Matt Ridley

into - an abortion. The reason given is that, despite the happy demeanour of these children, most people would rather not be the parent of a Down child. If you are of one opinion, you see this as a manifestation of benign science, miraculously preventing the birth of cruelly incapacitated people at no suffering. If you are of another opinion you see the officially encouraged murder of a sacred human life in the dubious name of human perfection and to the disrespect of disability. You see, in effect, eugenics still in action, more than fifty years after it was grotesquely discredited by Nazi atrocities.

This chapter is about the dark side of genetics' past, the black sheep of the genetics family - the murder, sterilisation and abortion committed in the name of genetic purity.

The father of eugenics, Francis Galton, was in many ways the opposite of his first cousin, Charles Darwin. Where Darwin was methodical, patient, shy and conventional, Galton was an intellectual dilettante, a psychosexual mess and showman. He was also brilliant.

He explored southern Africa, studied twins, collected statistics and dreamed of Utopias. Today his fame is almost as great as his cousin's, though it is something more like notoriety than fame. Darwinism was always in danger of being turned into a political creed and Galton did so. The philosopher Herbert Spencer had enthusiastically 288 G E N O M E

embraced the idea of survival of the fittest, arguing that it buttressed the credibility of laissez-faire economics and justified the individualism of Victorian society: social darwinism, he called it. Galton's vision was more prosaic. If, as Darwin had argued, species had been altered by systematic selective breeding, like cattle and racing pigeons, then so could human beings be bred to improve the race.

In a sense Galton appealed to an older tradition than Darwinism: the eighteenth-century tradition of cattle breeding and the even older breeding of apple and corn varieties. His cry was: let us improve the stock of our own species as we have improved that of others.

Let us breed from the best and not from the worst specimens of humanity. In 1885 he coined the term 'eugenic' for such breeding.

But who was 'us'? In a Spencerian world of individualism, it was literally each one of us: eugenics meant that each individual strove to pick a good mate - somebody with a good mind and a healthy body. It was little more than being selective about our marriage partners — which we already were. In the Galtonian world, though,

'us' came to mean something more collective. Galton's first and most influential follower was Karl Pearson, a radical socialist Utopian and a brilliant statistician. Fascinated and frightened by the growing economic power of Germany, Pearson turned eugenics into a strand of jingoism. It was not the individual that must be eugenic; it was the nation. Only by selectively breeding among its citizens would Britain stay ahead of its continental rival. The state must have a say in who should breed and who should not. At its birth eugenics was not a politicised science; it was a science-ised political creed.

By 1900, eugenics had caught the popular imagination. The name Eugene was suddenly in vogue and there was a groundswell of popular fascination with the idea of planned breeding, as eugenics meetings popped up all over Britain. Pearson wrote to Galton in 1907: 'I hear most respectable middle-class matrons saying, if children are weakly, 'Ah, but that was not a eugenic marriage!'' The poor condition of Boer War recruits to the army stimulated as much debate about better breeding as it did about better welfare.

Something similar was happening in Germany, where a mixture E U G E N I C S 2 8 9

of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy of the hero and Ernst Haeckel's doctrine of biological destiny produced an enthusiasm for evolutionary progress to go with economic and social progress. The easy gravitation to an authoritarian philosophy meant that in Germany, even more than in Britain, biology became enmeshed in nationalism.

But for the moment it remained largely ideological, not practical.1

So far, so benign. The focus soon shifted, however, from encouraging the 'eugenic' breeding of the best to halting the 'dysgenic'

breeding of the worst. And the 'worst' soon came to mean mainly the 'feeble-minded', which included alcoholics, epileptics and criminals as well as the mentally retarded. This was especially true in the United States, where in 1904 Charles Davenport, an admirer of Galton and Pearson, persuaded Andrew Carnegie to found for him the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to study eugenics. Davenport, a strait-laced conservative with immense energy, was more concerned with preventing dysgenic breeding than urging eugenic breeding. His science was simplistic to say the least; for example, he said that now that Mendelism had proved the particulate nature of inheritance, the American idea of a national 'melting pot' could be consigned to the past; he also suggested that a naval family had a gene for thalassophilia, or love of the sea. But in politics, Davenport was skilled and influential. Helped along by a successful book by Henry Goddard about a largely mythical, mentally deficient family called the Kallikaks, in which the case was strongly made that feeble-mindedness was inherited, Davenport and his allies gradually persuaded American political opinion that the race was in desperate danger of degeneracy. Said Theodore Roosevelt: 'Some day we will realise that the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world.' Wrong types need not apply.2

Much of the American enthusiasm for eugenics stemmed from anti-immigrant feeling. At a time of rapid immigration from eastern and southern Europe, it was easy to whip up paranoia that the

'better' Anglo-Saxon stock of the country was being diluted. Eugenic arguments provided a convenient cover for those who wished to 2 9 0 G E N O M E

restrict immigration for more traditional, racist reasons. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 was a direct result of eugenic campaigning. For the next twenty years it consigned many desperate European emigrants to a worse fate at home by denying them a new home in the United States, and it remained on the books unamended for forty years.

Restricting immigration was not the only legal success for the eugenists. By 1911 six states already had laws on their books to allow the forced sterilisation of the mentally unfit. Six years later another nine states had joined them. If the state could take the life of a criminal, so went the argument, then surely it could deny the right to reproduce (as if mental innocence were on a par with criminal guilt). 'It is the acme of stupidity . . . to talk in such cases of individual liberty, or the rights of the individual. Such individuals

. . . have no right to propagate their kind.' So wrote an American doctor named W. J. Robinson.

The Supreme Court threw out many sterilisation laws at first, but in 1927 it changed its line. In Buck v. Bell, the court ruled that the commonwealth of Virginia could sterilise Carrie Buck, a seventeen-year-old girl committed to a colony for epileptics and the feeble minded in Lynchburg, where she lived with her mother Emma and her daughter Vivian. After a cursory examination, Vivian, who was seven months old (!), was declared an imbecile and Carrie was ordered to be sterilised. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously put it in his judgment, 'Three generations of imbeciles are enough.'