Control, p.8
Control, page 8
The Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics post was created at Cambridge University in 1912, named after the prime minister who had given the keynote after-dinner speech at the First International Eugenics Congress in London that year, and it still exists today. The first person to hold this chair was Reginald Punnett, geneticist and inventor of the Punnett square, which we continue to use to work out which of the genes of two parents will be dominant in their children—it’s how we teach genetics to schoolchildren. Punnett had given a presentation at that eugenics conference in which he offered scientific caution that the number of traits for which we had detailed hereditary information was limited, but that feeblemindedness was one on which we could act right away. This argument was based on the grounds that it followed a pattern of “single Mendelian inheritance”—meaning that like pea wrinkliness or flower color, there was one gene that accounted for the trait, and it was passed from generation to generation in a particular pattern that could be recognized in a family tree. A similar pattern of recessive inheritance was presented for the combination of epilepsy and feeblemindedness: “two epileptic parents produce only defective offspring.”
Punnett’s view was identical to—and perhaps influenced by—that of Henry Goddard, the psychologist who had formulated IQ as the metric for feeblemindedness in the United States. In 1912, Goddard had published a very successful book, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, in which he analyzed the pedigree of one family that had split into two lineages, one fine and upstanding, the other criminal, diseased and delinquent. According to Goddard, the source of this bifurcation occurred when Martin Kallikak, a pseudonymous Revolutionary War hero, was en route home to his genteel Quaker wife, when he took a short detour to sleep with and impregnate a “feebleminded” but attractive barmaid, with whom he had no further contact. In his clinic, Goddard had been treating Deborah Kallikak, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Martin, since she was eight. His notes describe her as a “high-grade feebleminded person, the moron, the delinquent, the kind of girl or woman that fills our reformatories.” Goddard produced a detailed and exhaustive pedigree of the Kallikaks, starting with Martin, and traced a perfect pattern of Mendelian inheritance for traits good and bad. His legitimate family was bounteous and successful, whereas his bastard progeny produced generation upon generation of poverty, criminals and mentally disabled “defectives,” eventually including Deborah. With this, Goddard concluded that the feeblemindedness of the Kallikaks was encoded in a gene, a single unit of defective inheritance passed down from generation to generation, just like in Mendel’s peas.
Family histories were popular mechanisms for promoting eugenic ideas, and the Kallikak case study was influential. The trouble with Goddard’s bestselling book was that it was a fiction. It wasn’t true scientifically, which we will come to in a moment, but it also wasn’t true historically or genealogically. While it was the case that Martin Kallikak’s extensive legitimate family was packed with Galtonian eminent achievers—men of medicine, the law and the clergy—the good-looking yet feebleminded barmaid never existed. Instead, the so-called son of Martin Kallikak was in fact the unrelated John Wolverton (1776–1861), the son of Gabriel Wolverton and his wife Catherine Murray. John Wolverton was a landowner, with educated children. And while there were poor farmers and people with disabilities among his descendants, by the twentieth century there were also teachers, pilots and a banker.‡‡‡ They were not the miscreants Goddard had imagined.
The scientific assumptions about the root cause of their problems were also incorrect. Set aside the utter vagueness of the diagnosis itself. Whatever the clinical meaning of feeblemindedness, there are effectively no learning disabilities or mental health disorders that are the result of a single gene defect—I shall examine this further in the second half of the book. Goddard had discounted any possible environmental reasons for the disabilities he described, instead attributing them all to the innately inherited—that is, to genetics. Some recent analyses of this work suggest that some of the disabled members of the pedigree showed clear signs of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, a condition triggered by mothers drinking heavily during pregnancy. That, very obviously, is an environmental cue and not primarily modulated by genes. The best characterized of this suite of conditions is fetal alcohol syndrome, which includes behavioral problems, reduced cognitive abilities, and characteristic abnormal facial features—which are clearly visible in the photos of the Kallikak children in Goddard’s book.§§§ Furthermore, other nongenetic causes could reasonably account for the generational problems in the Kallikak family, such as malnutrition, which is social and heritable, and can cause severe mental and physical health problems.
But for those following in Galton’s footsteps, who misattributed complex behaviors to simple genetics, the Kallikaks were sharp evidence for the root cause of mental defectives. These types of family histories were just what the Eugenics Record Office under Charles Davenport were interested in—pedigrees that revealed patterns of inheritance, and therefore a fulcrum on which eugenics could act.
In the United Kingdom, the work on eugenics continued. The Eugenics Records Office had been bequeathed by Galton to the University of London in 1904, and evolved into the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics as part of UCL in 1907. The scientists there were critical of Goddard and, more generally, of the ERO in Cold Spring Harbor—because the work was shoddy, not because of any moral qualms they had. Quite the opposite: three papers that were written by the London eugenicists specifically criticized the slipshod approach of the Americans with the warning that it would “cripple the progress of eugenics.”
The scientists who populated the eugenics labs of Gower Street in central London were some of the greatest who have ever drawn breath. As well as Galton’s legacy in giving the world eugenics, some of his statistical inventions are still in use today, though they were relatively basic. Galton was never officially at UCL, but Karl Pearson was, installed at Galton’s bequest and behest as the first Galton Professor and director of the eugenics program. Pearson is rightly considered the father of modern statistics. Anyone who has dabbled with math and stats from high school onward has probably used the Pearson Correlation Coefficient, one of the standard ways of comparing two variables. If you want to know if writing about race correlates with receiving racist abuse, or wearing a face mask correlates with infection rates in a pandemic,¶¶¶ Pearson is your man.
Pearson was a polymath in a different way to Galton, his mentor and patron. They had similar educational backgrounds—top English public (i.e., private) schools, Cambridge to read mathematics—but then Pearson embraced a ridiculous diversity of academic positions and pursuits: in Heidelberg he studied physics and metaphysics; in Berlin physiology; he studied German history and literature, and was offered a position in Germanic history at King’s College, Cambridge, but instead returned to London to study law. He eventually settled on math, with a professorship at UCL in 1884. Pearson’s 1892 book, The Grammar of Science, contains nascent ideas about the interchangeable nature of matter and energy, dimensional space and relativity, all of which influenced a young Albert Einstein. Pearson’s impact on the history of science is titanic.
Galton took Pearson under his wing, a kindred spirit in seeing the power of measurement and statistics in revealing the hidden patterns in numbers. Pearson’s subsequent devotion to Galton is cringeworthy. He believed that Galton would be remembered over Darwin, rather than reviled by those who know his work and forgotten by those who don’t, as he mostly is today. After Galton died, Pearson wrote an incredibly detailed and mostly unreadable three-volume hagiography. Unlike his mentor though, he was a freethinker, and devoted to socialist ideals, to the extent that he refused both an OBE and later a knighthood as an expression of his opposition to the monarchy. Like Galton, however, he was a committed racist and eugenicist.
“We had been defeated,” Pearson wrote in 1900 in reference to the Boer War, “I may even venture to say badly defeated, by a social organism far less highly developed and infinitely smaller than our own.” He adopted the familiar refrain that science will provide the answer to this political issue: “What part from the natural history aspect does the national organization play in the universal struggle for existence? And, secondly, What has science to tell us of the best methods of fitting the nation for its task?”
The answer to Pearson’s mind was, of course, eugenics. He sums up his racism, math and paranoia in 1925 in a statement that foreshadowed the language of the Nazis. Jewish immigrants, he predicted, “will develop into a parasitic race. . . . Taken on the average, and regarding both sexes, this alien Jewish population is somewhat inferior physically and mentally to the native population.”###
Pearson retired in 1933, and the man who replaced him as Galton Professor sits comfortably in the top tier of scientists of all time. Ronald Aylmer Fisher spent a decade at UCL, but even before then had established his credentials as a brilliant and creative mathematician-scientist.****
Born in north London in 1890, Fisher also followed that route of top private school (Harrow) and math at Cambridge. His legacy is peerless. Much of what is taught on standard statistics courses in all universities is from Fisher: significance tests, the T distribution, the F distribution, maximum likelihood and much, much more. He had already coined the term “variance” in 1918, which describes how far numbers spread out from the average of a data set, and invented the concept of ANOVA—the analysis of variance—a powerful tool for simultaneously comparing range within and between data sets. Though these might not be familiar to anyone who doesn’t use voluminous data in their daily lives, for those who do—including anyone who works in most branches of biology, medicine, epidemiology, psychology—these are screwdrivers, wrenches and levels, the basic tools with which we understand data. ANOVA, for example, is used everywhere, but if you want to know how fundamental it is to the modern world, you could pick any one of a hundred papers published since the spring of 2020 and ANOVA will be there in the methods sections, crunching reams of Covid data, everything from the efficacy of vaccines in clinical trials to the spread of the disease in specific countries.
Fisher’s work was primarily in the service of evolution. Galton and Pearson had realized in the 1890s that natural selection occurs in populations. It is the changing frequency of different versions of the same gene in individuals in a population that allows us to see Darwin’s ideas in action—descent with modification, from generation to generation. Therefore, the best way to work out the rules of evolution is to simulate large populations in numbers and equations, and apply subtle or significant pressures to see what happens—these could be a female preference for a bigger horn, or a color change in a butterfly’s mimicry, or a population cut in half by a volcano or another natural disaster. Mendel had given us the units of heritable information—the gene—a few years earlier. But it was the fusion of Darwin’s ideas, with Mendel’s genes, with Galton and Pearson’s populations, that set the scene for the biggest revolution in biology since Darwin. We call it the “modern synthesis,” because unlike physicists who give their abstract and impenetrable work cool titles like the big bang or black holes, biologists are just terrible at catchy names. It was a synthesis of the ideas that had come before, but which hadn’t quite joined up, held hands and slotted into place to explain how evolution precisely works.
Most of this revolutionary work was done by Fisher, his colleague J. B. S. Haldane at UCL (more on him in a minute) and Sewall Wright (formerly a student of Charles Davenport at the University of Chicago) and their endeavors effectively founded the field of population genetics. Most of this is detailed in the first half of Fisher’s classic 1930 book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, a technical but essential textbook that lays out the foundations of the modern synthesis.
Actually, that’s not quite true. The first seven chapters of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection lay out the foundations of the modern synthesis. As well as being a peerless scientist, Fisher was a committed eugenicist. The final five chapters comprise a perplexing but full-bodied treatise on eugenics as the means to fix the looming decline of British society. “The deductions respecting Man are strictly inseparable from the more general chapters,” he writes in the foreword.
Like so many of his eugenic brethren, Fisher dives headfirst into the fall of Rome and other classical civilizations. He laments the high fecundity of the lower classes as the source of the rot, and, using the 1911 census, compares the end of the Roman era to contemporary Britain by describing an inverse relationship between fertility and “value to society.” He suggests tax incentives for middle-class people to have more babies, allowances proportional to the income of the father, and the abolition of benefits for large families with many children. Though he never endorsed involuntary sterilization, Fisher served on the board of the Committee for Legalizing Eugenic Sterilization, which advocated the neutering of “feeble minded high-grade defectives.” I am unaware of a book that is so scientifically important and influential in one half, and so jarringly polemical and frankly bizarre in the other.
In this odd fusion, Fisher had form. His first foray into this field was when he helped establish the Cambridge University Eugenics Society as an undergraduate in 1911. He published his first academic paper in The Eugenics Review, at the age of twenty-five, on the very Darwinian idea of sexual selection—“the love-notes of song-birds, the flower-scented glands of butterflies, besides the wonderful development of plumage and ornaments among birds of every description.” This article contains the roots of what we now call Fisherian runaway selection—that is, the process over generations where males acquire those preposterous horns or songs or dances to compete with other males and impress females. Nestled in some of his hypothesizing about how such exaggerated traits emerge are slightly rambling hints as to how he might apply this evolutionary theory to people, with qualities such as stinky breath or ruddy cheeks as clues to health, and therefore sexual attractiveness in potential mates. But ultimately, he concludes, character surpasses base aesthetics in humans. “Morality ceases to be arbitrary and dogmatic,” he opines, “but takes its place as a particular formulation of the requirements of the Highest Man—of our ultimate judgments of human value.”
Fisher was a theoretical biologist, meaning that he did little or no experimentation. This is not to be scoffed at—science is many things, including both theory and experiment—and he had the utmost respect for the lab work of the experimentalists: “The fact is that nearly all my statistical work is based on biological material and much of it has been undertaken merely to clear up difficulties in experimental technique.” This respect for a solid theoretical base was part of the British culture of eugenics, and was inherited from the founder. In 1909, Galton had issued a call to arms for the theoreticians to act as a bulwark against unfounded eugenics policy—as was already happening in the United States: “It cannot be too emphatically repeated that a great deal of careful statistical work has yet to be accomplished before the science of eugenics can make large advances.” Fisher answered that call, in formulating the rules of evolution and plastering them on to humans.
For all three of these scientific giants—Galton, Pearson and Fisher—eugenics is applied science. It is not politics peripheral to their research, nor is it in parallel. Their attempts to understand the mechanisms of evolution are—at least in part—in service of the political eugenics movement. The idea that science and politics are independent is demonstrably and doggedly false.
FISHER VERSUS HALDANE: CLASH OF THE TITANS
The same can also be said for those scientists who countered the eugenics movement. Just as G. K. Chesterton had pushed back against the political eugenicists of the Edwardian period, scientists did not unanimously back the supposedly data-driven justification for eugenic control.
The most notable of the scientific opponents was J. B. S. Haldane, a scientist of at least equal stature to Ronald Fisher. Jack Haldane was yet another product of British educational and class elitism: Eton followed by math and classics at Oxford (eighty miles from Cambridge, though culturally indistinguishable). However, his aristocratic family, his extreme privilege and his prodigious mind led him down a radically different political path.
Perhaps it was the bullying he endured at Eton, or his experiences as a soldier in the Black Watch, a Scottish infantry regiment, in the First World War, or maybe it was just that unpredictable soup of nature and nurture, experience and genetics, that drew Haldane to radical left-wing views and rejection of the hierarchical status quo of British society. Ultimately, he is arguably no less problematic politically than Fisher—in Haldane’s case, for maintaining admiration for Stalin and his intellectually corrupt scientific deputy Trofim Lysenko, whose ideological principles ignored data and led the Soviet Union into famine and ecological disaster that would last for decades, ruining a nation and killing millions.
Haldane was at UCL from 1933 until 1957 when he immigrated to India. There he eventually would convert to Hinduism, dress in traditional Indian clothes, and die an Indian citizen: “sixty years in socks is enough.” During his time as a scientist and science communicator, Haldane dabbled in physiology, on the causes of malaria, and even wrote a paper about genetics while in the trenches of the western front in France. He formulated ideas on the origin of life, and described the principle of size and scaling in animals in a classic essay “On Being the Right Size” in which he destroys the sci-fi notion that oversized King Kongs, Godzillas or giant spiders could exist.
Haldane had become a socialist in the Great War, and continued on this path, openly supporting communism from the 1930s onward. He toured workingmen’s clubs delivering public scientific lectures, and even showcased a bizarre and frankly chilling Soviet film concerning the sensory stimulation and resuscitation of beheaded dogs.††††
