“In 1927, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., delivered the Supreme Court's decision upholding the Virginia sterilization law in Buck v. Bell. Carrie Buck, a young mother with a child of allegedly feeble mind, had been sterilized under the law after scoring a mental age of nine on the Stanford-Binet [test of general intelligence]. Carrie Buck's mother, then fifty-two, had tested at mental age seven. Holmes wrote, in one of the most famous and chilling statements of our century: 'We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength fo the state for these lesser sacrifices... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” --SJGould, The Mismeasure of Man, 1981 |
How had we come to such a state, when the highest court in America could not only defend the state-forced sterilization of a citizen, but could do so with such outrage?
And in our own time, sufficient concern is raised about the theory of Evolution, and only this theory, that some find it a holy war to defeat it's inclusion in public education. How has Darwin's simple little theory so threatened all that is right and good in America?
This has been an interesting little excursion into history for me, a subject I confess is not one of my strong points. I've found the story to have been remarkably persistent, and fascinating in the various ways in which ideas continue to return to the surface, like some sort of mental indigestion of our civilization. Please bear with me as I take you on a little tour.
Scala Natura
Prior to Darwin, indeed, since the dawn of philosophy, folks have “recognized” that people appear to be somewhat higher than the apes, and a bit lower than the angels. Indeed, it is hard to look on a slug, say, and consider that animal to be the product of every bit as long a process of evolution as ourselves.
Without a complete listing of the genome of many creatures to lead us, it is easy to rank just the living organisms on a grand scale or ladder from pond scum at the bottom to our exalted selves near the top. Creationists will refer to this as the “from goo to you” theory. I say near the top of the ladder, as it was clear that we weren't the perfect pinnacle of Creation by any means. The top of the scale was reserved for the gods themselves, or later simply God the Creator.
In fact, this heirarchy from nothingness through imperfect creatures on Earth to heavenly perfection was invoked as a proof of the existence of God himself [sic] by Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz in the 17th century.
There is great comfort to be found in this scheme, whether or not one feels the need for a proof of God. “God's in his Heaven, all's well with the world.” It is a very conservative statement, and room may be found to rank people, from serf to noble to ecclesiastic to the Queen herself, just a fraction there beneath God's foot.
Laissez-faire Economics and Biology
Capitalism and America had their births in the same year. Adam Smith's little book On the Wealth of Nations might have been overshadowed for a bit on this side of the Atlantic by purely local events in the years following 1776, but his understanding of competition among small enterprises of roughly equal means was, as good insights often prove, to be inspiring to philosophers well outside the realm of economics or even sociology.
Add to Smith's theories a few decades of industrial development, and British thinkers, particularly, we ready to apply these concepts to other fields. Darwin wasn't the only one thinking of evolutionary implications in the early to mid 1800s, but his publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 was to provide the rich theoretical framework for how evolution might progress. Indeed, Natural Selection (the true name of Darwin's theory) remains the fundamental mechanism recognized to have driven the evolution of organisms through Earth's history. Non-Darwinian mechanisms exist, but their influence has been lesser and more contingent in their effects.
(It is telling that the Intelligent Design contingent only seem to have quibbles with the Theory of Evolution, and not the equally contentious theories of Gravity, General Relativity, or Quantum Theory. Perhaps they don't really understand the science?)
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer was a contemporary of Darwin, but was far more interested in social theory and psychology than Darwin. That did not keep Spencer from independently hatching a related theory of “social evolution,” if you will. His first statement of “the Development Hypothesis” was published in 1852, with the larger exposition coming in 1862 with The First Principals. It was Spencer who coined the phrase, “survival of the fittest.” And it was Spencer's writings regarding nations and races that could be most easily bent to other purposes.
Quoting now a brief example, “Political economists have made familiar to all, the evolution which, beginning with a tribe whose members severally preform the same actions each for himself, ends with a civilized community whose members severally perform different actions for each other; and they have further explained the evolution through which the solitary producer of any one commodity, is transformed into a combination of producers who united under a master, take separate parts in the manufacture of such commodity. ... So that beginning with a barbarous tribe, almost if not quite homogeneous in the functions of its members, the progress has been, and still is, towards an economic aggregation of the whole human race, growing ever more heterogeneous in prospect of the separate functions assumed by separate nations...”
Spencer identified a “stern discipline” in nature, where predators cull populations of inferior individuals. He believed that society, too, ought to “excrete” its unworthy members.
Karl Marx also found rich insight in Darwin's work, going so far as to offer to dedicate Das Kapital to the scientist (Darwin declined the honor). Socialists to follow concluded that by eliminating internal competition, by population control, eugenics, and state ownership of capital, one could create a more united community better able to compete with other races and states.
Most unfortunate to our ears are those interpretations, Darwin's included, ranking hominoids from ape right on through African, Oriental, Jew to White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. This reanimation of the Scala Natura culminated in the publication in 1911 of Friedrich von Bernhardi's book, Germany and the Next War, a little diatribe sufficient to motivate the rise of Nordic Racism and not one but two World Wars.
Eugenics
Back in 1869, Sir Francis Galton with his book Hereditary Genius began a series of works which laid the foundations for the eugenics movement. It's a natural combination of social (mis)applications of Darwinism and the technocratic desire to make things better.
Natural selection may be succinctly described as the differential reproduction of populations by virtue of favorable inherited traits. What is one to do when one notices that highly-educated Anglo-Saxon Protestants don't reproduce with the same lavish vigor of other groups? Horrors! Darwin himself worried that “the scum” of society were so prolific, and expressed deep concern about the future of civilization because natural selection had ceased to operate.
By the early decades of the twentieth century, eugenics societies were being formed in Great Britian and the United States with the aim to improve the race, much as farmers regularly work to improve their herds. H.G Wells stated it with usual clarity, “It seemed to me that to discourage the multiplication of people below a certain standard, and to encourage the multiplication of exceptionally superior people, was the only real and permanent way of mending the ills of the world.” Julian Huxley described eugenics as “of all outlets for altruism, that which is most comprehensive, and of longest range.”
Well, it is easy for all right-minded people to identify the “exceptionally superior,” but how to set the “certain standard” for our lower cutoff point? Fortunately, the statisticians and biometricians were working on this front.
Intelligence Quotient
The mathematical among us have long had an interest and desire to quantify the differences between human beings. From this vine has come such fruits as the Guinness Book of World Records, the entire sub-species of sports statisticians, phrenology, palmistry, and the unusual spectacle of an Ontario scholar quizzing random shoppers in his local mall about the size of their penis.
The earliest attempts in distinguishing behavioural and mental characteristics by way of physical measurements were from the criminology community. In hindsight, much of this early work was tainted if not entirely informed by prejudicial opinions regarding race. To their credit, it was in an attempt to eliminate such biases that the early intelligence tests were constructed and means of standardizing the results were pursued. The subsequent debate reveals how difficult that goal is to achieve.
Alfred Binet, a name perhaps familiar to many of us conjoined with that of Stanford University, laid the groundwork for standardized intelligence testing beginning in 1909. By 1917, the US Army found it had a great need to take in thousands of recruits and quickly determine for what they might be best suited, particularly to identify the best officer candidates among their ranks. The tests used were known as the Army Alpha and Army Beta series. A great mass of data was collected in a short period of time, and it has been reanalyzed, misanalyzed, and debated ever since.
Before I leave eugenics altogether, I should mention some milestones in that story since the First World War. In 1924, Congress passed the Immigration Restriction Act, which in an attempt to preserve the favorable characters of Western European stock most in danger of dilution, fixed national quotas of annual immigration at 2% of a nation's representation in the US population in the 1890 census. Why the 1890 census, and not later years? Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were relatively rare until around 1895. This act effectively kept many Jews of eastern and southern European residence from emigrating to the United States in the 1930s.
And in 1927, Carrie Buck was sterilized following the decision by the Supreme Court. In 1928, her sister Doris was likewise treated by the state. Virginia did not stop forced sterilizations until 1972 of the feebleminded and antisocial, including “unwed mothers, prostitutes, petty criminals and children with disciplinary problems.”
The Great Depression largely took the wind out of the sails of the eugenics movement. It became too hard to blame the situation of the poor and hungry on their bad genetic heritage, and new compassion and altruistic measures became for a while a part of our political and social structure. It has been only recently that the population control aspects of eugenics and the application of intelligence testing as a means of identifying the less-deserving individuals have come again to the political foreground.
In 1979, for a moment, Arthur Jensen's Bias in Mental Testing attempted to establish a dialog on racial differences in innate mental capacities. The furor died relatively quickly, but was revived in 1994 with the publication of The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray.
We do not have the time in this discussion to completely discuss the flaws in this latter work, ranging from the dubious nature of the agency funding much of this work, or the statistical assumptions and analyses which may have been in error. And an entire discussion could focus on the inherent cultural biases in the standardized tests themselves, and the great lengths to which folks like the Educational Testing Service has gone to reduce that bias (arguably, much work remains to be done on this score).
Darwinism
My background is in evolutionary biology and paleontology, so I am best qualified to analyze this work from that viewpoint. Speaking now from that background, some points need be made:
No mechanism has been reliably identified by which natural selection can operate on groups of individuals. The closest one can come is the limited selection mechanism at work in altruism, where my sacrifice to save my brother's children is rewarded in as far as those children share roughly one-quarter of my genes with me. To the extent that some of those genes affect my readiness to display such altruism, the trait will survive selection to be perpetuated with their descendants.
The range of genetic variation in the human species is large.
The range of variation within human subgroups is nearly as large as that for the species as a whole.
The range of variation within human subgroups is greater than the differences that might separate those subgroups.
There is in every instance a continuous gradation in character from one subgroup to another. As we mix and mingle, there is no point at which one can draw the line between groups. In the days of American slavery, only good documentation could identify those of sufficiently mixed ancestry as slaves.
In short, there is no biological justification for dividing Homo sapiens below the species level. Race is not a biological concept.
This is not to say that differences cannot be identified, but these differences are not consistent with well-defined groups as a taxonomist, one trained in biological classification, would recognize them.
If we succeed in unleashing the nuclear holocaust, and a tribe of natives in remote Amazonia were all that remained of our species, 97% of our total genetic heritage will have been preserved.
Timeline
- 322 BCE Aristotle introduces the concept of the Great Chain of Being.
- 1640 Descartes, 1663 Spinoza, and 1680 Leibniz rely on this concept of progressive perfection as sufficient proof of the existence of God.
- 1776 Adam Smith publishes On the Wealth of Nations
- 1857 Herbert Spencer begins publishing sociologic / economic works on Progress and Social Evolution. He was to be greatly influenced by his later reading of Darwin.
- 1859 Darwin publishes first edition of On the Origin of Species
- 1860 Karl Marx, in a letter to Frederich Engels, cites Darwin's tome as “the book which contains the basis in natural history for our views.” Marx was later to attempt to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, but the latter declined the honor.
- 1872 Walter Bagehot publishes Physics and Politics, perhaps the first clear statement that nations “evolved” from intergroup struggles.
- 1869 Sir Francis Galton begins (Hereditary Genius) a series of works laying the foundations for the Eugenics movement.
- 1909 Alfred Binet lays the foundations for standardized intelligence testing.
- 1911 Friedrich von Bernhardi fashioned an evolutionary argument for Germany and the Next War. This interpretation was sufficient to drive not one but two great wars.
- 1917 The great Army Alpha and Beta intelligence tests are administered to a wide group of recruits. The data so collected will be misanalized for years.
- 1924 Immigration Restriction Act. fixed new immigrants at quotas of 2% of those nations' representation in the 1890 census. Why 1890? Southern and Eastern Europeans didn't begin to emigrate to this country until after that date.
- 1927 Carrie Buck is sterilized by the state of Virginia, on account of being feebleminded.
- 1928 Carrie's sister Doris is also sterilized.
- 1930s Eugenics movement largely ran out of steam with the Great Depression.
- 1972 Virginia stops involuntary sterilization of the feebleminded and antisocial.
- 1979 Arthur Jensen's Bias in Mental Testing attempts to make the case for racial differences in intelligence quotient.
- 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray publish The Bell Curve
Copyright ©2002 by Calvin J. Frye