biology — by restricting reproductive rights or in the infanticide of babies deemed unworthy — appears to be almost universal in almost every culture as long as we have records.
What happened in the 19th century, though, is the emergence of the ideas of natural selection and evolution in 1859 as described by Charles Darwin. Darwin demonstrated that the behavioral or physical characteristics of any species can be changed over generational time by selection, either natural or artificial. Darwin doesn't mention humans in the "Origin of Species" at all, but later on, in 1871, he published the "Descent of Man" which is the application of evolutionary theory to humans.
Darwin’s half cousin, Francis Galton — who was very enamored with the work of his relative, and his celebrity status — took those principles of artificial selection and applied them to human populations. He wanted to craft better societies, better cultures, filled with people with more "desirable" characteristics. Galton wrote about the inheritance of genius in 1869 and he developed statistical techniques to model how societies should be shaped. He believed that the characteristics of humans are determined much more by biology than they are by environment, and he is the person who gives us the phrase "nature versus nurture," where nature is what we now call genetics and nurture is everything that isn't.
By 1883, he had come up with a term for this attempt to alter humans physically or behaviorally by changing their social structures: eugenics. It provided a scientific scaffold to the ancient idea of reshaping populations according to biological means. Francis Galton, an English Victorian statistician, sociologist, anthropologist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, psychometrician, was the founder of social Darwinism, eugenics and scientific racism
Yet the eugenics we’re discussing here emerged as an idea before Gregor Mendel gave us the concept of the unit of heritable information — the gene. What did eugenicists believe about how we inherit traits such as intelligence? And how did early developments in genetics influence them?
When Darwin described natural selection in 1859, he didn’t have a mechanism, just an overall scheme: evolution occurs as descent with modification. But he didn't know what was descending; what the unit of inheritance was; or how the inherited characteristics were divided up.
Meanwhile, Gregor Mendel is in Moravia working on his famous pea plants experiments. He breeds the plants together, carefully selecting them for specific traits. And through this he identifies inheritance patterns that can be expressed by the passing of discrete units of inheritance from generation to generation, and that these patterns can be predicted with alarming accuracy. What he discovered is the units of inheritance we call genes.
These two things are happening in parallel, but Mendel's work was only translated into English in 1900, after which it became the framework for genetics. The rediscovery of his work and the concept of the gene happens at exactly the right time for the eugenicists. Now, not only do they understand that humans are mutable and can change over generational time, but they have the unit of inheritance, the Mendelian gene. It gives a huge boost to the eugenicists' hereditarian thinking, cementing the idea that characteristics are encoded more genetically than they are environmentally.
So what is it exactly about hereditarian thinking that’s wrong? [Read on ...the article is especially well written and is interesting]
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