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Sci Tech
The shameful history at the heart of genetics
JOHNJOE MCFADDEN
Despite his frantic backtracking, James Watson’s statement that Africans are less intelligent than Europeans follows a long and dubious tradition of geneticists claiming that supposed racial differences have a genetic basis.
Birth of the science
The idea goes back to the birth of the science of evolutionary genetics and its illegitimate sibling: eugenics. After the death of his young daughter, Charles Darwin lamented natural selection’s “clumsy, wasteful, blundering and horribly cruel action”; but perhaps man could do better.
Darwin did not suggest this step himself, but in the 1930s six of his family were members of the British Eugenics Society, and his son was president from 1911 to 1928.
‘Feeble nations’
The Galton laboratory at the University of London is named after Darwin’s cousin, the geneticist Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics and advocated perfecting the human race by breeding “those only of the best stock” so that the “feeble nations” could give way before the “nobler varieties of mankind.”
Eugenics societies sprang up at the beginning of the 20th century in most western countries to promote breeding programmes, but the movement was not confined to scientists.
In November 1913 the Oxford Union carried a motion approving the principles of eugenics. As a cabinet minister, the young Winston Churchill advocated compulsory sterilisation of “the feeble-minded and insane classes.” George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells were profoundly influenced by Darwin.
The contraception pioneer Marie Stopes campaigned to pass laws to enable sterilisation of the “hopelessly rotten and racially diseased.”
Real roots
But the writings of literary eugenicists betray their real roots: fear. In 1915 Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary: “On the towpath we met and had to pass a long line of imbeciles. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.” H.G. Wells openly advocated the killing of the weak by the strong, insisting that “those swarms of blacks, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people ... will have to go.” Popular support for eugenics among the west European and U.S. intelligentsia had very little to do with its dubious scientific credentials. Fear was translated into action in many European countries and U.S. states that adopted eugenicist sterilisation policies.
‘Racial hygiene’
The full horror of eugenics was realised in the 1934 German ‘racial hygiene’ laws, which led to the enforced sterilisation of more than 80,000 individuals. Hitler’s enthusiastic support of its principles established eugenics as the pariah of post-war science. But many geneticists continued to investigated the genetic basis of intelligence, creativity, sexuality and criminality.
Recent controversial evidence that genes may indeed be linked to these traits has not come as a surprise to sociobiologists, such as Edward O Wilson, who have long argued that mankind cannot, uniquely, escape its genetic inheritance.
But the debate that must follow has nothing to do with the ill-considered remarks of Watson. Like his predecessors, Watson betrays fears and this time of white privileged Americans of a world that is slipping beyond their control.
— Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007
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