Eugenics & The Pure Race

Remember that movie Gattaca? The film presents a vision of a society where potential children are selected through preimplantation genetic diagnosis to ensure they possess the best hereditary traits of their parents. Do you know what Eugenics is? It is the "applied science or the biosocial movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population." Eugenics was widely popular in the early decades of the 20th century, but has fallen into disfavor after having become associated with Nazi Germany and with the discovery of molecular evolution. Since the postwar period, both the public and the scientific communities have associated eugenics with Nazi abuses, such as enforced racial hygiene, human experimentation, and the extermination of "undesired" population groups, a form of medical ethnic cleansing. However, developments in genetic, gnomic, and reproductive technologies at the end of the 20th century have raised many new questions and concerns about the meaning of eugenics and its ethical and moral status in the modern era. Eugenics is practiced around the world by governments, and influential individuals, foundations, and religious institutions. It's advocates regarded it as a social philosophy for the improvement of human hereditary traits through the promotion of a higher reproduction of people with certain traits and the reduction of reproduction of other people with certain traits they deemed unworthy. The worldwide Eugenics movement gained strength in the U.S. at the end of the 1890s, when theories of selective breeding espoused by British anthropologist Francis Galton and his protégé Karl Pearson, gained currency. Connecticut was the first of many states to pass marriage laws with eugenic provisions, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded" from marrying. The noted American biologist, Charles Davenport, became the director of biological research at a station in Cold Spring Harbor in New York in 1898. Six years later the Carnegie Institute provided the funding for Davenport to create the Station for Experimental Evolution. Then, in 1910, Davenport and Harry H. Laughlin took advantage of their positions at the Eugenics Record Office to promote eugenics. The ERO concluded after years of gathering data on families that the poor were the main source of the "unfit." Davenport and other highly regarded eugenicists such as psychologist Henry H. Goddard and conservationist Madison Grant started a campaign to address the problem of the "unfit." Goddard, using data based on his Kallikak family research, lobbied for segregation, while Davenport preferred immigration restriction and sterilization as primary methods. Grant, the most extreme of the three, agreed with both of his colleagues, and even considered extermination as a possible solution. Madison Grant, a lawyer, created the "racialist movement" in America advocating the extermination of "undesirables" and certain "race types" from the human gene pool. He played a critical role in restrictive U.S. immigration policy and anti-miscegenation laws. His work provided the justification for Nazi policies of forced sterilization and euthanasia. In 1926, the American Association of Physical Anthropology and the National Research Council organized a Committee on the Negro, which focused on the anatomy of blacks and reflected the racism of the time. Among those appointed to the Committee on the Negro were Hrdlicka, Earnest Hooton and eugenist Charles Davenport. In 1927 the committee endorsed a comparison of African babies with young apes. Ten years later the group published findings in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology to "prove that the negro race is phylogenetically a closer approach to primitive man than the white race." In the late nineteenth century, John Wesley Powell led the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution, which dominated the field of anthropology in the U.S. at the time. Powell and his curator for ethnology, Otis T. Mason, were proponents of Lewis Morgan’s theory of cultural evolution—the idea that the social progress of a culture is inextricably linked to technological progress. Franz Boas, often considered the father of American anthropology, opposed Morgan’s theory and introduced new ideas about the evolution of cultures, as well as organization and classification of artifacts. By the 1930s, hereditarianism—the theory that heredity was the basis for differences in intelligence and behavior—began to fall out of favor. To counter the rise of Nazism and its racist ideologies, scientists critical of the use of race to justify oppression and discrimination published a number of important works. We Europeans: A Survey of "Racial" Problems (1935) by Julian Huxley and A.C. Haddon, sought to show that science offered a very limited definition of race. Another work during this period, The Races of Mankind by Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, argued that though there were some racial differences, they were primarily superficial, and did not justify racial prejudice. The hereditarian theory was further discredited when Boas showed significant increases in cranial size in the U.S. from one generation to the next, undermining the notion that genetics and race determined intelligence. Beginning in the 1900s, scientists began to develop different methods for measuring intelligence. These tests were used often to justify racial and ethnic discrimination. The results of these intelligence tests were influential in shaping U.S. immigration policy that limited immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and in justifying race-based segregation in public education, and U.S. conscription during World War I. Previously, the scientific debate centered largely on perceived differences in racial intelligence based on cranial size. French psychologist Alfred Binet is credited with creating the the first modern intelligence test, the Binet-Simon intelligence scale, in 1905. Binet's objective in developing the test was to identify students who needed special help in school. However, Binet recognized the limitations of the test in understanding cognition and intellect; he did not intend that the test be used as a measurement of intelligence. Binet and his colleague Theodore Simon published revisions of the intelligence scale in 1908 and 1911. Lewis M. Terman of Stanford University, a prominent eugenist and member of the Human Betterment Foundation, published his refinement of the Binet-Simon scale in 1916. Terman incorporated German psychologist William Stern's concept that mental age/chronological age times 100 would quantify intelligence, thus creating the intelligence quotient or IQ. Terman's test, which he renamed the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, formed the basis for one of the modern intelligence tests, although IQ is calculated differently today.

Resources:

• Race - Are we so different?
• Gattaca - Wikipedia