Adam Rutherford’s new book takes readers on a journey into genetics's dark past.
In the Victorian era, in the shadow of Darwin's revolutionary theory of evolution, a sinister ideology took root — eugenics. It was an attempt to impose political control upon humanity’s unruly DNA by encouraging those with"desirable" traits to breed, while removing those with"undesirable" ones from the gene pool.
Live Science spoke with him about how eugenics originated, why it failed, and why he believes it still lives with us now. Darwin’s half cousin, Francis Galton — who was very enamored with the work of his relative, and his celebrity status — took those principles of artificial selection and applied them to human populations. He wanted to craft better societies, better cultures, filled with people with more"desirable" characteristics.
Meanwhile, Gregor Mendel is in Moravia working on his famous pea plants experiments. He breeds the plants together, carefully selecting them for specific traits. And through this he identifies inheritance patterns that can be expressed by the passing of discrete units of inheritance from generation to generation, and that these patterns can be predicted with alarming accuracy. What he discovered is the units of inheritance we call genes.
The reason why people assume eye color is genetically simple is because Charles Davenport, the key protagonist in the American eugenics movement, claimed that Mendelian genetics meant he could show that every trait — eye color, hair color, sexual proclivities, poverty, and weirdly even seafaringness — were mendelian, they were controlled by a single gene, and if you had that gene, you had that trait, and it’s not true. It’s a deterministic, monogenic, genetic-essentialist argument.
In America, it's the same but different. Immigration is the hot topic of the day — something like 15 million people migrated into the United States between the years 1900 and 1915 — and it is, as it is to an extent today, the most contentious subject. You see this idea emerging called the"great replacement theory," which is that the existing population is being threatened by an underclass.
Sure. Even though the concept of eugenics was invented in the U.K., the British were slower to get off the mark than the Americans, who adopted eugenics policies very enthusiastically. The first enforced sterilization bills passed in Indiana in 1907. Over the course of the next few decades, 31 states introduced coerced sterilization as part of their eugenics policies.
One state accounts for half of these, and no-one ever guesses which one it was: California. The main industry in California for much of the 20th century wasn’t Hollywood or Silicon Valley but farming — and eugenicists encouraged a lot of these farmers to apply the same principles to their families as they did their livestock.You mentioned that eugenicists believed"feeble-mindedness" was a genetic trait.
In 1920, Laughlin saw that states around America were introducing new sterilization bills, but he thought they were doing it in an ad hoc way. So he wrote a template — a boilerplate legal document — that states could simply fill in the blanks for and pass legislation easier. In 1933, this document was translated into German and became the first of the Nuremberg Laws.
The American physicist Stephen Hsu, who co-founded the prenatal screening service Genomic Prediction Inc., has said that it may soon become possible to select for superior intelligence during IVF screenings. How much power have modern technologies given scientists to identify and shape complex human traits?
We do know that IQ and cognitive abilities are highly heritable. But let’s say you measure IQ in a population of 100,000 people, and you determine the genes you think are behind it and how many of these genes are heritable. When you get to the stage of an individual using IVF to select for smarter genes, you’re choosing between ten possible eggs? Eight? Even four, maybe? The statistics fall off a cliff.
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