The Panda’s Thumb

by Stephen Jay Gould

  Few people who use the term are aware that both words, Mongolian and idiot, had technical meanings for Dr. Down that were rooted in the prevailing cultural prejudice, not yet extinct, for ranking people on unilinear scales with the ranker’s group on top. Idiot once referred to the lowest grade in a threefold classification of mental deficiency. Idiots could never master spoken language; imbeciles, a grade above, could learn to speak but not to write. The third level, the slightly “feeble-minded,” engendered considerable terminological controversy. In America, most clinicians adopted H.H. Goddard’s term, “moron,” from a Greek word meaning foolish. Moron is a technical term of this century, not an ancient designation, despite the length of metaphorical whiskers on those terrible, old moron jokes. Goddard, one of three major architects for the rigidly hereditarian interpretation of IQ tests, believed that his unilinear classification of mental worth could be simply extended above the level of morons to a natural ranking of human races and nationalities, with southern and eastern European immigrants on the bottom (still, on average, at moron grade), and old American WASP’s on top. (After Goddard instituted IQ tests for immigrants upon their arrival at Ellis Island, he proclaimed more than 80 percent of them feeble-minded and urged their return to Europe.)

  Dr. Down was medical superintendant of the Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Surrey when he published his “Observations on an ethnic classification of idiots” in the London Hospital Reports for 1866. In a mere three pages, he managed to describe Caucasian “idiots” that reminded him of African, Malay, American Indian, and Oriental peoples. Of these fanciful comparisons, only the “idiots who arrange themselves around the Mongolian type” survived in the literature as a technical designation.

  Anyone who reads Down’s paper without a knowledge of its theoretical context will greatly underestimate its pervasive and serious purpose. In our perspective, it represents a set of flaky and superficial, almost whimsical, analogies presented by a prejudiced man. In his time, it embodied a deadly earnest attempt to construct a general, causal classification of mental deficiency based upon the best biological theory (and the pervasive racism) of the age. Dr. Down played for stakes higher than the identification of some curious noncausal analogies. Of previous attempts to classify mental defect, Down complained:

  Those who have given any attention to congenital mental lesions must have been frequently puzzled how to arrange, in any satisfactory way, the different classes of this defect which have come under their observation. Nor will the difficulty be lessened by an appeal to what has been written on the subject. The systems of classification are generally so vague and artificial, that, not only do they assist but feebly, in any mental arrangement of the phenomena which are presented, but they fail completely in exerting any practical influence on the subject.

  In Down’s day, the theory of recapitulation embodied a biologist’s best guide for the organization of life into sequences of higher and lower forms. (Both the theory and “ladder approach” to classification that it encouraged are, or should be, defunct today. See my book Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Harvard University Press, 1977). This theory, often expressed by the mouthful “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” held that higher animals, in their embryonic development, pass through a series of stages representing, in proper sequence, the adult forms of ancestral, lower creatures. Thus, the human embryo first develops gill slits, like a fish, later a three chambered heart, like a reptile, still later a mammalian tail. Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the pervasive racism of white scientists: they looked to the activities of their own children for comparison with normal, adult behavior in lower races.

  As a working procedure, recapitulationists attempted to identify what Louis Agassiz had called the “threefold parallelism” of paleontology, comparative anatomy, and embryology—that is, actual ancestors in the fossil record, living representatives of primitive forms, and embryonic or youthful stages in the growth of higher animals. In the racist tradition for studying humans, the threefold parallel meant fossil ancestors (not yet discovered), “savages” or adult members of lower races, and white children.

  But many recapitulationists advocated the addition of a fourth parallel—certain kinds of abnormal adults within superior races. They attributed many anomalies of form or behavior either to “throwbacks” or “arrests of development.” Throwbacks, or atavisms, represent the spontaneous reappearance in adults of ancestral features that had disappeared in advanced lineages. Cesare Lombroso, for example, the founder of “criminal anthropology,” believed that many lawbreakers acted by biological compulsion because a brutish past lived again in them. He sought to identify “born criminals” by “stigmata” of apish morphology—receding forehead, prominent chin, long arms.

  Arrests of development represent the anomalous translation into adulthood of features that arise normally in fetal life but should be modified or replaced by something more advanced or complicated. Under the theory of recapitulation, these normal traits of fetal life are the adult stages of more primitive forms. If a Caucasian suffers developmental arrest, he may be born at a lower stage of human life—that is, he may revert to the characteristic forms of lower races. We now have a fourfold parallel of human fossil, normal adult of lower races, white children, and unfortunate white adults afflicted with atavisms or arrests of development. It is in this context that Dr. Down had his flash of fallacious insight: some Caucasian idiots must represent arrests of development and owe their mental deficiency to a retention of traits and abilities that would be judged normal in adults of lower races.

  Therefore, Dr. Down scrutinized his charges for features of lower races, just as, twenty years later, Lombroso would measure the bodies of criminals for signs of apish morphology. Seek, with enough conviction aforethought, and ye shall find. Down described his search with obvious excitement: he had, or so he thought, established a natural and causal classification of mental deficiency. “I have,” he wrote, “for some time had my attention directed to the possibility of making a classification of the feeble-minded, by arranging them around various ethnic standards,—in other words, framing a natural system.” The more serious the deficiency, the more profound the arrest of development and the lower the race represented.

  He found “several well-marked examples of the Ethiopian variety,” and described their “prominent eyes,” “puffy lips,” and “woolly hair…although not always black.” They are, he wrote, “specimens of white negroes, although of European descent.” Next he described other idiots “that arrange themselves around the Malay variety,” and still others “who with shortened foreheads, prominent cheeks, deep-set eyes, and slightly apish nose” represent those people who “originally inhabited the American continent.”

  Finally, mounting the scale of races, he came to the rung below Caucasian, “the great Mongolian family.” “A very large number of congenital idiots,” he continued, “are typical Mongols. So marked is this, that when placed side by side, it is difficult to believe that the specimens compared are not children of the same parents.” Down then proceeded to describe, with fair accuracy and little indication of oriental features (beyond a “slight dirty yellowish tinge” to the skin), a boy afflicted with what we now recognize as trisomy-21, or Down’s syndrome.

  Down did not confine his description to supposed anatomical resemblances between oriental people and “Mongolian idiots.” He also pointed to the behavior of his afflicted children: “They have considerable power of imitation, even bordering on being mimics.” It requires some familiarity with the literature of nineteenth-century racism to read between these lines. The sophistication and complexity of oriental culture proved embarrassing to Caucasian racists, especially since the highest refinements of Chinese society had arisen when European culture still wallowed in barbarism. (As Benjamin Disraeli said, responding to an anti-Semitic taunt: “Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages…mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”) Cauc
asians solved this dilemma by admitting the intellectual power of orientals, but attributing it to a facility for imitative copying, rather than to innovative genius.

  Down concluded his description of a child with trisomy-21 by attributing the condition to developmental arrest (due, Down thought, to the tubercular condition of his parents): “The boy’s aspect is such that it is difficult to realize that he is the child of Europeans, but so frequently are these characters presented, that there can be no doubt that these ethnic features are the result of degeneration.”

  By the standards of his time, Down was something of a racial “liberal.” He argued that all people had descended from the same stock and could be united into a single family, with gradation by status to be sure. He used his ethnic classification of idiots to combat the claim of some scientists that lower races represented separate acts of creation and could not “improve” towards whiteness. He wrote:

  If these great racial divisions are fixed and definite, how comes it that disease is able to break down the barrier, and to simulate so closely the features of the members of another division. I cannot but think that the observations which I have recorded, are indications that the differences in the races are not specific but variable. These examples of the result of degeneracy among mankind, appear to me to furnish some arguments in favor of the unity of the human species.

  Down’s general theory of mental deficiency enjoyed some popularity, but never swept the field. Yet his name for one specific anomaly, Mongolian idiocy (sometimes softened to mongolism) stuck long after most physicians forgot why Down had coined the term. Down’s own son rejected his father’s comparison of orientals and children with trisomy-21, though he defended both the low status of orientals and the general theory linking mental deficiency with evolutionary reversion:

  It would appear that the characteristics which at first sight strikingly suggest Mongolian features and build are accidental and superficial, being constantly associated, as they are, with other features which are in no way characteristic of that race, and if this is a case of reversion it must be reversion to a type even further back than the Mongol stock, from which some ethnologists believe all the various races of men have sprung.

  Down’s theory for trisomy-21 lost its rationale—even within Down’s invalid racist system—when physicians detected it both in orientals themselves, and in races lower than oriental by Down’s classification. (One physician referred to “Mongol Mongolians” but that clumsy perseverance never took hold.) The condition could scarcely be due to degeneration if it represented the normal state of a higher race. We now know that a similar set of features occurs in some chimpanzees who carry an extra chromosome probably homologous with the twenty-first of humans.

  With Down’s theory disproved, what should become of his term? A few years ago, Sir Peter Medawar and a group of oriental scientists persuaded several British publications to substitute Down’s syndrome for Mongolian idiocy and mongolism. I detect a similar trend in this country, although mongolism is still commonly used. Some people may complain that efforts to change the name represent yet another misguided attempt by fuzzy-minded liberals to muck around with accepted usage by introducing social concerns into realms where they don’t belong. Indeed, I do not believe in capricious alteration of established names. I suffer extreme discomfort every time I sing in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and must, as an angry member of the Jewish crowd, shout out the passage that served for centuries as an “official” justification for anti-Semitism: Sein Blut komme über uns und unsre Kinder—“His blood be upon us and upon our children.” Yet, as he to whom the passage refers said in another context, I would not change “one jot or one tittle” of Bach’s text.

  But scientific names are not literary monuments. Mongolian idiocy is not only defamatory. It is wrong on all counts. We no longer classify mental deficiency as a unilinear sequence. Children with Down’s syndrome do not resemble orientals to any great extent, if at all. And, most importantly, the name only has meaning in the context of Down’s discredited theory of racial reversion as the cause of mental deficiency. If we must honor the good doctor, then let his name stand as a designation for trisomy-21—Down’s syndrome.

  16 | Flaws in a Victorian Veil

  THE VICTORIANS LEFT some magnificent, if lengthy, novels. But they also foisted upon an apparently willing world a literary genre probably unmatched for tedium and inaccurate portrayal: the multivolumed “life and letters” of eminent men. These extended encomiums, usually written by grieving widows or dutiful sons and daughters, masqueraded as humbly objective accounts, simple documentation of words and activities. If we accepted these works at face value, we would have to believe that eminent Victorians actually lived by the ethical values they espoused—a fanciful proposition that Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians put to rest more than fifty years ago.

  Elizabeth Cary Agassiz—eminent Bostonian, founder and first president of Radcliffe College, and devoted wife of America’s premier naturalist—had all the right credentials for authorship (including a departed and lamented husband). Her Life and Correspondence of Louis Agassiz turned a fascinating, cantankerous, and not overly faithful man into a paragon of restraint, statesmanship, wisdom, and rectitude.

  I write this essay in the structure that Louis Agassiz built in 1859—the original wing of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Agassiz, the world’s leading student of fossil fishes, protégé of the great Cuvier (see essay 13), left his native Switzerland for an American career in the late 1840s. As a celebrated European and a charming man, Agassiz was lionized in social and intellectual circles from Boston to Charleston. He led the study of natural history in America until his death in 1873.

  Louis’s public utterances were always models of propriety, but I expected that his private letters would match his ebullient personality. Yet Elizabeth’s book, ostensibly a verbatim report of Louis’s letters, manages to turn this focus of controversy and source of restless energy into a measured and dignified gentleman.

  Recently, in studying Louis Agassiz’s views on race and prompted by some hints in E. Lurie’s biography (Louis Agassiz: a life in science), I encountered some interesting discrepancies between Elizabeth’s version and Louis’s original letters. I then discovered that Elizabeth simply expurgated the text and didn’t even insert ellipses (those annoying three dots) to indicate her deletions. Harvard has the original letters, and a bit of sleuthing on my part turned up some spicy material.

  During the decade before the Civil War, Agassiz expressed strong opinions on the status of blacks and Indians. As an adopted son of the north, he rejected slavery, but as an upper crust Caucasian, he certainly didn’t link this rejection to any notion of racial equality.

  Agassiz presented his racial attitudes as sober and ineluctable deductions from first principles. He maintained that species are static, created entities (at his death in 1873, Agassiz stood virtually alone among biologists as a holdout against the Darwinian tide). They are not placed upon the earth in a single spot, but created simultaneously over their entire range. Related species are often created in separate geographic regions, each adapted to prevailing environments of its own area. Since human races met these criteria before commerce and migration mixed us up, each race is a separate biological species.

  Thus, America’s leading biologist came down firmly on the wrong side of a debate that had been raging in America for a decade before he arrived: Was Adam the progenitor of all people or only of white people? Are blacks and Indians our brothers or merely our look-alikes? The polygenists, Agassiz among them, held that each major race had been created as a truly separate species; the monogenists advocated a single origin and ranked races by their unequal degeneration from the primeval perfection of Eden—the debate included no egalitarians. In logic, separate needn’t mean unequal, as the victors in Plessy vs. Ferguson argued in 1896. But, as the winners in Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education maintained in 1954, a group in power always conflates sep
aration with superiority. I know of no American polygenist who did not assume that whites were separate and superior.

  Agassiz insisted that his defense of polygeny had nothing to do with political advocacy or social prejudice. He was, he argued, merely a humble and disinterested scholar, trying to establish an intriguing fact of natural history.

  It has been charged upon the views here advanced that they tend to the support of slavery…. Is that a fair objection to a philosophical investigation? Here we have to do only with the question of the origin of men; let the politicians, let those who feel themselves called upon to regulate human society, see what they can do with the results…. We disclaim all connection with any question involving political matters…. Naturalists have a right to consider the questions growing out of men’s physical relations as merely scientific questions, and to investigate them without reference to either politics or religion.

  Despite these brave words, Agassiz ends this major statement on race (published in the Christian Examiner, 1850) with some definite social recommendations. He begins by affirming the doctrine of separate and unequal: “There are upon earth different races of men, inhabiting different parts, of its surface…and this fact presses upon us the obligation to settle the relative rank among these races.” The resulting hierarchy is self-evident: “The indomitable, courageous, proud Indian—in how different a light he stands by the side of the submissive, obsequious, imitative negro, or by the side of the tricky, cunning, and cowardly Mongolian! Are not these facts indications that the different races do not rank upon one level in nature.” Finally, if he hadn’t made his political message clear by generalization, Agassiz ends by advocating specific social policy—thus contravening his original pledge to abjure politics for the pure life of the mind. Education, he argues, must be tailored to innate ability; train blacks in hand work, whites in mind work.