Superior: The Fatal Return of Race Science. Angela Saini

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СКАЧАТЬ now the classic image of the white European in Africa. ‘If I say to you “African explorer”, the picture that pops into your head? That’s him,’ Das tells me.

      What was unusual about Galton was that travel failed to broaden his mind. His encounters with people in other countries didn’t help him to see their common humanity. ‘If anything, his racist assumptions were made stronger by his time in Africa.’ As Galton told the Royal Society on his return, ‘I saw enough of savage races to give me material to think about all the rest of my life.’

      In London, racism combined in his scientific research with a passion for data. Galton was obsessed with measuring things, once using a sextant to size up an African woman’s proportions from a distance. Another time, he came up with the mathematical formula for the perfect cup of tea. Through eugenics he saw a way of using what he thought he knew about human difference, shored up by Darwin’s theories of natural selection, to systematically improve the quality of ‘the British race’. ‘Darwin said that humans are animals like any other animal. Galton said, well, if that’s the case then we can breed them better,’ Das explains. ‘What he was concerned about was what he saw as the degeneration of the British race and how that could be prevented and improved.

      ‘You have to call Galton a racist because the work that he did is fundamental in the story of scientific racism. So not only is he a racist, he is part of the way we invented racism, and the way that we think about it.’

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      Eugenics is a cold, calculated way of thinking about human life, reducing human beings to nothing but parts of the whole, either dragging down their race or pulling it up. It also assumes that almost all that we are is decided before we are born.

      The origins of this idea – that everything is inherited, that it’s in the genes – date back to the middle of the nineteenth century when Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar in Brno, Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, became fascinated by plant hybrids. Working in the garden of his monastery, Mendel took seven strains of pea and bred them selectively until each one produced identical offspring every time. With these true-bred pea plants, he began to experiment, observing carefully to see what happened when different varieties were crossed. Nobody knew about genes at this point, and Mendel’s paper on the topic published in 1866 went largely unnoticed within his lifetime. But his experimental finding that traits such as colour were being passed down the generations in certain patterns would form the linchpin of how geneticists in the following century thought about inheritance.

      Once scientists understood that there were discrete packets of information in our cells that dictated how our bodies were built, and that we got these packets in roughly equal measure from each parent, the science of heredity finally took off. And it took almost no time for the political implications to be recognised. In 1905 the English biologist William Bateson, Mendel’s principal populariser, predicted that it ‘would soon provide power on a stupendous scale’.

      Mendelism became a creed, an approach to thinking about human biology which suggested that it is largely set in motion as soon as an egg is fertilised, and that things then go on to work in fairly linear fashion. If you crossed one yellow-seeded pea plant with one green-seeded pea plant and you could predict which colours subsequent generations of pea plant would turn out to have, then it stood to reason that you might be able to predict how human children would look and behave based on the appearance and behaviour of their parents.

      Through a narrow Mendelian lens, almost everything is planned by our genes. Environment counts for relatively little because we are at heart the products of chemical compounds mixing together. We are inevitable mixtures of our ancestors. Just as Bateson foresaw, this idea became the cornerstone of eugenics, the belief that better people could be bred by selecting better parents. ‘Mendelism and determinism, the view that heredity is destiny, they go together,’ says historian Gregory Radick, who has studied Mendel and his legacy.

      But there was a problem with Mendel’s pea plant research. At the beginning of the twentieth century Mendel’s paper became the subject of ferocious debate, says Radick. ‘Should the Mendelian view be the big generalisation around which you hang everything else? Or on the contrary, was it an interesting set of special cases?’ When Mendel performed his experiments, he deliberately bred his peas to be reliable in every generation. Before he even began, he filtered out the aberrations, the random mutants, the messy spread of continuous variation you would normally see, so every generation bred as true as possible. Peas were either green or yellow. This allowed him to see a clear genetic signal through the noise, producing results that were far more perfect than nature would have provided.

      Raphael Weldon, born in 1860, a professor at the University of Oxford with an interest in applying statistics to biology, spotted this dilemma and began campaigning for scientists to recognise the importance of environmental as well as genetic backgrounds when thinking about inheritance. ‘What really bothered him about the emerging Mendelism was that it turned its back on what he regarded as the last twenty years of evidence from experimental embryology, whose message was that the effects a tissue has on a body depend radically on what it’s interacting with, on what’s around it,’ explains Radick. Weldon’s message was that variation matters, and that it is profoundly affected by context, be it neighbouring genes or the quality of air a person breathes. Everything can influence the direction of development, making nurture not some kind of afterthought tacked onto nature, but something embedded deep down in our bodies. ‘Weldon was unusually sceptical.’

      To prove his point, Weldon demonstrated how ordinary pea breeders couldn’t come up with the same perfectly uniform peas as Mendel. Real peas are a multitude of colours between yellow and green. In the same way that our eyes aren’t simply brown or blue or green, but a million different shades. Or that if a woman has a ‘gene for breast cancer’, it doesn’t mean she will necessarily develop the disease. Or that a queen bee isn’t born a queen; she is just another worker bee until she eats enough royal jelly. Between the gene and real life is not just the environment, but also random possibility. Comparing Mendel’s peas with the real world, then, is like comparing a soap opera with real life. There is truth in there, but reality is a lot more complicated. Genes aren’t Lego bricks or simple instruction manuals; they are interactive. They are enmeshed in a network of other genes, their immediate surroundings and the wider world, this ever-changing network producing a unique individual.

      Sadly for Weldon, the ferocious debate for the soul of genetics ended prematurely in 1906 when he died of pneumonia, aged just forty-six. His manuscript went unfinished and unpublished. With less resistance than before, Mendel’s ideas were gradually incorporated into biology textbooks, becoming the bedrock of modern genetics. Although Weldon’s ideas have since slowly been reincorporated into scientific thinking, there still remains a strain of genetic determinism in both the scientific and the public imagination. Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin has called it the ‘Central Dogma of Molecular Genetics’. It is a belief that all that we are is set in stone in the womb.

      In the early twentieth century, before the advent of modern genetics but with Mendel’s findings prominent in their minds, Francis Galton’s theories seemed to make good sense to many. They had a logical appeal that stretched across the political spectrum. We associate eugenics today with the fascists who perpetrated the Holocaust, but before the 1930s, many on the left saw it as socially progressive. Galton himself was certainly not considered a crank. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, and an anthropometric laboratory he set up in 1884 to catalogue people’s measurements enjoyed support from the British Medical Association. Eugenics belonged firmly to establishment science, and amongst intellectuals, it wasn’t just mainstream, it was fashionable.

      The fly in the ointment was how to carry it out. Galton observed that the poor seemed to be outbreeding the rich, and he saw the poor as poor for the simple reason that they were congenitally unfit. Responsible action was necessary to address the problem and ensure genetic progress. On the one hand, the rich СКАЧАТЬ