Phil Gasper

Good breeding?

From Socialist Review, No. 178, September 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

Can crime or drug addiction be explained by biology or inheritance? Some scientists would argue that the way to solve these problems is through genetic engineering. Phil Gasper shows that such ideas have a dangerous history

Eugenics – the idea that it is possible to use scientific knowledge to breed ‘better’ human beings – is back.

Developments in technique over the past decade or so have given geneticists much greater knowledge of the specific genes – segments of the DNA in our cells – that are involved in the production of various biological effects. The successes of the new genetics have led to a revival of the idea that everything important about us is determined by our biological inheritance. This ignores the fact that even most physical diseases are not genetically determined, and that there is not a shred of convincing evidence that any complex human behaviour is biologically hardwired. Indeed, quite the contrary is true.

Lack of evidence, however, has done nothing to stop researchers making a series of well publicised claims that everything from intelligence to alcoholism and from criminality to homosexuality is genetically determined.

One of the implications of such claims is that social problems are not due to the way that society is structured – the distribution of income and wealth, for example, or access to jobs, healthcare and education – but are the consequence of defective individuals. The solution is thus not to change society but to improve the population through biological manipulation. In a recent editorial in Science Magazine Daniel Koshland explicitly drew this conclusion, claiming that genetic research can help to eliminate problems such as drug abuse, homelessness and violent crime.

The term ‘eugenics’ – which literally means ‘good birth’ – was originally coined by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. In his most famous book, Hereditary Genius, Galton attempted to demonstrate that intelligence is inherited by tracing the genealogies of well known English families and showing that, generation after generation, the members of such families tended to acquire prestigious social positions. The alternative explanation, that what is inherited is not intelligence but access to social power and influence, seems not to have occurred to him.

Since biological explanations assume that existing inequalities reflect fundamental facts about human nature, it is not surprising that Galton reached racist conclusions. He claimed that ‘the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own.’ A few years later he wrote that ‘the Jews are specialised for a parasitical existence upon other nations’.

Eugenics was adopted most enthusiastically in the United States. One of the principal advocates was the Harvard biologist Charles Davenport, a serious scientist who demonstrated the heritability of eye, skin and hair colour. But he was obsessed by the idea that our destiny lies in our genes. He claimed, for example, that the capacity to be a naval officer is an inherited trait, composed of two subtraits: thalassophilia (love of the sea) and hyperkineticism (wanderlust). Because there were no women in the navy, Davenport concluded that the trait is unique to males.

Davenport’s tendency to assume a genetic basis for nearly everything would be amusing if the consequences had not been so tragic. Against evidence that pellagra – an often deadly disease that was at epidemic proportions in the Southern US – was caused by dietary deficiencies, Davenport (who was also head of the US Pellagra Commission) argued that there was a genetic susceptibility to the disease. Successive administrations used Davenport’s false claims to avoid spending money on nutritional programmes. As a result hundreds of thousands died unnecessarily between 1915 and the mid-1930s.

Like other eugenicists, Davenport held that characteristics such as ‘pauperism’, criminality and ‘feeble-mindedness’ are biologically inherited. On this basis the eugenics movement encouraged nearly 30 states to enact laws permitting the forced sterilisation of thousands of people in prisons and mental hospitals who were judged to be defective.

Eugenicists in the US also urged the federal government to restrict the immigration of ‘undesirable’ races. Their arguments dovetailed with those of psychologists like H H Goddard and Lewis M Terman, who developed the first standardised intelligence tests. These tests reflected the racist and cultural biases of their designers. Even when testing led to the conclusion that half the US population – including most blacks and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe – were of substandard intelligence, the results were taken seriously. Terman advocated vocational training and placement for such unfortunates, warning that they could ‘drift easily into the ranks of the anti-social or join the army of Bolshevik discontents’.

Others went further. Carl Brigham of Princeton University testified to Congress that ‘American intelligence is declining, and will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial admixture becomes more and more extensive.’ Politicians relied heavily on such pseudo-scientific nonsense to justify passage of the viciously racist Immigration Restriction Act of 1924.

By the early 1930s leading eugenicists were praising Nazi race laws. In fact the Nazis themselves based their laws on those already passed in the US. Frederick Osborn, secretary of the American Eugenics Society, wrote, ‘The German sterilisation programme is apparently an excellent one. Taken altogether, recent developments in Germany constitute perhaps the most important social experiment which has ever been tried.’

In 1935 the American Eugenics Society argued that ‘crime and dependency keep on increasing because new defectives are born, just as new cancer cells remorselessly penetrate into sound tissue.’

Two years later Charles R. Stockard, president of the board of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, warned that the human race faced ‘ultimate extermination’ unless ‘low grade and defective stocks’ could be ‘absolutely prevented’ from reproducing. Eugenicists in the US were advocating the sterilisation of millions of Americans right up until 1940.

The disgusting idea that society’s problems are due to biologically inferior individuals played an important role in paving the way for the massive barbarism of the Nazi Holocaust. But, largely because the Nazis took these ideas to their logical extreme, the eugenics movement was discredited for a generation after the end of the Second World War.

Biological determinism first began to make a comeback in the late 1960s as part of the ruling class response to the movements for social change in the US and elsewhere. In 1969 Arthur Jensen, a professor at Stamford, published a paper arguing that blacks are innately less intelligent than whites. Jensen’s article, however, was soon subjected to withering criticism. The most devastating blow came in the mid-1970s when it was shown that research by the British psychologist Sir Cyril Burt, purporting to demonstrate that intelligence has a high degree of heritability, had been faked.

A second wave of biological determinism was soon launched with the development of sociobiology. E.O. Wilson and others claimed that evolutionary theory provides the key to understanding human behaviour. They argued that certain patterns of behaviour – such as hostility to outsiders, competition and male domination – were advantageous in the past and were now coded into our genes.

Ideas like this were taken up by the mass media. Business Week published an article titled ‘A Genetic Defense of the Free Market’ which claimed that ‘self interest is the driving force in the economy because it is ingrained in each individual’s genes’. Sociobiology was also enthusiastically embraced by far right and Nazi groups.

The claims of sociobiology are not only flawed, they are not consistent with the huge variability of human societies through history. Not every human society has exhibited the same sexual division of labour as our own, for example. Indeed, there has been tremendous cultural evolution in the past few thousand years which cannot be explained in biological terms.

We are now confronted by a third wave of revived biological determinism, a product of the new genetics and the continued need for the ruling class to search for explanations of social crisis that do not question the established order.

In the US, for example, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the Centre for Disease Control have spent tens of millions of dollars on the ‘Violence Initiative’. This project aims to study the biological roots of violence. Unsurprisingly, its subjects are not the Pentagon or the Los Angeles Police Department, but young blacks.

The claims of the genetic determinists are scientifically worthless, but politicians will use them in an effort to justify right wing policies on a whole range of social issues, from crime to education. The re-emergence of such ideas at a time when fascists have entered a Western European government for the first time since 1945 is particularly ominous. For this reason, these ideas must not go unchallenged.

But the challenge to these ideas cannot simply be an intellectual one, because science itself does not develop in a vacuum. It is not simply that under capitalism the fruits of science are frequently used by the minority who run society to dominate and exploit, although this is certainly true. For example, the most likely outcome of recent genetic research will be new forms of discrimination in employment and insurance, not cures for debilitating diseases. Social and political forces directly or indirectly affect the kinds of questions that are asked, the presuppositions that guide research and the interpretation of experimental results. In capitalism, the forces which shape science predominantly represent the power and interests of the ruling class. Those interests include a need to mystify the way in which society really functions. That is why the ideas of biological determinism constantly reappear, despite their lack of intellectual merit.

If we want to defeat biological determinism and its offspring, eugenics, we have to argue against its ideas while simultaneously attacking its material roots.

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