The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,35

human stock lies.”

Bateson spoke in the end, sounding the darkest, and most scientifically sound, note of the meeting. Galton had proposed using physical and mental traits—human phenotype—to select the best specimens for breeding. But the real information, Bateson argued, was not contained in the features, but in the combination of genes that determined them—i.e., in the genotype. The physical and mental characteristics that had so entranced Galton—height, weight, beauty, intelligence—were merely the outer shadows of genetic characteristics lurking underneath. The real power of eugenics lay in the manipulation of genes—not in the selection of features. Galton may have derided the “microscope” of experimental geneticists, but the tool was far more powerful than Galton had presumed, for it could penetrate the outer shell of heredity into the mechanism itself. Heredity, Bateson warned, would soon be shown to “follow a precise law of remarkable simplicity.” If the eugenicist learned these laws and then figured out how to hack them—à la Plato—he would acquire unprecedented power; by manipulating genes, he could manipulate the future.

Galton’s talk might not have generated the effusive endorsement that he had expected—he later groused that his audience was “living forty years ago”—but he had obviously touched a raw nerve. Like many members of the Victorian elite, Galton and his friends were chilled by the fear of race degeneration (Galton’s own encounter with the “savage races,” symptomatic of Britain’s encounter with colonial natives throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had also convinced him that the racial purity of whites had to be maintained and protected against the forces of miscegenation). The Second Reform Act of 1867 had given working-class men in Britain the right to vote. By 1906, even the best-guarded political bastions had been stormed—twenty-nine seats in Parliament had fallen to the Labour Party—sending spasms of anxiety through English high society. The political empowerment of the working class, Galton believed, would just provoke their genetic empowerment: they would produce bushels of children, dominate the gene pool, and drag the nation toward profound mediocrity. The homme moyen would degenerate. The “mean man” would become even meaner.

“A pleasant sort o’ soft woman may go on breeding you stupid lads [till] the world was turned topsy-turvy,” George Eliot had written in The Mill on the Floss in 1860. For Galton, the continuous reproduction of softheaded women and men posed a grave genetic threat to the nation. Thomas Hobbes had worried about a state of nature that was “poor, nasty, brutish and short”; Galton was concerned about a future state overrun by genetic inferiors: poor, nasty, British—and short. The brooding masses, he worried, were also the breeding masses and, left to themselves, would inevitably produce a vast, unwashed inferior breed (he called this process kakogenics—“from bad genes”).

Indeed, Wells had only articulated what many in Galton’s inner circle felt deeply but had not dared to utter—that eugenics would only work if the selective breeding of the strong (so-called positive eugenics) was augmented with selective sterilization of the weak—negative eugenics. In 1911, Havelock Ellis, Galton’s colleague, twisted the image of Mendel, the solitary gardener, to service his enthusiasm for sterilization: “In the great garden of life it is not otherwise than in our public gardens. We repress the license of those who, to gratify their own childish or perverted desires, would pluck up the shrubs or trample on the flowers, but in so doing we achieve freedom and joy for all. . . . We seek to cultivate the sense of order, to encourage sympathy and foresight, to pull up racial weeds by the roots. . . . In these matters, indeed, the gardener in his garden is our symbol and our guide.”

In the last years of his life, Galton wrestled with the idea of negative eugenics. He never made complete peace with it. The “sterilization of failures”—the weeding and culling of the human genetic garden—haunted him with its many implicit moral hazards. But in the end, his desire to build eugenics into a “national religion” outweighed his qualms about negative eugenics. In 1909, he founded a journal, the Eugenics Review, which endorsed not just selective breeding but selective sterilization. In 1911, he produced a strange novel, entitled Kantsaywhere, about a future utopia in which roughly half the population was marked as “unfit” and severely restricted in its ability to reproduce. He left a copy of the novel with his niece. She found it so embarrassing that she burned large parts of it.

On July 24, 1912, one year after Galton’s death, the first International Conference