Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

by Gavan Tredoux

  At Oxford in 1912, eugenics was part of the mental atmosphere for the progressively minded. As a student, Haldane had argued at the Union in favor of eugenics, and his friends included characters like Harold Laski, who as a schoolboy had been enthusiastic enough about eugenics to invite himself to visit Francis Galton. It was at Oxford that the prototype for Daedalus was written, and the final product issued a decade later was built around eugenic ideas.1 In that future utopia, as a “rather stupid” undergraduate reports in an essay “150 years hence,” humans come to be conceived outside the body in labs via “ectogenesis,” en masse. For these breeding batteries, donors are rigorously selected to meet desired traits. The quaint idea of restricted or encouraged marriages is discarded for a factory-like process, with quicker results. Here Haldane the God-slaying Daedalusscientist was being at least half-serious; one cannot help noticing the connection between assisted reproduction, a theme he returned to often, and Haldane’s own physical condition.

  A few years later in Possible Worlds (1927), Haldane revealed a less alarming preference for voluntary “positive eugenics,” and an aversion to punitive “negative eugenics.” The less intelligent poor appeared to be outbreeding the more intelligent middle and upper classes. “All investigators are agreed that mental capacity is strongly hereditary, though, as with stature, environment plays a part in its determination.” As evidence he cited twin studies, the fact that siblings are too dissimilar to support a large role for differences in upbringing, and the fact that the well-fed upper classes differed from the well-fed middle as much as the middle differed from the poorly fed lower. Therefore incentives ought to be offered so that the more intelligent would have more children, through family allowances and the provision of free education and other socialist measures to remove economic barriers. At the same time, the poor ought to be encouraged to use contraceptives. “Civilization stands in real danger from overproduction of ‘undermen’. But if it perishes from this cause it will be because its governing class cared more for wealth than for justice.” All this was conventional fare for a period in which the only serious intellectual opposition to eugenic measures was provided by religious conservatives like G. K. Chesterton.

  Charlotte Haldane had also become interested in the field, translating a 1928 study of criminal twins conducted by Dr. Johannes Lange, a German professor. JBS supplied an enthusiastic foreword for Charlotte’s edition of 1931. He found Lange’s evidence compelling, interpreting the genetic explanation of crime as a scientific demystification of evil. It suggested that free will was an illusion, that “crime is destiny,” except insofar as freedom means lack of external interference. He conceded that there were weaknesses in Lange’s modest number of seventeen twin pairs, and that the best evidence could be gathered from single-egg twins raised apart from birth, of which Lange had none. “So far as I know only four such cases have been investigated.” Hermann Muller and Horatio Newman had been unable to find any criminal cases to study.2 Nevertheless, Haldane found Lange’s evidence persuasive. For crime, genes must matter.

  The following year, Haldane released his second collection of essays. As the title The Inequality of Man suggests, he had warmed to the above themes. Whereas Possible Worlds contains one piece on eugenics, almost every piece now mentions, in varying detail, both the notion of genetic inequality and eugenic measures for manipulating inequality. The title piece lays out the facts as Haldane understands them about the sources of human differences.3 These are of two kinds: genetic differences (nature) and environmental differences (nurture), by then a well-established distinction. Two differences in outcomes are most important to his argument: intelligence and character. With regard to intelligence, he mentions the pioneering work that had recently been done by Barbara Burks on adoption and foster homes, which he considers persuasive evidence that intelligence differences depended strongly on genetic differences.4 Muller and Newman’s work on twins supports this, too. Haldane is also careful to partition genetic differences into an additive transmissible component and a non-transmissible component due to interactions unique to the particular combination of genes that an individual has, which is broken by segregation of the genes when sexual reproduction takes place.

  The notion of general intelligence, as in Spearman’s g factor, shows that the effects of intelligence differences are pervasive and not isolated to niches.5 Moreover, education has little effect on g, which it depends on. “In the course of the next century, if psychologists . . . cooperate with geneticists, it should be possible by the time a child is about seven to arrive at a fair idea of its capacities, and children will be sorted out accordingly.”6

  The evidence for character, or personality, he finds less persuasive, and he is prepared to find differences in upbringing more influential. However, the state has to accept the diversity of human traits, a “natural phenomenon like the weather” which is “predictable to a certain extent” but “very difficult to control.” Haldane’s up-to-date command of the literature in laying out his conclusions about differential psychology underscores his impressively wide reading in allied fields at this time.

  His stance here on eugenics remains essentially the same. Differential fertility by social class threatens to steadily decrease average intelligence but should only be addressed positively, for ethical reasons, by artificially raising the social level of the lower classes (simplistically equated with wealth) to the point where they have the same number of children as the upper classes. However, once conceived, this government-engineered “classless society” is not examined very closely by Haldane. For, if differences in ability inhere in the lower classes they will still be there when they are formerly lower class and have the same number of children. If a higher average is worthwhile, then the average would be raised even further by arranging for the formerly lower class to now have far fewer children than the formerly upper class. A genuinely classless society with random mating would end up with a lower average than a class-based society with different proportions. Haldane obliquely recognizes the force of this argument, which follows at once from his own work in mathematical population genetics, by contemplating that “In the remote future mankind may be divided into castes like Hindus or termites.” He prefers equality of opportunity, but recognizes that state intervention would be required, since differences in ability would otherwise translate into differences in social achievement, though this reason is only implicit in his argument. Moreover, this “positive” eugenics, assuming it would work at all, involves its own form of “negative” coercion, through state-enforced engineering of the class system by wealth confiscation.

  Haldane is also well aware of the conflict between his growing attraction to communism and his recognition of human inequality. “The test of the devotion of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics to science will, I think, come when the accumulation of the results of human genetics, demonstrating what I believe to be the fact of innate human inequality, becomes important.” But he immediately qualifies this with the claim that only “sentimental and unscientific views,” which are “often associated with Socialism,” are incompatible with a belief in human inequality, whether that inequality is transmissible (additive) or not (interactive).7 This statement was false when he wrote it, as the Hermann Muller saga soon showed.

  Muller had moved to the USSR in 1933, after being converted to communism by his visiting students Levit and Agol. As we have seen, he arrived just as the war on genetics there was getting serious. One of his aims in coming was to persuade the Soviets to adopt his eugenic scheme, which he had written up as early as 1910 and had been refining ever since. This was eventually published as the book Out of the Night in 1935, and Muller had it translated into Russian so that he could send it to Stalin for approval. Haldane supplied an enthusiastic blurb for the Left Book Club edition of 1936.

  You may regard it as a revelation, or, quite as likely, throw it into the fire. But do not dismiss it as a mere phantasy. The author is one of the world’s leadi
ng biologists, and his proposals, whether or not they are desirable, are entirely practicable. If they are adopted, the results will be as important as those of the industrial revolution.8

  Most of the book is taken up by a futuristic prologue of four chapters, anticipating manifold benefits from the advance of technology and priming the reader for the coming marvels to flow from the application of biological knowledge to social problems. As the marvels include the abolition of home cooking in favor of prepared meals from canteens, it is hard to have complete confidence in his judgment. The core eugenic ideas appear in the remaining three chapters. Muller introduces the inexorable buildup of genetic load, caused by the accumulation of recessive mutations that are no longer weeded out, thanks to the cushioning effects of modern civilization. He anticipates that in a thousand years these will really start to tell on the human condition.

  Negative eugenics is dismissed by Muller as hopelessly ineffective, given the large number of generations that it would take to select out recessives, if one waits for carriers to get a double dose and thus reveal themselves. This echoes similar arguments made by Haldane himself, who is referred to several times in the text. Muller does not address R. A. Fisher’s calculation that negative measures would work a lot faster in the presence of assortative mating. Nor does he notice that budgeting a thousand years to accumulate a problem is not much different from reckoning a thousand years to accumulate a solution. In any event, his own eugenic scheme proceeds along entirely different lines. It is the eugenics of the harem.

  Muller starts out by stipulating that two human traits of universal importance are under genetic influence and ought to be increased: high intelligence and group-oriented “comradeliness.” Aside from the provision of abortion, birth control, and surrogate motherhood to generally induce more capable women to have children, his solution is a sperm bank for donors of proven ability. For example, “such men as Lenin, Newton, Leonardo, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar Khayyám, Pushkin, Sun Yat Sen, Marx.” Where, one might ask, is Genghis Khan? Muller at once recognizes this difficulty. The men that women prefer need not match his own whims. They might want “a maximum number of Billy Sundays, Valentinos, John L. Sullivans, Huey Longs, even Al Capones.” That women would not see things his way is due, he is sure, to “general propaganda” and the press—not, one assumes, to the prospect of a million Lenins machine-gunning families by quota, excitedly encouraging famines, and endlessly hectoring their opponents for “bleating” and “sniveling.” To get around this backwardness, he concedes that human nature would first have to be reengineered to undo retrograde preferences for Billy Sunday over Lenin, before the sperm banks could be allowed to dominate reproduction.

  All this is not encouraging, from a purely practical point of view. Muller’s eugenic scheme requires bootstrapping, and all we are left with for that is, apparently, abortion, birth control, and surrogate motherhood. Turning to R. A. Fisher again, the long-term eugenic consequence of abortion as birth control is the removal of those who practice it from the population, leaving behind exactly those with an instinctive aversion to doing so (Christian Scientists, Hasidim, etc.). Muller does not explain why those who are averse to abortion would be more or less intelligent or comradely.

  It is also not obvious why 99 percent of men would passively accept being crowded out of reproductive success by the sultans of sperm, except at gunpoint. Rape would surely skyrocket. By contrast, under negative eugenics a small fraction of people known to have already developed serious symptoms would not reproduce. But as it happened, Muller had grossly misjudged his intended audience. Vavilov advised him to flee, which he did. Stalin had the man who translated Out of the Night into Russian shot.9 Muller and Haldane could have predicted all this by simply reading the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1932.

  Haldane’s next foray into this area came in 1938, by which time he was a concealed Party member and an open Marxist. Heredity and Politics is his only book-length treatment of the issues raised by social biology: human differences, eugenics, and (his first full treatment of) race. All three topics are now represented as inconclusive, ending in something like it depends. The elementary principles of genetics are recapitulated. Human differences do exist, but he cannot say for sure whether differences of nature or nurture are responsible. Negative eugenics gets no support, apart from limited measures for clear-cut cases, such as discouraging cousin marriages. Eliminating recessives takes too long. Positive eugenics, too, is dubious, since he now considers that differential fertility is not proven to lower intelligence and remedial measures to counter it might be ineffectual. He jokes that Muslim attempts to monopolize women for sultans have not produced notably smarter people—“a Turk should generally beat an Armenian or a Jew in a business deal. This is notoriously not the case.”10 Therefore, Muller’s sperm bank is now held to be harmless for those who care to use it, but is no savior.

  Races in the sense of Negro versus white he thinks can be well defined, but differences in abilities, if they exist, may be due to any number of causes. If races within Europe exist, they are not the same thing as the previous sense of race, and not “pure” in any useful sense. Even to say that races may be different depends on what “different” means (wholly distinct, or on average, etc.). More study on all topics is said to be required. Might, possibly, could, perhaps, probably not, it depends—his qualifiers extend through 202 pages. Even Haldane recognizes the unsatisfactory nature of his conclusions and apologizes for not being able to do better. He makes no attempt to reconcile earlier statements with current ones. They would keep changing anyway.

  In the following year, 1939, the Science Service of Washington, D.C., asked leading geneticists worldwide to answer the question “How could the world’s population be improved most effectively genetically?” Twenty-three geneticists replied in an open letter published in Nature. After a lengthy oration advocating education, wealth distribution, birth control, equality of opportunity, and other socialist concerns, they finally addressed the question they were asked.

  The intrinsic (genetic) characteristics of any generation can be better than those of the preceding generation only as a result of some kind of selection, that is, by those persons of the preceding generation who had a better genetic equipment having produced more offspring, on the whole, than the rest, either through conscious choice, or as an automatic result of the way in which they lived. Under modern civilized conditions such selection is far less likely to be automatic than under primitive conditions, hence some kind of conscious guidance of selection is called for. . . . The most important genetic objectives, from a social point of view, are the improvement of those genetic characteristics which make (a) for health, (b) for the complex called intelligence, and (c) for those temperamental qualities which favour fellow-feeling and social behaviour rather than those (to-day most esteemed by many) which make for personal ‘success’, as success is usually understood at present. A more widespread understanding of biological principles will bring with it the realization that much more than the prevention of genetic deterioration is to be sought for, and that the raising of the level of the average of the population nearly to that of the highest now existing in isolated individuals, in regard to physical well-being, intelligence and temperamental qualities, is an achievement that would—so far as purely genetic considerations are concerned—be physically possible within a com paratively small number of generations. Thus everyone might look upon ‘genius’, combined of course with stability, as his birthright. As the course of evolution shows, this would represent no final stage at all, but only an earnest of still further progress in the future.11

  They took care to stress voluntary measures only and to dismiss Lamarckism. The statement was probably written by Hermann Muller, as it summarizes most of Out of the Night. He was among the twenty-three signatories, as were Cyril Darlington, F. A. E. Crew, S. C. Harland, Lancelot T. Hogben, Julian Huxley, T. H. Dobzhansky, G. Dahlberg, Joseph Needham, and Conrad H. Waddington. And so was J. B.
S. Haldane. We must assume, then, that JBS had resolved some of his doubts since Heredity and Politics.

  Fast-forward to 1947, and a different audience, the Daily Worker. Now definitions lose clarity again: “someone asked me ‘Can you change human nature?’ I don’t know the answer, because I don’t know what ‘human nature’ means.”12 However, Haldane concludes that there is “very strong” evidence that education counts for a lot more than inborn differences, which are nonetheless real. He considers questions like “is intelligence inherited” to be meaningless. “I don’t know what determines differences in human intelligence. No doubt heredity and environment interact.”13 (If they interact, the question cannot be meaningless.)

  Haldane had embraced the theme of interaction a few years earlier in a more technical forum. It is possible that a (genotype × environment) combination can have different properties when both are present than either factor has alone, or in different combinations.

  We are not justified in condemning a genotype absolutely unless we are sure that some other genotype exists which would excel it by all possible criteria in all possible environments. We can only be reasonably sure of this in the case of the grosser types of congenital mental and physical defect. A moderate degree of mental dullness may be a desideratum for certain types of monotonous but at present necessary work, even if in most or all existing nations there may turn out to be far too many people so qualified.14