Eugenics will never work – thankfully

In his most recent book, How to Argue With a Racist, the geneticist Adam Rutherford set out a lucid account of how the basis for many widely held and apparently commonsensical ideas about race are pseudoscientific; and he lightly sketched, along the way, the historical context in which they arose and the ideological prejudices that nourished them. We might have some half-baked ideas about how evolution works — and have unthinkingly accepted racial categories invented by 18th-century imperialists — but, he assured us in perhaps the standout line of the book, the underlying genetics is ‘wickedly complicated’.

Control is a companion piece to that one. It again looks at the way in which ideological and political ideas co-opt science, or a half-baked understanding of it. These days, thanks to the Nazis, ‘eugenics’ is so dirty a word that it tends to blight anything it touches; and to that end it’s applied in newspaper scare stories to a whole range of interventions and ideas. Anything involving experimentation with embryos or stem cells will tend to ‘raise the shadow of eugenics’ — and give the reader a pleasant little shudder of horror.

It was not always so. In the early part of the 20th century eugenics was seen by many eminent people across the political spectrum as a definite, even an obvious, good. Selective breeding — to be nudged along, perhaps, by discouraging those deemed to have undesirable characteristics from having babies — could surely increase the intelligence, health and prosperity of the mass of humanity. It was not a new idea: Plato’s Republic imagined an overclass of the bright and the beautiful making bright and beautiful babies; the Spartans, at least apocryphally, liked to drop weedy infants off cliffs. With the arrival of Mendelian and Darwinian ideas about heredity and the mechanisms of heredity, though, this old impulse gained a new respectability.