Nature is a programme we are endlessly editing

British geneticist Adam Rutherford has a new book out, called Control, about the history of eugenics and how it might or might not come back in the 21st century. As regular readers know, I’ve been researching and writing about eugenics myself for the last two years — you’re probably sick of it by now! — so I read Rutherford’s book to learn and review.

The book has two parts. The first is a history of ‘eugenics’, the movement begun by Francis Galton in the late 19th century, which led policy makers around the world (but especially in the US and Nazi Germany) to enact authoritarian policies to try and protect and enhance their gene pool. This movement culminated in the atrocities of the Holocaust, after which eugenics seemed to disappear.

Except, as Rutherford explores in the second part of the book, it didn’t disappear entirely. Eugenic policies to sterilize the ‘unfit’ continued in countries around the world until the 1980s — China still has a eugenics law.

And, in the last few years, left-wing critics have seen the spectre of eugenics everywhere. Student activists have been shocked to discover that various famous biologists, geneticists, psychologists and statisticians from the late 19th or early 20th century were eugenicists and / or scientific racists, and have demanded that universities repent of their historical sins and stop honouring these villains with statues or halls named after them. Among the ‘cancelled’ are Francis Galton, Thomas Huxley, Marie Stopes, Margaret Sanger, Ronald Fischer, Karl Pearson, Cyril Burt and even Darwin himself.

And activists have also started seeing eugenicists under the bed in modern politics too. Most obviously, Boris Johnson’s former policy supremo, Dominic Cummings, has shown a fascination with genetics and the possibility of creating genius babies through genetic enhancement, and hosted the scientist most involved in this effort — Steve Hsu — at Number 10. Hsu has been leading a similar project for the Chinese government.

Cummings, left, and Steve Hsu

Rutherford’s aim thus appears to be two-fold. First, remind us of the awful history of eugenics from the 1880s to the 1940s, acknowledge the sins of past scientists, while reminding us that they were still in other respects very skilled scientists who built the foundation of modern statistics and genetics. We don’t need to have statues of them or halls named after them, but we still use their science. Second, explore to what extent Rutherford’s own field — modern genetics — is ‘eugenics’.

The first part of the book is a good conventional history of eugenics. It highlights the usual villains — proto-eugenicist Plato, intellectual elitist Francis Galton, the British Fabian socialists who took eugenics into public policy, the American racists who used the dodgy statistics of eugenics to shut down immigration to the US in the 1930s, and finally the Nazis who whole-heartedly embraced eugenics and used it to justify mass murder.

This effort is to be applauded. It is crucial that scientists understand their research always occurs in a political and historical context. Too many contemporary defenders of, say, the science of IQ and racial differences in IQ seem to be historically and politically tone-deaf. Rutherford is a wonderful example of a historically-conscious scientist, indeed he teaches the history of eugenics to students in University College London’s genetics programme.

However, the history of eugenics that he tells is, in a way, quite conventional. Rutherford concludes that eugenics was a project of upper-class white men obsessed with controlling the reproduction of women, the working class and ethnic minorities.

This might be music to leftist undergraduates’ ears, and it is true to some extent, but it’s not the whole truth. Firstly, eugenics was very much a middle-class project. Rutherford is wrong when he says Galton was upper class. Eugenics, like Darwinism, was a product of the 19th-century ‘intellectual aristocracy’ and its gospel of meritocracy — the aim was to discover natural talent through exams and then promote it. That’s why the inventors of modern exams like the SAT or the IQ test were typically eugenicists.

Secondly, the history of eugenics, as I’ve explored in this blog, is weirder, more complicated and more interesting than the conventional history that Rutherford tells. As Alison Bashford — the great expert on eugenics — has explored in her books, eugenics wasn’t just an attempt by men to control women. Some of its most active promoters were women, who used the discourse of eugenics to promote birth control, as a way to liberate women from the tyranny of endless motherhood. The Eugenics Society in the UK was founded by a woman and largely run by women.

Eugenics also overlapped with Malthusianism, and with cosmopolitanism and pacificism. Malthusians, as Bashford has explored, tried to take a global, ecological view of the human species and its place in the planetary ecosystem. They were the architects of global governance institutions like the United Nations. They saw global population control as essential to preventing wars, and protecting quality of life and the environment. And they also tended to be eugenicists.

As I explore in my ‘spiritual eugenics’ project, eugenics also overlapped with New Age spirituality and the dream of creating Nietzchean superbeings. Many pioneering New Age figures, from Annie Besant to Aldous Huxley to Abraham Maslow to Osho and Timothy Leary, embraced eugenics in some form. There were also African-American eugenicists, Indian yogic eugenicists, even queer eugenicists who saw gays or lesbians as the evolutionary future (weird but true).

Finally, the history of ‘eugenics’ is much older than Francis Galton, older even than Plato. Galton coined a new word for a very old practice — selective breeding, which simply means humans consciously breeding themselves and other species to try and create new types that are ‘fitter’ in some chosen respect.

Selective breeding created civilization. It gave us wheat, barley, cattle, milk, horses, dogs, most fruit and vegetables. Without selective breeding homo sapiens would not have advanced beyond hunter gatherers. We also practice selective breeding every time we weigh up a prospective mate and imagine what our children would be like.

From this point of view, we are all ‘eugenicists’ — Galton massively over-claimed when he announced his new science-religion. Even in the mid-19th century, the idea that heredity played a major role in people’s character, and that therefore we should breed carefully, was widely accepted. It was promoted by one of the best-selling books of the 19th century, George Coombe’s The Constitution of Man in Relation to External Objects, which was published in 1828 and was far more widely read than anything Galton wrote.

Victorians were fascinated by heredity and the possibility of creating new ‘types’ through selective breeding — this was the heyday of dog-breeding and cattle-breeding associations. So they were already primed to accept both Darwinism and Galton’s ‘eugenics’.

What was new in Galton’s ‘eugenics’ was the suggestion the state should intervene so vigorously to encourage the ‘fit’ to the breed more and the ‘unfit’ to breed less. And Galton’s work encouraged a concerted public policy movement which, tragically, was actively taken up by American racists and the Nazi party.

Not all eugenicists were racists however. Julian Huxley, the leading British eugenicist in the 1930s-1960s, was a firm opponent of scientific racism, and ordered the UNESCO statement on race, which declared race to be a pseudo-scientific concept. Luther Burbank, the fascinating American plant-breeder, thought the US should use eugenics to encourage the inter-mingling of races to create a super-race.

Luther Burbank, the ‘plant wizard’ who thought different human races should be encouraged to intermarry to produce an American super-race

In fact, in the 1920s ‘eugenics’ was used to mean everything from sex education to empowering women to be able to choose their sexual partners. So it’s not surprising that everyone seemed to be a eugenicist in the 1920s.

So…the history of eugenics is more complicated and more interesting than the conventional history. But what Rutherford says is still true and valuable to hear. Above all, he highlights that the eugenic attempt to improve the species, or a particular race, by sterilizing the ‘unfit’ was doomed to failure. We now know that traits like low intelligence, alcoholism or epilepsy (all of which could get you sterilized in some American states in the 1920s) depend not on a single heritable gene, but on multiple genes interacting in very complicated ways. The Nazis murdered millions, and did nothing to improve their gene pool. If anything, the suffering they inflicted on Germans and other people harmed the European gene pool.

Is eugenics coming back?

In part two of the book, Rutherford asks whether eugenics is making a comeback today through the field of genetic enhancement. This, I suspect, is why the Left is so obsessed with eugenics now. We’re arguing about the past but really fighting over the future. It’s a battle between egalitarianism / social justice and genetic meritocracy. This could be one of the great ideological battles of this century. Maybe it already is.

Rutherford notes with embarrassment that his own university, University College London, was the site of a conference on genetics and IQ, which included some scientific racists. It was an external event, he says, not hosted by UCL, but the university was sufficiently embarrassed that it launched a multi-year commission into its eugenic history.

As for Steve Hsu and Dominic Cummings’ dream of engineering species-advancing geniuses, Rutherford is sceptical that this is or ever will be possible, as IQ is too ‘polygenic’ (ie dependent on multiple interacting genes). The complexity of genetics makes it equally unlikely, he says, that we’re heading into an era of designer babies, where rich parents can pick things like height, skin colour, sporting ability, strong immunity and so on.

We are, however, able to screen foetuses for some conditions, like Down Syndrome, and around 90% of Down Syndrome foetuses are aborted. Is that eugenics or female empowerment? For progressives in the 1920s, it was both. Rutherford doesn’t try to decide what is the right choice in that circumstance, leaving it to the mother (and father).

I am not qualified to question Rutherford’s conclusion that the dream of designer babies is just that, a dream. Certainly, a lot of money is going into gene editing companies, and into companies that try to identify ‘super-genes’. Perhaps designer babies are impossible at the moment…but the science seems to be moving fast.

There are two new frontiers of eugenics / selective breeding. One is dating apps. Dating apps are how we select our partners these days, so they are having a massive impact on our reproductive choices and evolutionary future. As I wrote in 2018, online dating has led to a steep rise in the proportion of inter-racial couples — which would horrify racist eugenicists but elate a champion of inter-racial breeding like Luther Burbank. Harvard geneticist George Church has launched an app that lets people match through genetic fitness. Countries like China and Iran, meanwhile, have introduced state-owned dating apps to encourage their citizens to breed and to nudge the right sort of citizen (ie Han Chinse or Muslim) to breed more.

The other new frontier for eugenics / selective breeding is synthetic biology. Luther Burbank could create new forms of fruit or vegetable by careful cross-breeding over ten generations (he created the stoneless plum and the golden delicious apple for example). But now, computer technology makes it possible for undergraduates to create entirely novel types simply by computer editing — glow-in-the-dark rabbits, for example, or, more worryingly, hyper-infectious viruses.

Another ideological battle of the near-future will be how we relate to this sort of synthetic biology and genetic editing. The pandemic has highlighted how controversial new technology like mRNA vaccines can be — and also raised fears that COVID19 was itself a product of synthetic biology.

Personally, the last two years have made me more open to new technology, not less. As our climate rapidly changes, I think we will need all our ingenuity to create new forms of fuel, food and medicine, and synthetic biology gives us the building blocks to do that. New types of human, even? We are constantly creating new types. You’re one, so am I, so are our children. ‘Nature’ is a programme that we are endlessly editing.

However, as Rutherford shows, the dream of perfecting humans is extremely hazardous — as soon as we dream of creating ‘superhumans’ we seem to become incredibly intolerant of those we deem less than perfect. And we are all less than perfect. As Thomas Huxley noted, those who speak glibly of exterminating the imperfect seem to forget that we all have days when we could qualify as ‘unfit’.