Social Biology Today - DNA and the Race

When Galton launched the eugenics movement, he used one word to refer to the science (or pseudo-science) and also to policies based on that science, and also to a new comprehensive world view that could function as a new religion. Today, though, the movement is larger and more complicated. The theoretical work gets done in one place, and the applications are attempted elsewhere. The "science" of eugenics is called social biology or sociobiology.

After World War II, the word eugenics fell into disrepute. Major General Frederick Osborn commented wryly that genetic counseling, or "heredity clinics," were "the first eugenic proposals that have been adopted in a practical form and accepted by the public." They were accepted, but not at face value: "The word eugenics is not associated with them." In fact, he stated bluntly, "Eugenic goals are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics." The word had to go.

The journals of the eugenics societies shifted first. In 1968, the American eugenics journal switched from the Eugenics Quarterly to Social Biology. The same year, the English journal switched from Eugenics Review to the Journal of Biosocial Science. Then the societies changed their own names. In 1973, the American Eugenics Society was renamed the Society for the Study of Social Biology. And in England in 1989, the Eugenics Society became the Galton Institute.

The shift to social biology or sociobiology was supposed to get rid of any taint of Nazi connections. But it is not clear that the new labels could do the job, because they are in fact old labels.

In 1904, at the beginning of the German eugenics movement, Dr. Alfred Ploetz founded a journal called the Archiv f¸r Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie, or the Archive for Racial and Social Biology. The following year, he and Dr. Ernst R¸din founded a German eugenics society to carry on the same work as the journal, called the "Gesellschaft f¸r Rassenhygiene" or "Society for Racial Hygiene." Later they added a word "Gesellschaft f¸r Rassenhygiene (Eugenik)" or "Society for Racial Hygiene (Eugenics)." So the first phrase that the Germans used for eugenics was "social biology." The various phrases — race biology, social biology, racial hygiene, eugenics — certainly have slightly different connotations, but they were used to refer to the same collection of ideas. To get away from Hitler, the eugenics movement went back to Ploetz and R¸din.

E. O. Wilson: Harvard's Sociobiologist

A key sociobiology theorist, and certainly one of the most intellectually attractive, is Edward O. Wilson, who taught at Harvard for a generation. His writing and speaking were sophisticated, witty and challenging, and his classes were always well attended. He insisted that he was not a eugenicist, although it is not clear what he meant by that, except that he did not want to be associated with Hitler. He may also have been referring to a distinction from the earliest days of the eugenics movement, between science and policy. Galton had said that eugenics was a science that led to policy, and could become a religion. Wilson wanted his work to be considered science, although he knew well that his ideas had political implications. Further, he was explicit about the theological implications.

Wilson has written many books and articles, including fascinating tales about ants. In 1991, a book he had written (coauthored with Bert H–lldobler) entitled simply The Ants won a Pulitzer Prize. Wilson's exploration of the world of ants is intriguing and delightful, full of surprises. For example, ants (and wasps and bees) have a peculiar method of determining the sex of their offspring, and are able to produce a caste whose task is to rear their sisters. "Sterile castes engaged in rearing siblings are the essential feature of social organization in the insects," Wilson writes. "The societies of wasps, bees, and ants have proved so successful that they dominate and alter most of the land habitats of the Earth. In the forests of Brazil, their assembled forces constitute more than 20 percent of the weight of all land animals, including nematode worms, toucans, and jaguars."

You probably didn't know that. But if you did know it, you learned it from Wilson.

Wilson, like Darwin, amassed vast quantities of new information, but — again like Darwin — did not stop with the data. He offers an array of intellectual challenges, including a very effective assault on individuality. An individual ant is an incomprehensible bit of matter, lost in the cosmos, like a strand of hair or a fingernail clipping. To understand the ant, you must understand the colony. Is the same true of humans?

Wilson put his thoughts clearly, stating that the individual is just DNA's way of replicating itself from one generation to the next. The remark sounds like a joke, but it is not. Wilson is serious in his conviction that the things that matter are DNA and the race, not the individual.

Wilson's ideas are challenging partly because he was candid about the problems he was causing, and met criticisms head on, patiently. He was aware that ideas like his had been used (or abused) to justify genocide, and he was careful to "affirm human freedom and dignity."

In his book On Human Nature, Wilson discusses how to be proud even if you accept his beliefs. He wanted to explore the differences between Asians, Europeans and Africans (he hesitated to call them different "races"). Further, he wanted to explore whether there are any "racial" differences in behavior. For example, Navaho children are often described as relatively passive, unlike playful and easily aroused European children. 'It has been conventional," writes Wilson, "to ascribe the passivity of Navaho children to the practice of cradleboarding, a device that holds the infant tightly in place on the mother's back." But which is cause and which is effect? Does the practice of cradleboarding make Navaho children somewhat passive, or did the passivity of Navaho children make cradleboarding possible for them? Wilson was keenly aware that questions like this can cause huge problems very quickly.

It may be possible to understand cradleboards without picking a huge fight. But once you start exploring the genetic predisposition to various forms of behavior, it is difficult to fend off swarms of racists. In 1995, J. Philippe Rushton published Race, Evolution, and Behavior. He asserted that blacks have small brains, large genitals and tendency to commit rape. Transaction Publishers, a respectable publishing house, put out the book, and it was discussed soberly. Wilson would not have done that; he was aware that he was dealing with a topic that was "emotionally explosive and politically dangerous."

Still, he was insistent that there are differences among humans and that some of the different ways that people act are based on physical and mental properties that they inherited. To understand modern eugenics, you have to see and understand Wilson's sensitivity:

Given that humankind is a biological species, it should come as no shock to find that populations are to some extent genetically diverse in the physical and mental properties underlying social behavior. A discovery of this nature does not vitiate the ideals of Western civilization. We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm human freedom and dignity. The sociologist Marvin Bressler has expressed this idea with precision: "An ideology that tacitly appeals to biological equality as a condition for human emancipation corrupts the idea of freedom. Moreover, it encourages decent men to tremble at the prospect of 'inconvenient' findings that may emerge in future scientific research. This unseemly anti-intellectualism is doubly degrading because it is probably unnecessary."

I will go further and suggest that hope and pride and not despair are the ultimate legacy of genetic diversity, because we are a single species, not two or more, one great breeding system through which genes flow and mix in each generation. Because of that flux, mankind viewed over many generations shares a single human nature within which relatively minor hereditary influences recycle through ever changing patterns, between the sexes and across families and entire populations. To understand the enormous significance of this biological unity, imagine our moral distress if australopithecine man-apes had survived to the present time, halfway in intelligence between chimpanzees and human beings, forever genetically separated from both, evolving just behind us in language and the higher faculties of reason. What would be our obligation to them? What would the theologians say — or the Marxists, who might see in them the ultimate form of an oppressed class? Should we divide the world, guide their mental evolution to the human level, and establish a two-species dominion based on a treaty of intellectual and technological parity? Should we make certain they rose no higher? But even worse, imagine our predicament if we coexisted with a mentally superior human species, say Homo superbus, who regarded us, the minor sibling species Homo sapiens, as the moral problem.

If the brain is a machine of ten billion nerve cells and the mind can somehow be explained as the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions, boundaries limit the human prospect — we are biological and our souls cannot fly free. If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, [then] genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species.

Wilson's belief that he can find the conscience in the limbic system is a detail. He believes that biology and sociobiology can (and soon will) explain human nature. "Biology is the key to human nature," he writes, "and social scientists cannot afford to ignore its rapidly tightening principles."

Wilson dodges the nature-nurture debate, and affirms that both genes and the environment shape a person. In a chapter on "Development," he writes: "The newly fertilized egg, a corpuscle one two-hundredth of an inch in diameter, is not a human being. It is a set of instructions sent floating into the cavity of the womb. ... In nine months a human being has been created. Functionally it is a digestive tube surrounded by sheaths of muscle and a skin. ... The newborn infant is now seen to be wired with awesome precision. ... This marvelous robot is launched into the world under the care of its parents. Its rapidly accumulating experience will soon transform it into an independently thinking and feeling individual." It is noteworthy that in his description of the individual, a person emerges some time after birth.

It is a curiosity of history that Wilson has been dead set against being labeled a eugenicist. But whatever label the polite reader applies to him, it is important to understand his thinking. He is a serious scientific materialist, who believes that science — biology following Darwin in particular — explains humanity. He has an impact through his books and articles, but also in his classes, teaching some of the brightest students in the country for decades.

Mankind Quarterly: White Collar White Supremacy

The eugenics movement today is not all as urbane and polished as Wilson. There are still some theorists ready to explain white supremacy. The Pioneer Fund, run by Harry Laughlin and then by Major General Frederick Osborn, has continued its work. And in 1960, English eugenicists launched a new journal, Mankind Quarterly.

The editor was R. Gayre of Gayre. There were two associate editors: Professor Henry E. Garrett and Professor R. Ruggles Gates.

Gates had been married to Marie Stopes, whose career in England was similar to that of Margaret Sanger in the United States. That is, Stopes was committed to eugenics, and built an alliance with feminists to promote birth control. Before they parted ways, Gates had helped Stopes to launch the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress.

The lead article in the inaugural issue of Mankind Quarterly was part one of "World Population," by Sir Charles Galton Darwin. He was a grandson of the renowned biologist for whom he was named. (Numerous Darwins had promoted the work started by Charles Darwin and Francis Galton; the Eugenics Society membership list includes a bewildering array of Darwin cousins.) The article did not make any exciting new points; it was classical Malthusian doctrine that the population will soon outstrip food, unless we take preventive action now.

One of the most important ideas in the journal was stated explicitly in a book review. Mankind Quarterly was launched at a time when there was a great deal of discussion about integrating schools, ending a practice of running separate (but theoretically equal) schools for blacks and whites. Gayre of Gayre and Gates wrote a review together (of Race and Reason, by Carleton Putnam), in which they said that "separate schools are better for both races." They complained that "American anthropologists were responsible for introducing equalitarianism into anthropology, ignoring the hereditary differences between races . . . until the uninstructed public were gradually misled." Then they made a distinction: "Equality of opportunity, which everyone supports was replaced by a doctrine of social and genetic equality, which is something different."

This is a false dichotomy, presenting two possibilities as the only choices. In the French Revolution, the slogan for which people fought was "libertÈ, ÈgalitÈ, fraternitÈ," or "liberty, equality and brotherhood." When they spoke of equality, they were rejecting the concept of aristocracy, the idea that some people are better than others because they were born better, and deserve more simply because they were born into better families. As a practical matter, you can work toward a more egalitarian society by providing equal opportunity. But the French revolution was not about job applications; it was a fierce and bloody rejection of arrogance.

Equality can be expressed in theological terms: we were created by one God, we are children of one Father. Our dignity is based on God's love for us, not on our height, weight, IQ or accomplishments. But as the French showed, theology is not necessary to grasp the idea firmly. And many grubby street urchins can get to the heart of the matter in a few seconds: "Do you think that you're better than me, just because you're smarter?"

White supremacists reject the idea of equality as it is understood by most people. In Mankind Quarterly, the concept is rejected very cleverly: the editors embrace equal opportunity and make fun of equal endowment — and simply overlook equal dignity.

The Bell Curve: Ponderous Update of Eugenics Theory

Harvard provided a platform for updating eugenics, now called sociobiology. Harvard was also home for Professor Richard Herrnstein, who amassed data to update eugenics research in the social sciences. In 1994, Herrnstein and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Charles Murray, published a 845-page volume entitled The Bell Curve, exploring links between intelligence and other aspects of human life.

The subtitle of The Bell Curve is Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Murray and Herrnstein argued that there is a "cognitive elite," a class of people with above-average intelligence, who have power and influence. When the book came out, there was a national outcry, focusing on chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability." The chapter is about data which indicates measurable differences in intelligence among blacks, whites and Asians. They summarize the data in statistical terms: "this means that the average white person tests higher than about 84 percent of the population of blacks and that the average black person tests higher than about 16 percent of the population of whites."

The chapter was troubling, to put it mildly. However, the national debate about racism in chapter 13 overlooked a much larger matter. The entire book, from the beginning to the end, is eugenics theory. Racism is a grave evil, with a long and sordid history in the United States. But today, it is a single piece of a larger whole, called eugenics.

The conclusion of the book includes an assault on the Declaration of Independence. The authors discuss different ideas about equality, but eventually slip into the same false dichotomy that was evident in Mankind Quarterly: equal opportunity versus equal endowment. They embrace the first, and reject the second. Their language is a little confusing, because they talk about dignity: "At the heart of our thought is the quest for human dignity." But in their view, the role of the government, the measure of success, "is to permit people to live lives of dignity — not to give them dignity, for that is not in any government's power, but to make it accessible to all." The word they use here is dignity, but the idea is equal opportunity.

With regard to endowments, they are straightforward: "Inequality of endowments, including intelligence, is a reality. . . . It is time for America once again to try living with inequality."

Murray and Herrnstein made a serious effort to find a way to assert the intrinsic value of a human being. They chose to talk about "letting people find valued places in society." It is interesting that intelligent writers trying to express a fundamental aspect of human life ended up using their own new and idiosyncratic language. But their effort, however sincere and inventive, had serious flaws. They wrote:

The broadest goal is a society in which people throughout the functional range of intelligence can find, and feel that they have found, a valued place for themselves. For "valued place," we offer a pragmatic definition: You occupy a valued place if other people would miss you if you were gone. The fact that you would be missed means that you were valued.

In the concluding chapter of the book, the authors write about "Dealing with Demography." Like Malthus, they urge an end to welfare programs that make it easier for the poor to scrape along having more and more babies. In the same paragraph, as part of the same thought, they repeat Sanger's sugar-coated eugenics proposal: "The other generic recommendation, as close to harmless as any government program we can imagine, is to make it easy for women to make good on their prior decision not to get pregnant by making available birth control mechanisms that are increasingly flexible, foolproof, inexpensive, and safe." In the same section, they urge a shift in immigration laws, toward a system that emphasizes "competency."

The book has original thought, but most of it is a collection of research done by other social scientists in many fields over decades. And the experts who are quoted in the book are, overwhelmingly, members of the Eugenics Society (in England) or the American Eugenics Society. The book is a collection of eugenics research. The authors are forthright about the fact that they are dealing with controversial topics, but they shy away from the term eugenics. After summarizing a century of debate over intelligence tests, beginning with Darwin and Galton, they write: "Given these different ways of understanding intelligence, you will naturally ask where our sympathies lie and how they shape this book." The answer they give is almost honest: "We will be drawing most heavily from the classical tradition." They meant the tradition of eugenics, carried forward by members of eugenics societies.

One Faith, Many Works

The theories expounded by E. O. Wilson, by Mankind Quarterly and in The Bell Curve are very different from each other. Wilson spoke of insights from biology and from social biology. R. Gayre of Gayre and friends held fast to the Nordic myths. Murray and Herrnstein amassed a heavy tome of data from social scientists (overwhelmingly, members of eugenics societies). But they all took it for granted that it is possible to evaluate humans — not just to check height and weight, but to get at the essential quality of a human being and measure that. They all took it for granted that intelligence is the key quality of humanity, and that intelligence can be charted, displaying how up along the evolutionary scale a particular person has climbed. They all took it for granted that improving IQ scores is the way to improve the human race. And they all took it for granted that progress toward an improved human species, by increasing intelligence from one generation to the next, is the central goal of the human race.

Whatever these men may have thought of the label eugenics, they all held a coherent body of beliefs and goals that is hard to distinguish in any significant way from the views of Francis Galton.

1. What is social biology? During the Nazi era, what was the German name for eugenics?
2. Identify E. O. Wilson. Describe his work on ants and other living things briefly.
3. Identify Mankind Quarterly, and explain the use of the word equality.
4. Identify The Bell Curve, and describe its comment on the Declaration of Independence.
5. Is there a single, unified view of humanity shared by all eugenicists today?

Discuss: The word "dignity" means different things to different people. Give one definition of the word, and describe its importance in the teaching of at least one religious community.

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