"I think the main hope for the survival of the European peoples is Eastern Europe including Russia" -- Richard Lynn

Richard Lynn received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and since then has worked as a lecturer of psychology at the University of Exeter and a professor of psychology at the University of Ulster and the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin. He continues a productive career after five decades and more than eleven books. Lynn is credited with discovering the five point IQ difference between East Asians and Europeans, the Flynn Effect and sex differences in intelligence. I asked him a few questions about his books Eugenics and Dysgenics, reviewed here and here.

First of all, I think it’s important that your ideas be out there. Why are Eugenics and Dysgenics over $100 on Amazon?

The price is the publisher’s decision and seems barmy to me but I suppose they reckon they will sell a few hundred copies to libraries and make the most money this way

In Dysgenics you wrote that Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Fiji, and Indonesia are the only countries looked at that seemed to break the dysgenic pattern and that research was needed to see why. In the 13 years since the book was published has there been research and if so, what has it shown?

I haven’t followed this up.

In Eugenics you talk a lot about China and the Eugenic Law but surprisingly not much about the one-child policy. I’ve heard that it was actually dysgenic because it mostly or totally applied to the high IQ Han (92 percent of the population) and city dwellers. Can you tell us what you know about the policy and its implementation?

It may be eugenic because the effect has been a 20 percent or so surplus of males in their twenties, so females can be more choosy about mates and they will likely chose the more intelligent and successful. Conversely the less intelligent and successful will be less able to reproduce.

It’s been eight years since Eugenics was published. Your theory about the end of history was fascinating and the most exciting instrument for human improvement looked at was embryo selection. Have there been any notable advances in that area since your book came out?

Not yet so far as I know.

Has anything happened to change your mind about future being ruled by what I call the Chinese Superstate?

No.

Do you know if Singapore’s current leaders are as sympathetic to eugenics as Lee Kuan Yew was?

No.

The only thing I found myself disagreeing with in either of your great works was the idea that beauty shouldn’t be selected for. You argue that we should select against dwarfism, based partly on psychological distress that dwarfs suffer from. Can’t we say the same about people who suffer from extreme ugliness? In the environmentalist movement it’s considered reasonable to preserve a landscape or race of foxes because it’s aesthetically pleasing; why not with humans, especially considering the phenotypic uniqueness of those of Nordic descent?

You make an interesting point. When embryo selection comes into use, no doubt many couples will opt for beauty as well as other desirable characteristics.

Here in the US the Hispanic population is going to increase by 15 percent over the next few decades. That’ll surly hurt the gene pool more than a few generations of dysgenic breeding. Europe is in a similar situation. Do you think the whole argument against dysgenics is mute if we don’t stop immigration?

Yes this is a problem I ducked in Dysgenics and Eugenics because I did not want to antagonize readers. I hope to write new editions and cover immigration.

You try to explain continuing immigration to the West in political terms, saying that politicians don’t want to antagonize minorities. With anti-immigration parties popping up and winning elections all over Europe that argument really doesn’t hold. It seems a better strategy to appeal to the majority that don’t want to lose their civilization. Purely political considerations don’t explain why anti-immigration politicians are persecuted by law either; on all other topics (save maybe homosexuality) debate is allowed. Do you think you missed the ideological component of why the elites like immigration?

Yes, the relaxed attitude of political elites to continuing immigration is certainly partly attributable to political correctness ideology.

Has your pessimism about the West (see this lecture) subsided at all with the recent electoral success of the UKIP and BNP in Britain and other anti-immigration parties across the rest of Europe?

I remain pessimistic about the probability of curtailing immigration in North America and Western Europe. I think the main hope for the survival of the European peoples is Eastern Europe including Russia

Are you working on any new books or projects that would be of interest to readers of this site?

My next book will be on the IQ and achievements of the Jews.

Do you have an approximate release date?

Say around April, 2010.

Once again, I’d like to thank Richard Lynn for taking the time to answer my questions.

From HBD Books, June 16, 2009

Eugenics: A Reassessment

Richard Lynn

One of the only valid points made by the critics of The Bell Curve was that if the science was accepted, then eugenics, which Hernstein and Murray refused to endorse, becomes the rational solution to society’s ills. Steven Pinker, the next major public thinker associated with the hereditarian position, likewise refused to follow his own logic far enough. One scholar who doesn’t flinch is psychologist Richard Lynn. Eugenics is not only right, but we have a duty to increase the frequency of genes for positive traits and reduce the frequency of genes for negative traits. Once you determine that something is a genetic problem it cries out for a genetic solution. Eugenics: A Reassessment looks at the history of eugenics, the ethical case for it and its future. Here Lynn goes beyond his role as a psychologist and gives us his own theory of the coming end of history.

The Rise and Fall of Eugenics

Eugenic ideas existed long before the publications of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. In The Republic, Plato pictured a society where rulers, soldiers, and workers would be bred on the same principles of the breeding of plants and livestock, about which much must have been known in 380 B.C. Still, it was the discovery of evolution that was the catalyst of these ideas taking off in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Biologist, statistician, and psychologist Sir Francis Galton was the main prophet of eugenics. He spent his life forming organizations, writing, and spreading the word about humanity’s potential for improvement. He carried out the first studies that showed nature to be more important than nurture in determining intelligence and character.

By the early 1900s eugenics was endorsed by practically all biologists and geneticists, politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill, and thinkers across the political spectrum, including Bertrand Russell, H. L. Mencken, and George Bernard Shaw. Lynn makes the distinction between positive eugenics, encouragement given to society’s best to produce children, and negative eugenics, trying to set limits on the breeding of the inferior. It was the latter that was easier to legislate on. The first American sterilization law was passed in Indiana in 1907 “to prevent the procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists.” By 1913 similar acts had been passed in 12 states and a further 19 had laws on the books by 1931. The constitutionality of these laws was challenged in court and in 1927 Buck v. Bell went to the supreme court. The case centered around a mentally retarded woman who was born to a mentally retarded mother and gave birth to yet another retard. Her hospital applied to have her sterilized, and Christian groups protested. The court ruled 8-1 in favor of sterilization. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the following in the famous decision.

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices . . . in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute the degenerate offspring of crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit for continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccinations is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Unfortunately, over the twentieth century only about 60,000 American sterilizations would take place, which amounted to less than 0.1 percent of mentally retarded and psychopathic people. Sweden did a little better, sterilizing the same amount, totaling one percent of the entire population. In Japan, 16,520 women met the same fate until their law was repealed in 1996. In Denmark, a third of all retards over a ten year span. Unsurprisingly, the all-time champions of sterilization were the Germans, who sterilized 300,000 people after their sterilization law was passed in 1933.

As Lynn points out, it’s not all that unusual for a scientific theory to be accepted and then rejected. What makes eugenics unique is that it’s a rejected theory that turned out to be true. While the importance of heredity in determining individual and group traits is well-established, by the end of the twentieth century to call something eugenic was to condemn it. The author blames horror at the crimes of Nazi Germany and the increasing value given to individual over social rights. In recent years courts in the US and Britain have said that parents can have retarded women in their care sterilized, ruling against civil liberties organizations who’ve joined with Christian groups in arguing that all people have a right to as many children as they can produce. While these legal decisions aren’t made on eugenic grounds, we should be thankful for the effect.

The arguments against eugenics don’t hold up. First is the claim that we can’t decide what positive and negative traits are. It’s hard to argue with Galton’s original three characteristics of intelligence, health, and character (close enough to conscientiousness in modern psychology) being desirable. Who would argue that disease could be preferable to health or stupidity to genius? It’s a case of moral relativism taken to the extreme.

Lynn looks at other characteristics we may select for but doesn’t find any beyond Galton’s original three. Society needs a wide range of people on the continuum of extraverted/introverted and neurotic/relaxed in a way that it doesn’t need a wide range of propensity to break the law or catch diseases. He also says that beauty provides no social good, and people have different definitions of it. Here is the only place I part ways with the author. Among environmentalists (people who care about the environment, not anti-hereditarians), beauty is seen as a legitimate reason to preserve certain forests and trees that provide no economic good. It’s why we save redwood trees but not swamps. As far as the lack of a universal standard, Peter Frost demolishes that as a PC myth. Even if everyone didn’t agree that blue eyes and white skin were the most beautiful, every race could select based on their own standards.

The idea that eugenics wouldn’t work is also answered here. If we determined that it wouldn’t be possible to select for certain traits in living organisms, then not only eugenics but horticulture, animal domestication and even evolution itself would all have to be rejected too. As a matter of fact, heritability of running speed among horses has been found to be between 15 and 35 percent heritable, lower than the lowest estimates for intelligence or psychopathy among humans. Any trait that is passed on genetically can be made more or less common or enhanced among a population.

Classical Eugenics

Lynn differentiates between classical eugenics and new eugenics, the use of biotechnology. A section is given to each.

The only country to practice classical positive eugenics in the modern world has been Singapore, under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew. Higher earners were given tax breaks for children and a government unit was set up to bring college graduates together in social settings like dances and cruises to encourage relationships and procreation. In three short years, the results were impressive.

Births in Singapore

Education Level of Mother	1987		1990
	Number	Percent	Number	Percent
Below Secondary	26,719	61.3	26,718	52.3
Secondary and above	16,012	36.7	24,411	47.7

Between 1987 and 1990, births to college educated women went from 36.7 percent of all births to 47.7. Obviously, it’s not hopeless and the problem of dysgenics can be corrected if a government sets its mind to it. In Nazi Germany, loans were given to couples determined to be of good genetic stock. For each child they produced, 25 percent of the loan would be written off. Whether such things can be done in a democracy, especially a multi-racial one, is a different question.

The biggest victory for negative eugenics has been the liberalization of abortion laws. Although justified as based on a “woman’s right to choose,” those who have unintended pregnancies are usually of low intelligence and those with anti-social tendencies. Thus, increasing the availability of abortion is eugenic. Those who are concerned about good breeding should support causes traditionally associated with the left like abortion on demand and making birth control freely available.

The Promise of Biotechnology

The most exciting part of this book is the section on the new eugenics, and how biotechnology may make all the questions raised here obsolete. Prenatal diagnosis can now screen for some of the most common genetic diseases, and the fetuses can be aborted. In the 1990s, this was estimated to reduce incidences of genetic disorders at birth by 5 percent. As the technology becomes better and more widely available we can expect the rate of genetic disease to drop. It’s a matter of time before embryos can be screened for other traits like beauty and intelligence.

Gene therapy is the attempt to help an individual by inserting genes for positive traits. These genes are then passed on to offspring. In the 1980s, this technology was used on mice to treat a heredity disease and by the 1990s was used to treat human disorders. Like prenatal screening, it’s only a matter of time before this technology can be used for the selection of whatever parents desire.

Embryo selection consists of taking a number of eggs from a woman, fertilizing them with the sperm of a partner in vitro, testing each for desirable traits and inserting the best embryo. The second, third, and fourth best can be saved for possible future use and the rest discarded. When Lynn’s book was written in 2001, it was possible to test for sex and thousands of genetic diseases.

In the twenty-first century it will become possible to test embryos for the presence of genes affecting numerous other characteristics, including late-onset diseases and disorders; intelligence; special cognitive abilities, such as mathematical, linguistic, and musical aptitudes; personality traits; athletic abilities; height; body build; and physical appearance. It will then be possible for couples to examine the genetic printouts of a number of embryos and select for implantation the ones they regard as having the most desirable genetic characteristics.

Before this happens some technical issues need to be addressed, such as identifying the desirable genes. That’s going to happen over the next few decades. Right now it’s possible to hormonally stimulate a woman to produce around 25 embryos at one time. With this technology, even parents of poor stock will be able to produce at least average children. Couples can be expected to produce embryos within a range of 30 IQ points; 15 over the parents‘ average to 15 below. With embryo selection the IQ of a population will have the potential to be raised 15 points in a single generation. Average intelligence can be expected to keep increasing until we hit our limit and new mutations pop up, the way average speed among thoroughbreds has been rising without the fastest times doing so in decades. In 2001, in vitro fertilization cost between $40,000 and $200,000 in the US and $3,000 to $4,000 in Britain, due to lower health care costs in general. Today, it’s a fraction of that. Like all technology, the quality can be expected to improve and the price to drop.

Western governments may outlaw all these technologies, but they will be legal somewhere and as these options became cheaper and better known more couples will travel to take advantage of them. The situation will be similar to when abortion was only available in certain US states or European countries, and women desiring to have one would simply take a bus.

Not everybody will be able to afford biotechnology, and some ethicists reject it on those grounds. Of course, there are all kinds of things that rich people can afford that the poor can’t; we don’t outlaw them all. Lynn optimistically points out that no technology that can help humanity has ever been successfully suppressed. The inherent quality gap between the genetically engineered upper class and the ‘natural’ lower class will continue to grow until the former decides to sterilize the latter or forces them to use biotechnology themselves.

Why China is the Future

In 1994 China passed the Eugenic Law. All pregnant women were required to undergo embryo screening and abort fetuses with genetic disorders. This was a follow-up to the famous one-child policy introduced in 1979 that brought the birth rate down to 1.9 per woman.

Attitudes of elites and those who work in the relevant fields are likely to determine what technologies are accepted and how liberally they’ll be used. A survey was conducted between 1994 and 1996 asking geneticists and physicians around the world whether they agreed with the statement “An important goal of genetic counseling is to reduce the number of deleterious genes in the population.”

In addition to the negative attitudes of the elites towards anything eugenic, other reasons we can expect these ideas not to win fast acceptance in the West are the value placed on individual rights, democracy, and the existence of low IQ minorities who would be disproportionately affected by any measures aimed at improving the genetic quality of the population. While many countries in the third world might feel positively about eugenic measures, the attitudes in China are the most favorable and when that is combined with the advantages of an authoritarian government, a lack of dysgenic immigration, and a high IQ starting point it’s not hard to believe that the Chinese will continue to be the most enthusiastic and efficient users of biotechnology.

So how will this nation of a billion people treat the rest of the world after it’s raised its IQ to 150+? Lynn might be too optimistic here. He believes the Chinese will colonize the world and try to improve the IQs and living standards of their subjects. The Europeans will be kept around for their biological uniqueness and admired for their cultural accomplishments, the way that the Romans subjugated the Greeks but appreciated their philosophy and art. If the Chinese decide that the Europeans should be preserved they’d be doing more for them than whites are currently doing for themselves. A global eugenic superstate led by by the Chinese will be the “end of history.”

Lynn’s forecasts the next 100 years with a stone-cold detachment. The first government to utilize the power of biotechnology will take over the world. Thanks to third world immigration and egalitarianism, the decline of the West seems inevitable and eugenic policies unlikely. The future of humanity being in the hands of the dictators in Beijing may not be the most comforting idea in the world, but at least the reader of Eugenics may be convinced that intelligence and civilization will continue somewhere.

For a review of Richard Lynn’s work Dysgenics see here.

Richard Hoste runs the website HBD Books.

Richard Lynn

When it comes to population, quality matters more than quantity.  While educated Westerners never tire of sprinkling their conversations with the word “overpopulation,” voicing concern about population worth is taboo.  Put it this way: you have to spend the rest of your life in a city filled with Nigerians or Japanese.  You can either pick the ethnic makeup or the amount of people in the city.  Which would you choose?  As it’s settled that genes influence character and intelligence, could these traits be declining in some or all populations?  Has it to some extent?  Anecdotes exist about single educated women and fertile welfare queens, but hard data is needed.

While support for eugenics has been around since the time of Plato, the first person to worry about genetic deterioration was French physician Benedict August Morel.  He’s an obscure figure today and much better known is the more important Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics in 1883.  He thought that more genes for lower intelligence and poor character were concentrated in the lower classes, whose higher fertility would lead to a decline in genetic quality.  Galton spent his life working to reverse the trend.  He eventually convinced Darwin himself of the danger.  Biologist Alfred Russell Wallace wrote:

In one of my last conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilisation natural selection had no play and the fittest did not survive.

It wasn’t until 1974 that Nobel prize winning physicist William Shockley called the process dysgenics.  Darwin went on to despair over the excessive breeding of “the scum.”  Data has always been needed on whether his fears had been justified.  Richard Lynn brings together studies and data from the last 200 years dealing with the connection between fertility and intelligence/socioeconomic status from all over the world.  How afraid should we be?

Selection throughout Time

The conditions that hunter-gatherers lived in insured an upkeep of genetic quality.  Usually there was a chief who had to have a certain amount of intelligence to acquire and maintain his position.  He had the most access to females, there would be relatively high ranking men who had one wife and many of the unfit never bred.  Mutations that popped up which adversely affected health would be weeded out.  Early nation-states continued with polygamy.

With Western man’s transition to civilization selection was weakened but not eliminated.  The higher social classes enjoyed better nutrition so had better health and children more likely to survive into adulthood.  Christianity struck a blow against the Western gene pool by enforcing celibacy among the priesthood but probably more than made up for it by prohibitions against adultery.  Most who have children out of wed-lock then and now have/had lower intelligence and less self-control.  Overall, the years 1500-1800 were good for Europe’s gene pool.  In England from 1620-1624 the middle classes reported 4.4 children per woman compared to 2.1 for the working class.  Part of the reason why is life expectancy.  In Berlin from 1710-1799 the average life expectancy for the upper class was 29.8 years compared to 20.3 for the lower class.  The numbers for Geneva, Rouen and Neuruppin in the 18th century are similarly tilted towards the former.  This didn’t mean that everybody died when they were 20-30 years old but that more of the lower classes were dying in childhood before they could mate.

Lynn understands that for these numbers to mean anything it would have to be shown that there was social mobility.  If everybody was stuck in their own class with no opportunity to rise or fall then we would expect different social classes to be similar and not worry about differences in fertility.  Pitrim Sorokin looked at a wide range of societies and found that there has never been one with no social mobility at all.  The closest thing has been the caste system in India, but even these classes weren’t absolutely closed.  Economist historian S.J. Payling concluded that there was significant social mobility in Europe from at least the 14th century on.

Natural Selection Breaks Down: Health and Intelligence

Mutations occasionally pop up in any population.  Since the vast majority are adverse, stable fertility for an entire population still means deterioration.  The maintenance of the quality of the population requires not just a stable population at all levels but the active weeding out of the unfit.  The results of the slacking of selection in our modern world is apparent in disease.  Today, almost 1% of children born have a mutation for a common genetic disorder.  Due to carriers of bad genes surviving and new mutations, it’s estimated that the rates of hemophilia, cystic fibrosis and phenylketonuria are increasing every generation by 26%, 120%, and 300% respectively.  Humanity requires that we save children that can be saved but breeding for those with diseased genes needs to be restricted.  Lynn hints that better genetic screening and selective abortion can offset some of the consequences of modern medicine.

American psychologist Theodore Lentz was the first to devise a method for finding the relationship between intelligence and fertility.  He tested the IQs of children and found out how many siblings they had.  Assuming that children have the same IQ as their parents, if those with lower IQs had more brothers and sisters than children with high IQs then it could be determined that dysgenics is happening.  In 1927 Lentz calculated an IQ drop of 4 points per generation.  Calculations in Britain found a drop of about 2 points per generation. These surveys didn’t include the childless but since they are disproportionately those with higher IQs the studies actually underestimate the extent of dysgenic fertility.  Reviewing various studies and using findings from twin and adoption cases showing that IQ is 82% heritable, Lynn calculates a genotypic IQ decline of 5 points in Britain from 1890-1980.  In the US he calculates a drop of 2.5 IQ points for whites and 6.2 for blacks over three generations.  Interestingly, women are shown to universally have more dysgenic fertility than men.  This is partly because low IQ men probably have a harder time finding mates than low IQ women.

The Fall of Greece

Greece is a particularly interesting example.  Papavassiliou (1954) looked at IQ, socioeconomic status and fertitlity for men and came up with the following results.

Intelligence and Fertility in Greece, 1950s

Socioeconomic status      N         Mean IQ               N of Children

Professional 41              117.2                1.78

Skilled Workers 80              100.9                2.66

Semiskilled 27                91.0                4.00

Unskilled 67                 82.2                5.56

My calculations give an IQ of 96.9 for the parent generation and an IQ drop of 4.9.  Using a heritability of .82 for IQ puts the IQ of the children’s generation at 92.9 (IQ of parent generation – .82 x 4.9) .  Lynn has found elsewhere that the IQ of Greece is 95. This low (for Europe) figure is surprising considering the country’s historical accomplishments.  Papavassiliou’s data may solve the puzzle.

Does the Flynn Effect Disprove Eugenics?

While science has shown that traits for IQ and socioeconomic status are heritable and those with poor genes are outbreeding those with good genes, actual performance on IQ tests in the industrialized world has risen over the last century.  How can this be?  This seeming paradox is called the Flynn effect, after the scientist who estimated IQ gains of about 3-4 points per decade over the 20th century.

We can rule out the effect of increased familiarity with written tests or better education because these gains are present in children as young as two years old.  It is doubtful that it is due to increased stimulation because adoption studies show that the effect of shared environment is negligible; two biologically unrelated people raised in the same house are no more alike than any two random strangers.  Lynn’s explanation is that the Flynn effect is due to better nutrition.  This seems like the best explanation, as over the same time period height and brain size have increased by one standard deviation: the same as the increase in IQ.

So while genotypic intelligence, which can be seen as underlying genetic quality, has decreased, actual performance, phenotypic intelligence, has seen an increase.  This increase can’t last forever and the evidence shows that in the developed world, with even the poorest suffering from obesity, the Flynn effect has hit its ceiling.  We can now expect a decrease in observed intelligence in the developed even discounting low IQ third world immigration.

The Case of Character

Francis Galton and the early eugenicists weren’t only concerned with the decline in intelligence and health but what they called character: a moral sense, ability to delay gratification and work towards long term goals and sense of duty.  Modern psychologists call this conscientiousness and Lynn gives a working estimate for it being 66% heritable.  The news here is even worse than the data on intelligence.

Looking at criminals and psychopaths and their number of siblings yields a decline in consciousness that is twice the rate of the decline in intelligence.  This has had real life consequences

The straightforward prediction is that the high fertility of criminals has led to an increase in the number of genes in the population responsible for crime and this will show up in increasing crime rates.  These increasing crime rates have certainly occurred in most of the economically developed nations during the second half of the twentieth century.  In the United States, crime rates approximately tripled between 1960 and 1990; in Britain they quadrupled, and similar increases have occurred in many other countries.

Rates of out-of-wedlock births tell a similar story.  Western populations are morally worse than ever and we can expect the modern welfare state to continue to accelerate the decline.  Unfortunately, most social scientists and policy makers are too steeped in the environmentalist dogma to deal with these problems.

Does the Universality of the Problem Mean It’s Hopeless?

While there are no direct studies for IQ and fertility in the third world we can check to see how socioeconomic status and education, both correlated with IQ, relate to number of children.  Lynn calls the birth rate of the lowest class over the birth rate of the highest class the dysgenic ratio.  For example, if those in the lowest class have 3 children per woman and the higher class have 2, the dysgenic ratio is 3/2 = 1.5.  Anything over 1 indicates dysgenic fertility and anything under 1 indicates eugenic fertility.  While a number over 2 is high for modern Western nations, ratios have been calculated at 3.1 for Columbia, 2.6 for Guatemala, 2.7 for Mexico and 3.1 for Brazil.  Muslim and African countries have lower ratios, but only because even the highest classes have  large numbers of children.  In a worldwide survey the only exceptions are Bangladesh, Fiji and Indonesia who have ratios of 1.01, 0.93, and 0.86 respectively.  The developing world can be expected to remain “developing” indefinitely.

So dysgenic fertility is found everywhere: among rich and poor and every race.  Does that mean it’s hopeless?  We won’t know until we at least acknowledge and try to deal with the problem.  Communism once controlled half the planet and today its equivalent is globalization and the supposed triumph of liberal democracy.  While communists can say that true communism “has never been tried” and continue to be liberals, the legacy of Nazism poisons the eugenics movement.  Of course, blaming the ideas behind eugenics for the crimes of the Nazis is as silly as blaming the ideology of the welfare state for Soviet labor camps.  So there is no rational reason why eugenics can’t capture the hearts and minds of policy makers the way it did 100 years ago.  While the facts of differential fertility may discomfort our feminized elites we must never stop repeating that the cost of doing nothing is the end of civilization.  There’s no virtue in ignoring that.

Richard Hoste runs the website HBD Books.

War Against the Weak:
Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race
Edwin Black
New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003

Black’s book is an ill-informed and intemperate attack on eugenics. It follows in the tradition of two previous attacks, the first by Kenneth Ludmerer (Genetics and American Society, 1972), and the second by Daniel Kevles (In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, 1985). The Ludmerer and Kevles books are, up to a point, scholarly, despite the authors’ failures to understand the main arguments of the eugenicists. Black’s book is a hyped-up version of these two earlier accounts and adds little of substance to them.

Black has found himself a niche as a muckraker specializing in attacking American firms and institutions for assisting the Nazis in their program for the extermination of the Jews and inspiring the Holocaust. His previous book IBM and the Holocaust accused IBM of aiding Hitler by selling its punch-card machines to Germany. He writes that “I was able to demonstrate that the race-defining punch card used by the SS in Nazi Germany was actually derived from one developed for the Carnegie Institution years before Hitler came to power.” Wow! So what we thought was good old American IBM aided and abetted the Holocaust!

The central thesis of Black’s War Against the Weak is that eugenic theories of the Nordic as the master race and eugenic policies to promote Nordics were first advanced in the United States, financed by American foundations, and that these inspired Hitler, who put them into practice in the Holocaust. What a mishmash of misunderstandings is here!

Black writes, “As I explored the history of eugenics, I soon discovered that the Nazi principle of Nordic superiority was not hatched in the Third Reich but on Long Island decades earlier and then actively transported to Germany. How did it happen? To uncover the story I did as I have done before and launched an international investigation. This time, a network of dozens of researchers, mostly volunteers, working in the United States, England, Germany and Canada unearthed some 50,000 documents and period publications from more than forty archives, dozens of special collections and other repositories.” How strange that none of these documents apparently revealed that the doctrine of Nordic superiority was first put forward by the Frenchman Arthur Comte de Gobineau in his Essays on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853). How strange that apparently neither Black nor any of his dozens of research assistants should have been aware of this well known fact. There is no mention of Gobineau in Black’s book.

Black writes “Within these pages you will discover the sad truth of how the scientific rationales that drove the killers of Auschwitz were first concocted on Long Island at the Carnegie Institution’s eugenic enterprise at Cold Spring Harbor.” What nonsense. The idea of eugenics was first put forward about 380 B.C. by Plato in The Republic, a eugenic utopia in which people are bred to be superior rulers, soldiers, and artisans by using the same methods of selective breeding from the best individuals that had been successfully used to produce improved strains of domestic animals and varieties of plants. There is no mention of Plato in Black’s 550-page book. In modern times the term eugenics was proposed by the Englishman Francis Galton in 1883 for the science of finding ways for improving the genetic quality of human populations in respect of health, intelligence, and moral character, a concept that embraced law-abidingness, self-discipline, a strong work ethic, and a sense of social obligation. Over the next twenty-eight years Galton wrote a number of papers on how eugenics could and should be promoted, including “The possible improvement of the human breed under the existing conditions of law and sentiment” published in Nature in 1901 (not cited of course by Black). It was not until 1902 that Carnegie Institution was founded at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island.

Far from being an American idea that was exported to Europe, eugenics was a European concept that was exported to America. Eugenics societies for the promotion of eugenics were established in Germany in 1906 and in Britain in 1907. In the United States the American Breeders Association was set up in 1906 and renamed the Genetics Association in 1913, but the American Eugenics society was not founded until 1923. So much for Black’s thesis that eugenics began in the United States.

Black repeats uncritically the familiar canard that eugenics inspired Hitler to set in train the Holocaust. Contrary to this frequently made assertion; Hitler did not regard the Jews as inferior and did not send them to the concentration camps on these grounds. Everyone in Germany in the 1930s knew that the Jews are a highly talented people. Hitler recognized and believed that there would be a struggle for world domination between its two most talented peoples, the Jews and the Germans. This – and not eugenics, exported from America or not – was the reason for his policies toward the Jews.

Where the United States did take the lead was in the introduction of eugenic programs for the sterilization of the mentally retarded. This was first introduced in Indiana in 1907 and by 1931 had been introduced in 31 states. This provision was challenged in the courts in the case of Buck v. Bell. The case concerned a mentally retarded young woman named Carrie Buck who had a mentally retarded syphilitic prostitute mother and an illegitimate child who was backward at school. An appeal against the decision by a hospital in Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck went to the Supreme Court in 1927. Black continues, “If the Supreme Court would uphold Carrie Buck’s sterilization, the floodgates of eugenic cleansing would be opened across the United States for thousands” (p. 117). The Supreme Court rejected the appeal and the young woman was duly sterilized. The Supreme Court’s verdict was delivered by Oliver Wendell Holmes and concluded, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Black writes, “The words that would reverberate for ever – eugenic sterilization was now the law of the land. The floodgates opened wide” (pp. 121-2). Evidently it has never occurred to Black to wonder whether the mentally retarded make any contribution to society or are fit to be parents and raise children.

Even Kevles, who shares Black’s dislike of eugenics, cannot stomach Black’s book. In a review in the New York Times, he writes that it “is a muckraking book about a subject incontestably awash in muck. In the vein of the genre, it is a stew rich in facts and spiced with half-truths, exaggerations and distortions.” Quite so.

From TOQ, vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring 2004).