Why Trust Science?

by Naomi Oreskes

  Today, the idea of “racial degeneration” is impossible to separate from its Nazi associations, but in the early twentieth century the threat was keenly felt—at least by many white men—as real and present, and the eugenic ideal was taken up by physicians, scientists, intellectuals, and political leaders. In the United States, besides Teddy Roosevelt, another prominent eugenicist was the conservationist Madison Grant, a founder of the Save-the-Redwoods League, trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, and author of the popular book The Passing of the Great Race (1916).66 This was the Nordic “race”—what we might now call white Anglo-Saxons—which Grant believed was threatened by the weaker “races” of Jews, southern Europeans, and Negros. These latter groups, he argued, should be isolated in ghettos and prevented from interbreeding with men and women of northern European descent. Grant’s arguments played a role in the Johnson-Reed Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which limited immigration from southern and eastern Europe to no more than 2% of the US population as measured in the 1890 census and completely eliminated immigration from Asia.67 Stephen Jay Gould characterized The Passing of the Great Race as the most influential work of scientific racism ever published in America; historian Jonathan Spiro notes that it was widely embraced in Nazi Germany, including by Hitler, who wrote to Grant saying, “The book is my Bible.”68

  Eugenics as a social movement grew dramatically in the years 1910–20, with a proliferation of books and articles on race and fitness, nearly all of which were framed as applications of biological science. As Grant crisply put it, “The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit.”69 The rediscovery in 1900 by Hugo de Vries and colleagues of the work of Gregor Mendel, and the support it seemed to give—indeed, the proof, in some eyes—for the hard inheritance of characteristics, was important to the surge of support for eugenics, as Mendel’s findings seemed to rule out Lamarckian notions that individual improvement could be effected via environmental improvement.70

  In the United States, the locus of scientific eugenics was the Eugenics Record Office (ERO), founded in 1910 at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, and later incorporated as a department within the Carnegie Institution of Washington Station for Experimental Evolution.71 Its director was Charles Davenport, a professor of biology at the University of Chicago and pioneer in biometrics. In founding the ERO, Davenport declared in language that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., would echo, “Society needs to protect itself; as it claims the right to deprive the murderer of his life so also it may annihilate the hideous serpent of hopelessly vicious protoplasm.”72

  One could not do experiments on humans as Mendel did on peas, but one could collect data, and Davenport launched a major study on “heredity in relation to eugenics.”73 The goal was to establish the scientific basis of human inheritance through study of family histories; the methodology was to hire field workers to interview families about their histories. (In this regard, the activities at the ERO were quite different from the work of the biologists at the adjacent experimental station.) Trained field workers asked questions about such behaviors as alcoholism, prostitution, gambling, promiscuity, and criminality; physical “defects” including hermaphrodism, cleft palate, and polydactyly; illnesses such as hemophilia and tuberculosis; mental “defect” such as “feeblemindedness,” schizophrenia, and other forms of mental illness; and the general category of social attainment and accomplishment.

  Between 1911 and 1924, 250 field workers, mostly women, trained at the ERO and were sent out to collect these data. The answers were recorded on index cards. The field workers found that these traits often did run in families. Davenport therefore concluded that social remedies were needed to prevent reproduction by parents carrying “undesirable” trains, and he became an advocate of “segregation”—to keep the mentally and physically ill in home and asylums where they could not breed—and sterilization—to ensure that the unfit, both incarcerated and at large—would not reproduce.

  His deputy, Harry Laughlin, used the ERO results to promulgate “Model Sterilization Laws,” and to testify in Congress to the desirability of restricting immigration from southern and central Europe. ERO data demonstrated, he claimed, that immigrants were more likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes, and that this tendency toward criminality was inherited. In 1924, the US Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which severely restricted immigration along eugenic lines.74

  In the 1930s, thirty-two states in the Union passed sterilization laws, and at least thirty thousand US citizens were sterilized, mostly without informed consent and sometimes without their knowledge.75

  Laughlin was a hero to many Nazis. In 1936, he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg for his work on the “science of racial cleansing.” It has been said that the Nazis based their own sterilization laws on the model laws developed by Laughlin at ERO.76 At Nuremberg, one profferd defense was that Nazi laws were based on what Americans had advocated.

  As I have already noted, eugenics was complicated. Historian Daniel Kevles has argued that eugenics had several principal components, intermixed in various ways:77

  Social control of reproduction, either through control of marriage or isolation in asylums, jails, and other institutions;

  Natalism. Encouraging large families among the “fit” (generally understood to be wealthy and white) and discouraging of reproduction among the “unfit” (everyone else);

  Malthusianism. Discouraging social welfare programs, including universal education, minimum wage laws, and public health measures intended to reduce infant mortality on the grounds that they ran against the natural laws that would otherwise weed out the unfit. Eugenicists also discouraged birth control, assuming that those who should use it would not and those who shouldn’t use it would;

  Hereditiarianism and anti-environmentalism. Rejecting the role of environment and locating the cause of social position and behavioral traits exclusively or nearly exclusively in physical inheritance; and

  Racial anxiety. Fearing that breeding of the unfit, coupled with immigration, was polluting or diluting the racial identity of the country, leading to “national” or “racial” deterioration, with those two terms and concepts often used interchangeably.

  To this list we may add

  Gender anxiety. Eugenic arguments were often coupled to arguments against women’s participation in the work force and the promotion of a constricted role centered on home and family.78

  Most of these elements—racial anxiety, gender anxiety, natalism—are not scientific values, which raises the question: What exactly was the role of science and scientists in the eugenics movement?

  It is sometimes claimed that there was a scientific consensus supporting eugenics, and therefore we are justified in disbelieving or rejecting contemporary matters about which there is a scientific consensus. The novelist Michael Crichton, for example, used this argument to try to discredit climate science, likening contemporary calls for action to prevent anthropogenic climate change to earlier calls to prevent race suicide.79 Both, he suggested, were politics masquerading as science.

  The fact that scientists may have been wrong about some matter in the past in no way tells us whether they are right or wrong about some wholly unrelated matter today, but Crichton’s argument does remind us that scientists have not always been on the side of the angels. Insofar as eugenics, like the Limited Energy Theory, was conceptualized and justified as a logical deduction from scientific theory, we cannot simply explain it away as a “misuse” or “misapplication” of science. So was there a scientific consensus on eugenics? The short answer is no.80 Prominent social scientists and geneticists objected to eugenic claims. As historian Garland Allen has put it, “It was not the case that nearly everyone in the early twentieth century accepted eugenic conclusions.”81

  Social scientists made a complaint that is obvious in retrospect and often invoked today in nature-nurture debates: that many of the ills recorded by field workers could be explained by
bad nutrition, bad education, lack of linguistic skills, and/or bad luck. It was possible that genetics explained adverse outcomes, but so could many other things. The observation of an adverse outcome was no proof of the genetic theory of its causation.

  Many poor whites in the 1910s and ’20s were immigrants who faced numerous obstacles, including overt discrimination in employment and lack of adequate health care. Reformers pointed to the many immigrant children who had “improved themselves” with the help of education and other social programs, demonstrating that social reforms if seriously pursued could work to improve outcomes. The German-Jewish immigrant anthropologist Franz Boas, in particular, argued that while traits like hair and eye color might be wholly inherited—and there was scientific evidence from laboratory and breeding studies to suggest that this was so—other matters were not easily so reduced. Height, one of Francis Galton’s favorite topics of study, was a case in point. A person’s stature, Boas remarked, is partly inherited, but “is also greatly influenced by more or less favorable conditions during the period of growth.”82 Insufficient science had been done to understand the interplay between physical and social factors in determining developmental outcomes, and in the absence of understanding this interplay it was wrong to assume that any complex trait was controlled by genetics, and certainly wrong to assume that it was wholly so.

  Boas particularly objected to claims regarding the hereditary character of intelligence. IQ tests had not been shown to measure anything meaningful, and there was no evidence of racially specific hereditary mental or behavioral traits in blacks, immigrants, or any other group.83 We could observe disparate outcomes, but we had no independent evidence of the causes of those outcomes. On the contrary, there was evidence of social causes: Boas’s student Margaret Mead had shown in her 1924 master’s thesis that the scores on IQ tests of the children of Italian immigrants varied according to family social status, length of time in the United States, and whether English was spoken at home.84

  Mead’s discussion of Italian immigrants is an important reminder that, while the language of eugenics was that of “racial degeneration,” eugenics in America was concerned both with issues of race (as we understand the term today) and with gradations of European ethnicity, both of which were tied to class.85 The threat was understood to be to the “Nordic race”—the peoples of northern European descent—from both European and non-European sources, and so a major focus of eugenic study and target of eugenic practice was poor whites. In the United States, that largely meant immigrants, but in the United Kingdom it meant the working class. For this reason, it is perhaps not surprising that another group of scientists who objected to eugenics were socialists, including the British geneticists J.B.S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, and Julian Huxley, and the American socialist Herman Muller.86

  Professor of genetics and biometry at University College London, J.B.S. Haldane was the son of the famed Oxford physiologist John Scott Haldane, a socialist who pioneered the study of occupational hazards and originated the practice of bringing canaries into coalmines to monitor air quality.87 Initially Haldane sympathized with aspects of eugenics—in college he joined the Oxford Eugenics Society—but he was soon offended by its evident sociopolitical prejudices, particularly its class bias.

  Haldane highlighted the thin empirical basis for eugenic claims, particularly given that the mechanisms of inheritance, particularly of complex traits, were only just now coming into scientific focus. Too little was known about heredity to justify any eugenics program, and “many of the deeds done in America in the name of eugenics are about as much justified by science as were the proceedings of the inquisition by the gospels.” He opposed all sterilization programs, including voluntary ones, on the grounds that “any legislation which does not purport to apply, and is not actually applied (a very different thing) to all social classes alike, will probably be unjustly applied to the poor.” He also insisted in the value and dignity of the working class: “A man who can look after pigs or do any other steady work has a value to society and … we have no right whatever to prevent him from reproducing his like.”88

  Haldane did not believe that “the theory of absolute racial equality” was necessarily correct, but he thought that any actual difference—either of type of degree—would be difficult to establish objectively. The best one might hope for would be to establish difference between populations—as Galton had done—but that would not tell you anything meaningful about the characteristics, much less the social value, of any individual. Perhaps reflecting on his acquaintance with the great American actor and singer Paul Robeson, he insisted that “it is quite certain that some negroes are intellectually superior to most Englishmen.”89

  Herman Muller, who shared the Nobel Prize for his work demonstrating that x-rays could induce heritable genetic changes in fruit flies, also objected to eugenics. Muller is a complex case, insofar as he did not doubt that the human race could in principle be improved through eugenic practices. Nor did he doubt that ideally it should be. But equally firmly he believed that improvement would never happen equitably under capitalism.

  Muller was the principal author of the 1939 Geneticists’ Manifesto, signed by twenty-two American and British scientists (as well as the historian of science Joseph Needham), in response to a request from the Science Service to answer the query, “How could the world’s population be improved most effectively genetically?”90 Muller and his colleagues rejected the premise that this question could be answered biologically. They began by insisting that the question “raises far broader problems than the purely biological ones, problems which the biologist unavoidably encounters as soon as he tries to get the principles of his own special field into practice.”91 In other words, this was not only or even primarily a biological question:

  For the effective genetic improvement of mankind is dependent upon major changes in social conditions, and correlative changes in human attitudes. In the first place, there can be no valid basis for estimating and comparing the intrinsic worth of different individuals, without economic and social conditions which provide approximately equal opportunities for all members of society instead of stratifying them from birth into classes with widely different privileges.92

  These men were not unilaterally opposed to efforts to make genetic improvements to the human race. Even after revelations of Nazi atrocities, Muller continued to support the idea of deliberate human improvement, arguing in 1954 that “the fact that the so-called eugenics of the past was so mistaken … is no more argument against eugenics as a general proposition than say the failure of democracy in ancient Greece is a valid argument against democracy in general.”93 (This would have been an interesting response to Michael Crichton.) But Muller and his colleagues rejected much if not all of the evidence being invoked to support eugenic claims, because reigning accounts assumed a level social playing field that patently did not exist.

  Existing studies assumed that observed differences were genetic: in effect assuming the thing they were intended to prove. The authors of Geneticists’ Manifesto accepted that there were both genetic and environmental aspects of intelligence, behavior, social accomplishments, and many other things—as indeed most scientists accept today. But existing studies failed to identify the relative contributions of social and genetic elements in human characteristics.

  Before people in general, or the state which is supposed to represent them, can be relied upon to adopt rational policies for the guidance of their reproduction, there will have to be … a far wider spread of knowledge of biological principles and recognition of the truth that both environment and heredity constitute dominating and inescapable complementary factors in human well-being.94

  No real advance could be made, they held, without “the removal of race prejudices and of the unscientific doctrine that good or bad genes are the monopoly of particular peoples or of persons with features of a given kind,” and this would not occur until “the conditions which make for war and economic exploitat
ion have been eliminated [through] some effective sort of federation of the whole world based on the common interests of its peoples.” Capitalist societies manifestly did not provide “approximately equal opportunities for all.” Eugenics could not work under capitalism: the lower classes would always be targeted.

  A level playing field would only be a start, moreover, because it was unreasonable to expect any parent to worry about the state of future generations unless they were first “extended adequate economic, medical, educational and other aids in the bearing and rearing of children.” It was also unreasonable to expect intelligent women to abandon their personal interests and aspirations on behalf of improving the population at large; the scientists therefore suggested the need for social policies to ensure that a woman’s “reproductive duties do not interfere too greatly with her opportunities to participate in the life and work of the community at large.” This meant that workplaces needed to be “adapted to the needs of parents and especially mothers,” and that towns and community services needed to be reshaped “with the good of children as one of their main objectives.” It also meant that women needed access to safe and effective birth control: “A … prerequisite for effective genetic improvement is the legalization, the universal dissemination, and the further development through scientific investigation, of ever more efficacious means of birth control … that can be put into effect at all stages of the reproductive process,” including voluntary sterilization and abortion.95