by Janet Browne
By the start of the twentieth century much of the developed world was caught up in eugenic and hereditarian systems of thought on a wider scale. Eugenic movements reached a peak in 1912 with the first International Eugenic Congress, held in London. Long before then, Francis Galton and others in Britain caught the pessimistic mood of the times and pointed to the poor quality of army recruits for the Boer War to illustrate the decline of the nation’s biological fitness. Other signs of ‘degeneration’ seemed to abound in the eyes of the elite: increased criminal behaviour, a loosening of moral values with a consequent rise in prostitution and venereal diseases, a growing political restlessness among the workers, unionization and the threat of strikes or demonstrations. Huge publicity surrounded the legal case brought against Oscar Wilde for homosexuality. Even the cause of women’s suffrage and the political prominence of the ‘new woman’ (women who worked, who wished to be educated and to vote, and perhaps bicycled and smoked cigarettes) were taken as symptoms of a nation in decay. Whereas in Darwin’s day eugenics was mainly expressed in fears about the maintenance of biological fitness, in the early twentieth century it expanded through Europe and the Americas into significant political movements seeking to change government policy with public health measures for the masses, birth control and enforced restraint from breeding. At root, the old system of Malthusian checks that Darwin had applied to biology was reapplied to political economies with compelling biological support. The poor, the deranged, the weak and diseased came to be regarded as biological burdens on society. For the good of the nation, it was said, policies should be introduced to prevent them from reproducing their kind.
Many of these initiatives took an institutional form. A National Eugenics Laboratory was established in University College London with a bequest from Galton to investigate deteriorating family lines, principally gauged by the incidence of hereditary mental disorders. It was headed by Karl Pearson, an idealistic eugenicist and Darwinian biologist with marked socialist leanings. Psychiatrists identified degenerative ‘types’ among their inmates using the new medium of photography, and criminologists such as the Italian writer Cesare Lombroso proposed that there were physical stigmata to be seen in social deviants. These were sometimes linked explicitly with apish bodily features. He also popularized the word ‘atavism’, meaning a reversion to some ape-like ancestral type. Conditions such as epilepsy or gross deformity categorized yet others again as undesirable. It was thought that such unfit individuals could be identified by ‘signs’ and then removed from society. In 1888 the Parisian detective Alphonse Bertillon did exactly this by introducing a system of physical signs and measurements to identify any individual who came through the French criminal system, including the technique of taking fingerprints, the basis of all modern identification procedures. The same threat of physical and moral degeneration was taken up in dazzling fashion by Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) where Jekyll’s other self, the evil Hyde, progressively became more apelike as his murderous deeds increased.
Urban decay, industrial squalor and a wish for interventionist public health measures such as vaccination and the regulation of prostitution, filled the public journals. Upper- class fears in Britain about being overrun by a depraved and criminal underclass (the ‘mob’) became widespread. The Eugenics Education Society, soon to be the Eugenics Society, was established in Britain from 1907, and rapidly filled up with earnest professional people wishing to improve and control the masses. Its president from 1911 to 1925 was Leonard Darwin, one of Charles Darwin’s sons. An important outcome in Britain was that the Mental Deficiency Act was passed in 1913 to identify mentally impaired individuals and segregate them in an institution or asylum where they would be prevented from reproducing. Other European governments, particularly in Scandinavia, moved decisively in the same area, although some of these laws were never put into practical operation. All too often it turned out that the poorer sections of society contained the larger proportion of unfit individuals. Procedures were peremptory. Asylums, orphanages and prisons became dustbins for undesirables.
In America, too, eugenics flourished in the early twentieth century. In 1910 the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor was founded and efforts were made to trace traits such as insanity, feeble-mindedness and criminality back through the generations. The first task was to identify those who should not reproduce. Hereditary forms of mental disorder became the main target. Among the most notorious eugenicists, Dr Henry H. Goddard, of Vineland, New Jersey, adopted the French system of intelligence testing to compute the mental age and ability of mentally defective children, which were quickly converted into tests for IQ (intelligence quotient). Goddard coined the terms ‘feeble-minded’, ‘imbecile’ and ‘moron’ to describe specific levels of impairment and proposed that such people should be permanently separated from the rest of the population. He did not carry out sterilizations, although some medical bodies recommended that this should take place. He did, however, provide the government with a quantitative framework – a test – for identifying the biologically unfit in society. Later, Robert Yerkes tested the adult male population called up for service in the First World War (some 19,000 servicemen). He calculated that most of them possessed a mental age of thirteen years old. His IQ tests further indicated that African- Americans and others of recent European origin had even lower mental ages. Prostitutes and the Polish were lowest of all.
These tests were evidently biased in favour of literate middle-class whites familiar with North American culture, a fact made further apparent on Ellis Island. Tired, traumatized and usually unable to speak colloquial English, many hopeful immigrants to the USA were incorrectly categorized as imbeciles and turned away. Goddard’s statistics deeply shocked the American government. Charles Davenport, the director of the Eugenics Record Office, advocated the introduction of state programmes to restrict marriage, enforce segregation and compulsory sterilization. During the period 1900 to 1935, no fewer than thirty-two states passed sterilization laws. Most of the 60,000 people known to have been sterilized under these regulations were mental asylum patients or prisoners. It is not recorded how many were of African descent.
Eugenic doctrines around 1900 were invariably coupled with other ideological extensions of Darwinism. Several biologists and eugenicists working within the Darwinian system threw their support behind Germany’s claim to be Europe’s leading nation, particularly Haeckel who proposed a materialist philosophy of life called ‘monism’ in which spirit and matter were different aspects of the same underlying substance. His Monist League promoted German supremacy in the decade before the First World War and indirectly contributed to the rise of fascism afterwards. Embedded in these biologized aspects of society and visions of national ascendancy, Germany’s rulers reached furthest of all with their eugenic law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Progeny (1933). Some 300,000 people were sterilized under this edict until 1939 when it was replaced by the wartime ‘euthanasia’ programme for the extermination of the Jews.
Race science, sometimes known as racial science, reflected the most extreme prejudices of the day and this too drew on Darwinism. It should be said, however, that racism and genocide predated Darwin. Nor were they solely confined to the West. Nevertheless, evolutionary views, and then the new science of genetics, gave powerful biological backing to those who wished to partition society according to ethnic difference or promote white supremacy. The American author Joseph Le Conte spoke for many when he justified the subjugation of blacks in the post-Civil War South by saying that ‘the negro race is still in childhood… it has not yet learned to walk alone in the paths of civilization’. Some racial scientists believed that different ethnic groupings were completely separate species, although this was always a minority view. Carl Vogt’s theory, for example, was that each race had evolved from a different ape: whites from the chimpanzee, blacks from the gorilla, and orientals from the orang-utan. In Europe and North America thes
e and other racial scientists debated human interbreeding, made pruri ent ethnological investigation into sexual behaviour and initiated studies of mixed breeding in former slave-owning regions. Universities and museums accumulated collections of skulls from all over the world for scientists to measure cranium capacity (thought to be an indicator of intelligence) and deviation from a supposed ideal Caucasian type. These collections, a relic of long-superseded theories, are now an embarrassment to national institutions and are never put on display.
Armed with the naturalist Gregor Mendel’s notions about the transmission of characteristics from one generation to the next, a fresh generation of theorists turned the study of human evolution into a science of racial fixity that legitimized contemporary prejudices.
For Americans, the race question not only highlighted the problems created by slavery and difficulties encountered with emancipation after the Civil War but also precipitated academic warfare between social scientists and biologists, the former favouring cultural explanations of racial differences, the latter inbuilt physical and biological parameters. Franz Boas, one of the founders of anthropology, who argued for the unique and equal nature of every culture, suffered at the hands of a powerful race lobby within American biology during the 1920s that endorsed the existence of stages through which every society must pass in its development. Across the Atlantic, at much the same time, the Nazis claimed that the Aryan was a distinct and superior form of humanity destined to rule over ‘sub-humans’. Subsequent horror at the Nazis’ drive to eliminate the Jews challenged the ideology of racial science, although much still exists.
Racial theory of a lesser kind was also put to use by early twentieth-century palaeo-anthropologists who started to suggest that there had been multiple lines of human evolution, with some of those lines, including the Neanderthals, being driven to extinction by more successful races at various stages in the process. As traces of fossil humans began to emerge, scholars became convinced that there must have been a series of intermediary animal-man forms. In retrospect it is intriguing to see how much naturalists wanted to make these intermediaries apelike in shape and character, especially insisting on the small size of their braincase. The so-called ‘human’ characteristics were thought to appear quite recently in geological history, almost all together in a rush with the emergence of Homo sapiens. Eugene Dubois was famed for his exciting discovery of ‘Java Man’ in 1891, an ape-man that he named Pithecanthropus. The discovery of another species, to be named ‘Pekin Man’, arrived in the 1920s. Raymond Dart’s ‘Taung baby’ added a South African species named Australopithecus. The prize of becoming known as the cradle of mankind generated bitter national rivalries for fifty years or more. Soon, an exhibit in the American Museum of Natural History displayed reconstructions of three types of extinct mankind, Pithecanthropus, Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon (very close to present-day mankind), arranged as a progressive series towards the white, civilized form of today.
This fascination with ape-men perhaps accounts for the ease with which a notorious fraud was accepted by the academic community. The remains of an early human skull and jaw were found by an amateur archaeologist, Charles Dawson, in a quarry near Piltdown in East Sussex in 1912, and described as a new species of intermediate hominid, Eoanthropus dawsonii (Dawson’s dawn man). These bones fitted well with the hypothetical line of human evolution then in favour. Sir Arthur Keith, for example, one of the leading investigators of early mankind in Britain, regarded the remains as from a lower type, with no close relationship to the other humans known to have existed at the same time. Keith had little doubt about what happened when higher and lower forms came into contact: warfare between the races was a natural part of the prehistory of human evolution, he confidently declared, in the same way as the terrible 1914–18 warfare of his own time had resulted in victory for the British, the survival of the fittest. Gradually, however, the Piltdown skull came to be seen as increasingly anomalous. In the 1950s it was exposed as a hoax: an ape jaw had been attached to an ancient human skull and the teeth filed down to produce a human pattern. Dawson was probably not the main culprit. Other maverick amateurs have been suggested, each one with a grievance against the scientific establishment.
Across the globe fundamental shifts were taking place in the way scholars thought about the natural world. Modernism was on its way. Growing numbers of biological scientists started turning away from the problem of how species existed in the wild or the history of the evolutionary tree to direct their attention down into the living body, seeking the mechanisms of inheritance, hybridization, mutation and variation. At the time of Darwin’s death many already believed that inheritance held the key to life. By the last decade of the nineteenth century their aim was not to cata logue dead animals and plants but to understand the inner workings of living, breathing bodies – a self-conscious conceptual break with the past. This new attitude to biology reflected a major move away from observational natural history towards a more experimental, laboratory-based form of investigation, a move that can be seen taking place in almost all of the sciences at this time. Traditional natural history, of course, did not stop; it became sidelined, sometimes regarded as the province of amateur naturalists, or otherwise reconstituted as new sciences of animal behaviour, ecology and environmentalism. Like physics and chemistry, biology was becoming something that was primarily practised indoors, in a lab, under controlled conditions, and increasingly with the financial aid of government agencies.
These new experimental biologists made many astonishing discoveries in a relatively short period of time. Some pressed deep into the building blocks of the living body, investigating the cell and early stages of embryonic development. Others explored remaining gaps in Darwin’s theories by studying variation and inheritance. Galton’s speculations about innate inherited traits seemed to answer some of Darwin’s unanswered questions. But Galton’s proposals were entirely abstract ideas, never quite realizable in a laboratory setting. A group of his followers, clustered around Karl Pearson in the eugenics laboratory at University College London, therefore began to study how inheritance and variation might work in practice. Calling themselves bio- metricians, these men (and a few pioneer female scientists) measured variability in living beings, for example the dimensions of crab shells, and devised many of today’s most common statistical procedures for calculating deviations from the norm in order to show small adaptive shifts in a chosen species. By 1900 they were perhaps the last truly committed Darwinians in existence, for they insisted on Darwin’s original system of slow, gradual changes in populations.
In other parts of life, biometricians were quick on the draw. For five years or more, they quarrelled violently with a rival group of biologists at Cambridge University under the eye of William Bateson (1861–1926), himself an excellent field naturalist and experimental hybridizer. The Cambridge group was adamant that evolution proceeded by jumps and starts, and that columns of statistics produced in London were not going to tell anyone anything about how animals and plants varied or transmitted their characteristics to offspring.
This controversy has often been understood as the foundation of modern genetics for it provided the context in which Mendel’s work on peas was rediscovered. Three noted European experimentalists, Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak, each independently working on the variation of plants, and individually keen to disprove the bio- metricians’ arguments, one by one encountered Mendel’s paper in the early months of 1900 and brought it to public attention. As they put it, the essence of Mendel’s experiments was to show that the heritable characteristics were self-contained and not able to blend – in Mendel’s research, the peas in the pod were green or yellow, smooth or wrinkled, never anything in between. These self-contained characteristics tended to reassort (rearrange) themselves during the reproductive process and appeared in fixed proportions in subsequent generations, say three wrinkled peas for every smooth one. Moreover, the characteristics could be either dominant
or recessive: that is, some were visible in the body of the offspring while others remained hidden. Mendel had no notion of the modern ‘gene’ and yet his work strikingly anticipated the key concept of twentieth-century genetics that most physical characteristics, every pair of brown eyes, could be linked to a single particulate entity that was sorted and transmitted independently from generation to generation.
Nor could Mendel have anticipated how his results would be used. Bateson enthusiastically appropriated Mendel’s findings, turning his group at Cambridge into the first Mendelians in the world. Their approach was decidedly non- Darwinian, in the sense that they believed Mendel’s results supported the idea that evolution operated by jumps based on relatively sudden variations or ‘mutations’ in organisms. To them, the continuous tiny changes stipulated by Darwin and so carefully measured by the London biometricians were irrelevant, a waste of good scientific time. Within a few months, the transformation was complete. Bateson named his new science ‘genetics’ – the study of heredity – and claimed that mutation theory supplied the answer to the origin of new species.