Adam Rutherford is a geneticist, author, broadcaster and President of Humanists UK. His latest book is “Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics” (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
Your latest book explores the history of eugenics. How did the movement come about?
The idea that you can change population structure, or control how demographics work by restricting reproduction, or by planned marriages, goes back to [antiquity]. Plato talks about it very explicitly in Republic. But the Victorian English polymath Francis Galton gave eugenics its renaissance. He defined it as the moulding of populations
according to the desirability of particular characteristics. Galton was piggybacking off what was then new science by Charles Darwin: evolution by natural selection. I’m very clear, however, that eugenics is a political ideology, not a scientific project.
Would you describe Galton and Darwin as racist?
Francis Galton was a white supremacist in an extreme way, even for his time. Darwin expressed views about racial hierarchy that were pretty typical for the 19th century. But he was not wedded to the essentialist views of most of the scientific racists of that era. The central argument of scientific racism is that racial characteristics, which today we call phenotypes, cannot change. Darwin essentially mocked that view in his book The Descent of Man. Conversely, he suggested that there is continuity between these sets of characteristics and that none of these characteristics are immutable.
Scientific racism is expressed in Darwin’s work. But it isn’t central to it. In Galton’s work, it is. Does that make me an apologist for Darwin? Perhaps, I don’t know.
You write that “The pathway of eugenics led directly to the gates of Auschwitz.” One figure you write about was Alfred Ploetz. Who was he?
Ploetz was a driving force in the eugenics movement in Germany, which started in the 1890s. He was wedded to the idea of Nordic purity. He met Galton and was inspired by him. The term “racial hygiene”, which became the Nazi equivalent of eugenics, essentially ripped off the idea of public hygiene, which gained momentum in Germany during the 19th century.
In 1913 the German Society for Racial Hygiene, which Ploetz founded, had just a few hundred members. By the time Hitler came to power [two decades later], it had tens of thousands of doctors signed up. Which seems extraordinary, given that many of the fundamental ideals inherent to the German eugenics project focused on sterilising deformed babies, and people with disabilities or diseases like epilepsy.
And the American eugenics movement was also influential on Nazi Germany?
The link [with Nazi racial science] is unequivocal, well-documented and direct. They took intellectual, scientific, financial and legal inspiration from the American eugenicists. The eugenics laboratories in Berlin during the Third Reich were funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Also, the key players in the American eugenics movement included figures like Harry Laughlin and Charles Davenport. Laughlin helped draft important legislation which created a legal framework for involuntary sterilisation in the United States during the 1920s. This was the main inspiration for the Nuremberg Race Laws in Germany during the 1930s.
It’s also worth pointing out that the Americans were inspired by the British. But Britain never had a formal eugenics policy. There were, of course, many attempts to pass legislation [allowing involuntary sterilisation]. This was led by Winston Churchill, who, like Galton, was a white supremacist. The Americans, however, had eugenics policies in 31 states for the majority of the 20th century.
What about China today and the practice of forced sterilisation, which appears to have resulted in a drop in birth rates among the Uyghur population?
There are many challenges in trying to understand what has been happening in the last few years with regards to the Uyghurs, in what appear to be, according to some reports, effectively concentration camps . . . What the Chinese are doing as a state in this area is not very well known at all, and those allegations coming from Xinjiang are hard to verify.
One of the technologies that emerged out of former eugenics labs is prenatal screening. Does giving parents a choice to abort a foetus with Down’s syndrome count as eugenics?
I’m pretty clear about this: routinely screening pregnancies for conditions such as Down’s syndrome, and offering women the choice of terminating that pregnancy, doesn’t count as eugenics. Eugenics is considered a top-down, state-imposed sanctioning of reproductive rights. And selective abortion or embryo selection, in response to conditions or diseases, is a manifestation of parental choice. But this is partially a semantic argument and partially a political one.
Did you consult any parents of children with Down’s syndrome for your research?
Yes. I did. And many of them disagree with me. They say the ready availability of abortions for foetuses diagnosed with Down’s syndrome, or even with the potential risk, is a manifestation of eugenics.
You note in your book how in Denmark and Iceland, for instance, roughly 99 per cent of parents choose to abort such foetuses.
Yes, and this means incidence of Down’s syndrome has effectively dropped to zero in those countries. That does indeed begin to look like a eugenics project. It really doesn’t matter whether we call it eugenics or not. The real impact is that there is a group of people who exist today, who, through advances in technology and reproductive medicine, may not continue to exist in the future.
Your work shows how science, history and politics are connected. Does the scientific community do enough to acknowledge this interconnection?
There is a natural tendency for scientists to think that because we have set up these methodologies, we’re not influenced by politics, psychological biases, or historical and social contexts. That is a noble aim, but it’s impossible. Mainly because science is done by humans, and it’s very difficult to extract our own biases.
You call the story of humankind one of “wonderful impurity”. What do you mean by that?
The history of humankind is indeed a story of continuous mixing, constant migration and shared ancestry. A very small proportion of humans moved out of Africa in the last 100,000 years. Since then, we have populated every corner of the world. What we now know is that those migrations happened gradually. So, what you see, in reality, is that there is a constant mixing of populations when average populations move from place A to place B. During those migrations, people have sex and have babies. That is the real story of human biodiversity, rather than the creationist view of humans, which talks about people moving out of Eden, as described in the book of Genesis.
So family trees are less linear than we think?
We tend to think of our family trees as being these neat branching structures with these nice narratives, which satisfy our desire to understand where we come from. But such stories only tell a tiny fraction of what the total sum of our ancestry actually is.
Interview by J. P. O’Malley
