Control review – the dark and troubling past, present and future of eugenics
Adam Rutherford’s new book, Control, is primarily a book about eugenics — “the dark history and troubling present,” reads the cover — but to reduce the book to just this would be to gravely underestimate it.
Rutherford pens an investigation into the clash of science and politics throughout history, with eugenics as a guiding theme. Read Control not just for the history of eugenics but for commentary on so many contemporary political arguments.
It is a quick read, aimed at the non-specialist reader who might not know a great deal about the mechanisms of DNA. The first half of the book presents a history of the subject from its pre-history in the time of Plato, when babies with defects were “hidden away” (probably killed), as well the Spartan tradition of “dunking” infants in wine and then throwing any who showed weakness or deformities off Mount Taygetos.
If an instinct for eugenics is found in our early history, the beginnings of the modern subject began with people like Thomas Malthus, who thought it possible to increase happiness by controlling population growth.
From there, the work of Darwin became something else in the hands of people mistakenly believing they could improve human nature through such crude mechanisms of selective breeding or (more typically) non-breeding.
At times this makes for chilling reading. Rutherford details times and places in our relatively modern history where mass sterilisation was considered humane and necessary. He explains how Francis Galton, a pioneer in the field, also expressed racism that was “deep, consistent, and robust, even for his era”.
Galton’s book, Hereditary Genius, was typical of so many of the time, motivated by a belief in science to produce something with objectional ends. In the specific case of Galton, he attempted to rank ethnicities, but it is but one example of what becomes a recurring theme; rationalists believing that the complexity of human nature could be reduced to simple numbers. The outcome is anything but rational.
Rutherford shows that whilst science improved and often provided the analytical and statistical tools used to this day, these studies were often rooted in deep cultural biases to which their exponents were blind.
As Rutherford stresses throughout, though eugenics will forever be associated with the atrocities of the Nazis, it remains a powerful argument for some and needs to be treated coolly to prevent it from being shunted into the intellectual backwaters where its naiveite is rarely challenged.
Another problem is that our politics retains much of the language of eugenics, whether we acknowledge it or not. How we view the individual might be informed by our opinion of how we think genetics work.
It finds its crudest expression in the age-old debate about the importance of nature versus nurture.
Those that believe in the power of nature, might not believe that giving the poor money to facilitate a better standard of living would have any demonstrable effect on our culture.
They instead might believe that lower taxes for the rich (existing wealth presumably being a manifestation of “better” genes) will help them achieve what they are naturally inclined to achieve.
Conversely, if you believe that nature has less of an impact than nurture, you might view it differently in that helping the poorest to achieve more will see an improvement across society.
Rutherford skillfully guides us through this cultural minefield, explaining how genes are part of a much grander scheme of forces at work in every life and across every society.
As he puts it: “genetics is probabilistic not deterministic” and “this is a key reason why the eugenics project was always on precarious ground”. Whilst “all behaviours have a genetic component to them”, they also have “an environmental one too”.
The summary doesn’t do it justice since it’s not as crude as described here. Yet this is where the book comes together in surprising and valuable ways.
Rutherford ends the first half of the book with a surprising but powerful summary that explains the ramifications of eugenics and, indeed, genetics on politics.
It’s a section of the book that deals with the problematic history of science and how we choose to remember pioneers who might have held objectionable beliefs.
It’s a brilliant explanation of history, science, and progress, and at a time when we’re all arguing about the place of statues in our civic landscape, it is worth the price of the book for this alone.
The second half of the book is where matters become, arguably, darker. Eugenics did not end with the Nazi death camps, and Rutherford looks at the current science and where it might lead.
It’s the arguments that have persisted beyond the genocide that make eugenics an attractive science in many parts of the world where forced sterilisations are still being carried out by governments on their citizens.
The forced sterilization of China’s Uyghurs is presented as one damning statistic, with one “gynaecologist in 2021 claimed that she had personally administered eighty sterilisations per day”.
The second half of the book focuses on the advances in gene technology that pose ethical questions. The case of Chinese scientist, He Jainkui, is perhaps the most troubling. In 2018, he announced that he had created the first genetically edited babies, known as Lulu and Nana.
Jainkui had edited embryos to give them — he claimed — lifelong protection against HIV (their father was a carrier). As well as breaking long-established ethical rules, the episode highlighted that “there are always going to be people who are keen to take the next step, either with or without the consent of society or the law”.
Another scientist mentioned is Stephen Hsu, whose influence Rutherford traces through to its place in the thinking of one advisor to the UK government named Dominic Cummings. The story, as told, is fascinating in the way hard science slips into the less hard disciplines of punditry.
Rutherford reflects on the now notorious business of the London Conference for Intelligence and the resignation of Andrew Sabisky who had been employed by Cummings.
Rutherford concludes with a sentiment that has a bearing on much more than eugenics, especially during covid times, and the degree to which science had played handmaid to politics. “[I]f your understanding of a science only extends to the point where your political preconceptions are supported,” writes Rutherford, “then you are an ideologue not a scientist.”
The point is worth stressing. Those still seeking to embrace eugenics might fall foul of the same fallacies as the earliest pioneers. One is to misunderstand the role that genes play in our lives and the degree to which we might not be defined by a genetic sequence.
In a helpfully down-to-earth explanation of a subject that can often run too quickly into science fiction, Rutherford explains that “our current understanding of genetics does not allow for control of even the supposedly simplest trains,” like the colour of our eyes or hair. It might seem like a trivial point about an esoteric science, but it expresses something fundamental about individual agency.
For the moment, says Rutherford, “eugenics is a busted flush, a pseudoscience that cannot deliver on its promise”. In a way, our fascination with it perhaps says more about us than does even our genetic markup.