The Invisible History of the Human Race

by Christine Kenneally

  Flying squarely in the face of all preconceived notions governing the production of farm animals, he was the first of the world’s great animals breeders, [demonstrating] the readiest and most effective method of establishing and fixing desired characteristics.

  Bakewell’s keen powers of observation and his systematic approach forever changed the way people thought about what gets passed down—and the extent to which it can be controlled. But even though he developed masterful techniques for manipulating heredity, he didn’t understand its mechanics. That would take another century.

  • • •

  After sheep breeders, the second-most-important group in the history of heredity was the French medical community. Before the early nineteenth century hérédité was primarily a legal term used with reference to inheritance and bloodlines, but around 1830 French doctors began to think about the hereditary transmission of physical features through families and to use the word in a biological context. After 1840 doctors also considered the possibility of moral or psychological traits being passed down.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, doctors—and increasingly other scientists in the life sciences—came to agree that heredity might explain a whole set of phenomena that had previously been thought to be entirely unrelated, like the recurrence of disease and resemblance in families, the differences among races, and even the formation of species. It was possible for the first time to talk about traits and the connections between them without also speaking of the specific individuals who possessed those traits.

  At around the same time, Gregor Mendel became the first person to figure out how this process actually worked, or at least how part of it worked. Born in 1822 in northern Moravia (now in the Czech Republic), Mendel grew up toiling in his family’s orchards. In 1843 he entered the monastery of St. Thomas in Brno and began to work for Abbot Cyril Napp, who was head of the Moravian Agricultural Society, as well as a member of a number of other agricultural and scientific societies. Napp sent Mendel to study at the University of Vienna for two years. On his return Mendel was asked to look after the monastery’s garden, where he began a series of studies of pea plants, investigating the transmission of characteristics between generations, applying pollen to the plants himself with a small paintbrush.

  Mendel experimented with height, color, seed texture, and other features, and he concluded that for certain traits offspring received something from each parent that contributed to the trait. The elements that were passed down were either dominant or recessive, meaning that if one parent passed on a dominant version of a trait (like smooth skin) and the other parent passed on a recessive version (like wrinkled skin), then the dominant would always appear in the offspring. If both parents passed on the dominant trait, then that would also appear in the offspring. Only if both parents passed on the recessive trait would that characteristic emerge in the offspring. If parents with a dominant and recessive element had four offspring, the probability was that three would have the dominant trait and only one would have the recessive.

  Mendel’s theory explained how children may possess a trait that is the same as one parent’s but not the other, and why some traits seem to skip a generation. If an individual received the dominant element from one parent and the recessive element from the other, he will express the dominant element, but he might pass the recessive version on to his own offspring. If that offspring also received a recessive element from its other parent, then it might look more like one of its grandparents than either parent.

  Mendel published a paper about his findings in 1866, but it had little impact; he, much like Bakewell, was so ahead of the preconceived notions of the day that the significance of his insights was not appreciated. It wasn’t until three decades later that scientists came to realize that Mendel had neatly outlined some of the key principles of heredity. In 1906 the English scientist William Bateson first used the term “genetics” to describe work based on those principles.

  For all the individual contributions, collaboration, experimentation, and inspiration that it took to develop the idea of heredity, it was only the first idea of three that would radically change the way people thought about generations and genealogy in the late nineteenth century. The second idea was, of course, evolution.

  • • •

  It’s hard to overstate the impact that the concept of evolution has had on all science, medicine, conservation, and social sciences and on most of modern-day life. When Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, its definitive dismissal of a divine creation caused a furor. Darwin proposed that the individuals within a species naturally varied from one another. They adapted to their environment, and the animals that were best adapted reproduced in greater numbers. Darwin’s theory made it possible for science to think beyond the genealogy of the human race and imagine an unbroken line of mothers, beginning at one end with a creature that looked like a chimpanzee and continuing down through the line—each mother giving birth to and caring deeply for her child—to stop at the other end with us. Still, while Darwin knew that something like genes must be at work in the creation of individuals and species,

  he didn’t know what that actual material was.

  Darwin was influenced by the French discussion of hérédité, and he later even offered his own theory of hereditary transmission, which he called pangenesis. He proposed that small particles, called gemmules, were passed from parent to offspring and that they accumulated and helped shape traits. Although it was a flawed theory and was never seriously taken up, Darwin understood that heredity needed to explain how traits that weren’t apparent in a parent might appear in a child. Sadly, he never became aware of Mendel and his experiments.

  When Mendel’s discovery was finally taken up, it was with great and universal enthusiasm, because it so eloquently explained an observable phenomenon and helped breeders make reliable predictions. It also appealed because of its neat calculus, one that made something that had once been so mysterious now seem so controllable. The intoxicating feeling of mastery, plus the grand vision that evolution provided, seemed to lead to the tantalizing conclusion that men should take charge of the process. If artificial selection could be used to create better cattle, horses, and sheep, then why not create better humans as well? Eugenics was the third idea to completely transform how we conceive of generations and what is passed between them.

  Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s first cousin, thought that breeding better humans was an excellent idea, and thus the science of eugenics, a term that Galton coined, was born as a twin to the science of heredity. Galton enthusiastically conducted wide-ranging inquiries into heredity and many other fields. Like many other scientists at the time he was able to fund his own experiments through his family’s wealth, and he ranged far and wide geographically as well as intellectually. Galton became a rather famous explorer of South Africa and an influential early student of meteorology, and he worked out a method of categorization of fingerprints that is still used today. He was also the first person to study heredity in twins and develop a formula for predicting how much of a trait is inherited.

  Galton was profoundly influenced by Darwin’s ideas, as well as by his success. To test the notion that gemmules circulated in blood, Galton transfused blood between unrelated rabbits to see if traits could be passed on that way, an experiment that proved unsuccessful.

  Still, Galton was enthusiastic about the idea that artificial selection—that is to say, breeding—could weed out bad qualities and foster good ones in humans. Indeed, he believed that many traits were heritable in a straightforward way. If your father was brilliant, you had a good chance of being brilliant. If your father had a weak constitution and was fragile, then you probably would be too. If your parents were unsuccessful, then you would almost certainly be as well. Galton—who coined the phrase “nature and nurture”—also believed that biological traits were fixed, determinants of an inescapable fate that could only
marginally be influenced by education or other social forces. To prove his theory, Galton assembled a list of twenty-five hundred eminent men and tracked family relationships on that list. He found that men on the list were related to each far more often than could have occurred by chance. Galton’s interpretation was that genius underlay this eminence, and that his list proved genius was heritable

  The basic spirit of eugenics, then, involved grafting the ideas of breeds, traits, and improvement onto preexisting social divisions. In Galton’s Victorian world those divisions were thought to be natural, and it therefore made sense to him to look for biological rather than social explanations for the inequity in people’s lives. When conditions like poverty, criminality, and insanity were considered to be “natural,” it made sense to try to deal with them on the biological front. Why not breed them out? “What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly,” wrote Galton, who believed that eugenics could be a new religion.

  Galton’s ideas spread across the world, where they were quickly taken up in the newly energized post–Civil War America. There the egalitarian spirit was utopian but selective: Everyone was equal in the new democracy, except for women, black people, people with disabilities, and the poor.

  • • •

  Madison Grant was born in 1865 to a family that was well aware of its ancestry. On his mother’s side Grant descended from a Walloon Huguenot who had settled the “New Netherlands” in 1623. Grant’s father was a well-known Newark physician who had many fascinating ancestors, including the Puritan Richard Treat, who settled New England in 1630.

  Raised in Murray Hill, Manhattan, Grant was educated by tutors and spent his summers with his three siblings at their grandfather’s Long Island estate. As a teenager he spent four years in Europe receiving a private education and visiting museums. As an adult he became a member of the Society of Colonial Wars, whose exclusive membership was open only to male descendants of high-level participants in the conflicts that took place between 1607 and 1763. Members of the society received a certificate that detailed their family histories, and each year the society published a yearbook that included the genealogies of all its members. Grant was extremely bright, worked hard, and became one of America’s first and most powerful conservationists, as well as its “most influential racist.”

  The first biography of Grant, published only in 2009, was a project made difficult by the fact that after he died in 1937, his family destroyed his papers. Grant’s biographer, Jonathan Peter Spiro, spent years combing archives for traces of his subject. He noted that even Grant’s wide circle of friends seemed to have disposed of any documents that mentioned him. Nevertheless, Spiro identified a few key moments in Grant’s intellectual development.

  On his educational tour of Europe Grant visited the Moritzburg Castle, a Baroque hunting lodge. There, Spiro imagines, he was transfixed by the lodge’s extraordinary collection of red deer antlers, which had come from animals hunted three hundred years earlier. In a grand dining hall that can still be visited, the walls are covered with antlers extending two stories high, and at six feet six inches across, one of the pairs on display remains the largest set in the world today. It would have been apparent to Grant that these antlers were all much larger than those sported by most of the deer he had hunted. The red deer, Grant would have concluded, was degenerating.

  Another of the privileged societies to which Grant belonged was the Boone and Crockett Club, a group of self-styled adventurers “who believed that the hardier and manlier the sport is, the more attractive it is.” Grant was close to the club’s founder, Theodore Roosevelt, who went on to become the twenty-sixth president of the United States. Grant and the gentlemen of the club spent a great deal of time hunting. Their extensive, intimate contact with wild animals led them to realize that the animals of North America were getting smaller and shrinking in number.

  Inspired by his love of nature and his fear that it was being changed forever, Grant exercised his considerable social power to extraordinary ends. He lobbied to save the American bison from extinction. He cofounded a Save the Redwoods League to ensure that the giant California trees were not all chopped down. He was passionate about conserving whales and bald eagles, among other animals, and he was one of the founders of Glacier and Mount McKinley (now Denali) national parks. Grant was also a founder of the New York Zoological Society and the Bronx Zoo. At the turn of the century he was instrumental in the creation of a number of exhibits at the zoo, including one that featured a man from Africa.

  Ota Benga was a Mbuti pygmy from the Congo. He was four feet eight inches tall, and his teeth had been filed to points. Even before he crossed paths with Grant, Benga had experienced much tragedy. He was married with two children, but one day when he was hunting, his family was murdered by King Leopold’s Force Publique. Later he was captured by slave traders and purchased by a missionary for a bolt of cloth and a pound of salt. The missionary had come to Africa specifically to acquire a selection of pygmies to display at the St. Louis World’s Fair. After his stint as an exhibit, Ota Benga returned to Africa, but he felt that he no longer belonged there and he went back to America. For a while he was on display at the American Museum of Natural History but soon ended up spending time in the monkey cage at the Bronx Zoo. A sign outside Benga’s display read:

  The African Pygmy, “Ota Benga.”

  Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches.

  Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the

  Kasai River, Congo Free State. South Central Africa,

  By Dr. Samuel P. Verner.

  Exhibited each afternoon during September

  Soon after he became a popular public spectacle, a delegation of “colored ministers” from the Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn approached Madison Grant to plead the pygmy’s case. Grant, who was apparently quite charming, reassured them that Benga would soon be leaving and that while he was at the zoo he was helping look after its animals. That afternoon the delegation, accompanied by reporters, returned to the zoo and found Benga locked with a guinea pig in a cage, outside of which hundreds of people stood gawking.

  Benga was allowed to walk the grounds but always under the watchful eye of a groundsman and even police. Eventually he was released into the care of the Colored Orphan Asylum and later sent to Virginia, where he made plans once again to return to Africa. But he never went, and after years of working in a tobacco factory, Benga committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart.

  • • •

  In today’s world, where conservation is considered a necessity and a virtue and racism is regarded as deplorable, Grant is a hard person to understand. But for him, preserving his beloved redwoods and bison, putting human beings on display, and saving the Nordic race were all part of the same package. Grant believed that all these actions were a benevolent form of stewardship.

  Historians trace the xenophobia of Grant’s era to the 1880s, when U.S. immigration jumped from 250,000 new people a year to over half a million. Earlier immigrants had been predominately from northern European countries, like Germany, Britain, and Ireland, and it’s true that some of them were less welcome than others. In the 1850s, prejudice against the Irish fueled an anti-immigration movement. But a few decades later, more and more immigrants began to come from the other parts of the continent. The latter groups lacked urban skills and formal education, and they began to fill up the cities of the eastern United States. Contemporaries of Grant wrote about how anarchic it felt to be on the streets of New York, which were filled with crowds of European peasants. Unemployment was rife, and crime and poverty were out of control. The newcomers could not have been more different from Grant and his fellow northern European Americans and seemed to threaten every aspect of Grant’s privileged world. He wrote, “The immigrant laborers are now breeding out their masters and killing by filth and by crowding as effectively as by the sword.”

  G
rant rued the fact that Americans had brought their destruction upon themselves: “It was the upper classes who encouraged the introduction of immigrant labor to work American factories and mines. . . . The farming and artisan classes of America did not take alarm until it was too late and they are now seriously threatened with extermination in many parts of the country.” He likened the situation to the fall of Rome, where the lower classes succumbed first, but the “patricians” were taken down a few generations later.

  Still, Grant was born a few years after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published, and while his parents’ generation was deeply shocked by the idea that nature—not God—selected who would live and who would not, Grant was invigorated by the notion that humanity could direct selection by controlling traits passed down in families. Any sheep breeder knows, Grant wrote, that apart from the occasional throwback, black sheep have been bred out of domestic herds by selectively not breeding them.

  If all “social failures” were sterilized, Grant argued, humanity could rid itself of the unfit. “This is a practical, merciful and inevitable solution of the whole problem,” he wrote, “and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased and the insane and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.” While Grant agreed that the state should nurture the defective individual, it was the state’s duty to ensure that his “line stops with him.”

  Even by the standards of his day, the theory of eugenics was shot through with basic illogic. Grant wrote:

  The Negroes of the United States while stationary, were not a serious drag on civilization until in the last century they were given the rights of citizenship and were incorporated in the body politic. These Negroes brought with them no language or religion or customs of their own which persisted but adopted all these elements of environment from the dominant race, taking the names of their Masters.