Alongside Nazi eugenics, there emerged a movement for “German physics.” Philipp Lenard, Johannes Stark, and a few other German physicists claimed that science developed by Aryan men was superior to other science. They claimed that dead greats such as Galileo, Kepler, and Newton were Aryans, and praised the “pragmatic” approach of Rutherford, as opposed to the “dogmatic” Einstein.41 They ridiculed Einstein's relativity as “Jewish physics,” as theoretical conjectures and lies. They burned books and prevented Jews from teaching at universities. Einstein received death threats. Many Jewish professors including Einstein, James Franck, and Lise Meitner fled Germany.
Under Nazi rule, eugenics became such a powerful movement that some commentators traced its origins to purported influences centuries older than Galton's mathematical schemes. For example, one writer even associated it with Pythagoras.42 According to Iamblichus, Pythagoras examined his pupils to ascertain their innate talents. And allegedly, some Pythagoreans had believed that men should not be allowed to act freely, lest they become degenerates, but should instead be ruled even regarding birth control: “This is the most powerful and manifest cause of the vice and depravity of the greater part of mankind, for the generality undertake procreation on impulse, like beasts.”43 Other writers ascribed the eugenic drive to Plato, since he discriminated between citizens whom God had made different: “Some of you have the power to command, and these he has composed of gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honour; others of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has made of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in children.”44
Centuries later, in the colonial United States, racism infected the minds of even the most prominent leaders. When Benjamin Franklin, for example, wrote his essay on population growth (first published anonymously), he included a final passage that was deleted from various subsequent editions:
the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny; Asia chiefly tawny; America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who, with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we, in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.45
By the 1940s there was no shortage of great dead men who apparently endorsed or celebrated eugenic practices.
Hitler fired ambitious military campaigns to capture more “living space” for his so-called master race. But after devastating battles, his Slavic enemies along with the British and American armies defeated the Nazi army. Before World War II ended, though, the Nazi medical program had compulsorily sterilized hundreds of thousands of people. Moreover, the Nazis killed millions of Jews, Roma, and persons of various ethnic minorities.
Meanwhile, eugenics had become an important part of reforms in American education. Among biology textbooks used in high schools in the United States in the 1940s, nearly 90 percent of them included sections advocating eugenics.46 But when people learned of the horrors of the Nazi racial programs, widespread support for eugenics collapsed.
Overall, eugenics was fueled more by speculation than science. It had the yearning fervor of a young cult. In 1904, Galton acknowledged: “I see no impossibility in eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind.” Yet he hoped that it would be carefully based on scientific quantification. Galton feared that “Overzeal leading to hasty action would do harm, by holding out expectations of a near golden age, which will certainly be falsified and cause the science to be discredited.”47 This is indeed what happened.
In the 1960s, the notion that people are all naturally equal cast a shadow of shame on the efforts of scientists who insisted on quantifying differences in inborn abilities among individuals or races. One eugenicist complained that serious research was obstructed because “This nonsense about ‘equality’ has affected nearly everyone!”48
The drive to make a science of improving human heredity depended on the ancient aspiration to understand phenomena in terms of numbers. Yet its results clashed with the idea of equality. In 1976, more than a thousand members of the Genetics Society of America endorsed a statement declaring that “We deplore racism and discrimination…because they are contrary to our respect for each human individual. Whether or not there are significant genetic inequalities in no way alters our ideal of political equality, nor justifies racism or discrimination in any form.”49
Eugenics did not end with the Nazis. The word itself lost currency, especially in schoolbooks. But policy makers continued to struggle with its principles, and geneticists continued to search for inheritable causes of people's ailments, behaviors, and intelligence. Nowadays, geneticists have found that many hundreds of maladies are caused by “single-gene” disorders, even though most of those maladies are not those that the eugenicists targeted. Still, some geneticists today continue to search for genetic causes of many behaviors: alcoholism, criminality, schizophrenia, depression, violence, hyperactivity, even shyness.
Regardless, the old ideals were framed in speculations and common fictions. Despite its currency, the old notion of race is a myth. It was based mainly on skin colors, whereas the degrees of genetic differences among human groups do not mirror the apparent “races” that people and anthropologists had established on superficial impressions and skin colors. For example, Africans with dark skin are genetically much more similar to Europeans with light skins than they are to Australian aborigines with dark skins.50
Large-scale social programs to restrict or control breeding lost public favor, while new technologies for genetic screening have given greater reproductive control to individuals. Unfortunately, most people only want to have “normal” babies, the very kind that eugenicists wanted. Einstein's second son, for example, became melancholic and schizophrenic and was interned in an insane asylum. His father attributed such ailments to heredity, and he wrote to his son, “The deterioration of the human race is surely a bad thing, one of the worst possible things,” and he added, insensitive: “forgive me for your existence.”51 Likewise, Einstein bitterly opposed the marriage of his first son to a woman whom he disdained as genetically inferior: she was older, shorter, driven, and complicated, much like Marić, so Einstein rudely tried to prevent the supposedly “risky,” “wretchedness,” or “disaster” that Hans Albert have children with her. His prejudiced objections failed.52
Now we know that certain genetic anomalies are not entirely disadvantageous. Consider one example. Some American eugenicists had opposed the influx of “inferior blood” from southern and eastern Europe. Accordingly, it turns out that the blood of many people of eastern Mediterranean descent carries an anomaly that makes them susceptible to being poisoned by certain chemicals that don't affect most people. In particular, they become poisoned by eating beans, fava beans. Thus the ancient Pythagorean prescription, abstain from beans, makes good sense, at least for some people from the very regions where Pythagoras lived. Other chemical compounds, other than fava beans, might also be toxic to people with that blood condition. This heritable blood disorder, geneticists have found, is caused by a “genetic defect” that, however, has a positive consequence: it gives blood a resistance against malaria, especially the most deadly form of that disease.53 And so, biologists have conjectured that thousands of years ago this genetic mutation arose in a region affected by malaria, and it propagated by natural selection.
Is that inferior blood? It might also have other advantages.
And what about behavior? Was the aim of eugenics merely a myth? Is it impossible to predict or predetermine behaviors merely on the basis of selective breeding?
Eventually, geneticists did make certain discoveries that once could have seemed impossible. For example, in 1958, the French geneticist Jérôme Lejeune discovered that people with Down's syndrome have forty-seven chromosomes instead of forty-six. He then realized that this anomaly was the underlying cause of Down's. Here finally was an instance in which the distinctive future behavior and intelligence of certain infants could actually be predicted genetically. This finding was so remarkable that a fellow geneticist described Lejeune's chromosomal photograph as “just about as astonishing as a photograph of the back of the moon.”54 At that time, a Russian space probe had actually photographed the far side of the Moon, which humans had never seen—an ancient mystery. Moreover, researchers soon found that one kind of Down's syndrome (namely, Robertsonian translocation) was actually transmitted by inheritance, thus explaining its recurrence in families. Here finally was an example of a behavioral anomaly that is inherited.
What about the question posed at the start of this chapter—is there a way to improve human behaviors by selective breeding, to prevent, for example, aggression and crimes? There is no evidence for it, but consider again the case of dogs. One might doubt whether dogs' behaviors were designed by humans by selective breeding. Yet evolutionary theory requires that species' behaviors, like their bodies, have changed over time. Accordingly, scientists have carried out experiments to see whether the behaviors of certain animals can really be modified by selective breeding.
Beginning in 1959, Dmitri Belyaev in Novosibirsk, Russia, began to selectively breed wild silver foxes to try to make them tame. Each caged fox reacted with more or less fear when presented with a human hand. Those that exhibited less fear and aggression were segregated to breed. None were trained, and contact with humans was strictly limited, to ensure that any behavioral changes resulted only from intrinsic factors.
Surprisingly, after only ten generations, the selected foxes exhibited very tame behaviors, similar to those of domestic puppies—including eagerness for human contact, sniffing and licking humans, and wagging their tails.
Meanwhile, the more violent foxes were bred together, resulting in a strain of particularly aggressive foxes.55 After Belyaev's death in 1985, Lyudmila Trut continued the experiments. In 1999, she reported that having bred forty-five thousand foxes over forty years, they had produced a variety of fox as tame as a dog.56 The friendly behaviors of these foxes became evident before they were even one month old. And there was another stunning result: the more passive, friendly foxes were physically distinct. Some parts of their fur lacked pigmentation creating, in particular, a star-shaped pattern on their face; their ears became floppy, their tails curled, and after fewer than twenty generations, some of the increasingly tame foxes were born with shorter tails, shorter legs, overbites and underbites; the skulls tended to be smaller, their snouts shorter and wider. On the whole, there was an increased incidence of doglike characteristics. Therefore, we can practically identify the genetic strain of such a fox not only by the animal's behavior, but by its physique; we can predict its overall behaviors from its physical traits. There it is, in one species: a connection between behavior and physical traits.
Belyaev and his colleagues also began to domesticate other mammals: river otters, minks, and wild rats. Like the foxes, the Siberian gray rats were segregated to breed according to their tolerance toward humans. After only sixty generations, two distinct varieties had arisen: one that readily let itself be handled freely, and another that behaved viciously, screeching and lunging against cage bars, ferocious against being handled. In the words of an animal behavior expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland: “Imagine the most evil supervillain and the nicest, sweetest cartoon animal, and that's what these two strains of rat are like.”57
Eugenics and dysgenics already have had behavioral effects in some animal species. Geneticists are now trying to identify differences in the DNA between the two strains of rats. Such differences might exist in other mammals as well. And history shows that our attempts to assert discontinuity between humans and the rest of nature have often been wrong. As shown in dogs, foxes, rats, it seems clear that eugenics was not merely a myth.
Behavioral genetics creeps closer to disturbing revelations, but fortunately, the prospect of mandatory eugenic policies among humans remains in disrepute. Traditional mathematical notions of beauty foster a mystical appreciation for equalities, which seem eternal and unchanging. But a renewed appreciation for differences should encourage us toward an ethics that kindly values fluid inequalities of all individuals.
Epilogue
STORIES of innate genius still generate interest in science, but they also disguise. Pythagoras, Newton, and Einstein are sometimes portrayed as nearly divine. But that hides answers to questions: What did they really do? And how did they do it? Because they were gifted, well born?
At the start of this book, I said that portrayals of science often take the shapes of myths. I was referring to some questionable aspects of old religious cults, such as the tendency to deify charismatic leaders, to celebrate their achievements as miracles, to shroud knowledge in esoteric language, to neglect genuine understanding, and to echo traditional stories rather than historical findings. We began by tracing how astronomy became infused by Pythagorean myths, and finally, we traced how the would-be mathematical science of eugenics decayed into murderous sects driven by myths and millennial visions. Having analyzed a series of myths and historical episodes, one might be expected to synthesize some common pattern by which such myths develop. Let me therefore say a few comments along these lines.
Writers and researchers who wish to tell the past go through a process of selection. Following their needs or curiosities, they carry out a limited search for source materials. Driven by personal or practical motivations, and by the interests they expect from a prospective audience, they search and select whichever elements seem worthwhile, plausible, and compelling. That limited search stops when writers or researchers become satisfied that they have enough material, that it is reasonably reliable, and that they have something worth saying. While composing their account, they not only omit, as they must, material that is beyond the present scope of interest, they also often add phrases and notions that are absent from the original sources. To compose their narrative, they imagine scenes, and consequently, imaginary details from those scenes become woven into the historical excerpts. That imaginative process is not arbitrary, it responds to certain notions.
In the myths that we have considered, we see a common pattern of compression. Key elements in a story are increasingly pushed together. Consider a few examples. First we read that Darwin fancied that variations in finches arose from some sort of evolution. Then writers imagine that Darwin entertained such thoughts while he was on his voyage of discovery and saw strange finches on the Galápagos Islands. Then they also assume that, being a naturalist, Darwin “would have” systematically measured the beaks of the finches, studied their eating habits, and recorded their geographical distributions; and then writers infer that Darwin “must have” concluded that finches had evolved, and that this was the seed that led to his theory of evolution. Likewise, first we hear that Newton was inspired by seeing an apple fall in his garden. Next, the apple falls at his feet, or on his head, or on his nose. Or it hits him hard on the head. And rather than being merely an interesting event that accompanied a series of thoughts, it becomes construed as the trigger, the cause.
The small event leads to great consequences. I've met many people who believe that the apple story conveys the fact that “Newton discovered gravity,” as if gravity, which is just a Latin expression for heaviness, had been unknown for thousands of years. The point of the story, instead, is that Newton wondered whether gravity, as we kn
ow it on Earth, extends beyond the atmosphere, into outer space. But the three elements, Newton, apple, gravity, become compressed into a mythical, grand discovery. Likewise, many people now think that Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm and that lightning struck the kite, whereby “he discovered electricity.” Similarly, Einstein lived in Switzerland, a country famous for its clocks. There is a large clock tower on a street where he lived, and in 1905 he formulated the relativity of time. Wouldn't it be interesting if the clock tower triggered his ideas? Then writers make the connection. But there were many clock towers all throughout Europe. Likewise, Giordano Bruno believed in the theory of Copernicus, and he was killed by the Inquisition; wouldn't it be dramatic if Bruno was killed for believing in Copernicus? These stories develop by a kind of compression, their elements are brought together.
Once a writer publishes an account, it begins to compete against other similar stories in the market. If readers like it, then it propagates. Or, if the story is carried by a popular book, which itself does not focus on that topic, the story spreads. This process of public selection is determined partly by the public's preconceptions of what makes a story sound good, rewarding, dramatic, inspirational, and true. One reason why some stories sound true is that they echo dramatic notions that readers previously hold. For example, a story might echo the true notion that small things can sometimes have extraordinary effects. The plain apple led to the greatest discovery, the system of the universe. A child's toy, a kite, led a man to understand a most powerful force in nature: lightning. A telling moment shows up in the movie The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. One of the characters, Boromir, picks up a thin, silver chain from which there hangs a golden ring, the One ring, the ring of power. He stares at the ring, entranced, and says: “It is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing…such a little thing.”
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