https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/life/eugenics-still-dirty-word-making-comeback/
Eugenics is still a dirty word, but is it making a comeback?

The public conversation about eugenics and race might feel new and
startling, but it’s far from over, says a UCL geneticist
By Adam Rutherford <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/authors/adam-rutherford/> 21
February 2020 • 6:00pm
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[image: image.png]
Geneticists are arguing about whether embryo selection for intelligence
would 'work' Credit:  Jason Horowitz

Eugenics made a big comeback this week. That might seem like a surprising
sentence to read in the 21st century, given its toxic past, the genocides
of the 20th century, and the hope that it had been consigned to a historic
midden. Yet there it was in every newspaper, current affairs programme and
the swamp of social media.

The primary reason was the resignation of Dominic Cummings’ controversial
new advisor, Andrew Sabisky
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/02/18/downing-street-super-forecaster-andrew-sabisky-quits-eugenics-row-just-days/>,
following the discovery of some of his musings on race, IQ research, forced
contraception of the poor, and embryo selection for desirable traits. That,
by any other name, is eugenics.

In the social media melee, Richard Dawkins
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/richard-dawkins/> chimed in, tweeting: “It’s
one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds.
It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course
it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth
wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.”

Dawkins made it as clear as vodka in a follow-up tweet that he deplores the
idea of eugenics, a fact lost on the nuance-free Twitter mob. But his
imprecise wording on such a delicate topic fails to recognise that eugenics
is a poorly defined term, policy and scientific idea.

Did he mean the policy enacted in the US for most of the 20th century,
where up to 80,000 people were involuntarily sterilised to remove
undesirable traits from the collective gene pool, things such as
criminality, alcoholism, mental health problems and homosexuality? Or did
he simply mean that humans, biological organisms to the core, are
susceptible to evolutionary change?

He implies the second, by comparison to agricultural breeding. Farming has
indeed deliberately, obviously and radically changed animals to enhance
characteristics desirable to us. It’s worth noting that, as farmers well
know, this process has also produced both monsters, and many undesirable
spin-off traits, en route – anyone who has ever loved a pedigree dog knows
that pure breeds come with a whole host of unintended and often tragic
side-effects.

Would eugenics “work”? It depends on what you mean by “work”. More than
200,000 people with schizophrenia were murdered during the Holocaust, which
resulted in a huge decline in numbers for a few decades after the war, but
by the 1970s, numbers had returned to pre-war levels. What does this mean?
Well, complex diseases are mediated by both genetics and the environment in
ways we poorly understand, and only a permanent extermination programme
would eradicate such complex disorders from a population.

Sabinsky, meanwhile, suggested in a 2016 interview that modern eugenics
might work, via selection of embryos during IVF
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/parenting/designer-babies-far-should-science-go-create-perfect-human/>for
traits such as intelligence – chiming with Cummings’ own suggestion, in a
blogpost two years earlier, that “a national health system should fund
everybody to do this” to avoid an unfair advantage for rich would-be
parents.

This is both historically and scientifically illiterate. We do use embryo
selection for serious diseases already, but these tend to be ones for which
the biology is straightforward and well understood, such as cystic fibrosis
or Huntington’s disease.

When it comes to traits such as intelligence, the picture is infinitely
more complex, with a significant genetic component, and a roughly equal
environmental element. There are hundreds of genes involved, and these do
many things in many tissues. There are no genes ‘for’ intelligence, and so
what would you be selecting, alongside? What would be selecting against? We
don’t know. Geneticists argue about whether embryo selection for
intelligence would “work” because genetics is really hard, and genomes
wickedly complex. But Cummings and Sabisky seem to know better.
[image: image.png]
Andrew Sabinsky had a brief but controversial tenure as Dominic Cummings'
aide Credit:  School Week

Though the public conversation about eugenics and race might feel new and
startling, it’s very much typical within the academy. Genetics is a field
that is only a century old in any meaningful sense, but it also is
intrinsically linked to the birth of eugenics. Next month, I will be
teaching biology and medical students at UCL about eugenics and race. This
is not unusual, particularly at the university where the concept of
eugenics was born, under the midwifery of Francis Galton.

He was unequivocally one of the greatest scientists of the Victorian era,
overshadowed – as all are – by his half-cousin Charles Darwin. Galton was
also profoundly racist. In a letter to *The Times* in 1874, he described
the “inferior Negro race” as lazy, palavering savages, the “Hindoo” as
inferior “in strength, industry, aptitude for saving, business habits,” and
the “Arab” as a “destroyer rather than a creator.” An important principle
in history is not to judge people of the past by contemporary standards,
but Galton was racist even for his time, and part of the eugenics project
was for the enhancement of the British stock, at the expense of other
inferior peoples.

Galton set up a lab and funded a chair at UCL, which was initially
dedicated to eugenics, but subsequently evolved into genetics. The most
beautiful irony is that his intentions were not met by his legacy: Galton
instigated a field in order to demonstrate the hierarchy of so-called
races, but that same field ultimately demonstrated that, from a biological
point of view, race is not a meaningful concept.

But don’t get too comfortable, because the conversation about eugenics is
far from over. In the next few weeks, UCL will conclude its inquiry into
its own past
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/01/10/ucl-launches-eugenics-probe-emerges-academic-held-controversial/>,
enmeshed with eugenics and scientific racism as it is. I provided expert
testimony, and we shall see how this great university, one founded on
radical principles, plans to expose and account for its own pernicious
past, and build a future fit for all.
[image: image.png]
Eugenics was born under the midwifery of Victorian scientist, Francis
Galton Credit:  Hulton Archive

Part of the motivation for this inquiry was the revelation in 2018 that
there had been a series of private conferences held on the UCL campus in
the last few years that featured amongst other things, discussions about
race and intelligence. The participants at these conferences are a small,
fringe group of weirdos and misfits who are well outside the scientific
mainstream, none of them geneticists, many outside of academia, and many
for whom race science is the enduring passion of their lives  – their
voices amplified by social media.

Notable attendees at the various meetings include Richard Lynn, a highly
controversial researcher whose work in "race science" has repeatedly shown
to be disreputable; Noah Carl, the sociologist best known not for his
research probing the connections between IQ and genes, but for being
hounded out of St Edmund's College, Cambridge after a distasteful
witchhunt; Toby Young was there in 2017, though purely in a journalistic
capacity, later describing some of the attendees as ‘right wing fruit
cakes’; and in 2015, Andrew Sabisky.

Why does this matter? Well, maybe Sabisky was there with youthful
ignorance. Maybe his views have changed – we don’t know because neither he
nor Downing Street deemed it necessary to qualify either his recruitment
nor his odious views
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/02/18/boris-johnson-brexit-latest-news-andrew-sabisky-bbc/>.
But there is precisely the problem. Cummings’ stated aim is to bring more
science into governance. So far, we have seen no evidence for that, nor any
evidence that Cummings understands the science he claims to be so entranced
by.

If he wants scientific advice, he would do well to recruit scientists.
There’s plenty of weirdos and misfits in my squad, but ones who have done
the work to know their songs well before they start singing. Without solid,
nuanced, qualified and expert scientific evidence, the UK will evolve into
a state akin to Soviet Russia, where science was shamelessly co-opted into
ideology. Those scientifically illiterate policies lethally crippled an
empire.

*How to Argue With a Racist
<https://books.telegraph.co.uk/Product/Adam-Rutherford/How-to-Argue-With-a-Racist--History-Science-Race-and-Reality/24235057>
by
Adam Rutherford is published by W&N (£12.99). Buy now for £10.99 at
books.telegraph.co.uk <http://books.telegraph.co.uk/> or call 0844 871 1514*