Superior: The Fatal Return of Race Science. Angela Saini

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СКАЧАТЬ or moral grounds … I would like to apologise for the suffering of the victims of these crimes – the dead as well as the survivors – done in the name of science.’

      This came too late for justice, of course. Those involved had died already. What was remarkable was that it had taken so long to root out the facts, to even find the will to do it. Scientists complicit with the regime had been skilled at covering their tracks, evidently. But maybe it was also easier for their colleagues to pretend that fellow scientists couldn’t possibly have been active participants in murder and torture. Perhaps, they imagined, they were just bystanders, caught up in the mess while trying to get their work done.

      The truth – that it is perfectly possible for prominent scientists to be racist, to murder, to abuse both people and knowledge – doesn’t sit easily with the way we like to think about scientific research. We imagine that it’s above politics, that it’s a noble, rational and objective endeavour, untainted by feelings or prejudice. But if science is always so innocent, how is it that members of such a large and prestigious scientific organisation could have sold themselves to a murderous political regime as recently as the middle of the twentieth century?

      The answer is simple: science is always shaped by the time and the place in which it is carried out. It ultimately sits at the mercy of the personal political beliefs of those carrying it out. In the case of some Nazi scientists, particular experiments may have been perfectly accurate and rigorous. They may even have produced good science, if goodness is measured in data and not human life. Other times, researchers didn’t care about the truth or other people’s lives, choosing instead to give the illusion of intellectual weight to a morally bankrupt ideology because it suited them.

      Now, decades later, the horrors of the Second World War still have a warping effect on how we think about race science. Many of us choose to remember Nazi scientists like Otmar von Verschuer as some kind of uniquely evil exception, nothing like those who found themselves on the winning side of the war. The Holocaust and the twisted scientific rationale behind it are thought to belong to that time and place alone, purely the work of ‘the bad guys’. But there was one question that went unanswered after the investigations into the bloodstained history of the Max Planck Society: Were scientists in the rest of the world so blameless?

      To file away what happened during the war as aberrant, as something that could only have been done by the worst people under the worst circumstances, ignores the bigger truth. This was never a simple story of good versus evil. The well of scientific ideas from which Hitler and others in his regime drew their plans for ‘racial hygiene’, leading ultimately to genocide, didn’t originate in Germany alone. They had been steadily supplied for more than a century by race scientists from all over the world, supported by well-respected intellectuals, aristocrats, political leaders and women and men of wealth.

      Among the most influential of them all, as far as the Nazi regime was concerned, was a pair of statisticians working at 50 Gower Street, Bloomsbury – not in Germany, but in the famous old literary quarter of London.

      *

      ‘You have biologists who say there is no such thing as race, we need to get over it, forget it,’ Subhadra Das tells me in an angry whisper. ‘But then, if there is no such thing, why did you just say “race”? Where did that idea come from?’

      Das is a curator of the University College London Medical and Science Collections, moonlighting occasionally as a stand-up comedian. Her dark wit betrays a fury fed by the things she’s learned from her research. We’re in the heart of Bloomsbury, recognisable by its peaceful garden squares and smart Georgian townhouses. Once a meeting point for artists and writers, including Virginia Woolf, it is still home to a large slice of London’s universities and colleges. Outside, busy Gower Street is jam-packed with students heading for lectures, but where Das and I are it’s library quiet. We’re seated at a small table inside the Petrie Museum, named for Sir Flinders Petrie, an Egyptologist who, before he died in 1942, used to collect heads from around the world to shore up his ideas of racial superiority and inferiority.

      ‘Scientists are socialised human beings who live within society, and their ideas are social constructions,’ she continues. She wants me to hear this, setting the scene before she begins unfolding the packets of objects in front of us, which she has pulled from the archive. Among the first is a black-and-white photograph of a well-dressed older man, his bushy eyebrows resting in a canopy over his eyes, long white sideburns trailing down to his collar. Underneath is his autograph: it is the biologist Francis Galton, born in 1822, a younger cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton, she tells me, is the father of eugenics. He coined the term in 1883 from the Greek prefix ‘eu’ for ‘well’ or ‘good’, to describe the idea of using social control to improve the health and intelligence of future generations.

      Galton considered himself an expert on human difference, on the finer qualities that make a person better or worse. Not quite the genius that Darwin was, he certainly aspired to be. ‘I find that talent is transmitted by inheritance in a very remarkable degree,’ he had written in an essay titled ‘Hereditary Character and Talent’. His idea drew on his cousin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, that individuals in a population show a wide variety of characteristics, but those with the characteristics most suited to the environment will survive and breed, passing on those beneficial traits. Galton thought that a race of people could be more quickly improved if the most intelligent were encouraged to reproduce, while the stupidest weren’t – the same way you might artificially breed a fatter cow or a redder apple. For him, this would speed up human evolution, driving the race closer to mental and physical perfection.

      As an example, he drew on the fact that brilliant writers were often related to other brilliant writers. He noted that of 605 notable men who lived between 1453 and 1853, one in six were related. The ingredients for greatness must be heritable, he reasoned, choosing to overlook that being notable might also be a product of connections, privilege and wealth, which these men also had. ‘If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create!’ Galton dreamed of a ‘utopia’ of highly bred super people, and he made creating one his lifelong mission.

      The first challenge would be to measure people’s abilities, to build up a bank of data about who exactly were the most intelligent and who the least. In 1904 he convinced the University of London to set up the world’s first Eugenics Record Office at 50 Gower Street, dedicated to measuring human differences, in the hope of understanding what kind of people Britain might want more of. University College London jumped at the chance, replying to his request within a week. After a short time the department became known as the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics.

      Eugenics is a word that’s no longer used around here. Long after Galton’s death, his laboratory was renamed the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, housed in the Darwin Building. And this is where Subhadra Das steps in. Among the vast collection of objects she is responsible for at the university is Galton’s archive, containing his personal photographs, equipment and papers, tracking the genesis and development of eugenics. She also looks after objects belonging to his close collaborator, mathematician Karl Pearson, who became the first professor of national eugenics in 1911 after Galton died. ‘Pearson’s greatest contribution, the thing that people remember him for, is founding the discipline of statistics. A lot of work on that was done with Galton. Galton, if you’re going to bring his science down to anything in particular, is a statistician,’ she tells me.

      But before he settled down into science, Galton had been an explorer. He was lavishly funded by the estate of his father, who had made a fortune from supplying weapons that helped support the slave trade, and later from banking. An expedition in 1850 to Namibia, then known as Damaraland, earned Galton a medal from the Royal Geographical Society. Always proud of his appearance (there’s a hand mirror and sewing kit among СКАЧАТЬ