Eugenics

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Eugenics

While the idea of improving humans through selective breeding is at least as old as the ancient Greeks, it gained widespread prominence after 1869. In 1883, Sir Francis Galton coined the word "eugenics," from the Greek word eugenes, meaning "well-born" or "hereditarily endowed with noble qualities," to describe this new science of directed human evolution. Galton's work, and the subsequent rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's genetic studies, convinced many scientists and social reformers that eugenic control over heredity could improve human life.

Galton's ideas swept America during the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. At that time, many scientists and laypeople believed that eugenics could facilitate social progress by eradicating problems ranging from alcoholism and prostitution to poverty and disease. What better way to prevent such misfortunes, eugenicists asked, than to prevent the birth of people genetically susceptible to them? Eugenics seemed to offer an efficient and humane solution to society's ills. Unfounded hope in this imperfect science, however, ultimately contributed to repressive social policies, including marriage and immigration restriction, forced sterilization, segregation, and, in the case of Nazi Germany, euthanasia ("mercy killing") and genocide, all in the name of human betterment.

British Origins

Charles Darwin's theories of evolution by natural selection rocked the scientific world in 1859, and prompted his cousin, Galton, to study human evolution. Galton's first book, Hereditary Genius (1869), analyzed famous European families and concluded that "genius," which he defined as the ability to succeed in life, tended to run in families. Galton believed that individuals inherited the traits that destined them to either success or failure. Thus, success resulted from biology, not from the wealth or poverty of a person's background, and controlled breeding might permanently improve the human race.

Galton hoped to speed and direct human evolution. Writing in Inquiries into the Human Faculty and Its Development (1883), Galton defined eugenics as "the science of improving stock … to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had." Familiar with farmers' achievements in breeding more-valuable plants and animals, Galton believed that such methods were "equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants."

Galton identified those fit folk who should have children and stigmatized those he deemed unfit for parenthood. He also believed then-accepted notions of "racial" superiority and inferiority, had more to do with class and cultural prejudice than with biological difference. Galton assumed that wealthy people like himself were fit, whereas poor folk were unfit. Northern European "white" people stood atop the evolutionary scale of fitness, followed by "whites" from southeast Europe, Asians, Native Americans, Africans, and Australian Aborigines.

Positive and Negative Eugenics

Galton identified positive and negative eugenics as the two basic methods to improve humanity. Positive eugenics used education, tax incentives, and childbirth stipends to encourage procreation among fit people. Education would convince fit parents to have more children, out of a desire to increase the common good. Lower taxes on larger families and the provision of a small birth payment for each "eugenic" child would provide further inducements. Conversely, eugenically educated but unfit people would selflessly forgo procreation, to prevent the propagation of their hereditary "taint." Believing that neither altruism nor self-interest would be enough to control the unfit, however, many eugenicists also advocated negative eugenics.

Negative eugenics sought to limit procreation through marriage restriction, segregation, sexual sterilization, and, in its most extreme form, euthanasia. In an attempt to decrease procreation among the "unfit," laws prohibited marriage to people with diseases, or other conditions believed to be hereditary. Similar restrictions banned marriage between people of different races, in order to prevent miscegenation . Popular in the United States, antimiscegenation laws sought to use science to legitimize racial prejudice. Since marriage restriction failed to stop extramarital procreation, eugenicists argued for more intrusive interventions.

Many of these more intrusive interventions relied upon segregation. For example, individuals judged unfit might be segregated in institutions such as insane asylums, tuberculosis sanatoriums, and homes for the so-called feebleminded or mentally retarded. Isolated from "normal" society, these people were also segregated by sex within the institution to prevent procreation. Segregation through incarceration, however, proved too costly to be applied to all but the most severely handicapped.

Compulsory sexual sterilization of those individuals deemed "feeble-minded" or "slow" promised eugenic and economic benefits for society. Once sterilized, such individuals posed no eugenic risk; sexual intercourse would never result in pregnancy. Sterilized individuals could therefore return to society and work, rather than remaining an economic "burden" in an institution. Many social reformers argued that compulsory sterilization was more humane than locking people away during their childbearing years.

In the case of individuals afflicted with gross physical or mental abnormalities, the most radical eugenic intervention was proposed: euthanasia. While many eugenicists theorized about euthanasia, very few seriously considered it as a real possibility. This would change with the advent of Nazi eugenics in Germany.

Mendelian Inheritance, Intelligence Testing, and American Eugenics

Galton's eugenic ideas found fertile ground in America after 1900, when scientists rediscovered Mendel's findings regarding the inheritance of physical traits in pea plants. Mendel's notions of "dominant" and "recessive" genetic traits, easily identified in "lower" organisms such as plants and animals, convinced people that human eugenic improvement was possible. Scientists assumed that even complex human traits such as intelligence and behavior behaved as simple genetic "unit characters," such as height or color in peas.

The advent of intelligence testing in the 1900s provided a new way to quantify Galton's notion of genius. American eugenicists assessed an individual's eugenic worth by combining his intelligence quotient (IQ) with a Galtonian study of the family pedigree. Psychologist Henry Herbert Goddard published one famous study, The Kallikak Family, in 1912. Goddard traced two family lines that originated with a common male ancestor, whom he called Martin Kallikak (from the Greek words for beautiful [kalos ] and bad [kakos ]). One branch appeared healthy and eugenic, descended from Martin's marriage to a "respectable" woman. The second branch was composed of "Defective degenerates" (alcoholics, criminals, prostitutes, and particularly the mentally "feebleminded") born of Martin's dalliances with a "feebleminded" tavern mistress. Goddard thus "proved" the inheritance of feeblemindedness, and its social cost.

Convinced that "feeblemindedness" and other complex antisocial behaviors behaved like simple Mendelian traits, eugenicists lobbied for compulsory sterilization laws. Between 1907 and the mid-1930s, such laws were adopted by thirty-two American states. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld these laws in 1927, when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that, "the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination of schoolchildren is broad enough to cover the cutting of the fallopian tubes. … Three generations of imbeciles are enough." "Feebleminded" individuals were prominent among the more than 60,000 individuals sterilized in the United States under eugenic sterilization laws between 1927 and 1979.

Nazi Eugenics

Eugenics is commonly associated with the Nazi racial hygiene program that began in 1933 and ended in May 1945, with Germany's defeat near the end of World War II. Although the German eugenics movement existed long before the Nazis came to power, scholars have shown that Nazi eugenicists were inspired by American eugenic studies and sterilization, as well as their antimiscegenation and immigration restriction laws.

Goddard's Kallikak study was well respected among German eugenicists who, like American eugenicists, emphasized genetics as the basis of human differences. German racial hygienists also praised the American eugenicist Madison Grant's racist book, The Passing of the Great Race, which Adolf Hitler referred to as his "Bible." The 1933 Nazi "Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Progeny," relied on American examples, especially the model law drafted by American eugenicist Harry Hamilton Laughlin. In 1936 the University of Heidelberg awarded Laughlin an honorary degree for his contributions to "racial hygiene." Laughlin's degree was ordered and signed by Hitler.

The Nazis instituted state-supported positive eugenics programs that encouraged "racially fit" women to reproduce, as well as a massive negative eugenics program that included euthanasia. Ultimately, the Nazis sterilized about 400,000 people and euthanized another 70,000 individuals that were judged to be feebleminded or otherwise unfit. The euthanasia program fore-shadowed the extermination of six million Jewish victims, along with millions of others, notably Gypsies and homosexuals, in the Holocaust.

Demise of Eugenics

Early on, some scientists objected to the eugenicists' insistence that heredity overwhelmed environmental influences in shaping human life. Others objected to the eugenicists' methodologies, noting that family studies often relied on hearsay evidence and biased observation rather than direct, quantifiable, empirical measurements. Others challenged the eugenicists' reliance on phenotypic traits such as body form to diagnose presumed underlying genetic causes. Developments in genetics increasingly undermined this simplistic reasoning from phenotype to genotype.

Instead, genetic studies increasingly revealed the complex nature of most human phenotypic traits. Human traits rarely result from the action of single gene pairs, and expression depends on complex environmental influences. Moreover, many genes induce pleiotropic effects: that is, a single gene may influence more than one phenotypic characteristic. If multiple genes cause single traits, or if single genes are involved in many effects, then any attempt to "breed out" traits becomes virtually impossible. Moreover, if, as most eugenicists believed, negative traits are recessive factors in single-gene disorders, then most "bad" genes are harbored in apparently normal, heterozygous carriers. The Hardy-Weinberg theorem, formulated in 1908, made it clear that eugenic selection directed solely against affected individuals would barely reduce the incidence of a trait in the larger population. To decrease such defects by half would require forty generations (1,000 years) of perfect negative eugenics.

The Hardy-Weinberg theorem alone, unfortunately, did not dissuade most geneticists from eugenics. Many continued to believe, as geneticist Herbert Spencer Jennings wrote in 1930, that preventing the "propagation of even one congenitally defective individual puts a period to at least one line of operation of this devil. To fail to do at least so much would be a crime." Nevertheless, the most bigoted aspects of eugenics dwindled after 1946, as scientists recoiled from the horrors of Nazi atrocities.

The dream of improving human life through genetic intervention remains with us today. While genetic knowledge and technology have changed since the Holocaust, the cultural and political context surrounding the pursuit of genetic improvement has undergone even greater transformations. The goal of present genetic intervention is not group improvement, but individual therapy. Modern conceptions of individual, patient, and human rights reduce the risk of abuses committed in the name of eugenics. While negative eugenics has been largely eliminated as neither possible nor socially acceptable, positive eugenics are still considered desirable among some people who propose genetic engineering for the development of children with superior traits. The ethical issues surrounding genetic engineering and cloning are still debated in light of the history of the eugenics movement.

see also Cloning: Ethical Issues; Gene Therapy: Ethical Issues; Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium; Inheritance Patterns; Reproductive Technology: Ethical Issues.

Gregory Michael Dorr

Bibliography

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Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.

Kuhl, Stefan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Paul, Diane B. Controlling Human Heredity, 1865 to the Present. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995.

———. The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.

Pernick, Martin. The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of Defective Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Proctor, Robert. Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1988.

Reilly, Philip R. The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Selden, Steven. Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America. NewYork: Teachers College Press, 1999.