No One Cares About Crazy People

by Ron Powers

  Twenty-two years elapsed between Beagle’s docking and the publication of his first and most historic book: years of studying his Galápagos species and specimens and annotating his meticulous journals, then coming to grips with the staggering paradigm shift that they implied, and then struggling with his reluctance to publish his discovery because the Church might (and did) get mad at him. But in 1859, the first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared, sold out instantly, went through several more printings, and was followed by an equally seminal work, The Descent of Man, in 1871.

  His studies had convinced Darwin of the validity of common descent for the multitude of species roaming the earth, particularly obvious in geographically isolated communities such as the Galápagos Islands, and resulting from small variations occurring over decades and centuries. These small variations led to such attributes as the different lengths and shapes of the beaks on the finches of the Galápagos Islands. And, compounded over time, these variations led to large differences—for example, when a common ancestor is discovered between two seemingly disparate species (such as the American buffalo, whose neck is quite overwhelmed by an enormous head extending down toward the sustenance of grasslands, and contrasts sharply with the small head of its relative the giraffe, which reaches up into the trees with its very long and slender neck).

  Darwin’s theory needed no conjectural leaps to support itself. (Interestingly, in the first edition of Origin, he did not include human beings in the evolutionary chain, though later he repaired that omission.) His theories of natural selection generated great advances for mankind. They opened gateways that led scientists to integrate and unify the multiform strands of biology. From that achievement came breakthroughs in medicine (polio vaccines, resistance to pests and pestilence, the treatments for bacterial infections and HIV). The study of natural selection energized the science of linguistics (based upon a common grounding in variability). It led to the introduction, in the 1970s, of “theory of mind” studies that traced human beings’ remarkable adaptability to increasingly complex environments to the gregariousness and “excess” cognitive capacities of primates.3 Evolutionary theory opened up new corridors of argumentation into human uniqueness and the basis of human morality, given the implied possibility of a godless universe.

  The theory of common descent, and the resulting unifying “tree of life” relating man to monkey, generated anger, horror, and discord within Western Christian faith. Church leaders saw the theory as an attack on the Genesis creation story and thus a refutation of the Christian God, though none of Darwin’s works argued for the absence of divine agency. Darwin himself adhered to his faith, and, by the 1890s, the Church of England had accommodated itself to his evolutionary principles. Catholicism also coexists with evolution, as represented most recently in the statement by Pope Francis in 2014 that “evolution is not opposed to the notion of Creation, because evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve.” Yet fundamentalist Christians, for whom the literal interpretation of the Bible is essential, continue to deny that evolution occurs. Although 60 percent of American adults believe that living creatures evolved over time, 33 percent actively reject evolution and 42 percent believe that God created human beings in a form that has not changed.

  The affront to Christian doctrine aside, significant misuses soon compromised Darwin’s evolutionary revolution. In 1905, thirteen years after the naturalist’s death, the British biologist William Bateson gave a name to his countryman’s field: “genetics,” a coinage of Greek derivation that means “pertaining to origins.” By that time, another new term similar in sound to “genetics” had become in vogue in Britain and the United States. Soon it would find its true home in Nazi Germany. The term was “eugenics.”

  Bluntly put, “eugenics” referred to genocidal solutions for a monstrously illegitimate “problem”: the “problem” of negative attitudes, culturally fostered, toward those perceived to differ significantly from the “norm.” Most people familiar with eugenics—the practice of manipulating biological systems to refine reproduction—believe it to have been a passing atrocity of years long past, a tool of Nazi experimentation that became obsolete with the demise of the Third Reich. This is wrong in many ways. Eugenics was a gift to Hitler’s scientists from American naturalist-entrepreneurs, who had picked up on it from the British. And far from being obsolete, eugenics remains very much alive in the world today. Many of its post-Holocaust refinements have been shaped to benefit mankind—conquering diseases, enhancing the yield and nutritional quality of crops. More recent refinements, while dedicated to the noble cause of combating mental illness, have indisputably crossed into the morally ambiguous territory of physically altering components of the brain. Gene-editing, to be discussed later, is the current paramount example.

  And at the darker extremes, eugenics techniques are still occasionally used for their original purpose: population control; the elimination of the unwanted.

  History is often whimsical when it is not brutal, and sometimes even when it is.

  A central argument of On the Origin of Species, reviled by the pious as apostasy, was ironically inspired by a Church of England priest, also an eminent economist. To deepen this irony, the Darwinian argument in question was an error: a misreading of the cleric’s point (shaky enough in itself) that human population growth was outrunning the growth of food supplies. And to turn the irony into travesty, Darwin’s skewed amplification of the cleric’s ambiguous point helped propel mankind into the foothills of genocide, not only of Jewry, but of any grouping deemed unfit or “surplus.” Homosexuals, for example. And lunatics, idiots, morons, imbeciles, nuts. And of course the ever-shunned and vulnerable mentally ill.

  The economist and priest was Thomas Malthus, who made his fuzzy argument in a widely read 1798 pamphlet, Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus warned that the human population was expanding at a “geometrical” rate; that is, in quantities far higher than the simple replacement number of two; while the food supply—plants and animals—was slogging along at a much slower pace—incremental, or “arithmetical.” These dynamics, Malthus predicted, would escalate under the “laws of nature” into famine and brutal competition for food.

  Thomas Malthus did not really believe that man would exhaust his resources and die out, though Malthus shared (and reinforced) a belief of his time that there were getting to be too many people. It was the economist in him that researched the statistics, but it was the servant of God who drew the conclusions. He saw the burgeoning population as a sign of man’s overweening sexuality, and he saw potential food shortages as a warning from God that man should—well, scale it back a little. Marry later, and spend more time being productive in the fields than being productive in the bedroom. (True to his piety, Malthus could not accept even marital contraception as a corrective.)

  Charles Darwin read Malthus’s treatise in 1838, when he was twenty-nine and the economist was four years dead. He was electrified to find in Principle of Population a missing link regarding his own theories. The link was competition. “Competition” lent dynamism, and supreme consequence, to what had been, despite the protean vastness and variety of evidence the young botanist had collected, a mere description of natural-world processes. Now Darwin had a tool for making his observation predictive.

  “It at once struck me,” Darwin later wrote regarding Malthus’s impact upon his thought, “that under these circumstances favourable variations [or species] would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species.”4

  And, later:

  This is the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms. As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have
a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.5

  Darwin’s theories would be roundly misinterpreted in his lifetime and afterward, but this reading of Malthus was itself a misinterpretation: a small misinterpretation and an understandable one, yet one that led to a great deal of trouble. Darwin salted the first edition of Origin of Species with Malthus’s “scarcity” arguments, and he took them more literally than his source intended them. According to the scholar Abdul Ahad, Darwin cited Malthus’s notion of “geometrical increase of population” eleven times, “struggle” eighty-four times, and “competition” forty-four times—a lot more frequently, in each case, than had Malthus himself.6 Before long, educated Britons were talking even more nervously than before about the coming nightmare of too many people and too little food.

  Charles Dickens, alert as always to the zeitgeist, picked up on this anxiety and used it to satirize the comfortable classes in his 1843 classic A Christmas Carol. His immortal skinflint Ebenezer Scrooge, irritated at two charity solicitors, wonders why the poor don’t simply go to prison or the workhouses: “‘The establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.’ [One of the solicitors replied,] ‘Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.’ ‘If they would rather die,’ said Scrooge, ‘they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.’”7

  And there it was: a buzz-phrase that would soon mushroom into an illusion of self-evident truth. Malthus himself had never uttered or written “surplus population.” But now, uncritically reinforced by Darwin and then enshrined by Dickens, the concept spread and soon brought into the sunlight all sorts of unworthy social bigotries that until then had remained politely covered in euphemism.

  The sixth British edition of On the Origin of Species, published in 1869, featured another freighted phrase not conceived by Darwin yet inspired by his work. The phrase was “survival of the fittest.”

  “Survival of the fittest” was a coinage of the eminent British philosopher Herbert Spencer. Spencer had read the first edition of Origin and decided that Charles Darwin was talking not about species in general but about the human race, whether Darwin realized this or not. Spencer’s overriding passion was economics; he inherited some of Malthus’s ideas and ran them to the logical breaking point. Laissez-faire was his game, in economics and everything else. He had already formed some dogmas of his own about evolution by the time he picked up Origin of the Species not long after its first printing and found in its pages the face of Herbert Spencer looking back. He promptly wrote Principles of Biology, published in 1864, incorporating some of Darwin’s sedate “natural selection” ideas and rebranding them with the manly tag “survival of the fittest.”

  Darwin, with his typical deference toward peers in his field, was happy to slip the term into the fifth edition of Origin of Species, which came out in 1869. “This preservation of favourable variations, and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest,” he wrote.8

  “Survival of the fittest” was a term that boiled, for men of certain temperaments, with intimations that the mild botanist would never have arrived at on his own. Herbert Spencer was a near zealot in his promotion of unrestrained competition among men for resources and capital gain. He fanned Malthus’s spark into open flame. American captains of industry, notably the ruthless steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, saw in Spencer—and, no doubt squinting very closely, in Darwin—predatory selfishness revealed as a higher law.

  “I remember that light came as in a flood and all was clear,” Carnegie wrote, describing the transformative effect that the “survival” trope had had on him. “Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution. ‘All is well since all grows better’ became my motto, my true source of comfort.”9

  The flame spread. In 1869, the same year as Darwin’s fifth edition, another bold new stepchild of Origin of Species appeared. Hereditary Genius: Its Laws and Consequences instructed the world that a person’s intelligence was immutably fixed by his or her bloodlines. The “consequences” were happy for people born into smart families, and not so great at all for everyone else.

  The author was Darwin’s second cousin, Francis Galton, an amateur scientist of great range and staggering intellectual gifts, and the common sense of a trilobite. He pursued geography and anthropology, traveling the Nile and the Jordan and the wilds of tropical South Africa. He studied meteorology and invented the weather map as we know it. His gift to criminology was the forensic significance of the fingerprint.

  Galton’s true genius lay in the mastery of numbers as keys to unlocking scientific truth. He was a tabulator and classifier, a counter-and comparison-maker; a proto-statistician. He gave the world psychometrics and quantitative differential psychology.

  As if to prove that brilliance and good judgment do not necessarily go hand in hand—as eugenics itself was to prove—Galton once wrote a letter to the London Times proposing that it would be a good idea if the Chinese, whom he considered adequately civilized, were to relocate to Africa and shoo away all the dark savages who lived there. Where the dark savages would go, or what their take on the idea might be, Galton was not prepared to say. He apparently did not poll the Chinese, either, who, in the event, elected to stay in China. It was just a thought.

  He was interested for a while in “quantifying” the beauty of women’s bodies; but whereas other men might content themselves with furtive glances at female buttocks, only Galton (while in South Africa) tried to measure their bottom-line appeal by applying a sextant.

  The sub-interpreter was married to a charming person… a Venus among Hottentots. I was perfectly aghast at her development, and made enquiries upon that delicate point as far as I dared among my missionary friends… The result is, that I believe Mrs. Petrus to be the lady who ranks second in all the Hottentots for the beautiful outline that her back affords, Jonker’s wife ranking as the first… I, profess to be a scientific man, and was exceedingly anxious to obtain accurate measurements of her shape… my eye fell upon my sextant; and I took a series of observations upon her figure in every direction, up and down, crossways, diagonally, and so forth… this being done, I boldly pulled out my measuring tape, and measured the distance from where I was to the place she stood, and having thus obtained both base and angles, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms.10

  With that accomplishment, Galton put the “hot” in Hottentot and the “sex” in sextant.

  Such was the sexist, racist, white supremacist makeup of the man who presumed to build upon his great cousin’s discoveries to tweak the human brain toward perfection.

  Like Spencer, Galton concluded that Darwin’s method could foretell the evolutionary traits of human beings as well as plants, fish, and animals, based on inherited characteristics, or what would be called genes. And like others to follow, he overestimated and oversimplified wildly, erring into faulty research and coarse determinism. The tools of neurobiology, for instance, which would have revealed the nearly infinite volition of the brain and its capacity to override many supposed limitations, remained far in the future. That did not stop Galton from making staggering suppositions.

  What Galton had in mind, unnamed as yet, was human engineering. He began with the premise, based on his fatally parochial research, that “talent,” by which he meant intelligence and productive innovation, was clustered within certain families. He employed questionnaires, studies of twins, biometrics, an analysis of bodily traits (a field that he invented), and other statistical tools. From these methods, he concluded that all human physical and mental levels were determined solely by heredity. Further—and what a coincidence!—the families favored by fate formed parts of Francis Galton’s own social milieu. They were well-off, well-educated, industrious sorts, and (Galton being Galton) not hard to look at, either—unlike the greasy, swarthy wogs against whose grubby shoulders Galton and other imperialists found themsel
ves increasingly rubbing. The beautiful and “talented” proceeded from classic Anglo-Saxon stock, tribes of blond, blue-eyed Angles and Saxons and Jutes who immigrated to the British Isles from northern Europe in the fifth century in search of open farmland and whose descendants now went to the same churches, universities, and clubs that Galton frequented. The others, those inconvenient wogs, amounted to a deadly snake coiled in the garden of his Eden. The snake was poisoning the purity of the noblest human strain, the hope of history. The serpent was embodied by the misguided champions of social reform, the philanthropists, the charitable folk. Didn’t they realize that they were accomplishing nothing but the artificial propagation of the unfit, who did nothing of note but bear more unfit children? The surplus population? Their efforts only impeded the natural correctives that cousin Charles had identified.

  It seemed to Francis Galton that natural selection needed a boost from unnatural selection.

  The remedies proposed in the first edition of Hereditary Genius were mild in comparison to those offered by Galton’s more hot-blooded adherents, and later by Galton himself. The book suggested that the human race could be improved via arranged marriages between bright, accomplished men and comely women. This solution brings to mind nothing so much as the riposte that George Bernard Shaw is said to have offered a woman who proposed marriage, given that Shaw had a brilliant mind and she had beautiful looks: “What if the child inherits your mind and my looks?”* Later, Galton fastidiously subdivided his concept into “positive” eugenics (pairing fit and intelligent and sane sorts of men and women and, incidentally, Nordic sorts of men and women) and “negative” eugenics (preventing the “unfit” from having children).

  Hereditary Genius rushed to popularity amid the “evolution” mania. Fourteen years after the book first appeared, as Galton’s new system grew toward international fame as an icon of the age of progress, he came up with a suitably pretentious name for it: “eugenics.” His recourse to the ancient Greek was shrewd. “Eu” is a word-forming syllable meaning “goodly” or “well,” as educated Victorians would know. “Gen” expresses coming into being. Thus “eugenics”: a goodly birth. Galton might better have called it “pláni tou eniaíou aitía,” the fallacy of the single cause.