More on that Eugenics Book

Following up from yesterday's post about the Eugenics in Race and State volume that I found in a used bookstore...

First, some more on Charles B. Davenport, who chaired the Publication Committee for the second International Congress and then ran the third International Congress in 1932. He started out as a zoologist and taxonomist, but soon turned to heredity and eugenics. He published Heredity in Relation to Eugenics in 1911, which was used as a college textbooks for years and which got him into the National Academy of Sciences (!). This is a particularly eyebrow-raising paragraph from his Wikpedia entry:

Davenport founded the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations (IFEO) in 1925, with Eugen Fischer as chairman of the Commission on Bastardization and Miscegenation (1927). Davenport aspired to found a World Institute for Miscegenations, and "was working on a 'world map' of the 'mixed-race areas, which he introduced for the first time at a meeting of the IFEO in Munich in 1928."

Davenport dabbled with Nazi publications in the 1930s. He authored a Eugenics Creed, which included these gems that would make Iowa Congressman Steve King proud:

• "I believe that I am the trustee of the germ plasm that I carry; that this has been passed on to me through thousands of generations before me; and that I betray the trust if I so act as to jeopardize it, with its excellent possibilities, or, from motives of personal convenience, to unduly limit offspring."
• "I believe that, having made our choice in marriage carefully, we, the married pair, should seek to have 4 to 6 children in order that our carefully selected germ plasm shall be reproduced in adequate degree and that this preferred stock shall not be swamped by that less carefully selected."
• "I believe in such a selection of immigrants as shall not tend to adulterate our national germ plasm with socially unfit traits."

Henry Fairfield Osborn (ex officio member of the Publication Committee) was a paleontologist and president of the American Natural History Museum, but he wasn't on the committee just because the Congress happened to be held at his building. He, too, was a noted eugenicist. Again, according to the Wikipedia, his "efforts to imbue the museum's exhibits and educational programs with his own racist and eugenist beliefs disturbed many of his contemporaries and have marred his legacy." I find it ironic that someone who must have thought he was part of the master race was wrong not only about his superiority, but also about how evolution works: Osborn didn't believe mutations and natural selection had a role in evolution, but that instead organisms have an innate tendency to change toward a particular goal! Osborn came from a long line of patrician New Englanders.

Clark Wissler started out in psychology but moved into anthropology, also at the Natural History Museum for some of his career. He believed culture was biologically innate in humans (though I'm not sure if that means he though specific cultures are biologically innate or that having culture in general is biologically innate). He appears to have been something of a geographic determinist as well. There's not much detail on his Wikipedia page about his work in eugenics, but there are two articles cited from anthropology journals on that topic.

H.H. (Harry) Laughlin was a sociologist and superintendent of Davenport's Eugenics Record Office from its entire existence, 1910–1939. Davenport recruited him into the field. It sounds like Laughlin had a lot of influence on American eugenics policy, including compulsory sterilization legislation and the anti-immigration laws of the mid-1920s. He was a one-many early version of ALEC, drafting "model" state legislation to enact compulsory sterilization, which was made law in 18 states. Carrie Buck of Virginia was sterilized under the law Laughlin wrote. He also supported Virginia's Racial Integrity Act, which outlawed miscegenation, and received a 1936 honorary degree from Germany's University of Heidelberg "for his work behalf of the science of racial cleansing."

It should be noted that both the International Congress and the Eugenics Record Office were funded largely by multi-millionaires Mary Williamson Averell Harriman and John Harvey Kellogg, and later the [Andrew] Carnegie Institution. They were basically the robber baron equivalent to our Peter Thiels, Mark Zuckerbergs, Bill Gateses, and so on: people who think they are rich because they're better than everyone else, so they can and should use their money to remake society in their image.

You may have heard that columnist Bret Stephens had what many consider a eugenics-oriented piece in today's New York Times. I'm not linking to it, and I confess I haven't read it because... who wants to give him the click, but here's a Daily Beast article about it. And it's worth reading this 2018 Guardian article that investigates the recent resurgence of media interest in scientific racism (always part of eugenics). Like Stephens, its current supporters like to style themselves as brave truth-tellers facing down political correctness, but they're just regurgitating self-serving non-science. As the Guardian puts it,

[The] second plank of the race science case goes like this: human bodies continued to evolve, at least until recently – with different groups developing different skin colours, predispositions to certain diseases, and things such as lactose tolerance. So why wouldn’t human brains continue evolving, too?

The problem here is that race scientists are not comparing like with like. Most of these physical changes involve single gene mutations, which can spread throughout a population in a relatively short span of evolutionary time. By contrast, intelligence – even the rather specific version measured by IQ – involves a network of potentially thousands of genes, which probably takes at least 100 millennia to evolve appreciably.

Given that so many genes, operating in different parts of the brain, contribute in some way to intelligence, it is hardly surprising that there is scant evidence of cognitive advance, at least over the last 100,000 years. The American palaeoanthropologist Ian Tattersall, widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading experts on Cro-Magnons, has said that long before humans left Africa for Asia and Europe, they had already reached the end of the evolutionary line in terms of brain power. “We don’t have the right conditions for any meaningful biological evolution of the species,” he told an interviewer in 2000.

In fact, when it comes to potential differences in intelligence between groups, one of the remarkable dimensions of the human genome is how little genetic variation there is.... human beings share a remarkably high proportion of their genes compared to other mammals. The single subspecies of chimpanzee that lives in central Africa, for example, has significantly more genetic variation than does the entire human race.