Daniel Kevles’ In the Name of Eugenics

3,641 words

Daniel Kevles
In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985

It is young men like you, Bertie, who make the person with the future of the race at heart despair. Cursed with too much money, you fritter away in idle selfishness a life which might have been made useful, helpful and profitable. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures. You are simply an anti-social animal, a drone. Bertie, it is imperative that you marry. — P. G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves (1923)

One thing I like about enemy literature is that at the very least it gives you a feel for how strong — or weak — the opposition’s case is. As for Daniel Kevles’ 1985 book In the Name of Eugenics, it isn’t very strong. Billed on the back as “the first book to objectively deal seriously and objectively with the development of human genetics as a scientific and medical discipline,” it amounts to exactly that, despite the author’s unconvincing attempts to condemn his own subject matter. There really isn’t all that much to condemn. Nearly three-quarters of In the Name of Eugenics focuses on either genetics proper, “reform eugenics” (which arose in the 1930s as a milder form of the original “mainline eugenics”), or straightforward biographies of the topic’s major players — all of which Kevles finds unobjectionable.

So what is Kevles’ beef with eugenics? The fact that he is Jewish might give us all a clue. So would the book’s blurbs from co-tribesmen Stephen Jay Gould and Leon Kamin. As Kevles states in the Preface to the 1995 edition:

In the interest of reducing the proportion of the “less fit” in society, eugenicists in the United States helped restrict immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. They promoted the passage of eugenic sterilization laws that disproportionately threatened lower-income groups. The laws and programs they fostered supplied a model for the Nazis, who sterilized several hundred thousand people and, brandishing their research into the genetics of individual and racial differences, claimed scientific justifications for the Holocaust.

Basic bitch, essentially. It’s made even bitchier by the fact that such a small proportion of what Kevles covers in his own book meets the description above. It’s like he’s selling us Dracula, but ends up delivering Renfield. Still, aside from a few ideological hiccups and the occasional lapses into psychoanalysis and race denialism, In the Name of Eugenics is an informative, absorbing, and valuable history of a widely misunderstood twentieth-century phenomenon. As it turns out, eugenics isn’t as bad as all that — especially the bad parts.

Kevles begins, appropriately, with Sir Francis Galton, “the founder of the faith.” As the first cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton was keenly aware of the rise of evolutionary theory in 1860s England. His 1869 work Hereditary Genius and other writings promoted the idea that humanity can improve itself over successive generations through selective breeding. His underlying assumption was the still-nascent idea of the heritability of genetic traits, which included those difficult to quantify such as intelligence and temperament. Galton relied for his research on the study of statistics, of which he was also a pioneer. He developed the now-ubiquitous statistical concepts of standard deviation and regression towards the mean. Galton also fashioned himself the anti-Malthus by insisting that human reproduction must be encouraged — but only among the right humans.

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At the core of his beliefs was the inegalitarian nature of humanity. The upper classes, he noted, produced on average individuals of higher quality and greater fitness than the lower classes. Yet, the lower classes continually outbred the upper classes. This “birthrate differential” fueled much of the eugenic concerns of the British and American upper classes throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. If the lower classes outbreeding the upper classes is dysgenic, then how can it be stopped, or at least curtailed? How could the upper classes be persuaded to produce more of their own?

As Galton stated in the Preface of the 1892 edition of Hereditary Genius:

We may not be able to originate, but we can guide. The processes of evolution are in constant and spontaneous activity, some towards the bad, some towards the good. Our part is to watch for opportunities to intervene by checking the former and giving free play to the latter.

While Kevles’ treatment of Galton is fairly benign and evenhanded, this begins to change with Galton’s protégé and biographer, Karl Pearson. For Kevles, Pearson was less scientific and more professionally — that is, selfishly — interested in eugenics. He was “concerned less with the shape of the new society than with where the Karl Pearsons would fit into it.” Kevles unsurprisingly reports with some distaste on Pearson’s penchant for both nationalism and socialism. He also accuses him of advocating a particularly uncharitable form of social Darwinism as an excuse to perpetrate class warfare, or what Kevles calls “social imperialism.” After all, it was Pearson who noted that only the small, super-fertile percentage of a population is responsible for producing future generations. 20% of today’s generation, he estimated, produces around 75% of tomorrow’s. And if that 20% is substandard, that does not bode well for the future:

In the eighteen-eighties, Pearson had pinned the excessive reproduction of the socially unfit upon capitalism, which, with its demand for cheap labor, encouraged the immigration of workers below a desirable standard. In the early twentieth century, he found his target in liberal reformism. “We have placed our money on Environment,” he quipped, “when Heredity wins at a canter.” Thus, assuming that everyone in Britain who could benefit from an education was getting one, Pearson saw no point in expanding schools. “No training or education can create [intelligence],” he declared in the Huxley Lecture. “You must breed it.” Indeed, he privately asserted to Galton that charities for the children of the “incapables” were “a national curse and not a blessing.” In his opinion, such measures as the minimum wage, the eight-hour day, free medical advice, and reductions in infant mortality encouraged an increase in unemployables, degenerates and physical and mental weaklings. Natural selection, he believed, had been suspended, and replaced by “reproductive selection,” which gave the battle “to the most fertile, not the most fit.”

According to Kevles, Pearson’s eugenics led him to found a “secular religion” out of the science centered on his Biometrics Laboratory in London and his journal Biometrika. At heart was his contention that “under all psychic states lay physical states that were presumably normally distributed in the manner of, say, height.”

Racial egalitarian that he is, Kevles disparages this contention (falsely, as it turns out, as IQ scores do correspond with tangible, mappable structures in the brain). Yet, he gives Pearson credit for personally eschewing politics out of principle. He also credits him for going beyond Galton and laying down the foundations of modern statistics. Included in his accomplishments are the development of probable error theory and the chi-squared test. Kevles also calls Pearson’s Treasury of Human Inheritance, which is a vast compendium of human traits, “a scientific treasure.”

The more fashionable eugenics became in the early twentieth century, however, the more Kevles dislikes it — and not entirely for bad reasons. As the furor took hold in the United States, “positive eugenics” — that is, pressuring the upper classes to have more children — gave way to “negative eugenics,” which entailed finding ways for the lower classes to have fewer children whether they wanted to or not.

Here’s where immigration restrictions and forced sterilizations enter the equation. Here’s also where we find rather unscientific notions among the eugenicists. For example, top American eugenicist Charles Davenport supported some questionable notions about the heritability of mental disease and of vaguely-described behavior patterns such as feeblemindedness, degeneracy, and shiftlessness. To solve these problems, he then promoted “the sexual segregation of defectives.”

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Even worse is American eugenicist Harry Laughlin, whom Kevles describes as “humorless, intolerant of criticism, and continually afire with dogmatic secular zeal.” Kevles dives into the man’s shoddy scholarship, questionable ethics, and aristocratic prejudice — and then laments the fact that Laughlin, as an expert, had considerable influence over policymaking in Washington. Of course, these policies largely included forced sterilizations and immigration restriction — although oddly enough, not abortion, as eugenicists in general were not too keen on abortion. According to Kevles, many who were not mentally ill or feebleminded were nevertheless deemed to be so and then sterilized. The same went for people who suffered from conditions that we know today are not hereditary.

It’s one thing for a scientist to be wrong because little is known about a particular field, but it’s something else entirely for that scientist to influence public policy based on his incomplete knowledge. Kevles brings home this point throughout his book, and it is a fair one. During the 1920s, Americans went sterilization-happy in a way the British eugenicists never could or would have. In response to the “menace of the feebleminded,” many Americans sought to “weed out of our race the contaminating strains of worthless blood,” in the words of eugenicists W. C. D. and Catherine Wetham. Sounds a bit harsh, doesn’t it?

From the 1910s to the Second World War, nearly 36,000 Americans were sterilized. Some accepted it voluntary. In most cases they were criminals, the habitually indolent, and the incurably insane. Despite the zeal of the eugenicists, however, many American judges and lawmakers were concerned about medical tyranny and sought to do justice whenever they could. It wasn’t all smooth sailing for eugenics back then. Still, Kevles makes the point that many innocents were victimized by this policy. Whether this was a worthwhile price to pay to purify the race, or to at least curtail poverty and lawlessness, it’s up to the reader to decide.

Despite not discussing eugenics outside of England or the United States for nearly the entire book, Kevles notes that the Nazis had sterilized nearly 225,000 people before the Second World War, and euthanized an additional 70,000 in 1939.

Kevles’ thesis regarding the insidious nature of eugenics is undermined by several factors. First, he is simply wrong about the heritability of intelligence and temperament. In Chapter 9, fittingly entitled “False Biology,” Kevles ties himself in knots trying to cast doubt on this notion. As with Stephen Jay Gould’s equally wrongheaded The Mismeasure of Man, Kevles looks to errors in early IQ and intelligence testing — especially as conducted by the US Army during the First World War — and attempts to discredit the entire enterprise. He pulls the same trick with the supposed Nordic supremacism of Madison Grant, as if minimal intra-racial differences compel us to believe that inter-racial differences are just as minimal. He cites the fraudulent nature of Cyril Burt’s mid-century twin studies, which reported a .771 correlation between genetics and intelligence, but ignores the fact that psychologist Arthur Jensen later excluded Burt’s questionable data — and yet came to similar conclusions. Kevles also fails to mention the fact that subsequent twin studies have exonerated Burt’s conclusions.

Kevles seems to assert that there is no such thing as general intelligence (later known as g), and that race is a political or social, rather than biological, phenomenon.

He then makes the case for environment being a major culprit of perceived racial differences in intelligence. This entails childhood studies from the time period which show how children raised in different environments, even twins, will demonstrate mental aptitudes roughly proportional to the quality of these environments. He also cites studies claiming that when black children move to cities from the countryside, their intelligence testing scores increase. This all ignores the fact that while environment often seems to play a role in determining children’s intelligence, its impact all but evaporates in adulthood. Two 40-year-old identical twins raised in vastly different environments will most likely have very similar IQs.

In another instance, Kevles triumphantly cites a study of “performance tests” given to Native Americans whose scores in some cases surpassed those of white children. These tests required physical rather than verbal or mathematical tasks, however, and so can hardly be trusted as intelligence tests. Most astonishingly, he cites a ludicrous claim by the psychologist Otto Klineberg that blacks as babies learn rhythm when their mothers wave their arms in the air while listening to marching-band music during football games.

Since Kevles so often notes that eugenics’ prime supporters, as well as the eugenicists themselves, tended to be white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, it becomes fair game for this reviewer to note that many of Kevles’ race-egalitarian sources in this chapter are Left-wing, diaspora Jews: Klineberg, Walter Lippman, Franz Boas, and Edward Sapir, to name only a few. He implies in several places that the white eugenicists were waging some kind of covert warfare on behalf of their race. If so, could the same not be said of all the Jews he trots out who deceive the reader regarding the heritability of intelligence?

Check out my reviews of Richard Haier’s The Neuroscience of Intelligence and Stephen Sanderson’s Race and Evolution for more on how recent studies have nailed the coffin shut on the idea of racial egalitarianism.

The second blow to Kevles’ anti-eugenics position springs from his own writing — which is why, as enemy literature, it is refreshingly weak. By the 1930s, some were already formulating a “reform eugenics” to push back against the more stringent features of the previous “mainline eugenics.” Eugenics effectively self-corrected, and it did not require the Second World War to do so. Much of this sprang from concern for human rights in the face of cruel and unusual punishment. More, however, came from advances in biology, and genetics in particular. Front and center of this pushback were J. B. S. Haldane and Lionel Penrose, who provided a much-needed reality check for eugenics:

Besides, by the mid-thirties, the weight of authoritative opinion concerning mental deficiency was rapidly shifting to the truths that Lionel Penrose was demonstrating: that the term “feebleminded” was carelessly used to cover a spectrum of mental disabilities, most of them ill-defined; that many of the disorders were caused by deprivation or disease; and that apart from a few deficiencies, little reliable was known about the actual dependence of mental disability upon heredity. Authoritative opinion also had it that the feebleminded were not proliferating at a menacing rate . . .

In many ways, eugenics was informed by the development of the science of genetics once the theories of Gregor Mendel gained acceptance in the early twentieth century. Armed both with this and improved technology, it was only a matter of time for the reform school to overtake the mainline one. Kevles dedicates the latter half of In the Name of Eugenics not so much to eugenics as to all the dizzying accomplishments of geneticists from the Second World War to the time of his writing. This is all good stuff, but it cannot possibly be construed as anti-eugenics, since the inheritors of Galton and Pearson kept pace with the times. For example, modern eugenicists abandoned all talk of sterilization and instead focused on volunteerism. They also spearheaded the necessary push to genetically screen husbands and wives for genetic disorders and to advise prospective parents on the possibility that their progeny might inherit genetic diseases. They also toned down all the racial talk, even as people such as Arthur Jensen, Edward O. Wilson, and William Shockley, all of whom were professional eugenicists, were reinvigorating the hereditarian school of biology in the 1960s and ‘70s.

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So if Kevles has at least grudging respect for Galton and Pearson, and finds little to complain about after the 1930s, then what is his problem with eugenics? It essentially boils down to the 20-year period between 1910 and 1930, during which eugenicists acted for the greater good despite lacking the scientific clarity of future generations. But as soon as that clarity was attained, they changed their emphasis. A disinterested study of eugenics would see this period as a hiccup rather than a defining moment. Such a study would also underscore how the early eugenicists, despite their errors, meant well. Kevles does neither of these things, which indicates that he is not disinterested, but rather appears to have an axe to grind.

As for the Nazis and Kevles’ fear that eugenics provides the slippery slope to the gates of Auschwitz, one need merely ask: Did it? The answer is not in America, and certainly not in England. In both countries and elsewhere outside of Germany, the trend was to pull back from the type of extreme eugenics as Kevles reports was practiced in the Third Reich. And this was all well before the Second World War. Further, for someone so haunted by the specter of the Nazis, Kevles hardly mentions them. What did the Nazi eugenicists themselves have to say about their advanced sterilization and euthanasia programs? Did they provide any reasons for their measures? Did Germany derive any benefit from them? Was there any backlash? Kevles doesn’t bother to say. It seems In the Name of Eugenics amounts to a trial in absentia as far as the Nazis are concerned, and is less convincing as a result.

The final way in which Kevles undermines himself is by giving oxygen to the eugenicists themselves. Alexandra Minna Stern makes the same mistake in her 2019 book Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate, in which she gives dissident leaders such as Greg Johnson and Jared Taylor ample room to express their ideas. Perhaps she felt that their ideas were so bad that they would refute themselves. But the opposite happened: She inadvertently made the dissident Right look good. With the benefit of 50 years of hindsight, Kevles does the same with the early eugenicists. By quoting them so liberally and describing them so accurately, he makes them look not only good, but prescient.

Here is Kevles on Davenport making sense:

He may have argued against barring the entry of particular national groups, but he believed that the European nations sent over disproportionately large numbers of their worst human stock, that immigrants rapidly outbred the native population, and that they supplied an excess of public charges. Davenport deplored the fact that the government had to support tens of thousands of insane, mentally deficient, epileptic, and otherwise handicapped wards, not to mention prisoners and paupers, at a cost he estimated to be about a hundred million dollars a year.

Here is Henry Fairfield Osborn, President of the American Museum of Natural History, making sense:

. . . [T]he true spirit of American democracy that all men are born with equal rights and duties has been confused with the political sophistry that all men are born with equal character and ability to govern themselves and others, and with the educational sophistry that education and environment will offset the handicap of heredity.

Here is psychologist and psychometrics pioneer Henry Goddard making sense:

. . . [T]he chief determiner of human conduct is the unitary mental process which we call intelligence. . . . This process is conditioned by a nervous mechanism . . . and the consequent grade of intelligence or mental level for each individual is determined by the kind of chromosomes that come together with the union of the germ cells . . [and] is but little affected by any later influence except such serious accidents as may destroy part of the mechanism. As a consequence, any attempt at social adjustment which fails to take into account the determining character of the intelligence and its unalterable grade in each individual is illogical and inefficient.

And here is Kevles on the Nazis making sense:

Sterilization was, of course, only the beginning of the Nazi eugenic program. In the interest of improving the German “race,” the government provided loans to biologically sound couples whose fecundity would likely be a credit to the Volk; the birth of a baby would reduce the loan indebtedness by twenty-five percent. A number of German cities established special subsidies for third and fourth children born to the fitter families. To foster the breeding of an Aryan elite, Heinrich Himmler urged members of the S.S. to father numerous children with racially preferred women, and in 1936 he instituted the Lebensborn — spa-like homes where S.S. mothers, married and unmarried, might receive the best medical care during their confinements.

The more I read about these early eugenicists, the more I like them! Had we heeded the warnings of some of them, we wouldn’t have all the dire problems we have today: declining average intelligence, out-of-control immigration, crime-ridden cities, rampant transsexualism, and anti-white racism, to name only a few. If history has taught us anything, it’s that you either have eugenics or you have dysgenics. Pick one. If a society is not actively pursuing eugenic goals, then it is practicing dysgenics, whether it realizes it or not.

Yes, eugenics’ authoritative fatalism will never make it popular — even if practiced reasonably and stripped of its more questionable dogma. It is an elitist doctrine through and through. But there is a certain amount of dignity and autonomy that should accompany human life — and eugenics, as sensible as it is, does chafe against that. How else can you describe a program which effectively reduces people to animal husbandry? This is perhaps why eugenics is so easily dismissed or mocked — as P. G. Wodehouse did so adroitly in his Jeeves stories via Bertie Wooster’s overbearing aunt Agatha. It’s funny to imagine the old battle axe trying to pound good eugenic sense into her errant and irresponsible nephew. We know she’s right, but we can’t help taking Bertie’s side, as feckless as he is.

Daniel Kevles and the other race egalitarians he cites in In the Name of Genetics would like us to think that this is all there is to eugenics: It restricts freedom, it says mean things about brown people, its practitioners made mistakes in the past, and it led to the Nazis. Eugenics bad! Case closed. But a careful reading of Kevles himself shows that not only is this view wrong, but that the case should be reopened.

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