“Darwinism” and eugenicsJohn Wilkins, University of Queensland

The Eugenics Myth

• Or, Nazis ate my Evolution

• The claim is:Eugenics is applied Darwinism. And it sticks out like a sore thumb that all of these German eugenicists, preceding the Nazi regime, were enthusiastic Darwinists. Margaret Sanger, of course, in this country of Planned Parenthood—enthusiastic Darwinist. Hitler—that is the most amazing thing at all, that I could get through 12 years of government schools here in the United States, Cornell and Michigan Law School, and with all of the chit-chat about what led to the Nazi regime, I never knew about the link between Darwin and Hitler, until reading Richard Weikart’s book. And once you see it, it’s one of those things you see that the truth has an inherent appeal—the moment you hear it, suddenly it all makes sense. I mean, how is it that Hitler could simultaneously seem to be anti-abortion, but be slaughtering six million Jews? Well, that’s because he wasn’t against abortion for Jews. He was applying Darwinism. He thought the Aryans were the fittest and he was just hurrying natural selection along. I mean, Mein Kampf means my struggle, which he described in explicitly Darwinian terms—the struggle among races.

Is this true?

• Did Darwin’s theory of evolution lead to the Holocaust?

• Is eugenics always racist?

• What does this mean for modern technologies like genetic counselling?

Darwin’s theories• Transmutation of species

• Struggle for existence

• Natural selection

• Common Descent

• Sexual Selection

• Heredity

• Biogeography

Natural Selection

• There are more organisms born than can survive

• Traits vary in a population

• Some traits have a greater contribution to survival and reproduction than others

• These traits are heritable

• Ergo, traits that are better adapted will spread through a population

Types of selection

Common Descent

• Organisms fall into groups within groups

• e.g., Mammals within Vertebrates

• So the history of life is like a tree

What Natural Selection Isn’t in social terms

Social Darwinism

• Began 4 years before the Origin of Species was published in 1859

• Based on the work of Herbert Spencer

• Spencer aimed at a universal philosophy based on evolution

• He therefore argued that society was served by elimination of the unfit

Evolution before Darwin

• The first person to offer an evolutionary theory was the French physicist Pierre Maupertuis, in 1743

• Maupertuis also held that inheritance came equally from both parents, and was passed on in discrete particles. He came up with something very similar to Mendelian ratios, based on a study of polydactyly

Evolution before Darwin

• Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, also proposed an evolutionary theory in 1794

• He was followed by Jean Baptiste de Lamarck in 1800–1809

• Both theories involved progress and a scale from lower to higher

Progress and evolution• The idea of a scale of

nature is called the Great Chain of Being

• Racial classifications, begun in the 1760s, relied on races being thought to be “higher or lower”

• It was popular from the 15th century onwards (Lullius, right, from 1550)

Racial classification before evolution

1799

1770

1854

So when evolution was

• We get this:

• Note that the left-to-right order matches racial rankings: African, Australian, Mongolian, European

Racialist evolutionism• Ernst Haeckel developed

“Darwinismus”, a mix of Lamarck, Darwin and Goethe

• He believed that evolution was progressive, and that races were part of a spectrum from apes to Aryans (mid-Europeans)

Racialist evolutionism after Haeckel

• In the period from 1890 to 1930, there were many racialist evolution books and pamphlets

• About this time, genetics developed

• Many early geneticists were both evolutionists and eugenicists

• But not all: a famous opponent of eugenics was the leading evolutionary geneticist, Theodosius Dobzhansky

Dobzhansky wrote in 1935

“The eugenical Jeremiahs keep constantly before our eyes the nightmare of human populations accumulating recessive genes that produce pathological effects when homozygous. These prophets of doom seem to be unaware of the fact that wild species in the state of nature fare in this respect no better than man does with all the artificiality of his surroundings, and yet life has not come to an end on this planet. The eschatological cries proclaiming the failure of natural selection to operate in human populations have more to do with political beliefs than with scientific findings.”

The origins of eugenics

• Term coined in 1887 by Francis Galton, Darwin’s first cousin

• From eu- a Greek prefix meaning “good” or” well”, and genos, meaning “tribe” or “race” or “kind”, related to the term genes, meaning “stock” or “birth”: hence “well born” or “good stock”

Before Galton

• There is a tradition of breeding humans the way livestock are bred going back to the Spartans

• Plato argued for it in The Republic around 380BCE

• The western tradition of the Aristocracy (“rule by the best”) spoke of “good breeding” and “good (and bad) blood”, at a time when inheritance was thought to involve the blood

Galton on Hereditary Genius

• Published in 1869, this book aimed to match achievement (by “professional men”) with families, in order to establish how social traits were passed on

• No simple distinction between biology and culture at this time

• Galton invented “biometrics” (measurement of biological traits) and started the development of modern statistics, such as the “normal curve”

Eugenics in America

• From 1907, the United States introduced eugenics legislation, along with other English speaking countries such as Australia, Canada, South Africa and others.

• The charge was led by Charles Davenport, who headed up the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, where he started the Eugenics Records Office

Eugenics in America• Connecticut enacted marriage laws with

eugenic criteria in 1896 to prevent the “epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded” from marrying

• William Graham Sumner, a social Darwinist sociologist, argued against state support for the “defective” portion of society, who should be allowed to sink or swim on their own, and that “delinquents” should be eliminated by sterilisation

• Eugenics became something of a cause celebre amongst educated people

• Davenport was influenced strongly by Galton, and Pearson and Fisher at the Galton Institute in London

• In 1927, the Supreme Court decided in Buck v Bell that the “feeble-minded” could be forcibly sterilised by the state, declaring of one family that “four generations of idiots are enough”

Eugenics in America

The Eugenics Movement – 1921

Eugenics in America

• The last sterilisations occurred in America in 1967!

• In Canada and Australia in 1972!

• Interestingly, in the land of its birth – the United Kingdom – church pressure ensured that legislation for eugenics was never passed

Eugenics in Germany

• The original Nazi legislation in 1933 was deliberately modeled on the US legislation

• In 1942 the Final Solution was commenced, killing six million Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and “mentally unfit” in industrial scales

• The Nazis also practised a positive eugenics, giving state subsidies to those who were Aryan to have more children

“This person with hereditary defects costs the community

60,000 Reichsmarks in his lifetime. Fellow Germans, that is

your money too”

“We do not stand alone” – listing the countries that have eugenics legislation like the 1933 German

law

So, is evolution to blame?

• The counter-evolutionary nature of eugenics:

• Natural selection doesn’t need intervention by definition; this is artificial selection

• Natural selection defines the “fit” – if the Irish, or the working class, etc. are outbreeding other classes or nationalities, then they are by definition more fit

• Might makes right: the drawing of moral or values from what is “natural”. The Naturalistic Fallacy

Is evolution to blame?• The science from which eugenics

was drawn was genetics, not evolution. Evolutionary theory and genetics did not become harmonised until 1930...

• By Ronald Fisher, who devoted some one-third of his seminal work The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection to arguing for eugenics

Different kinds of eugenics

• Two kinds of eugenics:

• Positive eugenics, in which the “fit” are encouraged to breed and given incentives

• Negative eugenics, in which the “unfit” are sterilised, prevented from breeding, or killed (“euthanised”)

• State involvement:

• Laissez faire versus enforced eugenics

Back to Social Darwinism

• Herbert Spencer is often called a social Darwinist

• But he predated Darwin, and was appalled at the use of his ideas by American industrialists to justify their materialism

• Sumner was a social Darwinist, but arguably the only one

• The term “social Darwinism” has no generic content; it was a term used to smear opponents, particularly by the Left

Not all Darwinian applications to society are evil

• “Darwinism” is a mythical creature

• If it means Darwinian theory, then it has no moral consequences

• If it means anything, it is Haeckel’s Darwinismus

• But the odour of social evolutionary theory and eugenics affected attempts to apply Darwinian evolution to society

Social biology

• Early social evolution theories were based on non-Darwinian views, such as the neo-Lamarckians’

• In the 1970s, Ed Wilson published Sociobiology, in which he argued that behaviour is genetically determined

• Critics called this “eugenics”

Genes and health

• Since the rise of molecular genetics, it has become common to screen for genetic illnesses such as Porphyria, Tay-Sachs, and Trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome), so that parents can decide to abort

• Recently, gene screening has started for insurance and employment purposes

Natural selection and Nazism

• Did the Nazis employ natural selection?

• Their view of competition was between nations and races, not individuals as Darwin (mostly) thought

• They rarely appealed to evolution, and when they did, it was of a progressive kind

• They also appealed to Christianity, pagan religion, and genetics, as well as an old tradition called Volksphilosophie.

Discussion