The Wiki Man | 5 December 2009

I read Dennis Sewell’s article on the damaging influence of eugenics on the welfare state with interest and mostly agree with his views.

I read Dennis Sewell’s article on the damaging influence of eugenics on the welfare state with interest and mostly agree with his views. Even in my most right-wing moments, I don’t want to open my Spectator to find articles proposing a selective breeding programme (though, come to think of it, this may have been the idea behind the Spectator Editors’ Dinner — I left around 11, so never got the chance to find out).

All the same, his attack on eugenics, as with many anti-Darwin assaults, seems to focus on the evil done in the name of eugenics rather than the science itself. While it’s true that political scientism has had disastrous consequences, and that Darwin has had adherents every bit as nasty as Marx, that is no reason to decide that Darwinism must never colour our thinking. After all, we don’t refuse to use four-lane motorways just because they were first built under Mussolini.

Is it even right for Sewell to call eugenics a ‘pseudo-science’? Racehorse breeders would be surprised to hear this, as would the judges at Crufts. Will genetics influence policy? I hope not. But we should be conscious that many policies could have genetic effects. One geneticist has suggested the invention of the bicycle changed human evolution by promoting genetic diversity. If this is true, then it is conceivable that the expansion of university education, causing people to choose partners more cognitively similar than before, may reduce social mobility.

Already one effect may have arisen from people marrying their colleagues. There is evidence that certain industries have seen an increase in progeny diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.