The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,34

applied form of genetics for Galton, just as agriculture was an applied form of botany. “What nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction,” Galton wrote. He had originally proposed the concept in Hereditary Genius as early as 1869—thirty years before the rediscovery of Mendel—but left the idea unexplored, concentrating, instead, on the mechanism of heredity. But as Galton’s hypothesis about “ancestral inheritance” had been dismantled, piece by piece, by Bateson and de Vries, Galton had taken a sharp turn from a descriptive impulse to a prescriptive one. He may have misunderstood the biological basis of human heredity—but at least he understood what to do about it. “This is not a question for the microscope,” one of his protégés wrote—a sly barb directed at Bateson, Morgan, and de Vries. “It involves a study of . . . forces which bring greatness to the social group.”

In the spring of 1904, Galton presented his argument for eugenics at a public lecture at the London School of Economics. It was a typical Bloomsbury evening. Coiffed and resplendent, the city’s perfumed elite blew into the auditorium to hear Galton: George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells; Alice Drysdale-Vickery, the social reformer; Lady Welby, the philosopher of language; the sociologist Benjamin Kidd; the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley. Pearson, Weldon, and Bateson arrived late and sat apart, still seething with mutual distrust.

Galton’s remarks lasted ten minutes. Eugenics, he proposed, had to be “introduced into the national consciousness, like a new religion.” Its founding tenets were borrowed from Darwin—but they grafted the logic of natural selection onto human societies. “All creatures would agree that it was better to be healthy than sick, vigorous than weak, well-fitted than ill-fitted for their part in life; in short, that it was better to be good rather than bad specimens of their kind, whatever that kind might be. So with men.”

The purpose of eugenics was to accelerate the selection of the well-fitted over the ill-fitted, and the healthy over the sick. To achieve this, Galton proposed to selectively breed the strong. Marriage, he argued, could easily be subverted for this purpose—but only if enough social pressure could be applied: “if unsuitable marriages from the eugenic point of view were banned socially . . . very few would be made.” As Galton imagined it, a record of the best traits in the best families could be maintained by society—generating a human studbook, of sorts. Men and women would be selected from this “golden book”—as he called it—and bred to produce the best offspring, in a manner akin to basset hounds and horses.

Galton’s remarks were brief—but the crowd had already grown restless. Henry Maudsley, the psychiatrist, launched the first attack, questioning Galton’s assumptions about heredity. Maudsley had studied mental illness among families and concluded that the patterns of inheritance were vastly more complex than the ones Galton had proposed. Normal fathers produced schizophrenic sons. Ordinary families generated extraordinary children. The child of a barely known glove maker from the Midlands—“born of parents not distinguished from their neighbors”—could grow up to be the most prominent writer of the English language. “He had five brothers,” Maudsley noted, yet, while one boy, William, “rose to the extraordinary eminence that he did, none of his brothers distinguished themselves in any way.” The list of “defective” geniuses went on and on: Newton was a sickly, fragile child; John Calvin was severely asthmatic; Darwin suffered crippling bouts of diarrhea and near-catatonic depression. Herbert Spencer—the philosopher who had coined the phrase survival of the fittest—had spent much of his life bedridden with various illnesses, struggling with his own fitness for survival.

But where Maudsley proposed caution, others urged speed. H. G. Wells, the novelist, was no stranger to eugenics. In his book The Time Machine, published in 1895, Wells had imagined a future race of humans that, having selected innocence and virtue as desirable traits, had inbred to the point of effeteness—degenerating into an etiolated, childlike race devoid of any curiosity or passion. Wells agreed with Galton’s impulses to manipulate heredity as a means to create a “fitter society.” But selective inbreeding via marriage, Wells argued, might paradoxically produce weaker and duller generations. The only solution was to consider the macabre alternative—the selective elimination of the weak. “It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the