What's wrong with eugenics?

Theory? Practice? Other?

Humans, like every species of animal, have always been picky about reproduction. Males seek the most attractive females. Females seek the most attractive males. At some point humans figured out that attractive parents tend to have attractive kids. What constituted attraction varied over time. In some societies, male cleverness could make up for lack of physical prowess. Where food might be in short supply, voluptuousness in females signaled efficiency at making the most of resources.

Social rules and norms supplemented individual choice. Kings had first selection of females, in some cases forming harems. “Droit de seigneur" was the French term for the right of a lord to deflower a bride before her wedding. How often it was exercised is hard to tell. But slave owners practiced something similar on their plantations. In modern times popular musicians and athletes have groupies.

Males weren't the only ones doing the selecting, although they tended to have a monopoly on force. Beauty allowed women to rise above their birth class. Cinderella had her counterpart in lots of cultures, continuing to My Fair Lady and Pretty Woman.

The system worked well enough for Homo sapiens to survive and eventually prosper. But it didn't work well enough for certain thinkers who came along after Darwin and concluded that evolution could use help. Actually, Darwin didn’t invent the idea that species might be improved by conscious decisions. Humans had been selectively breeding horses and dogs and wheat and corn for thousands of years. But Darwin gave the practice a scientific gloss. “Social Darwinists” applied the theory of natural selection to societies, contending that fitter societies rose to the top of the struggle among nations. What made them fitter? The very fact that they rose to the top. Imperialists with qualms about their treatment of subjugated peoples breathed easier knowing they were on the side of evolution.

Eugenics – the term was coined by Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin – proposed to employ Darwinism to make individuals, and not just societies, better. Intelligent and otherwise gifted people should be encouraged to have lots of children. Others should be discouraged or even forbidden. By this means the eugenics-practicing societies would come to consist of smart, beautiful people.

The idea caught on in most wealthy countries. In America it appealed to the improving types who called themselves progressives. The Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations funded eugenics research.

The eugenicists often spoke in terms of public health. At a time when science was beating back malaria, cholera and other diseases, eugenicists hoped to reduce heritable ailments by discouraging people who appeared prone to them from passing their genes to future generations.

Some of the eugenicists confined themselves to persuasion. Others employed coercion. The “feeble-minded” – a contemporary term – couldn’t be counted on to make judgments in the best interest of society, the eugenicists asserted. To be sure, curtailment of personal liberty was involved, but personal liberty was curbed when quarantines were imposed against contagious diseases, they said. Was this very different?

Yes, said critics. Two weeks in lockdown is very different from a lifetime of no children. Moreover, the eugenicists’ program grew over time. Some in America sounded alarms at rising immigration and said the strangers were diluting – or polluting – the American gene pool. If they couldn’t be kept out of the country, perhaps they could be discouraged from having so many children. Margaret Sanger, the mother of the American birth control movement, made this a central part of her contraception campaign.

But what destroyed the credibility of eugenics was the adoption of its language by the Nazis of Germany in their genocidal campaigns against Jews, Roma and others. After 1945, no respectable person wanted to be placed anywhere on the slippery slope that seemed to lead to the Holocaust.

Yet nitpickers asked whether eugenics had caused the Holocaust or merely been an excuse for what Hitler would have done anyway. Neither answer made eugenics look good, but the former was far more damning than the latter.

This mattered. A central impulse that gave rise to eugenics, namely the desire to make human lives better, hadn’t disappeared. As science advanced, prospective parents were offered tests to indicate the chances their children would develop particular diseases or disabilities. In America the parents were then allowed to make their own decisions about having kids. Most Americans were okay with this.

In other countries coercion was involved. China adopted a one-child policy for new families. Chinese culture traditionally valued boys more than girls. Ultrasound imaging and other tests allowed the identification of males and females several months before birth. The result was millions of sex-selective abortions of females.

Some eugenicists distinguished between positive eugenics and negative eugenics. By the second half of the 20th century, the latter, involving discouragement or forbidding of categories of births, was in irretrievable disrepute. In the 1990s the United Nations declared reproductive rights to be human rights.

Yet positive eugenics, the encouragement of certain births, was regularly practiced. Couples unable to conceive by ordinary means turned to in vitro fertilization and other novel methods. The result was a blessing to the millions of families for whom the methods worked.

Yet there was a selection bias. Assisted reproductive technology wasn’t cheap, and more kids were born to richer families this way than to poorer families.

The situation is only going to get more complicated. Genetic tests already do or soon will allow screening for any number of traits, positive and negative. Who can fault parents for wanting the best for their children? Yet the new technology will amplify the advantages already enjoyed by the rich.

Suppose that half of a society gets smarter generation by generation. Suppose the other half stays the same. Is the society as a whole better off for having the extra brain power? Or is it worse off for having greater inequality?

Is this an experiment you’re willing to try? If not, how would you stop it? And on what grounds?