Superior: The Fatal Return of Race Science. Angela Saini
by context, be it neighbouring genes or the quality of air a person breathes. Everything can influence the direction of development, making nurture not some kind of afterthought tacked onto nature, but something embedded deep down in our bodies. ‘Weldon was unusually sceptical.’
To prove his point, Weldon demonstrated how ordinary pea breeders couldn’t come up with the same perfectly uniform peas as Mendel. Real peas are a multitude of colours between yellow and green. In the same way that our eyes aren’t simply brown or blue or green, but a million different shades. Or that if a woman has a ‘gene for breast cancer’, it doesn’t mean she will necessarily develop the disease. Or that a queen bee isn’t born a queen; she is just another worker bee until she eats enough royal jelly. Between the gene and real life is not just the environment, but also random possibility. Comparing Mendel’s peas with the real world, then, is like comparing a soap opera with real life. There is truth in there, but reality is a lot more complicated. Genes aren’t Lego bricks or simple instruction manuals; they are interactive. They are enmeshed in a network of other genes, their immediate surroundings and the wider world, this ever-changing network producing a unique individual.
Sadly for Weldon, the ferocious debate for the soul of genetics ended prematurely in 1906 when he died of pneumonia, aged just forty-six. His manuscript went unfinished and unpublished. With less resistance than before, Mendel’s ideas were gradually incorporated into biology textbooks, becoming the bedrock of modern genetics. Although Weldon’s ideas have since slowly been reincorporated into scientific thinking, there still remains a strain of genetic determinism in both the scientific and the public imagination. Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin has called it the ‘Central Dogma of Molecular Genetics’. It is a belief that all that we are is set in stone in the womb.
In the early twentieth century, before the advent of modern genetics but with Mendel’s findings prominent in their minds, Francis Galton’s theories seemed to make good sense to many. They had a logical appeal that stretched across the political spectrum. We associate eugenics today with the fascists who perpetrated the Holocaust, but before the 1930s, many on the left saw it as socially progressive. Galton himself was certainly not considered a crank. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, and an anthropometric laboratory he set up in 1884 to catalogue people’s measurements enjoyed support from the British Medical Association. Eugenics belonged firmly to establishment science, and amongst intellectuals, it wasn’t just mainstream, it was fashionable.
The fly in the ointment was how to carry it out. Galton observed that the poor seemed to be outbreeding the rich, and he saw the poor as poor for the simple reason that they were congenitally unfit. Responsible action was necessary to address the problem and ensure genetic progress. On the one hand, the rich needed to step up their baby-making game. On the other, society’s dregs, particularly those described as mentally feeble, physically weak, and criminal types, needed convincing to have fewer children. Managing reproduction was the linchpin of eugenics, even attracting a fan in women’s rights activist and birth control pioneer Marie Stopes. To support her first clinic, Stopes founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. Philosopher Bertrand Russell, too, suggested that the state might improve the health of the population by fining the ‘wrong’ type of people for giving birth.
Eugenics was more than a theory, it was a plan in search of policymakers. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, was welcomed as vice-president at the first International Eugenics Congress, held at London’s grand Hotel Cecil in 1912. Other vice-presidents included the Lord Mayor of London and the Lord Chief Justice. Delegates came from all over Europe, Australia and the United States, including Harvard and Johns Hopkins University. The US state of Indiana had already passed the world’s first involuntary sterilisation law in 1907, informed by eugenicists who argued that criminality, mental problems and poverty were hereditary. More than thirty other states soon followed, with enthusiastic public backing. By 1910 a Eugenics Record Office was established at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island in New York, with support from oil industry magnate John D. Rockefeller and later funding by the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
A news item in the journal Science announced that one of the purposes of the new office in New York would be ‘the study of miscegenation in the United States’, the mixing and intermarriage of different racial groups. Its board of scientific directors included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, and the economist Irving Fisher. The hardware behind at least one of America’s most ambitious eugenics projects came from none other than IBM, the same company that went on to supply the Nazi regime in Germany with the technology it needed to transport millions of victims to the concentration camps.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, all over the world, eugenics began to be conflated with nineteenth-century ideas about race. In Japan, Meiji-period thinker and politician Katˉo Hiroyuki used Darwinism to make the point that there was a struggle for survival between different nations. In China in 1905, the revolutionary Wang Jingwei argued that a state whose members were of a single race was stronger than one comprising multiple races. Other politicians advocated sterilisation as a means of human selection, and racial intermarriage to produce children with whiter skins. Historian Yuehtsen Juliette Chung has noted that during this time, ‘China seemed to accept passively the notion of race as the West understood it.’
In India, too, European notions of racial superiority were easily absorbed by some, partly because they mirrored the country’s existing caste system – itself a kind of racial hierarchy – but also because Germany’s Aryan myth placed the noble race as having once lived in their region. The ideological quest for the true ‘Aryans’ remains alive in India, and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is a bestseller in Indian bookshops. Each nation utilised the idea of race in its own ways, marrying it with science if it could be of use. Eugenics, then, became just another tool in what were longstanding power dynamics.
By 1914 the word ‘eugenics’ was being used with such abandon that it had almost became synonymous with being healthy, complained American eugenics professor Roswell H. Johnson in the American Journal of Sociology. ‘A school for sex education is called a school of eugenics. Even a milk and ice station has been similarly designated,’ he grumbled.
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In its early days, particularly for its mainstream supporters, eugenics focused on improving racial stock by weeding out those seen to be at the margins of society, the feeble-minded, insane and disabled. But as time wore on, the umbrella inevitably expanded. Karl Pearson, who succeeded Galton as the main force behind eugenics when he died in 1911 and shared his views on race, believed that since other races than his own were inferior, intermixing was also dangerous to the health of the population. By this logic, the very existence of those other races represented something of a threat. ‘Pearson’s argument is that if you have uncontrolled immigration the welfare of British people is at stake,’ Subhadra Das tells me.
At the time, despite the mainstream popularity of eugenics, some did notice the slippery slope. This is one reason why, despite all the support it attracted from politicians and intellectuals and how popular it became in other countries, eugenics never managed to gain a firm toehold in Britain and was not implemented by the government. British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley argued that privilege and upbringing could surely more accurately explain why some people were successful and others weren’t. He noted that many remarkable people had unremarkable relatives. Another vocal critic was biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had come from humble beginnings to become an important and well-loved researcher, credited with formulating evolutionary theory at the same time as Darwin. ‘The world does not want the eugenicist to set it straight,’ he warned. ‘Give the people good conditions, improve their environment, and all will tend towards the highest type. Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant, scientific priestcraft.’
But it’s important to remember that history might well have gone another way. Das pulls out another object from the archive. It’s a narrow tin box, resembling a cigarette case but twice as long. It was brought to London by Karl Pearson, but had been designed by Eugen Fischer, a German scientist who had been director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. The box still bears Fischer’s name. Inside is a neat row of thirty locks of artificial hair, ranging in