1859-PRESENT
EUGENICS AND SCIENCE
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Overview | Eugenics and Science (1859-Present)
As you scroll through this timeline, you’ll learn about some of the key events in the development of eugenics in Britain and the U.S., specifically in the scientific and academic community. Eugenics is the effort to control fertility and reproduction in order to increase the numbers of the “fit” and to decrease those of the “unfit”. The concept of eugenics came from Britain, and later the first eugenics societies emerged in Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. By the turn of the 20th century eugenics had attracted some of the most important scientific figures of the time. The rise of eugenics coincided with a rise in popularity of Darwin’s theories of evolution by natural selection and Mendel’s laws of genetic inheritance. Equally significant was the work of German biologist August Weismann, whose theory of the “germ plasm” argued that hereditary characteristics were physio-chemically fixed and not subject to modification by environment. Eugenicists were influenced greatly by these theories as they applied a deeply flawed and prejudicial understanding of the theories to support their racist claims that certain “desirable” traits, like high intelligence or ability were inheritable and that undesirable “traits” such as “criminality” and “promiscuity”, and perhaps most importantly predispositions to various diseases (consumption, arthritis, cancer) were also subject to hereditary transmission from parents to children.
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1859 | Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by the means of natural selection had a profound impact on our understanding of the natural world and society. At the end of the 19th Century, sociologists like Herbert Spencer took Darwin’s theories and applied them to racist and prejudiced understandings of human social life. Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” which became one of the tenants of social Darwinism. Social Darwinism became particularly important in Britain, France and in the United States, where some leaders sought to enable government policies to allow the “fittest” to prosper and succeed, while ensuring the “masses” of the urban poor did not.
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1866 | Gregor Mendel's Laws of Inheritance
Through his pea experiments, Gregor Mendel discovered that certain traits, namely color, were either "dominant" or “recessive”, the combination of which determined how those traits were passed down to future generations. U.S. eugenicists in later years incorrectly applied the laws of Mendelian inheritance to humans as they argued for strict genetic links to the heritability of complex behavioral traits like intelligence as well as the hereditary predisposition to specific diseases. This became known as biological, or genetic determinism.
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1869 | Sir Francis Galton Publishes the Book: Hereditary Genius
Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, was a mathematician and statistician, and is most well-known as the father of eugenics. Galton believed he could apply his knowledge of mathematics and statistics to describe and predict how certain traits, like intelligence, were inherited from both the parents and distant relatives of an individual. Historians of science refer to this mathematical approach as the biometric school of inheritance. The Hereditary Genius was Galton’s first major work on touching on this belief.
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1883 | The Origins of Eugenics
Sir Francis Galton coined the term “eugenics”, which was derived by from the Greek word eugenes meaning “good in birth” or “good in stock”. The first mention of the term comes from an 1883 text written by Galton entitled Inquiries into Human Fertility and Its Development. Galton’s eugenic philosophy known as “positive eugenics”, or the belief that those of “superior” genetic stock should be encouraged to reproduce through direct payments and other incentives by the government. This is opposed to “negative eugenics” which is the belief that those deemed unfit should be prohibited from reproducing, often through sterilization, or through the isolation of specific individuals or groups in medical or psychiatric institutions.
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1900 | The Emergence of Mendelian Genetics
Mendel’s work was relatively unknown until 1900 when three botanists - Hugo DeVries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak – each independently verified his research. Two years later British biologist William Bateson coined the term “genetics” to describe the new field focusing on Mendel’s laws of inheritance. Additional important discoveries related to chromosomes were discovered by Walther Flemming in 1882, which led to the acceptance of the influence of Mendel's laws in the study of evolution and inheritance. The Mendelian approach to inheritance proved to be very influential for eugenicists, especially in the U.S. The most prominent U.S. eugenicist was Charles Davenport, who had been an early proponent of the biometric approach to inheritance, embraced the Mendelian approach and sought to apply it to the U.S. eugenics movement.
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1906 | American Breeders’ Association Establishes a Committee on Eugenics
The American Breeders’ Association (ABA) was established three years after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work as the first nationally organized association to study and promote genetics and breeding research in the U.S. The ABA created “the Committee on Eugenics” in 1906 to study eugenics at the request of Charles Davenport. The ABA’s Committee on Eugenics provided Davenport with a scientifically established forum to study his eugenic ideas of selective and restrictive breeding in humans.
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1910 | Eugenics Record Office Established at Cold Spring Harbor, NY
Through generous funding by a wealthy philanthropist Mrs. E. H. Harriman and the cereal magnate John Harvey Kellogg, Charles Davenport started the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor. The ERO was an extension of an experimental station Davenport started at Cold Spring Harbor in 1904. Initially, the purpose of this station was to study Mendelian inheritance patterns and breeding in animals. The newly established ERO was focused specifically on humans and eugenics. The ERO compiled prejudicial and flawed data on subjective traits such as feeblemindedness and criminality. The ERO’s attempts at educating the public about the value of eugenics included a nationally distributed publication, Eugenical News.
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1912 | The First International Eugenics Congress
The First International Eugenics Congress was held in London and organized by the British Eugenics Education Society. The event served as a forum to extol the virtues of eugenic policies and ideas, and to communicate the importance of eugenics to the general public. It was attended by over 400 individuals from across Europe, Britain, and the U.S. Notable attendees included Winston Churchill, Arthur Balfour, Alexander Graham Bell, and several well known Mendelian geneticists of the time.
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1921 | The Second International Eugenics Congress
The Second International Eugenics Congress was held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Attendees were from Europe, the U.S., and Central and South America. U.S. attendees played a prominent role by contributing the majority of the papers and exhibits presented at the Congress. Immigration was a major issue in U.S. politics and society at the time. U.S. eugenicists, like the ERO Director Harry Laughlin, believed European immigrants were “inferior” and their differential birthrates represented a threat to the "superior" Nordic races.
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1932 | The Third International Eugenics Congress
The third installment of the International Eugenics Congress was also the last. It was very sparsely attended compared to the previous two installments, with fewer than 100 delegates present at the academic meeting of the Congress. By the 1930s the eugenics movement had come under fire from several prominent scientists who were openly critical of the scientific merits of eugenics. There were critics within the eugenics community itself, sometimes referred to as reform eugenicists. They believed that mainline eugenicists like Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin didn’t sufficiently account for the effects of economics and environment in their eugenical philosophy. Among these reform eugenicists present at the Third Congress were Washington D.C. eugenicist/geneticist Robert Cook who presented a paper entitled Is Eugenics Half Baked? and future Nobel Laureate Hermann J. Muller who presented a paper entitled The Dominance of Economics Over Eugenics.
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1939 | Eugenics Record Office Closes
With the onset of WWII in 1939, eugenics continued to fall out of favor with both the public and the scientific community. Throughout the 1930s, the U.S. population began to learn of how scientists and politicians in Nazi Germany were advocating for and implementing eugenics policies, like forced sterilization, almost identical to those already in place in many states in the U.S. In fact, many historians of eugenics point out correctly that these policies provided a blueprint for Nazi scientists who were also looking to enact similar eugenics-minded policies domestically against Jews and other persecuted communities. As these horrific realities became more known, mainline eugenics became increasingly unpopular in the U.S.
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1940s | The Decline of Eugenics
Eugenics did not disappear after WWII. In the years following the war, many prominent eugenicists began to focus on other initiatives like population control and birth control. In fact, several organizations which are currently active in population studies and policy have historic ties to the eugenics movement. Organizations that had been affiliated with eugenics rebranded themselves, for example the American Breeder’s Association became the American Genetics Association. Though many eugenics academic courses remained in place for many years following WWII, eventually, universities began to phase them out. Forced sterilization laws remained on the books in states for many decades, with some not being repealed until the 1980s.
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1990s to the Present | Eugenics and Genomics
To this day, eugenics is an issue of concern to the scientific, and specifically the genetics and genomics, community. The 1994 publication of The Bell Curve led to criticism for arguing a genetic link exists between intelligence and race. In the 2000s, public comments made by former director of the Human Genome Project, James Watson, about IQ and race led to many denouncements of Watson in the global scientific community. More recently, innovations in gene-editing technology like CRISPR have led to concerns about designer babies. Though eugenics is nowhere near as popular as it was once was, concerns about the misuse of genetic information for nefarious purposes are an ever-present subject of debate.