by Paul Johnson
Mendel’s theory and laws, which laid the foundation of the entirely new science of genetics, and the experiments that led to them were described by Mendel in two papers presented to the Brünn Natural Science Society in 1865 and published in full in the transactions of the society in 1866, in a single long article, “Experiments with Plant Hybrids.” This publication was by no means as obscure as it may sound, as it was taken by the major libraries in England, Europe, and America and seen by leading botanists. It is not clear whether Darwin saw a copy of this issue. There is a story that one was found in his library after his death with the pages uncut. This seems to be untrue. But Darwin recommended to a scientific friend a book by Wilhelm Olbers Focke, which mentions the article no less than fourteen times. It is a thousand pities that Mendel did not send his papers directly to Darwin and explain how his work fitted into Darwin’s Origin. He might so easily have done so, and Darwin, who was always considerate and conscientious in handling foreign scientific correspondents, even if unknown to him, would have responded. As it was, Mendel tried to open a correspondence with a leading German botanist, Professor Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli of Munich, but the German turned out to be a blockhead who could follow neither the mathematics nor the logic of the argument. Darwin would have made more effort and gotten the point. The missed opportunity is of the greatest importance, for in 1866 Darwin had a decade and a half of good work ahead of him. If he had been apprised of genetic theory then, he could have entered a new world of discovery. The Descent of Man had not yet been written and would have been totally different and much better if Darwin had been able to give the how as well as the why of natural selection. The truth is, he did not always use his ample financial resources to the best effect. He might build new greenhouses and recruit an extra gardener or two, but he held back on employing trained scientific assistants. A young man with language and mathematical skills, with specific instructions to comb through foreign scientific publications for news of work relevant to Darwin’s particular interest, would have been invaluable to him. Such an assistant would almost certainly have drawn his attention to Mendel’s work and given him a digest in English. There is no question that Darwin could have afforded such help. During these years he was regularly showing a large surplus on his accounts, and reinvesting up to £5,000 a year. But his old fears about being attacked by religious fanatics—the shadow of Priestley—appear to have been succeeded by equally baseless fears of losing his money and going bankrupt. Indeed at one point, he even made enquiries about Australia as a safer place to live and invest his capital, so he saved when he should have spent. Darwin and Mendel, two of the greatest scientists of the epoch, never came into contact.
Mendel was in some ways a more thorough scientist than Darwin. Though he worked on a much narrower front, the scale of his experiments was greater by far. Darwin believed, quite wrongly, that inheritance was a blend. Mendel discovered that there was no mingling. The characteristics did not mix. One is dominant, the other recessive. Of nearly 20,000 hybrid pea plants of the second generation—19,959 to be exact—Mendel, by counting them himself with infinite care, found that the dominants outnumbered the recessives by 14,949 to 5,010, or nearly three to one. The hybrid carried the imprint of either one parent or the other, but not of both. If the inheritance blended, like a mixture of two fluids, then natural selection would not work, because the new and improved hybrid would be lost in the process by which descent diluted the inheritance. Curiously enough, a Scotsman, Fleeming Jenkin, had noticed this, arguing that inheritance based on blends would defeat the whole principle of natural selection. He attacked Darwin accordingly. Darwin was clearly worried by this line of argument and seems to have retreated from the blending idea. He wrote to Huxley, “I have lately been inclined to speculate, very crudely and indistinctly, that propagation by true fertilisation will turn out to be a sort of mixture, and not true fusion, of two distinct individuals. [That was why] crossed forms go back to so large an extent to ancestral forms.” If Darwin had followed this line of thought, he might have reached the same conclusions as Mendel independently. Instead he spent the last, precious years of his life on climbing plants and earthworms and plants that swallow insects. All useful and commendable stuff and clearly delightful to him, but not the material from which dramatic scientific progress emerged. One has the feeling that Darwin was often inclined to avoid the hard cerebral activity of thinking through fundamental scientific principles, taking comfortable refuge in minute observations. So his work on species remained incomplete.
As for Mendel, he outlived Darwin by nearly two years but never got any recognition of his genius. In 1868 he was made abbot of his monastery, the rest of his life was spent largely in administration, and his work passed into limbo. Only in 1900, when he and Darwin had been dead nearly two decades, did three European botanists quite independently develop the same ideas about inheritance. They then, in searching the literature, came across Mendel’s papers, and realized the importance of his work. The science of genetics then began in earnest, and Mendel got due credit. But the blending of Darwin and Mendel never took place. Instead there was a new hybrid, a true monster—social Darwinism in its various forms.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Evils of Social Darwinism
Darwin’s later years were ones of growing fame and personal celebrity but of decreasing happiness. Having missed a grand opportunity of discovering genetics, he came to recognize that the work he was doing was somehow unsatisfactory. He wrote to Hooker, “I am rather despondent about myself.” He complained of illness and discomfort, but chiefly of inability to embark on a major project. “I have not the heart or strength at my age to begin any investigation lasting years, which is the only thing which I enjoy, & I have no little jobs which I can do.” He admitted that “I have everything to make me happy and contented, but life has become very wearisome to me.” He was also perturbed by the ever wider and adventurous use thinkers at home and abroad were making of his work on evolution, for political, economic, and ideological purposes. He found himself under the lengthening shadow of social Darwinism.
The Origin had an enormous and rapid impact on the investigation of almost all human activities. Those who studied progress were hugely attracted by Darwin’s notion of natural selection as a relentless, self-directing machine, “daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation . . . silently and insensibly working . . . at the improvement of each organic being. . . .” Darwin’s words caused lip-smacking delight among writers and intellectuals. They also loved his presentation of organic life as a ferocious drama of “struggle” and “survival,” the two key words, which soon occupied a prominent place in every tract of the times. Herbert Spencer, the archetypal polymath and guru, who had got on to “the survival of the fittest” even before Darwin, received a dynamic boost from the universal success of Origin and was delighted to see the great scientist adopt his phrase.
Spencer enlarged the debate in two ways. First, the struggle to survive applied not just to individuals but to entire societies and nations. Second, evolution provided an explanation for all phenomena—political, economic, military, psychological, and social. He admitted that a “final explanation” was not possible. That depended on the “Ultimate Cause,” what he called “The Unknowable.” That apart, all could be worked out, and starting in 1860, the year after Origin, he gradually produced his enormous System of Synthetic Philosophy, at last finished in 1896. In 1872, just after Darwin produced Descent, Spencer was joined by another highly representative guru, Walter Bagehot, Economist editor and author of the classic work on the English constitution, who has been described as the “greatest Victorian.” His Physics and Politics; or, Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of “Natural Selection” and “Inheritance” to Political Society was an analysis of English history and current leadership in the world in terms of Darwinian evolution. Though Spencer and Bagehot saw England going ever upward, like Darwin’s man, the
y warned of dangers in the continuing struggle, with the lower classes seen rather like the primitive savages from whom the progressive middle class had triumphantly evolved, now threatening regressive antiprogress by revolution, violence, and all-out democracy. Darwin’s work also inspired the fear that top nations like Britain might become degenerate by dilution of its racial purity. Charles Kingsley warned that “physical science is proving more and more the immense importance of Race, the importance of hereditary powers, hereditary organs, hereditary habits, in all organised beings, from the lowest plant to the highest animal.” The racial or “favoured nation” theory of history, springing from Darwin, found powerful expression in The Expansion of England (1882) by John Robert Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, and in James Anthony Froude’s Oceana; or, England and Her Colonies (1885), Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution (1894), and J. A. Cramb’s Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain (1900), all of them big-selling books taken seriously by the educated, ruling class. Lord Rosebery, prime minister from 1894 to 1895, said the English race had a moral duty to “peg out claims for the future” and “it is part of our heritage to take care that the world . . . shall receive an English-speaking complexion, and not that of other nations.”
Darwin’s writings led directly to the state of mind that promoted imperialism, the quest for colonies, the “race for Africa,” and, to use Rhodes’s expression, “painting the map of the world red.” In less than twenty years, Britain acquired 3.5 million square miles of colonies and a further 1.5 million of protectorates. But of course other nations began to seize colonies too, and expand their earth space, developing their own master-race theories in justification—the Russians, the French, the Japanese, a newcomer to modernity but immensely proud of its undoubted “racial purity,” and above all, the Germans. The leading Darwinian historian in Germany, Heinrich von Treitschke, elaborated a fierce racial analysis of Germany’s history and triumphant future, and Bismarck started a national program of German imperialism with a slogan of Darwinian resonance, “Blood and Iron.”
There was also a drive to improve the racial stock by positive and negative measures. Darwin was always nervous about speculating on the operations of natural selection in the present and was confused about whether society should assist its forces or impede them. He seems to have been opposed to vaccination and other medical processes, which preserved the lines of “weaker” humans. And he explicitly opposed birth control. Despite his hatred of cruelty, he saw the reduction or even extinction of aboriginals in Argentina, New Zealand, and Australia by “the stronger races” as natural and therefore welcome, and he took it for granted that whites would eventually rule Africa and replace the natives. It is vital to remember that in Darwin’s lifetime, white European birthrates were historically the highest ever. So Darwin looked on benevolently while the processes of natural selection operated in favor of a world ruled by whites of European origin. But he did not necessarily back any positive measures to help the process of keeping whites “superior” as a race.
His cousin, Francis Galton, had no such inhibitions. The publication of Origin was the formative event in his life, and from absorbing its lessons he went on to invent his own science, which he eventually (1885) called eugenics. He began work on a book called Hereditary Genius (1869), which argued that civilization, though desirable in itself and proof of the importance of human stock of high mental and physical capabilities, had the unfortunate tendency to increase the number of “unfit” people by preventing nature from eliminating the weak, mentally ill, and other undesirables. He called the present situation in the 1860s “a sort of intellectual anarchy” for “the want of master-minds.” It was no use, he argued, improving the environment by factory laws, good sanitation, poor laws, and hospitals if the state did nothing to assist the birth of those with superior minds and bodies and prevent the birth of the weak. He wanted the state to compile a national biographical index of “desirables” and “undesirables,” and permit marriage only of those who could produce a certificate of their fitness. Galton, unlike his cousin, was good at math and statistics and recruited as a follower a first-class statistical innovator named Karl Pearson, who was terrified by the advancing economic power of Germany and wanted to combat it by a national program of selective breeding. Adopting Galton’s neologism, he invented the term “eugenic marriage” and argued that the state should make unlawful any union that did not qualify.
It is common among Darwin’s more enthusiastic scientific followers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, who attribute to their idol powers of prescience and wisdom he clearly did not possess and would never have dreamed of claiming, to insist that Darwin had nothing to do with any kind of social Darwinism, let alone eugenics. He was in no way responsible, they claim, for any ultimately malign or disastrous consequences of his work on natural selection. This needs qualifying. Darwin was always careful to steer clear of politics as such. Though by family background and gentle inclination a Whig or Liberal, he was never a party man. But he took up some public postures, as his views on vaccination and birth control indicated. He gave broad approval to his cousin Galton’s work. He praised his book warmly on its publication. He drew attention to his work repeatedly and approvingly in both Descent and Expression. He might have disapproved or even publicly rejected views held after his death by Galton and his followers, but this is pure conjecture. There is nothing to suggest that Darwin was opposed to eugenics in either its positive or its negative practices. Darwin took it as axiomatic that the improvement of the human race, by natural or artificial means, was and is desirable.
Moreover, although Darwin often in theory took up a detached scientific viewpoint, this is constantly belied by his vocabulary, phraseology, and verbal coloring. The actual title of Origin, it has been pointed out, uses words like selection, struggle, favored, and preservation, which imply a mind or force or something more conscious than blind nature at work. Origin and Descent are dotted with words and phrases that imply design, purpose, or creative intelligence. One critic has noted his fondness for popular phrases like “handsome is as handsome does,” “many a mickle makes a muckle,” “in the midst of life we are in death,” and “the race being to the swift”—as though Mother Nature, far from being impersonal and neuter, was a lady with a taste for proverbs and even for the Bible. Darwin’s immediate followers were even less careful in using loaded expressions. Michael Foster, the leading Cambridge physiologist, wrote of nature making “wise and unwise investments in the animal economy,” and mammals “living up to their physiological incomes.”
The truth is, Origin is a book that, with total success, embodies an exciting idea and had a devastating intellectual and emotional impact on world society. The word devastating is accurate: It destroyed many comfortable assumptions, thus clearing space for new concepts and ideas to spring up in almost every subject. It acted like a force of nature itself, and by the end of January 1860, when the second edition sold out, it was quite beyond Darwin’s control. Darwin became one of the formative thinkers of the twentieth century, alongside Marx, Freud, and Einstein, affecting the way people thought about an immense variety of topics, often quite remote from his own preoccupations.
Social Darwinism took many forms. Eugenics, as a science, enjoyed only limited success in that national registers of marriageable persons were not compiled and no country insisted on eugenic certificates before allowing a marriage, as Galton had wished. But its companion science, or pseudoscience, of dysgenics, the elimination of the unhealthy, made startling progress for half a century. In 1904 Charles Davenport, a follower of Galton and of Darwin, got the billionaire Andrew Carnegie, a superb example of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, to finance the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. This quickly took on board the new science of Mendelism to reinforce Darwinism and preach the doctrine that physical weakness and, still more, mental illness, was inherited, and to lobby state and federal governments to pass laws preventin
g it. This cause was assisted by concern over immigration and the risk that lower-race arrivals from eastern Europe, especially Jews, would “contaminate” and “weaken” the Anglo-Saxon racial stock of the United States. The passage of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 can be traced back to the publication of the Origin. But individual states went further and passed laws giving the authorities the right to sterilize the mentally unfit and certain types of criminals. By 1920 fifteen states had sterilization laws. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled most of them unconstitutional until 1927, when in Buck v. Bell, it decided that Virginia could sterilize Carrie Buck, a feeble-minded epileptic, daughter of another low-mentality woman and already the mother of a child judged “an imbecile.” Passing judgement, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” In the quarter century up to 1935, U.S. states passed over a hundred sterilization laws and sterilized over a hundred thousand people with subnormal mental faculties. Virginia went on sterilizing up to the 1970s.
It is curious that, although sterilization has been practiced on a large scale all over the world, especially in Scandinavia, no investigation has been made to discover whether national dysgenic programs have had any statistically discernible effect on societies. Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, and Estonia all passed laws, and Sweden actually sterilized 65,000 people, a much higher proportion, per capita, than the United States. Except for Canada, the British Empire rejected sterilization, thanks largely to a vigorous campaign conducted by G. K. Chesterton, who wrote a fierce book on the subject. He was helped by a brilliant satire written by Aldous Huxley in 1932, Brave New World, which pictured a “dark Utopia” in which science was used in innumerable ways to create a hygienically perfect but docile and submissive population. This combined an attack on Galtonism with a reprise of George Eliot’s worry that Darwinian natural selection was a dangerous form of determinism, which would extinguish free will and the human instinct for freedom. It was also a sally against the bright utopia preached by H. G. Wells, in which science was king. Wells, Shaw, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, Havelock Ellis, and many other socialist intellectuals favored both eugenics and dysgenics and would have condemned to sterilization or even death all the mentally unfit if they could have brought to power a government to their taste. But they never persuaded the British Labour Party to adopt their views.