 Tonight Adam's going to turn his attention to something that I guess he's maybe still developing some of his ideas on a rather troubling area if you like. So tonight he's going to talk to us about eugenics, it's dark history, and it's troubling past. So over to you, Adam, and you could share your screen and we're looking forward to hearing what you have to say. Well thank you Pat, that's a very generous introduction, and that's Lushkin my cat who has this is the main access route into the house so if she walks across and I apologize in advance. I'm going to share my screen because I've got slides. And hold on just a sec. So you should be seeing my slides now is that right, you should be seeing my three book covers. Yes. So, yeah, so I'm as you've as you very accurately described that the, this is work that I've been thinking about for 25 years really because I was an undergraduate at UCL and one of my books from a few years ago was called a brief history of everyone who ever lived. And in that, I began to develop some of the ideas between about the relationship between the history of genetics my field, and the construction of race and racism, but also separately the intertwining of the history of genetics with with the ideology of eugenics. Now, one of the reasons why eugenics is is part of my sort of overall purview is because much of it was developed at UCL. So for the last since I was since I was 19 when I was an undergraduate in in the genetics department, the golden laboratory as it was then. And Francis Colton and the concept of eugenics has been a big part of my, of my sort of intellectual development. And in my later years in the last few years as I've been writing about the interface between history and, and biology was science more broadly but specifically genetics and evolutionary biology. These two subjects have become the focus of my last two books so how to argue the racist came out in 2020. And my next book, which is out in February, February the third is called control. It's the title of this talk, and it is about the history of eugenics but also its repercussions and its legacy in in our present practices and in society today. Now, as a housekeeping note. I, the reason I do talks like this is because I want to test the ideas I want to test what lands with audiences. I want to see what they're interested in because that's not always the same as what you're interested in as a writer. But these two are my guinea pigs. So I, I've been teaching this to undergraduates and to various sort of academic or close to academic audiences for many years now, but because this book is coming out in February. This, this is going to be part of my sort of public output, talking about the history of eugenics and talking about this particular book, but this talk is the very first time I'm doing this. So I'm asking you for some, some leeway and offering up a preemptive apology, because I haven't timed it. I'm notoriously bad at timekeeping it may be 20 minutes long or three hours long I'm hoping that it's going to be somewhere in the middle of that. It is because it's the first time the structure is going to be I think there's a structure there but I will be changing it as I, as I continue to do this talk so so if I could, if I could beg your forgiveness if this feels like it's the first time out. Because it is actually the first time out for this talk. Okay, so that's that's the sort of set up for this idea. One of the reasons that we're talking about this now is because what I argue in the book is that understanding the history of our field is really important because the legacies persist in in our current work within genetics and within society more broadly. But as conversations about the relationship between politics and and science and particularly genetics and evolutionary biology are becoming more, more prevalent in the in the popular discourse. A few things have happened in the last few years which have really sort of acted as a tipping point for why I think this needs to be a public conversation that happens robustly now. One of those things is that these three gentlemen many of you, many of who of you will know who they are will know their work in great detail many of you will use their work in statistics and evolutionary biology, maybe on a day to day basis, Carl Pearson on the left there, there's Francis Golton with a hat on and then Ronald Fisher with the with the bushy beard. And of course, these are three of the founding figures in all biological sciences in all the statistics in psychology. They're three Titans of science are in entire fields are based on rest on the shoulders of these three men and a few others. They're all very closely associated with with UCL Francis Golton was never actually at UCL, but he bequeathed the scholarship, sorry a professorship and a lot of money to UCL to set up the golden laboratory where I was an undergraduate and Carl Pearson was the first golden professor and Ronald Fisher was the second golden professor. So their scientific legacies are unmatched three absolute Titans of late 19th and early 20th century science whose work we simply cannot abandon was whose work we absolutely rely on. They also were three key founding members of the whole eugenics movements I'll talk about Golton specifically in in just a minute. And as a result of the sort of rediscovery of that outside of the academic world of genetics and outside of the biology department of UCL in the last few years, and in the culture that we currently occupy where we are reassessing the political views of significant historical characters. In the last two or three years, all three of these men have had their, their legacies reassessed in 2018 UCL instigated its first eugenics inquiry, which concluded in in 2020 February 2020 just a couple of weeks before the first lockdown began. And one of the outcomes of this investigation of this inquiry was that the names of Golton Pearson and Fisher were to be removed and have now been removed from UCL buildings and namings. The Golton Lecture Theatre is now theater 115 the Pearson building is now the Northwest wing, the golden professorship has been permanently retired, and the golden restitution funds the money that he left has been redistributed to employ three excellence fellows which which are being advertised at the moment for younger researchers willing at the point where they're setting up their their careers. We have part of the sort of public discourse on assessing historical figures but also trying to understand the relationship between the history of our field and our current practices. And I argue and my work is based around arguing that our history is interesting not just because it's interesting and it's recent and history is interesting, but also because it informs our current practices. And in this talk, I'm going to mostly focus on that history on the relationship between the sort of late 19th centuries and development of the ideas of eugenics. And I'm going to take it up to the end of, well, it's it's ultimate ramifications in the Second World War and the Holocaust, and then briefly at the end touch on why we're still thinking about some of these ideas with contemporary medical and reproductive systems and new technologies and new genetic technologies that are part of becoming part of the tools of genetics and human genetics today. So that's that's broadly the setup. So Francis Colton I'm sure many of you will know exactly who he is his legacy is absolutely enormous, but he is the guy who formulates the idea of eugenics and spends most of much of the the second half of his life as a sort of proto scientist a sort of gentlemen scientist and developing ideas about population control via this new idea, this new ideology of political ideology of eugenics. This is one of the definitions that he comes up with during his life this one's from 1907 written with Carl Pearson, which you can read for yourself but the whole idea about eugenics, it is it is that it is the application of the new understanding of biology that came a few years after Darwin's origin of species in 1859 as applied to humans to human societies with that with the sense that as humans are now demonstrably understood to be animals and evolved that we can apply the same selective pressures artificial selection that Darwin talks about in the first chapter of the origin of species. We can apply that to humans as a means of improving the quality or the stock of, of, of a people. Now I'm going to be using a lot of language which is some somewhat archaic and some of it sounds offensive to our ears today but so I apologize in advance for that I'll be contextualizing those, some of these terms even though they sound weird to us so things like, you know, talking about the stock of a population is a very Victorian or Edwardian term and not really one that we would use today to describe populations. The idea here, at least in the first half of this talk is that the concept of improving the stock of a population via this eugenics methods that understands that we as biological organisms are are mutable and not immutable as had been thought in in earlier generations. The concept of improving a population is much older than eugenics and in fact, I think it's pretty much eternal throughout human cultures throughout all human cultures and, and that's one of the things I explore at the beginning of the book in in depth. I'll just skip through some of some of the examples of this because the first version of of what you could broadly describe as as eugenics in the Western Canon is described in books five and six of of Republic by Plato in which he describes how populations as he has a concern that people are not breeding enough. And that's people of high quality are not breeding enough and this becomes a persistent theme from the third century BC into the present day, and that the, the, the, the people of high quality are not breeding enough but people of lower quality are breeding too much and therefore in danger of the high quality system so he came up with a metricized a quantification system in which he describes gold caliber men and women should be paired together and bronze caliber men and women should be paired together and their children should be bred as a means of maintaining the sovereign society where the improvement was part of the, the, the overall mission of a sort of philosophy king. So that's right there in Republic that that really is a sort of proto eugenics idea it's never enacted of course it remains theory throughout his life. This example comes from the, the, well the legend of sparta more than the historical fact of sparta more than anything there's only really one description of the infanticide birth control and population control descriptions that we attribute to the Spartans and that comes from several hundred years later, but this idea that this great militaristic might, this, this, this, you know incredibly powerful nation status sparta. One of the reasons it had such militaristic might was it brought young boys into the military at the age of seven, but only after they passed the first hurdle of selection, which was at birth, where anyone, anyone deformed or deemed defective in any way or the one, the children that couldn't survive exposure overnight were cast off Mount Tegatos into the, the apotheca which is a deposit a pit. And this, this image here is from the not historical filmed 300, but it does show the acts those are fetal skulls or baby skulls down at the bottom, there isn't any physical evidence for infanticide in, in sparta in, in the deposits, there are bones of adults, but we just don't know so it may be mythical, but it becomes a persistent theme the reference to Spartans remains a persistent theme throughout the history of eugenics right up into into the 20th century. We don't really know whether it happened or not but what we do know is that Rome practiced actively practiced infanticide infanticide by selecting Seneca describes and in the first century how we kill rampant bulls we kill disease chickens, and we drown babies if they, if they look default and we think this is a verifiable example of infanticide that happens in Rome. In the UK in 1921 in Hamilton, 91 bodies were discovered in a Roman dig of babies, and some historians have argued that this is an example of some sort of form, formalized infanticide policy which may be selective. It may, it may conversely reflect different burial practices or different death rituals in that adults would have been cremated and babies would have been interred. But nevertheless, this this is part of the sort of suite of evidence that isn't just in Western civilizations and classical Roman Greece, but all over the world and pretty much every culture in fantasy as a means of population control and issue in control over the reproductive autonomy of all but primarily of women is something which effectively appears to be pretty much universal in in almost all cultures. So this idea that population control is, is, is ancient, and it, it is falling a skip forward, couple of thousand years and of course you'll, you'll be familiar with the works of, of Malthus where in the late 18th, early 19th century becomes more formalized and Malthus describes the inherent problem in that happy populations grow exponentially but resources grow in a linear fashion so all populations are doomed to this sort of cycle of, of population growth until the resources can't meet them. And this was a sort of metric of success of, of, of populations, you know, as an economist he's about as good as any economist in predicting things that may or may not happen, sort of flip of a coin type thing. Now it's like there's probably economists in the audience so I apologize to them for that. But this is sort of general context in which in the 19th century. We're beginning to fret in a sort of pseudo scientific but a more academically formalized way about population control. And so on this slide I'm trying to summarize some of the ideas of what the sort of landscape, the soil, in which the idea of eugenics is sort of pseudo scientific version of population control is planted and then can emerge. So, as a result of industrialization and urbanization we have expanding cities, expanding populations we have a much more visible poor. The poor laws that were established in Tudor times being repealed and replaced with various acts of parliament including the lunacy laws and the madhouse laws, and a general trend towards the state taking a more active, more proactive role in the institutionalization in the, in the care, although that's a pretty euphemistic term of people who are deemed at the bottom end of society. We've also got mass immigration coming in from, from the expanding colonies. That's, that's a, that's more of an issue in America and I'll probably allude to that later on. But we've also got, you know, endless conflict in the colonies as well in the late 19th century in the 1890s the Boer war is raging and the British get their, get their asses kicked, and this this is another fuel for suggesting for various members of, of hegemonic power and in the UK to suggest that we're not physically capable of dealing with these people from the colonies who are fitter and healthier than us. And then alongside that you've got the emerging and the, the cementing of scientific racism which really sort of starts in the 17th century but in the 19th century is, is becoming more and more robust. And that goes very much hand in hand with concepts of white supremacy in, in a literal sense in that colonial expansion and expansion, particularly of Western European powers around the world is almost high almost always hierarchically really based with with white Europeans being at the top of that top of that pile. And then there's this emerging, what possibly eternal but certainly again being formalized in the sort of the, the, the, the scholarly and chattering classes of Victorian Britain, this idea about colonialism, that everything is in the past is, was better particularly in ancient Greece and Rome and everything is getting worse today. And alongside that, another eternal threat, which is that populations are being replaced by invaders by underclass and again in the UK and Britain it's slightly different from the same idea being expressed in America and all of that. So there's this sort of rich soil in which this idea can be, can be planted. And so, Golton comes along, and he's Charles Darwin's half cousin, and he comes along already established having traveled extensively is as a young man around Africa and hating the whole experience. And he's absolutely enamored with the work of his cousin and begins to formulate this idea which is the application of evolutionary theory to humans as a means of bettering the British society. A bit of biography very quickly so there's a little bit of the family tree there, they're half cousins in that they share a grandfather there's, can I point, can you see my cursor. There's Charles Darwin there and there's Francis Golton there and they know each other and they talk to each other and they communicate with each other and Golton is very enamoured with with Darwin's work and sends great praise to him on multiple occasions. Let me briefly as a sort of cul-de-sac talk about some of Golton's astonishing intellect and astonishing legacy, intellectual legacy, because he's part of inventing a whole set of things on which society is very dependent to this day. There's a couple of trivial examples here. Golton is the first person to invent or use a weather map, and this is, is that weather map published in the Times in 1875. It is actually the day after that this is the weather of the day before so, you know, arguably of limited use. Nevertheless, every time you see a weather map on TV or in the paper, Golton was the first person to do that. Bottom right there, Golton's interest in both measuring things and concepts about heredity, which becomes the sort of dominant passion of his life via eugenics. One of the questions that he was fundamentally interested in was how our characteristics passed from parent to child, and in the mid 19th century, the idea that fingerprints were either heritable or not was not really well studied. Golton was interested in that question and helped develop the idea and test the idea that indeed fingerprints are unique to individuals, and although there is some heritability in terms of the patterns, basically they are unique for individuals. As a result of that, the development of fingerprints as a forensic techniques emerges, and of course the police and criminal just still rely on the development of fingerprints under Golton's auspices to this very day. The top right is a bit of a joke. This is published in 1906 in the journal Nature, which was Golton's new way of cutting a round cake. On the grounds that if you cut a cake in, like, you know, crossways as you would normally cut a cake that it's liable to dry out, whereas if you cut it in this particular way shown in the diagram there, you can sandwich back the quarters and it won't dry out. Didn't really catch on. Anyway, he also comes up with the term nature versus nurture which has as Pat will say and all evolutionary biologists and Genesis will say has blighted the field for the last 140 years or so but the idea that nature is in 18 us what is in built in us and what we've been now regardless genetic, and what is nurture which is in the environment but more broadly today we were we think of the non genetic environment meaning everything in the universe that isn't DNA. The idea that these two things are in conflict with each other nature versus nurture comes from Golton he invents that term. It's not it's not correct, we don't think of them these two things the innate genetic and the environmental is being in conflicts with each other today they work in concert with each other but nevertheless this idea is very much in his thinking, and as the first hereditary the first person to really think that the innate is much more important than the environmental. His weight is definitely on nature, rather than nurture, and that is what his motivation is for studying large parts of heredity and inventing lots of techniques to understand heredity. And, and on top of that build a model where greatness of people qualities of people can be enhanced via this this idea of eugenics. So there again is that definition from a bit later from 1907. And again a racial term, sorry, a word semantic terminology thing here, some of the words we use today I don't aren't used in the same way that they were in the 19th century. And he's talking about race there. It doesn't necessarily mean the same as how we describe the social construction of race as we do today. You know, Darwin talks about races of cabbage and races of pigeons. But broadly, you know we're talking about type or population or groups of people there isn't really an equivalent term. This is a sort of model of how built an imagined society could be like and should be like. If eugenics is practiced in the way that he was suggesting that you have a large respectable working class, and you have a small hegemonic power at the top, and we reduce the amount of criminals and paupers and undesirables via selective breeding. So here in lies some of the fundamental problems with eugenics because although it starts off as a sort of positive idea to improve society. It absolutely and quintessentially relies on a hierarchy of people. If you have people at the top who's characteristics you wish to enhance that inherently means there are people whose characteristics you wish to to suppress. What you see with eugenics and part of the argument of the book and one of the ideas I want to sort of develop is where that ranking comes from what what is the power structure which allows some people to be on top of others and of course the Victorian ages is different they have different social and cultural norms. In all cases where eugenics is explored the initial groups of people who are deemed desirable or undesirable very rapidly expands to include less precise diagnosis and less precise categorizations until you see the ultimate definition of this and it's just people we don't really like. So eugenics becomes in every practical sense it becomes a sort of a centre rising an idea that is exclusion exclusively apart from the people of the group that you're in. And so it's always expressed by the powerful to the less powerful. So it includes racialized groups includes people with disabilities it includes people with pseudo medical pseudo medical pseudo psychiatric diagnosis as well as more well established medical diagnosis such as Huntington's or what was then referred to as mongolism but what we would now refer to as people with Down syndrome. And then it expands to include poor people working class people and then non specific mental health diagnoses which include archaic terms such as feeble mindedness or imbeciles low grade imbeciles idiots and morons and I'll talk about that in just a bit. And then it expands to include it and alcoholics it's criminals people with epilepsy women with menstrual troubles and so on. So the discussion about eugenics that have that is happening, primarily in the UK but expands to other countries and I'll talk about Germany I'll talk about America in more detail in a minute includes like who are the undesirables who are the people that we need to be. Removing some from society or removing the franchise from or more specifically with regards to eugenics, removing sterile rendering rendering them sterilized. So removing reproductive autonomy from these people and all in all cases, the criteria are vague and non specific and a bit nebulous. One of the things that I think we find very difficult to process only 100 years after this is really a central part of the public discourse is quite how popular this was as an idea, the ideas of eugenics have become so irredeemably toxic. Mostly mostly as a result I think of the actions of the Nazis. But only, you know, a few decades before that it is eugenics has bipartisan and almost universal support almost universal support. This is an advert from from the, from the railways about you're promoting good breeding and using this agricultural analogy. This is another example. This is a eugenic Valentine's card. So, you know, the idea that some you would woo someone woo a woman by declaring quite how eugenically pure and mentally and physically balance you were so again you know this is this is part of the public discourse. To exemplify bipartisan support I've picked for four people who were very active in promoting ideas of eugenics from across the political spectrum. When I did this in front of students I asked them to name who these people are. They very rarely get any of them right but I know that all of you will know exactly who these are. That's Beatrice and Sidney Webb. So, left-wing activists found as a Fabian society. George Bernard Shaw in the hats top right. A young Winston Churchill bottom left and the former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour on the bottom, bottom right, all very active vocally active and in some cases, politically active in terms of developing legislation and action with regards to eugenics. We're now into the Edwardian era, and one of the things that I think is very interesting about the eugenics movements and shows its bipartisan and confusing from our modern point of view. Popularity is that eugenics becomes a sort of central pillar of first wave feminism. And so ideas about reproductive autonomy for women which we now regard as part of the emancipation of women. At the time, the eugenics angle to this was very much associated with removing the reproductive rights of women from lower socioeconomic statuses. So, Mary Stopes, most commonly associated with the reproductive rights of women in clinics all around the world and offering abortion advice and services to hundreds of thousands of women for the last many decades. Well, Stopes was a passionate eugenicist she was also profoundly racist by any standards of any time, and she absolutely adored Hitler and wrote him love poetry. One of her main motivations for being so interested in reproductive rights or reproductive issues for women was as a eugenicist, so that she could pursue one of her great interests which was the removal of the Irish and Slavic people and Jews from London. This is a poem that she wrote, and this is in the 30s. Right, so this is not, you know, this is not bad early but she wrote a book of love poetry and sent it to the German Chancellor in 33, I think that one is for. There's some proper horror stories from people that today we regard as as as having positive legacies but you know people are complex and I'm not. I'm not really in the business of, you know, post hoc or posthumous cancellation of people I just as an academic and as someone who is interested in decent scholarship about these, these sorts of issues because I think they're important I think we just have to be absolutely straightforward about the fact that people are complex and they have complex legacies. William Beverage is another example the architect of the welfare state and and of the NHS in many ways also as a young man affected very strongly eugenics views that's pointed out in this particular quotation but that particular men said not only lose the vote and civil freedoms but also fatherhood. Now Churchill is a key player in this, and I think I'm in the next few months I'm going to get into hot water about this because it's hard to criticize Churchill one of our greatest leaders and the person who is charged with. One of his great legacies in vanquishing one of the greatest evils that the humanities ever seen, but he was profoundly racist as well and he was also passionate a passionate advocate of eugenics policies at least forced a couple of decades he appears to have lost interest in it by the 1920s by. Certainly by the end of the first world war, but Churchill is very instrumental in in developing policy, particularly two bills, one of which didn't pass and one of which did in 1913 the Mental Deficiencies Act. And he drafted early versions and campaigned quite vigorously within politics to include specific eugenics. Legislation clauses in these bills. And for example, as it says on the slide, using x-rays newly discovered x-rays are only what 16 years old at this point to sterilize men and women who were in the categories that the eugenicists were interested in eradicating from from society. And it went into the 1912 published in 1913 or passes passes Royal Ascent in 1913, the Mental Deficiencies Act, which, which lasts from 1913 until 1959, I think it was, but it doesn't include compulsory sterilization by the state and a reason it doesn't include that is largely down to. Weirdly enough, the poet and Christian apologist and orthodox Catholic humorist who spent a lifetime campaigning against against eugenics and successfully lobbied, particularly one MP, Josiah Wedgwood, who's part of the Wedgwood Darwin plan, who also was passionately opposed to eugenics and Chesterton's opposition to eugenics is sort of exemplified and in that bottom quote he was a humorist and he was very funny about it but also he felt very passionately something which I think is correct, which is that eugenics decrees weren't targeted at those specific, you know, sort of pseudo scientific or pseudo clinical diagnoses such as feeble mindedness or imbeciles or women with menstrual problems as as decreed, they all targeted the poor. So we see, we see evidence of sort of Malthusian thinking in Scrooge in a Christmas Carol, and in in Chesterton's book eugenics and other evils just in case you were unsure of his views on eugenics. He makes, he makes that very point he thinks that he says very, very specifically that you can't breed out poverty using eugenics means because the poor are not a breed. And anyway, he successfully lobbies just our Wedgwood and Wedgwood has this clause about involuntary sterilization removed from the Mental Deficiencies Act of of 1913. And that is how close we came in the UK to having official eugenics policies, it was just a whisper a whisker away. And I think that that's very interesting because this is in many ways, London, particularly in a bit of Cambridge and ideas around the UK were really where eugenics was was first developed not not just at UCL but in the sort of salons and clubs of London and universities around the country, but we never actually had a policy. Now the same can't be said for something like 30 other countries around around the world. So it's in the book and in the talk of just sort of touch on two of them because I think they tell slightly different stories and stories that are important for our overall understanding of the repercussions of eugenics today. So it's about 3031 countries around the world have official eugenics policies during the 20th century, almost all in the form of involuntary sterilization. The UK is not one of them. So let's talk about America this this is a map from 1913. The first eugenics legislation comes into into force in Indiana in 1907, but they'd already been talking about eugenics types ideas with mating strategies so people having to provide prospective couples having to provide family histories demonstrating that they weren't suffering from heritable problematic conditions. And from as early as as the mid 1890s, but in 1907 Indiana adopts the first statewide involuntary sterilization law and over the next several decades. It is 31 states in the US that have official eugenics policies California, interestingly, that famously liberal state being the most vigorous adopter in the first two decades of the 20th century. California accounts for half of the involuntary sterilizations carried out in in America. Now, this is a slide that shows the sort of what on the left hand side the normalization of this is a sort of pseudo scientific pseudo psychiatric technique. This is a, this is from a textbook about breeding and about eugenics policies from 1912. And it shows the words that they used at the time which had clinical, clinical significance, and were clinically significant in the decision to in to enforce the legal that fell into these categories. On the right hand side is a demo demonstration, a pro eugenics demonstration from New York, I think it's 1917. The resolution on this photo is not very high, but it says, for example, I must drink alcohol to sustain life. Shall I transfer this craving to others. I don't know if our faces are on the left hand of the screen, and I can't see it but you can probably see it for yourself. So, a very similar idea is emerging at the same time there's a strong influence from the Galtonians at UCL. And indeed, one of the key protagonists in the eugenics movement in America met Galton in 1899 and I'll talk about Charles Davenport in just a minute. He is, he's the sort of Galton equivalent in the States, but it also is from up on high so Roosevelt is a keen eugenicist and writes to Charles Davenport this is after his, his presidency after after his term has finished and expresses a very clear eugenic idea there. And I want to go in talking about America when I talk about the bottom one of those earlier, the sort of social context of soil in which the eugenics idea was was was planted and that is what's known as replacement theory the idea that the powerful or the existing population are threatened by either an internal underclass replacing them because they have more babies and the existing people don't have enough, or that there is immigration from external forces now I think that the immigration idea is very significant in America because this is a time when there is no immigration into into America, and it's also part of the sort of general culture of worry a persistent threat, and eugenics becomes absolutely tethered to to this threat. Again, in the UK, it's heavily influenced by this idea that this is what happened in Rome, and particularly the fall of Rome, and there is a particular class of people who are the key protagonists in the eugenics movement and they include Richard Fisher and they include Galton and Pearson, and Churchill and Balfour that they go through a particular educational structure which goes top public school they all either went to eat and or Harrow, followed by maths and classics at Oxbridge, almost exclusively at Oxbridge and I think that is significant, because I think that there is a veneration for classical civilization that is predicated on them reading Gibbon, the fall of the Roman decline for the Roman Empire, but not really a super nothing more than a sort of superficial reading of Gibbon really just the assumption that the barbarians at the gates. They're coming from the East, they're both immigrating, and they have more babies than us, and therefore we are constantly under threat. Fisher Ronald Fisher talks about this explicitly in his key textbook his key scientific textbook, the Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. The final three chapters are devoted to some pretty potty ideas about eugenics first eight chapters are about the fundamentals of population genetics very strange book. But when it comes to this idea about population replacement. This is so universally held and supported in in society, and particularly in a slightly different way in America. I'm very interested in the sort of cultural context of eugenics. Now, I know all of you will have read the Great Gatsby. I love it. I've read it several times. This is one of my favorite books and I've never really noticed until about three or four years ago that a big theme in the great Gatsby is specifically the promotion or the discussion of eugenics and replacement theory. I'm Dan and Daisy's horrible husband on about page four very explicitly discusses the great replacement theory as described to him in a book that you read by a fictional scientist called Stoddard. And Stoddard is based on three real scientists called Goddard Goddard and Madison Grant. And I'll talk about a couple of them in just a minute. And Gatsby for reasons of and I'll come on to Gatsby in just a second as well Gatsby it really has this very, very clear underlying eugenics idea in one of the great books of the 20th century and I think we don't even notice. I think many of I hadn't noticed it in the 30 years that I've been familiar with that as as a text. This example comes from the food that we eat so John Harvey Kellogg is one of the Kellogg brothers and they effectively invent the way we eat breakfast today. For very peculiar reasons, John Harvey Kellogg, he became. He split up from his brother and they sort of together invented the cornflake the reason they split up was because John Harvey was obsessed with protecting. There's no polite way of saying this protecting the bodily fluids of what upstanding white American young men. He believed in abstinence he believed in, he was married to his wife for, for I think 31 years and boasted about how he had never had sex with her once. He also had a he boasted about having a daily enema, which I just think is strange. But his the creation of the cornflake was in service of his idea that spicy foods sugary foods and in fact any flavor and any food including coffee and tea were encouraged to the veto, and therefore should be suppressed he split from his brother because his brother wanted to add sugar to cornflakes. Anyway, you know, completely nutty story. Tomorrow morning when you're eating breakfast cereal you can, you can reflect on the fact that the reason you're eating cornflakes is because one man in 1894 thought that it might suppress your libido and therefore you wouldn't waste your precious bodily fluids. Aside from that, he plugged his enormous amount of wealth into a sanatorium and the creation of what was called the race betterment foundation, which was one of the two key eugenics establishments in the United States for the first three decades of the 20th century. It was closely associated with Charles Davenport's the key genesis in in the US. And again, part of the cultural normalization of both replacement theory white supremacy and and its pseudoscientific ideological action class which is eugenics itself. Now, just to go back to Gatsby briefly, the evidence for Gatsby's association with eugenics is fascinating because Gatsby is not based on or the individual characters and Gatsby are not based on on individual people, but they're based on the people that some Fitzgerald was hanging out with on on in places like Westview which become the various areas in which Gatsby is actually set. One of the key protagonists in the real story of eugenics and that era is Mary Harriman, who is the widow of each Harriman the railway tycoon, you know, millionaire not billionaire because no one was a billionaire back then. But she is we she's a multimillionaire and lives up on West egg and she has a daughter called Mary Harriman run run Z. Who knew Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald went to parties and Zelda his wife went to parties with the with the Haramans, and the daughter was so interested in eugenics that her nickname at college was eugenia. Now, again, this is where some of the public there's a sort of conversations that this these type of American aristocrats are having at their wild parties, some of which are described in in Gatsby and other literature of the time. But Harriman Mary Harriman via meeting Charles Davenport via her daughter who knows. Scott Fitzgerald becomes the primary funder of the eugenics records office, based at Cold Spring Harbor in upstate New York, which is the official eugenics office of the United States from its foundation in 1910 until it's dismantled in 1939. Harriman is the primary funder she donates money every year something like $39,000 per year for the entirety of that period. Other people also fund it and they include the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation that John Rockefeller is some some people have argued is the richest man who's ever existed in America. So it's something like the GDP of America something like 3% of the GDP of America for the first couple of decades of the 20th century was in Rockefeller's pocket. Now the Rockefeller Foundation is a good foundation today and its legacy is absolutely a positive benefit of its philanthropy is superb. As was culturally normalized at the time, Rockefeller is also funding the eugenics record office at Cold Spring Harbor, and other eugenics records offices around the world and this this becomes significant in the way this story develops. These three fellows are key protagonists in the actual rather than just the funding in the actual development of eugenics. Charles Davenport who is a sort of geneticist evolutionary biologist animal breeder. Charles Davenport is a sort of scientific mind behind this. He meets golden in 1899 begins to develop ideas about improving the stock of British people are of American people after after that. He also did fundamental and foundational work in human genetics including trying to describe the inheritance patterns of things like eye color in a way that is still taught in schools today. Charles Davenport is one of the initial inheritance patterns of diseases like Huntington's, and he's very very focused on what becomes the dominant idea of the science of occasion of eugenics, which is that one gene is responsible for complex characteristics. And the way we talk about eye color today, which is wrong, and the way we teach eye color genetics today, which is also wrong to school children comes from Davenport, and his absolute commitment to what we might describe as humanism. His second in command is called Harry Lachlan in the middle I'll talk about him in just a second. And then there's another guy who's not at the ERO but is at the sanatorium in New Jersey, called Henry Goddard. Now Henry Goddard's role in this story is really important as well for a number of reasons, he is the first person to translate the IQ tests from Binay and Simon into American and IQ tests become very important in establishing eugenic principles and eugenic enforcement in America. He's also the first person to use the word moron as a pseudo clinical term for eugenic sterilization and enforcement. Just checking the time because I can probably talk about this without breathing for another 24 hours and I'm about halfway through. No, I'm doing all right. So Goddard is a big part of this story but I want to focus on one particular aspect of this story which is that he's working in the first decade of the 20th century with a young girl, an eight year old girl called Debra Kalakak, who he describes as a moron in an illiterate idiot. But he's interested in why she is like this. And he tracks her family tree but he plots a family tree which goes back six generations to Martin Kalakak, a pseudonymous returning war hero, civil war hero, who on the way back from the war to his Quaker upstanding family and wife stops off at a bar, has sex with what he describes what is described in Goddard's book as an attractive but feeble minded barmaid, impregnates her and then never speaks to her again. Now, Goddard establishes this family tree which perfectly bifurcates with the children of the attractive unnamed but feeble minded barmaid, and the family of the upstanding family of Kalakak on his Quaker side. The Quaker side are full of upstanding men of science, men of clergy, businessmen and they're all very successful. And on the barmaid side they're full of delinquents and degenerates and people with disabilities and extreme poverty. And he sees this perfect bifurcation and tracks using this pedigree using this family tree tracks what he establishes, according to this, this analysis as a single gene responsible for the feeble mindedness and in one branch of the family and the success in the other. So again, we've got this model of monogenic determinism, like we see in other Mendelian traits, like we see an eye color or cystic fibrosis but we see it for a complex range of behaviors which include these sort of broad pseudo scientific or pseudo psychiatric diagnosis on one side and great success in whatever metric you choose to employ for success on the other side. This is a bestseller, it becomes hugely influential we see direct repercussions of this idea in England in 1912 at the first eugenics international conference where Reginald Punnett, who is the guy who invents the Punnett Square that we've all used to determine inheritance patterns and in genetics. He presents at this conference on the strand in London in front of Winston Churchill and Arthur Balfour, this idea that feeble mindedness runs in families in a single monogenic way. And therefore, we should act upon it, therefore we should apply eugenic sterilization to people who have feeble mindedness in their, in their families, it doesn't happen because that clause is removed from that particular act. Arthur Balfour at that dinner. At that conference sorry begins the process of setting up the Arthur Balfour Professor of genetics at Cambridge which still exists today, and is populated by Anne Ferguson Smith who's a wonderful and brilliant human geneticist, Reginald Punnett is the first in that line. Now the problem with this whole bit of the story. You know anything about genetics you'll know that there are no psychiatric or behavioral traits which are governed by single genes, and in fact, the traits that we think about as being determined by single genes actually mostly turn out not to be anyway and that includes things like eye color. But that's not the problem with this the problem with the Calacat family tree is, they never existed. Martin Calacac didn't exist. The feeble minded but attractive barmaid did not exist. He did track. We know the names of the people that were in these these two branches of the families including the degenerate side of the family. They weren't the Calacats and they weren't the descendants of of the feeble minded but attractive barmaid. They were the descendants of someone who is a business owner and had plenty of successful and literate people within the family. It did also include heredity, hereditary, hereditary poverty and various medical conditions. But if you look at this, there's photos in this book and some of the photos include pictures of the Calacat children who have facial developmental deformities. And when you look at them with any sort of background in medical genetics at all, or any any sort of clinical understanding of exactly what they look like, you will immediately be able to identify that those children have fetal alcohol syndrome, which of course is not genetic at all in its origin its etiology. It is a totally socio socially and culturally mediated thing. So we've got this absolute commitment from the eugenicists to this idea that single genes create heritable problems in families and heritable successes in other families and therefore this justifies the idea of eugenics because they can be bred in or out of populations. And it's a house of cards. It doesn't exist. The Calacacs didn't exist. The genetics is wrong. They are absolutely committed. They're wedded to a scientific idea, which is simply not true. Okay. Now, I said that there was popular support for it and that is definitely true. It's not universal though and there are plenty of scientists at the time and plenty of members of society such as GK Chesterton and HG Wells, such as significant cultural players who are aware that there are problems with the sort of the commitment to this, this science or the pseudo science. Th Morgan is one of the great founders of genetics. And he points out as early as 1925, that this commitment to a monogenic version of complex disorders such as eugenics in the Calacacs or whatever it is in the Calacacs, debauchery, alcoholism, social misconduct crime, all of these things which are part of the eugenics sort of framing are obviously not correct. The nurture aspect of the development of these problems in families is being ignored or being suppressed by the eugenics enthusiasts. The line he says at the bottom there may be to a large extent communicated rather than inherited. What he means by communicated is an old fashioned term for inherited but in a non-genetic way because of course we inherit our environment from our family as well as our biology. So it's not universally accepted, but there are scientists thinking about this in a specific way. Now, that's America. It's sort of, it continues to grow and thrive into the 1930s in America. But in the late 1890s eugenics begins to emerge in Weimar Republic Germany and begins to develop in similar ways with a lot of contact with both the British eugenicists and the American eugenicists. But it again, it's slightly different. So it's all predicated on in a similar sense to the Americans about replacement theory or replacement ideas that Slavs are coming from the East and are pushing Nordic or Aryan people away and they're having more babies and so on. And so the development of the idea of Nordic purity becomes central to the German eugenics movement in a fascinating way. The first eugenics and for the first two decades of the 20th century, the keenest enthusiasts for eugenics, particularly a man called Alfred Plurts, are not anti-Semitic. In fact, they regard Jewish people as being so successful in their particular domains. That Nordic people should breed with Jewish people in order to promote their own Nordic success. And it only later on with the rise of Hitler and Hitler's using power in 1933 and his virulent and rampant anti-Semitism. So they begin to adopt anti-Semitism on the grounds that this is the guy and Nazism and the Third Reich is the policy is the government, which is going to enable eugenics policies more broadly. And therefore, we can concede anti-Semitism and weave that into our eugenics policies. So that's part of it initially. Now, again, I'm picking out, I'm cherry picking various, you know, moments in time and obviously history is complex and winds all over the place. So, so this is a sort of very linear story of a very messy history. But one of the key ideas that develops in 1920 in a particular textbook by Irvin. Fritz Lenz, Irvin Bauer, is the idea of Laban's Unwetters Laban, so the lives unworthy of life. And this becomes a central idea in the development of euthanasia and eugenics policies in in 20s Germany and then into the Third Reich in the 30s. But, and this is super, super important. Almost all of their ideas are directly and demonstrably and physically influenced by the enacted eugenics policies that are already happening in the States. Americans are so far ahead of the game in terms of enacting eugenics policies that they recruit American eugenicists in order to develop German eugenics and euthanasia programs in the 1920s and 30s. And this Rockefeller the Rockefeller Foundation funds the Berlin eugenics office and Harry Lachlan, who wrote in 1920, the legislation that was an attempt to unify various ad hoc attempts at the eugenics legislation in the States in multiple states. So we use that directly translating that from US documents from this book by Harry Lachlan, and that becomes the 1933 sterilization laws that Hitler adopts as one of his first at first acts in June 1933, having taken power in February 1933. So you've got this incredible link between the American eugenics, which is dominated by very few but the active people, and the development of the German German sterilization eugenics and euthanasia laws in 1933 and onwards. I don't know the exact numbers, but the estimates are that over over the years 1933 to 1939, something like 350,000 people are involuntarily sterilized and of course the same pattern occurs that I talked about at the beginning. At first it's people with very specific medical diagnosis, and then it just expands and expands and expands until it becomes Jews and Slavs and Roma. In 1939. So, before 39 Hitler has already said that he, he's, he's passionate about Spartan infanticide he cites the Spartans, he cites Madison Grant's book, the fall of the great race from 1916 American right it's the only only American writer he cites apart from Henry Ford who is another virulent anti semi. He says in 1938, I think it is that he doesn't imagine that the German people except euthanasia, unless it is during war time. And then there's a specific incident involving a disabled boy called Gerhard Kretschmar, who was born severely disabled, and whose parents, rural farmers near Leipzig were members of the Nazi Party and they asked their local doctor William, not William, cattle, his name was cattle. To, to kill the child to to to euthanasia the child but the doctor points out that this is illegal. So they go to, they go to Berlin and say to the furor. We wish to kill this child because he's, he's degenerate and deformed and Hitler sends his personal physician. Brant to the Kretschmar's to assess the child Gerhard and finds and Hitler's instruction is that if he finds that the diagnosis is correct and he should have the baby killed. And, and they would test they would use that to test the legality of it. And that is what happened. So Gerhard Kretschmar was killed in I think it was July 1939. And there was no legal challenge of course because it was a totalitarian state pretty much by, by that point. And so they design what then subsequently becomes known as the law of the law of racial purification and the Nuremberg laws, which get collectively referred to as axion T4. And it's backdated to the first of September which is two days after Germany invades Poland and and war is declared. And so that's the German story and and it's during the course of the war, you know, I don't need to tell you the details of that but the eugenics is not. It is not what happens during during Second World War Germany and it's not what happens during the murder of 6 million Jews and millions of others in the concentration camps and beyond. It's the lifeblood to it. The policies of the Nazis were deranged and they drew from many sources, many religious and scientific and pseudo scientific sources. But it is that in the dehumanization of people that was central to the eugenics movement labors and verters labors that eugenics is an absolute sort of enabling lifeblood, a pump at the center of the heart of, of, of Nazi policies. One of the ideas in the first half of the book and one of the ideas I'm trying to explore in my work is how you get from an esoteric academic idea by an obscure Victorian gentlemen in 1883 to the Holocaust in in 60 years. And it's important to think about these things because it is the normalization of difficult ideas. It is the bastardization of science and the marshalling of science into political ideologies which I find interesting. I find that geneticists and scientists often don't know their own history, I've had to discover this history for myself, although being at UCL it is, it's part of our history but one thing that I've noticed in the last few years that I've begun teaching this more and more, is that we know this stuff at UCL and and to a lesser than other universities in the UK, but this is not widely known beyond beyond beyond the UK and beyond even the biology department of UCL. One of the motivations for the UCL eugenics inquiry was the discovery by departments in the humanities and sociology and philosophy that we had this history. And so there was this, you know, very, there were loads of awkward moments when the geneticists were sitting around going yeah well we've been teaching this for 40 years or so and you're sort of discovering this now. And of course you know we shouldn't be indignant about people discovering stuff that we already know we should be, we should lament the fact that we didn't do a better job in sharing that information. Now, I do have, I've got a couple more slides. I'm wondering whether Pat I should stop so we can get to questions because I've lost track of time. And what do you think. I think you go on for a couple of minutes more and then and then we should go to questions but it's a fascinating story so I think people probably would like to hear your. As I warned I didn't. You know this is this is a trial run so just cut me off, stop, you know, wave, and I will stop because I think there's enough to talk about already and I haven't really begun to talk about repercussions in today's world. So this is, this is just an example of Nazi propaganda to show the ideas of eugenics. So further is common then minda, minda vertical fear kinder and hocker vertical type in the house. This is what will happen when low minded people feeble minded people have four children and high minded people have two children so again, it's that eternal idea of replacement upper classes, the educated classes are not having two children, and the underclasses are having having too many. Now, second on the right there is Karl Brandt, and Karl Brandt is Hitler's personal physician before the war and then becomes the chief architect of the world, but also broadly medical program of the third Reich, and he is the person sent to Gerhard Kretschmar in 1939 to assess this, this boy and to have him killed, which starts off the euthanasia program in axiom T for in Nazi Germany. After the war, and the Nuremberg trials. So the Nuremberg trial start in 45, but the second wave of the trials are called the doctors trials and it's the USA versus Karl Brandt at et al. And Brandt is one of I think 17 people prosecuted, and almost all found guilty and he's hanged. But during the Nuremberg doctors trials, they do specifically cite the American influence they specifically cite the use of American legislation in order to develop euthanasia and eugenics policies in in Nazi Germany. The reason they talk about him specifically is is in the book and I'll do it briefly now. Because a question that emerges from this whole discussion, which I think is fascinating and slightly sinister. One that needs to be asked is, would eugenics work. Right, because we are animals and we are evolved, and we are subject to selection pressures over evolutionary time, and, and in the modern era. So the question becomes, you know, all of these analogies that the genesis all the way back to Plato in fact have used which is that we can be bred. You can breed horses or you can breed roses. Then you can breed humans and therefore we should do that. And that's an interesting question. And it's a question which I get really stuck into in the book in various ways but I want to talk about one specific example with reference to Karl Brandt and the Nazis. One of the diagnoses that was specifically targeted by the Nazis and is schizophrenia and then under accident for the estimates are that something like between 250 and 300,000 people with schizophrenia diagnosed schizophrenia in Nazi Germany are permanently sterilized or murdered. And we think that that represents something like three quarters to 100% of people with schizophrenia in Germany at that time. You've removed all the people with a specific diagnosis from the population in a way that you that is, is, is part of the eugenics in the nation program. And then what we see after the war is that there is a there is a decrease in the prevalence of schizophrenia for several decades, but by the 1970s the incidence of schizophrenia has not only returned to pre war levels but has actually increased. There were more schizophrenic people in Germany in the 1970s and they were accounted for in the pre war era. Now there's many ways to look at this, there's many ways to try and understand what has happened here, and we can talk about different diagnostic techniques where the diagnoses are more encompassing than they were before the war but we think we think that actually the opposite is more likely to be true that the diagnosis has become more precise over time than than less. There's been discussions of changing demographics that in the 60s and 70s. There were large immigrant immigrant populations have moved into Germany, but assessment of schizophrenia in the immigrant populations in the Mannheim area in the one particular study that I'm referring to shows that schizophrenia incidence is lower in those populations than in long standing German people. Of the various attempts to explain this phenomenon which shows which appears to show that not only did eugenics not work for this particular condition, but it actually had the opposite effect. The, I think the most convincing is that the environment schizophrenia is is is very heritable and has a large genetic component to it. But it is also heavily modulated by by the environment. And I think the most probable answer to the increased incidence of schizophrenia in post war Germany is that they created the environment, which includes a country broken economically and culturally broken by the war, which is exactly the type of environment in which mental health disorders flourished best. And we have it sounds a bit fluffy that right it sounds a bit theory, but we actually have one example where the that answer is absolutely verifiable. It's from what's known as the hunger winter, which started in 1944 September 44 which is in the end game of the war. The Nazis blockaded a large area of Western Holland, the canals froze they removed all of the butter or the dairy or the and enforced a period of famine which started in September and lasted until operation chowhound and operation manner by the RF and allies, and by the Canadian Air Forces. So you got this enforced period of famine where 18,000 people die and hundreds of thousands of people are subject to starvation. And because this is rationing and because this is the modern era. We've got really really good data on what these people were eating what their calorific intake was during this entire period, and because it's in the modern era, scientists have followed up the people who were who lived through the hunger and who were conceived during the hunger winter and indeed their children as well. And what you see is very predictably people conceived during the during the hunger winter suffer from a whole range of developmental and psychiatric problems that we now understand are very clearly associated with with inutrious starvation or or insult. And one of those is schizophrenia three times the risk of developing schizophrenia from the babies born in in the hunger winter. And so we've got this very clear model very very clear example of how their attempts to eradicate a particular disorder. The effects of a very messy and violence war actually had literally the opposite effect. Now I will stop there. Obviously I've got a million hours more things to talk about and quite a few more slides if you're interested. I'd quite like to move off that that slide. But let me let me see I've got absolutely tons more. I'm going to stop there and get a blank slide and maybe some of these things that I've, I've, I'll come to I'll talk about in the discussion in the questions but thank you for listening. As I said, I haven't timed this is the first run out. Thank you for listening. It's a pretty horrifying story that you've told us many things that I'm sure many of the audience didn't know about. And thank you for that we'll just take a few minutes for people to type in some questions and then, then we'll carry on and have a bit of a discussion and put some of these questions to you we normally finish around nine. Doesn't matter we run a little bit late nobody's got to catch the bus home. So, we'll just take a few minutes to let people put in some questions. Just put to you some, some of the questions that we've got. One questioner who starts his question by saying they, they'll never look at a conflict in the same way again. And the list of the US states adopting eugenicist policies is not what one might have expected and it seems to be dominated by the West and East Coast liberal states and not the ex slave southern states. Is there an obvious reason for that. Well, that is a good question and I'm not sure I know the answer to that. So, one of the things that the ERO tried to do was to contend the idea that this was very much a top down strategy from, from, you know, wealthy white upper class people to the people. One of the things they did successfully in the US was to really bring out the comparison with agriculture. And so the first sort of popular. There were eugenics fairs right so eugenics baby baby better baby competitions were they started in Kansas in 1907 I think it was. There were a lot of agricultural fairs and there's a quote from from one of the key eugenicists at this time saying that while you're judging the Holsteins and the Frisians will be judging the Joneses and the Smiths. And so there was a real attempt to try and get working class and particularly agricultural communities involved in that. So, so that that is happening in the in the Midwest, particularly it starts in Kansas. I think maybe part of the answer to this is that. Well, I can, I am speculating now I don't really know the answer to this, but one of the things that people forget is that California, the main industry in California is not Hollywood is it's actually farming. It's a huge agricultural population, historically in California which may account for part of California's vigorous enthusiastic adoption of eugenics policies. But here's another suggestion. And again, got a stress I don't know the answer to that and it's a very good question is that eugenics policies did disproportionately target poor people. But in America where poverty is heavily stratified by race and the descendants of the enslaved black people descendants of the enslaved and remember this is only like one or two generations from people who were enslaved were disproportionately targeted. So it may be that those, those coastal regions which we associate with being liberal, because they're urban. Or tend to, you know, have have large urban, you know, cities, and therefore have large black populations it may be that we see we, we see those effects in cities more than in the country, but that is a that is a semi informed guess. And I don't know maybe maybe whoever asked the question has a has a view on that. It's a webinar so we can't, participants themselves can't can't come back at you so interesting. So some questions that relate to the same issue around how these policies might in the present time be implemented in a kind of undercover way as a couple of questions about incarceration being used instead of sterilization and effectively keeping people out of reading by basically shutting them away. Do you think that's a real thing. It not only is it a real thing it's a real thing which is enacted in the current era in California and other states in in America. So involuntary sterilization continues to happen in America and other places around the world but mostly focus on America. So it happens almost exclusively in in prisons or in the immigrant detention centers last year 20 women were have have claimed I think legitimately that they were given involuntary hysterectomies. So the association between internment imprisonment and involuntary sterilization is both historically real and real in a contemporary way so when I go on to talk about the the sort of contemporary ramifications that the involuntary sterilization continues to exist in the states in detention centers around the rest of the world I can see one of the questions is what what are the ramifications today and that is what half the book is about. But if you look at so so in India, which has had active eugenics policies since the 1970s. The semi permanent via ID or permanent by a tuba ligation sterilization of women is the primary form of birth control so 40% of women of a child bearing age, but have either semi permanent or permanent sterilization. And that's that is encouraged and sometimes coerced and sometimes incentivized by by the state in China where sex selective abortion is is endemic and where until you know from the 70s until 2015 it was the one child policy existed and then it was two children and then last year became three children in 2000. I want to say 15 but it might have been 12 in either 2015 or 2012. 12 it was, there was the iron fist policy, which was the involuntary sterilization of 10,000 women who had violated the one child policy, and that happened over the space of three months. You know this is this, the stuff is is real and contemporary happens less in in in the West, but still definitely does happen. There's a class action of hundreds of first nation women in Canada against involuntary sterilization that they endured in within the last, you know, 10 years. So it's very real and very really exists today. I have a question about gene manipulation therapy gene editing and whether you would consider that as a kind of eugenics and perhaps an acceptable one or not. My other 30 slides are about that. And I won't, I won't do the rest of it. But I think that there's many things to say about that. And I think that the first thing is, I'm not sure the semantics are important. But the book is called control because all of these ideas are about eliciting control over, over unruly biology neuro biologist and you know how difficult this control anything to do with reproduction. Now, what what the eugenics laboratories that disband in the 1930s and after the war become genetics laboratories they become human genetics labs and that happens at UCL happens at Uppsala it happens all over Germany and all over America Cold Spring Harbor was voted the best research station on earth in 2018 by by nature and it was the hub of the human genome project. My department genes evolution and environments was the golden laboratory 20 years ago and was the eugenics office 100 years ago. So you see this move from the study of heredity in with with eugenics as its ideological framework to the study of human genetics in 1960s and 1970s. And I think that is a fundamental distinction, because they are scientific labs and establishments, whereas the eugenicists were primarily ideological labs that have coerced science or co opted science into their framework. And you see the development of reproductive technologies and genetic techniques, which are primarily in service of alleviating suffering in individuals and giving choices to parents. You see the development of IVF, and you see the development of pre implantation genetic diagnosis primarily by scientists, exclusively women by chance in the golden laboratory in the 1980s. And, and now in the in the modern age we begin to see the ability to gene edits, especially with new techniques like CRISPR. And in fact, you know that the heinous case of the age and quay in the last couple of years, who did, who did gene edit to babies who were born, though unsuccessfully, the gene editing was done unsuccessfully but they were born illegally and but we're at a stage where where the techniques, I don't think they are eugenics, because I don't think they're state imposed, and I don't think they're imposed for a population level. But I think they are techniques which would have been would have been of interest, if they had existed to the eugenicists 100 years ago, because our ability to control reproduction reproduction has only improved and become more precise, I still think it's incredibly unruly and incredibly difficult to do. But I had a slide of that with Dominic Cummings on on it because he's someone who's obsessed with the these ideas. And has taken more than a passing interest in current in contemporary techniques and, for example polygenic scoring for for complex traits such as intelligence, and has suggested that this this is what's coming that we could improve we could actually improve the intelligence of of babies via embryo selection via polygenic scoring as a result of the IVF process. And, you know, that's, he's, he whispered in the ear of the Prime Minister of one of the, the, the, the biggest and most successful countries, historically on Earth. So, so it is part of the of the of the public conversation. There's a couple of questions asking about, you know eugenics. It's history seems to be at least the history that we know about in connection with white people wanting to stop non white people breathing is that really it's history or in other parts of the world, China, for example, is there anything going on, or in the past there that people have the same ideas. It's a brilliant question, and what I would expect from this, this audience. The development of eugenics as a pseudo scientific ideology does come inherently with white supremacy associated with it. It is primarily developed by white Americans, white British people and white Germans. The longer standing idea of population control via via control of reproduction is I argue universal and has occurred in all populations and all cultures for all time. But eugenics specifically I think develops out of white supremacy because it's because we're talking about a time where colonial expansion is is an effective white supremacy right you've got Cecil Rhodes you've got Winston Churchill you've got Francis and thousands of others men men of of of high society and power who do genuinely think that's that's white people should not just are the best people on earth but should replace people in the in other countries because Anglo Saxons are of the greatest quality. And he was very explicit about that, you know he says that virtually verbatim Cecil Rhodes is part of Cecil Rhodes doctrine all through his life. So I think it begins as associated with with eugenics itself begins associated with white supremacy. I've just mentioned China and I've just mentioned India as well and so you can't apply those those same criteria to that is it's absolutely fascinating and bizarre, frankly, sort of cul-de-sac within the American eugenics story, which is that in the 1910s and 20s. And there is a movement amongst emancipation of black people and the sort of scholarly class of black people, led by w e b Du Bois, the great black American scholar, who is very. He's mates with Margaret Sanger, who's the first wave feminist in the sort of in the the pioneer of birth control and what's it called what's the what's the main birth control organization in the States called Planned Parenthood, so she's a creator of Planned Parenthood. She's the first wave suffragists. Her association with w e d e b Du Bois. He writes for her magazine that black uplift, which is this concept of how to make black people more successful should include eugenics type policies it should include encourage the breeding of the best quality of African Americans and not the best classes. Now he doesn't you know it's not a major part of his work but it's definitely there and it's and I included as a small section in the book I don't think it's that many people have written many scholars of American American history and black history in America have talked about this in much greater detail, but racial uplift using eugenics policies is part of w e d Du Bois is intellectual output. And while we're on that kind of theme I went at the beginning of your talk this is a question of mine. You showed these titans of the development of, you know, evolutionary theory and genetics and so on. And yet, then you're about ideas of hybrid vigor and, you know, advantages of heterosegosity and so on. You know, interbreeding. How did they manage to keep that disconnect in their minds and have this idea that it was better to breed light with light. Well, I mean, I again, amazing question. And between you and me, and I hope the other 130 people aren't listening, my real interest in this stemmed from studying the modern synthesis and so trying to understand the process by which natural selection becomes population genetics and incorporates genetics into it is really what I'm sort of fascinated in most of all, I'd like to write a biography of Fisher and Haldane but no one would publish that and fewer people would read it. But fundamentally you've got it. One of the things I think is really interesting is whether you can separate the scientific work of Pearson and Fisher from their political beliefs. And that plays into the whole conversation about how we treat them today, whether we should remove their statues or names from our, our universities or from our stats, you know, our plinths. And I think that what the first thing is I think you have to look at them individually I don't think there is there is, you know, you can apply broad brushes or generalize for all of the individuals and imperial last week have proposed removing Thomas Huxley from their campus and I don't think that's right I don't think it's right in the same way that removing Pearson absolutely was, and I'm slightly equivocal about Fisher I think Fisher was a bad guy. But I think more than anything, he was just sort of deeply insensitive and data driven, but he definitely was ideological and ideologically committed to eugenics. He runs the Cambridge eugenics society as an undergraduate, his first, you would love this his first writings are in the, in the eugenics in house magazine for the Golden Institute what becomes the Golden Institute. And their essays about the touch on, you can see the development of things like Fisherian runaway selection in these early in these these essays he's writing when he's like 21. They definitely also include applying these sorts of models of, of selection to humans he talks about ruddy cheeks and stinky breath as being potential runaway selective, you know exaggerated traits for human mating. So you've got these, it's, it's so fascinating, because on the one hand you can see the emergence of some of the really the genuinely smartest ideas anyone's ever had. You know, the modern synthesis is emerging in his thoughts, and at the same time is absolute commitment to the enemy at the gates, the fall of Rome, great civilizations. Poor people having too many babies incentive tax incentivizations for for middle middle and upper class people to have more babies, and that is in that's in his text that's in his textbook the Genetical Theory of Natural Selection which is, you know, that's the origin of species for population genetics. And I never noticed it before. It's right there. It's right there. And then how then comes along and how Danes. He's eaten Oxford, and then takes a radically different view he becomes a. He's a socialist and then he becomes a communist and then he becomes a Stalinist. So equally problematic in terms of his political legacy becomes and he remains a Stalinist until well after the Second World War. But his view on eugenics is like the polar opposite of fishes and his book. Politics and heredity and politics, which is not in this room right now is it's a it's a it's a popular science book but it's it melds politics with the science and it does the opposite of what those the Cold Spring Harbour guys was trying to do which is he looks very carefully at family trees and how things like him affiliate or pass through royal families, the victorious families and descendants, and he comes to the opposite conclusion he just says, you know, these things aren't they're not eugenics they're heavily influenced by the environments and and that for it did I did I include the slide. I did I think I didn't get to the slide hold on a minute I mean just quickly without going back to me because he says this thing I when I do this talk better next time. I will. I will make sure I get to this one, which is that this is what he says. Can you see that. Yes. So he says that in 1938. And my, I think that is true today. When you get people like Dominic Cummings saying things like that. Last year. I think that what how they said in 1938 is still true. And of course, IQ is a controversial subject and then when you think of Sir Albert and his fabrication of data on the inheritance of IQ and you touched a bit on that kind of thing we can't even rely on the veracity of the data that are put forward. We could go on for ages more with this there are a number of other questions questions along the lines of, you know, does our increased understanding of inheritance make eugenics not worth doing anymore, because we can fix things more or we know that they're not. Not worth doing really and so on but I don't think we've got time to go there. I can briefly answer that because I think the answer is no I think I think are the more we, you know the eye color thing I alluded to, which we to teach to 15 year olds about how you know the allele for blue eyes is recessive and a little for brown is dominant and blah blah blah and you all know that we, we draw it out on a punnets square table. It was worked out by Charles Davenport to the key genesis, but it's just not true it's just it's vaguely true in a probabilistic way. But what we now know and this is current work like this is work published last year, so this year, this year 2021. We know that some coming the exact numbers off the top of my head but but something like two thirds of people who have the genotype for blue eyes, two copies of don't have blue eyes. My eye, if you do your 23 and me, which I'm deeply skeptical of and deeply cynical about about its rollers in understanding ancestry but my version of the gene occur to OCA to which is the blue brown one is is indicates that I have a 31% chance of having brown eyes and I've got two copies of the brown version the so called brown version. Now I knew that because you know, I've got mirrors and I've got brown eyes, but it's a one in three chance that the genetic version of those that gene which is the one that we teach to children is gives you brown eyes if you've got if you're heterozygous or homozygous for for this allele will give you brown eyes, and it's, it's a one in three chance according to according to the largest studies. So in answer to the question, does our increased knowledge of genetics, which is, you know, really burgeoning is great we're going through a golden era of understanding the genome. I think it's gone the other way I think we know less about we're less confident in the in the potential eugenic interventions. I, if you wanted to have blue-eyed children, and you could accurately genotype a fertilized embryo as part of the IVF process, and you could identify the exact versions of that gene occur to to get and you selected an embryo based on the, the, the two gene, the two versions of the gene that you'd had in that embryo, and reimplanted it, and that baby went to term if you went through that whole expensive horrible process, you'd have a one in three chance of predicting of accurately predicting the color eyes that that baby had. And that's eye color. If you want to do that for IQ, where in the latest studies, 1500 genes have been identified that account for 5% of the variance seen in the heritability of IQ. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's like, it's like, it's madness that we're even having this conversation. Well, I think on that, on that happy note, we probably ought to consider ourselves having run out of time. It was a fascinating talk, Adam, and I'm sure we're all looking forward to your book. I'm sorry. I apologize to the people who put in comments and questions. We just didn't have have the time to do justice to them all. It was a great talk. It's an amazing topic. People are still putting in wonderful talk and thank you for it. And it's given us a lot to think about. So, as George said to you at the beginning, the end of these things is rather abrupt, but I'd just like to thank you really ever so much, Adam, for a great topic. And the next time you want to make us a guinea pig for talk, just get in touch. I hope you'll be listening and I hope everybody enjoys their conflicts tomorrow. So thank you very much. Thank you, Pat. Thanks. And thank you for everyone for those those great questions and sorry I waffled on for so long. No, no, no, it was great. Thank you.