Genetics by Adam Rutherford

Author:Adam Rutherford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405935555
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

A murky past: eugenics

Genetics has a politically dark past. Many of the techniques and statistics that we still rely on today were invented by a Victorian scientist called Francis Galton. His legacy includes publishing the first weather map (actually printed the day after, so arguably of limited use), the basis of fingerprint analysis, and a vented hat to cool the head while thinking hard (though it might have been easier to simply take the hat in question off).

Galton was Charles Darwin’s half-cousin, and somewhat enamoured of Darwin’s fame. He thought that genius ran in families, and that humans segregated naturally according to race. He began collecting data on people, in order to work out the biological basis of the differences between people.

In doing so, he effectively became the father of human genetics. Many people thought at the time that Galton’s ideas about improving the ‘stock’ of people – in the parlance of the day – was desirable for society, notably to find fitter men to fight in colonial wars. This was the birth of eugenics, a word that Galton himself coined.

Over the decades that followed his death, it wasn’t just the Nazis who embraced eugenics. Churchill, Roosevelt, Marie Stopes (who wrote love letters to Hitler) and many public figures at all points on the political spectrum thought eugenics was a good idea. Many countries enacted eugenics policies to reduce the number of ‘undesirables’ in the population, including drunks, homosexuals and people with mental-health problems. In the United States, tens of thousands of people were involuntarily sterilized throughout the twentieth century, and even into the twenty-first.

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