Adam Rutherford: Control - The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics

Adam Rutherford: Image courtesy of Adam Rutherford

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As an undergraduate studying genetics at UCL, Adam Rutherford sat in the Galton Lecture theatre - named after Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s half cousin - listening to the leading lights of the field expound on the joys of genes. And some of them didn’t shirk from pointing out the connection between the theatre’s namesake and the darkest legacy of genetics: the eugenics movement. 

Today, as an honorary senior research associate at UCL, Adam continues to dig into the history of genetic, race science and eugenics in his teaching and his writing, including his most recent book, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics, which comes out on February 3rd. 

We’ve previously talked about Galton and eugenics back in our first series in the episode Sex and Death, which we reposted recently on the feed, so I was keen to sit down with Adam for an in-depth chat about the story of the eugenics movement, from its early days at UCL through to its present manifestation in policies such as enforced sterilisation. It’s a tough topic, so why did he want to get stuck in to such a thorny and distressing subject?

Adam: It's always been part of my output; the relationship between the science that we're interested in and the political ramifications and framing that are part of its history and its relevance in contemporary society.

Adam: So my last book, which was about the relationship between scientific racism and the origins of biology, because I love dealing with these sort of super fun topics...

Kat: You are a brave man!

Adam: So I wrote that; How to Argue with a Racist came out a couple of years ago. And then this feels like a companion piece to it because there are these two strands of the origins of biology and specifically the origins of genetics and evolutionary thought, which are inextricably intertwined. One is scientific racism and the other is eugenics.

Adam: The 'why now?' question is really interesting and I think really important, because I think that when you know these subjects, when you study them, as I have done for decades now, you begin to see the thing that historians know and say all the time, which is that we see these patterns over and over again.

Adam: And I think with modern techniques in reproductive medicine and new tools available to understand the relationship between DNA and physical characteristics or behavioural characteristics, behavioral genetics, the relationship between genotype and phenotype and so on... new techniques that have been developed in the last five, ten years have relaunched conversations about the same things that the eugenicists were talking about in the late 19th and early 20th century. And so I think that we teach this history and we talk about the history, not just because it's interesting, which it is, and recent, but because it informs our current practices.

Adam: So really it's about an idea which started out as a sort of esoteric, scientific idea by one guy, primarily, that fitted into a cultural landscape that was fertile for the development of what was always designed as a political idea that marshals science. And the idea is eugenics. But within 50 years of the origin of eugenics, we have the Holocaust.

Adam: And so how does an idea start in the salons of gentlemen's clubs and scientific discourse in London? How does it grow into one of the defining acts of the 20th century and what are its legacies today. So that was a long answer to a short question.

Kat: It is interesting. We've done a lot of episodes about the history of genetics and you find these great figures from the past and then you look at them and go, "Oh, yeah. They were a eugenicist". Sometimes it does feel a bit like it's eugenicists all the way down, which is awkward because this is the legacy. This is the field. And how do we talk about these great men and some great women - there are a few there and some of them were eugenicists too, people like Maud Slye who we've talked about. But let's start with the great man Francis Galton, because I've talked about him a bit. You've obviously talked about him a lot, because that seems to be really the start of what we'd called eugenics and the coining of the term. So who was Galton what was his deal in all of this?

Adam: So Galton is a sort of key person in establishing what is a much older practice, which is the ideas about controlling biology, population control, controlling reproductive autonomy, mostly the control of reproductive autonomy of women by men.

Adam: But these are old ideas, right? So infanticide....

Kat: It's breeding, right?

Adam: Yeah, sure. And it's very closely associated and always has been with the concept of breeding and agriculture. Right. So people say, "Oh, we can breed sheep to be like this, or cows to be like this, so why can't we do it with humans?" And that's an old idea. We see it in Republic by Plato we see it in the legends of the Spartans and we see it in every culture through history. People have always tried to control unruly biology via techniques which we would probably describe as being eugenics today.

Adam: But what happens with Galton is that, well, he's Darwin's half cousin, right? And so in the 1860s, after the Origin of Species has been published in which Darwin recognises the mutability of organisms, although he doesn't talk about humans at all, Galton sees this masterpiece and sees this incredibly central idea to the whole of biology and says, "Can we apply this to humans? Can we breed humans to be better?"

Adam: So immediately it becomes a political ideology and Darwin is not particularly interested in this as an idea, but what Galton does is set it up in a political landscape in which population control is a big issue. So we're only a few decades after Thomas Malthus has been talking about the difference between exponential growth of a happy population and linear growth of resources available. And this is an economic conundrum. And at the same time, we're in the Industrial Revolution, and Victorian Britain is rapidly expanding in wealth and cities are becoming larger, more urbanised industrial complexes.

Adam: And then at the same time, we've got mass immigration from the wealth of the colonies of empire. And so all of this is a big melting pot, or a bit of fertile ground; it's the earth in which Galton can come along and say, "What we can do here is apply Darwinian ideas to humans in order to improve the stock of the British people."

Adam: And then the motivation for this is that there's a much more visible poor in the urbanisation of cities as a result of the Industrial Revolution. And along with poverty, as everyone knows, you get a high prevalence of various diseases and of behaviours, which are deemed 'undesirable' by people in public and particularly people in positions of power.

Adam: So I describe it in the book as being the sort of sciencification; it is turning to scientists at a point where we've got a political issue and saying, "Can you help? Is there a framework or a new type of science that we can apply to this political problem?"

Adam: And Galton sets that up. He says, "Yes, eugenics is the way that we can do this." He's a man who is obsessed with status and rank. He's also an obsessive data collector with an ultra-systemising mind. And he begins thinking about how we can improve the quality of people, initially by measuring the greatness of other people...

Kat: Greatness of men, let's be clear on this. So much of this is all about the excellence and the greatness of men very specifically.

Adam: Yeah. I mean, he's almost entirely uninterested in women, which I think is an interesting characteristic in and of itself. He was married throughout his life to Louisa Butler, but they didn't produce any children and he almost never talks about sex itself.

Kat: But he does do the beauty thing, doesn't he? He goes around the country seeing the kind of 'am I hot or not?' thing of the different parts of the country, where the women in Aberdeen are the mingers and the ones in the south of England are the hottest. That seems like as far as it goes, it's trying to categorise beauty.

Adam: Well, I mean, the terminology used there is not much better than what he was doing. I mean, he talks about 'prize sows' as part of his categories for female beauty. But that is a really good example. It's quite funny, and it's grotesque to our modern ears, but it is a really good example of what Galton's always trying to do, which is to apply metrics to things that are vague or esoteric or determined by value judgments.

Adam: So that ultra-systemising brain was part of that, "Can you apply metrics to female facial beauty in order that we can understand the underlying biological architecture of what makes a pretty face?"

Adam: Now, of course, as all data bros do, it fails to see the subjective experience of things like beauty. It fails to acknowledge that he's talking about a particular class of people in one particular country. He's not interested in broader ideas. He's also part of the culture of white supremacy in 19th century Britain. He's an upper class, successful, wealthy man who comes from a Quaker family and is independently wealthy after his dad has died when he was a young man. He's also successful as a writer; he travelled extensively and wrote successful travel books about how to survive in deepest, darkest Africa.

Adam: So he's a big cheese already by this point but what he sees, not just in Darwinian ideas, but also in the development of statistical techniques - many of which he invents - is the ability to systematise esoteric things or things that are difficult to quantify. The female beauty thing is one. But where the origin of eugenics is relevant here is that his first major work in this area, Hereditary Genius, is really about establishing the greatness of men - as you quite correctly say - by categorising men as being eminent, coming from eminent families and establishing how this eminence and greatness flowed through through families.

Adam: And he very much thought, as do a lot of people at this time, that it is all genetic, right? That it's not environmental. They don't have genes at this point. They don't have an understanding of heredity; that won't come for another 30 or 40 years. But it is Galton who comes up with the dichotomy of nature and nurture. He is the person who says 'nature versus nurture'. And people like us abandoned this decades ago because the two things are not in conflict with each other. But for Galton it is, "What are these characteristics in men that make them eminent, that make them great? And what is that underlying natural, nature element to it, which is passed down through the generations?"

Adam: And that's what Hereditary Genius is. It's an attempt to statistically quantify what he describes as 'geniuses'.

Kat: And from there you get all the putting people in boxes. You've got the categories that some people may have seen and we laugh at now; these are 'imbeciles', 'morons'. This idea that you can literally just stratify and quantify the population and say, "These people shouldn't be allowed to have babies." And fundamentally that's obviously the root of it all.

Adam: That's exactly right. And eugenics was always about power. It was always about the maintenance of power. It always was a political ideology, not a scientific idea. Although as I say, it marshals science into that political ideology. But if you are from a privileged background and you believe that white people and white, British, upper class men in the majority are the most important people on Earth, but that societies have to be structured in particular ways with a sort of hegemonic power at one end and a happy middle and working class at the other, and you want to reduce the amount of - and I'm going to use Victorian terminology here - people who are 'defective' or 'undesirable', or as you say later, we have pseudo-clinical terms like 'imbecile' and 'idiot' and later 'moron'; that doesn't come until the 20th century.

Adam: But these are pseudo-clinical diagnoses which are built around the idea of eugenics. The idea that if you fall into these specific categories, then these are the people that we don't want to reproduce so that the society is healthier. Now at its inception, eugenics is a sort of positive movement in the sense that we want to improve the quality of a people overall by reducing the number of 'undesirable' people at the bottom end of society.

Adam: And, you know, there's many qualifications within what I mean by 'undesirable'; I'm using their terminology. And we'll probably get onto the value of people in society more generally later in the conversation. But you can't rank people without having people at the top and the bottom. So the eugenics ideas of Galton go hand-in-hand with the disgenic ideas that also emerged at the same time.

Adam: If you're selecting for quality at the top, you're also deselecting for lower quality at the bottom. So while it starts off as being a positive idea; people of higher quality should mate with each other as decreed by Plato in Republic, and that way we will shift the balance towards a better quality of people. But if you do that, you're also deselecting at the bottom end. And so I think that this idea, which I think they thought had noble intentions, it's always hand-in-hand with illiberal views and the control of reproductive rights and a lack of autonomy of sections of society, which are decreed to be of less value than others by the powerful.

Adam: And so that's where, a hundred years on, we look at eugenics as being a toxic idea, a poisonous thing. But at the time almost everyone was totally into it and thought these are good ideas, these are things which we should embrace.

Kat: It's something that you unfold in the book; the consequences of this. The obvious example being the Holocaust and the Nazi's persecution, not just of Jews, but of people who were disabled, people who were schizophrenic, people who were homosexual, anyone who they classed as not being 'right' in their view. But I think what really shocked me reading the book is all the examples that you give going on until incredibly recently. Not just in living memory, but in the past decade or so of coerced reproduction....

Adam: Not just in the past decade or so, this year. I mean, there are contemporary practices, particularly in America, which are involuntary sterilisation. We never did it in the UK. There's a slight irony to that, that it is an idea which is created in Britain and nurtured in Britain and it spreads all over the world - I think 31 countries had official eugenics policies - but the UK never did.

Kat: That's the irony, isn't it. It's like football; you know, we invent it but then the rest of the world gets really good at it.

Adam: Well, that's the pattern of empire. But we got away with it by a whisker. I'm fascinated by this period in history, because it is such a turmoil with industrialisation and empire and global wars emerging and the rise of antisemitism throughout the 19th century, which will culminate in the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Adam: And one of the key protagonists is Churchill. So Churchill is an enthusiastic eugenicist from the word go, from as soon as he discovers these ideas. And he is largely responsible for the writing of the legislation that would have been the UK's eugenics policies had not the involuntary sterilisation clauses been vetoed by other MPs, specifically Josiah Wedgwood of the Wedgwood-Darwin clan.

Adam: And so the Mental Deficiencies Act of 1913, which was a major act that dealt with people with mental health issues and institutionalisation of those people, ran until the 1950s. So it's a big policy that lasted for many decades, but it almost included involuntary sterilisation and then didn't. And that was why the UK didn't have official eugenics policies.

Adam: In the States, who had begun embracing ideas of eugenics in the 1890s, then formalise them from 1907 onwards, and 30 states have eugenics policies up until the second half of the 20th century, and we estimate 70-80,000 people were sterilised under those policies. And then in Germany, where similar sorts of ideas begin to emerge in the late 19th century and develop in the 1910s and '20s .And the eugenicists then, again, are almost universally supported by men of science and men of power as well.

Adam: A weird cul-de-sac in this story is that most of the early eugenicists in Germany, in Weimar Germany, were not antisemitic and considered the purity of the Aryan race - or 'Nordic people' is what they referred to them as rather than Aryan - should be improved by mating with Jewish people, because Jews were regarded as so successful in intellectual pursuits.

Adam: And it's only when, in 1933 with the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany, that the eugenicists effectively concede that the best way they're going to get their eugenics policies enacted is by signing up to Nazism. And with signing up to Nazism comes antisemitism from Hitler's virulent antisemitism. And so it's almost like this weird concession; the best way we can get eugenics enabled in Germany to protect the Nordic people is by embracing the antisemitism of Nazi Germany.

Adam: And then there's this other really sort of baffling, breathtaking link, which is that most of the policies of the Nazis that were eugenics - or 'racial hygiene' is what they really called it - were derived from the American policies. I mean they literally took the same legislation and translated it. They literally took the enthusiasts from America and brought them out to Berlin. The Berlin eugenics establishments were funded by Rockefeller and Carnegie and other American organisations.

Adam: In the Nuremberg Trials after the war and the Doctors' Trial, which specifically dealt with the issue of euthanasia and eugenics policies of the Nazis, they cite the Americans as their inspiration. So you've got this weird network. It starts in the UK. The ideas spread; they spread to Germany and America. Americans develop them in one particular way, the Germans develop them in another particular way. We don't succeed in developing eugenics policies in the UK for various reasons. And then the Germans begin to extract eugenics policies from the Americans in the run-up to the war and then it becomes the deranged policies of the Nazis, which result in the Holocaust.

Kat: This is big stuff. And as you say in the book, this is still ongoing up until now, and the extent that you outline of things like forced sterilisations in India. One of the few examples, I think, where they try and get men to have the snip rather than controlling women.

Adam: Yep, yep. Quicker and cheaper. But then, but then they discovered that men are more likely to resist than women so they switched their policies

Kat: Funny, that. And then the horrific story we've seen of the First Nations people in Canada and just horrendous policies there. And as you mentioned, very recently in Trump's America of people being sterilised; migrants being sterilised as they're crossing into the border. Why is this not going away?

Adam: That is a very good question that I do not have an answer to. I mean, the numbers are significantly lower, right? So this isn't policy now in America. But there are dozens of examples in America and in Canada of enforced sterilisations or involuntary sterilisations, always of women. And they are always women who are in very low socioeconomic status or mostly in prison already, or in detention centres if they're part of the immigration sort of framework. And the legality of this is very difficult to unpick.

Adam: There is a class action in Canada against the government for enforced sterilisation for First Nations women and that's ongoing. And many people are aware of the involuntary sterilisations of women in the ICE detention centers and in prisons in California, most recently. People think of California as being the most liberal state, which it is in many ways, but California was the state that embraced eugenics more enthusiastically than any other state in the U.S. and they have been involuntary sterilising women in prisons until the last few years.

Adam: I don't know how it still continues because it seems so baffling to us today.

Kat: Yeah. I want to - continuing the cheery line of conversation about things and 'why are they still here?' - is specifically the racist and the white supremacist side of eugenics.

Kat: And you mentioned Churchill, and I think there are certainly strands of people who are almost reluctant to admit that Churchill was an absolutely massive racist and Galton was a massive racist. And a lot of these people were really racist and you sort of go, "Well, it's of their time. They were people of their time."

Kat: Can we really make that argument? And then also, how is the racist and white supremacist side of the legacy of eugenics playing out?

Adam: It's really important for people like us, who end up being historians by default because we talk about the origins of our fields. But I think that one thing that scientists don't do very well is pay academic history its due diligence in terms of looking at its evidence base. And I really think that scientists need to be better at history and better at weighing up the evidence that's in front of them with the same scrutiny that we apply to looking at our scientific data.

Adam: An absolute cornerstone of the understanding of history is that we judge people by their standards and not by ours. And it's very easy with a benefit of hindsight to look back on people of the past and say, "These were terrible people who did terrible things." That's a trap that is often sprung and we have to be wary of it.

Adam: But it is possible to contextualise them in their time and use that as a framework for understanding how individuals played out policies that have great global or local significance. So when people say, "They were of their time," or, "You can't change the past," or, "You can't change history," well, they're not very sophisticated arguments.

Adam: People are always 'of their time'. It is literally impossible to be of another time, unless you are a time traveller. We can contextualise views of people in the past by looking at the views of other people. And just like today, people of the past did not all have the same view. People argued about all sorts of things or else no progress and no history would occur.

Adam: And then the third point that I like to make is that 'the past' is the thing that you cannot change. 'History' is, by definition, always changing. It's always challenged and is always interpreted through a contemporary lens.

Adam: So the first thing to say is, "Everyone was more racist in the past," right? That's a non-controversial thing to say. The second thing is that white supremacy in its traditional, imperial form was pretty much universal at that time. And the hegemonic power of white, upper class men was part of the framework of popular discourse on any subject; politics, science, whatever. So when you look at people like Galton and Churchill - and I'm going to put those two together in the same pot - they did have views that were typical for their time, although I argue that they were pretty extreme.

Adam: And if you compare the views of say, I don't know, Galton to Darwin or Huxley on things like race science and imperialism and slavery, you find that they have different views, right? Huxley and Darwin are abolitionists through-and-through, and Galton and Churchill have much clearer ideas about 'the white, British people are the greatest on Earth, and therefore it is our moral duty to fill the Earth with people who look more like them'. And that's also Cecil Rhodes's view at the same time. But Cecil Rhodes, who we absolutely condemn for being an imperialist monster today, was also condemned during his life for being an imperialist monster.

Adam: So it's not good enough to say, "They were of their time," or, "They had views which were typical for their time." They had views that were regarded by some people in society as absolutely monstrous at that time.

Adam: Now, when it comes to eugenics, there's almost universal support for the idea that people can be improved, that populations can be improved through eugenic policies. It isn't universal, but it is almost universal. And it's also - and I think this is really interesting - it's bipartisan.

Adam: So you've got the Churchills on the right wing saying, "Yes, we should definitely improve the stock of the British people using eugenics". And Arthur Balfour; so at the first eugenics conference in London in 1912, Churchill's there as, I think, the vice-chair. Churchill; future Prime Minister. Arthur Balfour; former Prime Minister is giving the keynote speech. And all of the people that our field, that me and you study our whole life are all there. You know, the Pearsons and Reginald Punnett, and they're all they're talking about heredity and genetics.

Adam: So that's the right wing, but also the origins of the socialist movements in the UK are also heavily tied to eugenics policies. So you've got people like Beveridge and popular figures like George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the founders of the Fabian society, are also really interested in eugenics ideas and promote eugenics. The New Statesman publishes editorials, the Manchester Guardian - both left-wing publications - publish editorials in supportive of eugenics.

Adam: So it's bipartisan. It's broadly supported as an idea across, across society, but not universally. And in fact, one of the people that plays a big part in opposing eugenics is the Christian apologists and Catholic, G.K. Chesterton, who wrote a book called Eugenics and Other Evils. That gives you an indication of his views.

Kat: One of the things I really like about your book is the first half is really laying out this history of where did eugenics come from, how was it enacted, all the way up to the horrific episodes of the Second World War. And then in the second half, you do go into what's still going on today in the second half of the 20th century, but you really do embed it in genetics. It's a wonderful explainer of what do we know about how our genes make us who we are in concert with the environment.

Kat: And I think that's really important. And it's so interesting. You pick up that people like Haldane, like Morgan were like, "Nah, this just doesn't check out scientifically". Because one of the lovely quotes that I really liked that you wrote is, "One thing that we do know about human genetics with absolutely confidence is how little we know".

Kat: And all the emerging stuff from genomics and we recently interviewed Paige Harden about her book looking at genetics and life outcomes and polygenic risk scores and all of this, and this is really, really, really complicated. And when you look at things like animal breeding, if you breed in enormous cows with enormous udders, they have other health problems, so it's complicated, man.

Adam: We're never going to be unemployed. And I think that the whole problem, not just with the eugenics movements, but also just more generally is that people always turn to science for simple answers to complex problems. And the zealots or the people who aren't as well informed or aren't experts in their fields, they're the first ones to say, "Yeah, this is definitely true." Whereas people like me and you and Paige, we'll be the first ones to say, "We know loads about genetics, but we also know where our limits are."

Adam: Does any of our current knowledge of genetics - human genetics - and heredity give us enough freedom to enact policies that look like the eugenics ones of the past? And I say, "No." I also say, "I can't really see a time when that is going to change."

Adam: So the analogy with farming has been present since Plato is talking about it in Republic and Galton talks about it and Churchill talks about it. And even Richard Dawkins last year in one of his less well-considered tweets said, "It works for roses. It works for cows or sheep or whatever. Why wouldn't it work for humans?" Well, I remember reading that and thinking, "That's a good question." I know it's needless provocation, but it is a good question.

Adam: You have to answer it; well I tried to answer that question and it's not a good analogy. The conclusion I came to, one of the things I did, which is, I think, something that most people don't do when they start talking about breeding and eugenics and comparing humans to farm animals is I spoke to a shepherd.

Kat: That's research.

Adam: Yeah. Yeah. I spent some time talking to a shepherd, and asking him questions about what breeding's actually like, and is this a valid comparison. I think that when people compare humans to agricultural animals in order to think about eugenics questions, they've got no idea what farmers actually do. And they've got no idea what breeding programmes are actually like.

Adam: So the analogy falls apart because of, well, one of the things is the wastefulness of farming, which all good farmers try to reduce. But unless you're willing to severely lower the standards that we have about looking after humans, which I don't think people are willing to do, then that analogy falls apart there.

Kat: I mean, who gets to be the stud male? You get one ram for a whole farm!

Adam: Well exactly! One sheep will impregnate a hundred females. And that's not how we structure society... I think. But the other thing is that the analogy doesn't work at all because farming has very specific intentions, right?

Adam: A rose, a beautiful rose, doesn't grow in any old ground and has been bred carefully for hundreds of years to look a particular way according to our aesthetic desires. But as a result of that, it needs to be nurtured in particular ways. It needs to be fed specific foods and the roses that we want and see at flower shows or by garage forecourts wouldn't grow in any old garden or wouldn't grow in a crack in the pavement, in the desert, or in Norway or wherever.

Adam: Most farm animals would be instantly dead if they lived in the wild, because they are bred specifically to exist in the environments of farms to have one or a few specific functions, like massive udders or meaty legs or whatever we actually want from them. So it's a daft analogy. I mean, it makes no sense to use that as an analogy.

Adam: All it says is that humans have genetics. If it were ethically possible, acceptable and desirable, of course we could breed humans to have specific characteristics, but it would be a terrible thing to do. And we could, I don't know, we could, we could introduce individual characteristics in humans and they would suffer from terrible other diseases and they wouldn't be able to function in other situations. So it's a completely fatuous thing to say, and it's a completely specious way of justifying eugenics policies of the past or present. But it's ubiquitous and it seems to be a very persuasive argument, though I think only because people haven't thought about it very hard.

That’s all for now. Thanks to Adam Rutherford for chatting with me. His latest book, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics is out on February 3rd, wherever books are sold.