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,
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
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 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.
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,
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.
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.
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 by Adam Rutherford is published by W&N (£12.99). Buy now for £10.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514