Should Dr. West Be Sterilized?
Jim Curtsinger
Jim Curtsinger
I missed the live presentations by Dr. John West and Dr. Mark Borrello, but fortunately videos are available online. Both talks can be viewed here. The video is in four parts: Part I is the first 30 minutes or so of John West's talk; Part II is the second part of West's talk, about another 30 minutes; Part III is Mark Borrello's 10-minute rebuttal. Part IV is questions from the audience. When I refer to specific statements in the talks I will reference the part number and the minute-mark.
Borrello's analysis of West's presentation is politely devastating. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to add a few comments, partly because I'm more blunt than Borrello, and also because I have a personal stake. Just a couple of weeks before Dr. West's visit to Minnesota I gave a lecture on the eugenics movement to a large undergraduate biology class. One of my main points was that evolutionary genetics played a crucial role in demonstrating on scientific grounds that negative eugenics, the nasty forced-sterilization part of eugenics, could not work as intended. Even if one decides that negative eugenics is socially and morally OK, that undesirables can be objectively defined, and that there is a simple genetic basis to socially undesirable traits (and those are enormous if's), evolutionary theory shows that sterilizing hereditary defectives cannot clean up the gene pool. That's right - my main point was diametrically opposed to the message that West presented a few weeks later. Evolutionary biology destroys rather than promotes negative eugenics. I did not tailor my remarks to offset West - in fact I had never heard of the guy until a few days before his talk on campus.
One of us is wrong. Following are a few comments about West's talk, and then a brief description of an important evolutionary model that invalidates negative eugenics.
Dr. West has an agenda. He wants to show that mainstream biologists in general and evolutionary biologists in particular can be utterly and tragically wrong about policies that are important to society. (Of course the likely follow-up is: "And so they could be utterly and tragically wrong about Intelligent Design".) The agenda involves two central ideas: first, that Darwin is responsible in some way for negative eugenics; second, that Darwin's intellectual heirs had the power to "dictate" social policy and put negative eugenics to work. Both central ideas are wrong.
Lying About Darwin
Promulgating the idea that Darwin is responsible for negative eugenics requires some fancy footwork, since it's false. Here's how West did his little dance: First, he titled his talk "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" so that everything that transpired was supposedly under the umbrella of Darwinian thought. Second, he made it clear right at the beginning of the talk that he pins eugenics squarely on Darwinian biology. At the 1:56 mark of Part I he states that: "[Eugenics] sought to really breed better human beings on the principles of Darwinian biology". Third, and most deviously, he quotes from Darwin's Descent of Man and leaves out the bits that don't fit his agenda, changing Darwin's meaning in the process.
Using a fancy Powerpoint presentation, West showed his audience a picture of Darwin while a recorded actor read Darwin's words about how civilized men take actions to care for the weaker members of human society (Part I 9:25). The actor says in part, quoting Darwin ("this" refers to acts of sympathy toward the weak): "No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed." Note the nasty implication in what are supposedly Darwin's words - weak men are like weak animals, and you would have to be ignorant to let them breed. To drive home the point West quotes the "hardly anyone is so ignorant" phrase again in his own voice, after the actor finishes (Part I 10:23). He quotes and alludes to the phrase several times later in the talk - this is central, not incidental.
The problem with the Darwin quotation is that it's a lie, an intentional, pre-meditated distortion. As Borrello notes in the accompanying editorial, Descent of Man actually says:
No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
West and his actor leave out excepting in the case of man himself! Re-read the quotation with and without that phrase to see how much difference it makes to the perception of Darwin's role in eugenics. Darwin explicitly exempts humans from the breeding proscription, but that doesn't fit West's agenda, so he does a hatchet job and alters Darwin's meaning. Any politician caught in such a lie would be forced to make a public apology, but for West and his cronies at the Discovery Institute such lofty standards of honesty and integrity apparently do not apply. This dishonesty alone is enough for any reasonable person to ignore the rest of the talk, but I'm something of a glutton for punishment, so I'll push on.
Darwin Answers West's Question
At Part I 10:23, selectively quoting Darwin again, West says:
Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. Now, Darwin was a proper Victorian, and Darwin was a very kindly man, a brilliant man. I think every educated person needs to read his writings, and understand them. Having said that, umm, and because he was naturally compassionate he goes on to say after this that, well, because we're compassionate, uh, we can't really do what the dictates of hard reason would tell us. Destroying our race, that's what reason's telling us, because we're counteracting the law of natural selection, but really we can't as sympathetic people do anything else.
So far it's faltering, but accurate. West continues:
Now, it's one thing to say that Darwin was kindly, so he would be squeamish about people applying his theory. It's another thing to say that what Darwin has just laid out, that the problem we face by counteracting natural selection, uhh, doesn't provide a logical grounding to actually do something about it. Darwin may have been squeamish, but what logical reason would he have to complain about someone who's not so squeamish who says I agree with you Darwin, you're right, by inoculating people against small-pox, by helping the poor, by helping the sick, by building hospitals, we are, as he says hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed and that no one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.
Overlooking the lack of eloquence, note that the answer to West's question, what reason would Darwin have to complain, is in the next paragraph of Descent of Man, right after the hardly anyone is so ignorant phrase. Darwin says we cannot check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without the deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. Our noble nature! Darwin continues: if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil. Evil! Notions of our noble nature and evil from Darwin! None of this fits West's agenda, so he leaves it out - there's not one mention in West's entire hour-long talk of Darwin's thoughts on nobility and evil in Descent of Man. The stuff that West skips over shows where Darwin's thoughts really lay, but that wouldn't fit with West's Dangerous Idea schtick.
Logic Clear As Mud
After a pause, West continues (Part I 11:55):
Now, it seems to me that there are a couple of different applications you could make of that. One could be that you just go back to the law of the jungle, and stop doing all that and let people die in the gutter. That in some sense would be the most purely Darwinian thing to do, because then you let natural selection have full force. But it seems to me if you're compassionate like Darwin was, the other alternative is, well if we're counteracting natural selection on which our progress is based as humans we have - we can more compassionately re-institute through modern science an artificial selection to try to at least mimic the results of natural selection in a more humane manner. And that really is what eugenists, the scientists who were pushing eugenics, thought they were doing. And in fact this passage that I just read that I'm sure you've heard time and again in eugenics researchers' materials after it was published in the Descent of Man. If anything Descent of Man was their bible as well as Francis Galton providing the rationale for why we have to do something.
Note in the third sentence where West's distortions have led: what West calls Darwinian is what Darwin called "evil" and against our "noble nature". But the bottom line is this: Darwin pointed out a problem, and then ruled out a certain solution. Decades later some scientists agreed with Darwin's identification of the problem, rejected his cautions, and argued for application of the solution he would not have approved. By West's twisted logic, Darwin is responsible for the application of the solution that he discouraged. Go figure.
All Hail the Mighty Biologists
The second pillar of West's agenda is the argument that mainstream early 20th century biologists had the power to dictate social policy. Sound ridiculous? Here's the exact quotation from West's talk (Part II 20:40):
I think rather than an effort by politicians to sort of foist, you know, to contaminate science or twist science, eugenics is much better, you know, viewed as or accurately described as an effort by a group of leading scientists, really elite scientists at places like Harvard, Columbia, Yale, uhh, Stanford, to dictate social policy based on their presumed scientific expertise.
Dictate social policy? What planet is this guy from? Is there some parallel universe where scientists have or ever had the power to set, you know, social policy? On the planet I inhabit scientists are sometimes asked for advice, and sometimes the policymakers listen, and it has always been that way. That's a far cry from dictating social policy.
Perhaps Dr. West arrives at his moronic conclusion because he fails to consider any other factors that might have contributed to the popularity of eugenics in the early 20th century, such as massive immigration that dwarfs today's levels in terms of percentages, or the burgeoning Progressive movement that dedicated itself to various social improvements including prohibition, worker's rights, and women's suffrage. No, it has to rest on the scientists according to West, those all-powerful scientists.
West doesn't even look at the scientists thoroughly. He ignores the prominent ones who were opposed to eugenics, including Herbert Jennings, William Castle, Raymond Pearl, Nobel laureate H.J Muller, and Nobel laureate T.H. Morgan.
So I guess what West's thesis shows is that if you want to explain a complicated social phenomenon and you only examine one small group of contributors, then you can conclude that they were entirely responsible.
The Evolutionary Argument Against Negative Eugenics
Enough of West's baloney - even I have limits on how much nonsense I can digest. Let's talk about real science, some very interesting stuff that is fundamental to understanding inherited human diseases. I'm speaking of the evolutionary genetic model called "mutation-selection balance", which was developed by the British evolutionary biologist, biochemist, and physiologist J.B.S. Haldane in 1927. I'll present a very simplified description here; the model is fully laid out in any standard population genetics text.
Haldane analyzed a mathematical model of an idealized population of organisms that have only one gene. Spontaneous mutations are assumed to occur in this gene at a constant, low rate. If one of the hypothetical organisms happens to inherit two copies of the mutated gene, it has an inherited disease and does not survive to reproduce.
From the point of view of the gene pool, two processes are going on simultaneously in Haldane's model: spontaneous mutation is dumping "bad" alleles into the gene pool every generation, and selection is cleaning them up at a certain rate through the deaths of carriers. What is not obvious but was shown mathematically by Haldane is that the gene pool gradually evolves to a state where the rate of input of deleterious mutations is precisely balanced by the rate at which they are removed by natural selection (hence the name of the model). An equilibrium frequency of deleterious mutations is reached.
Haldane's insight has important implications for understanding inherited human diseases. There are thousands of different diseases, but fortunately for us, each is rare. This occurs because with realistic mutation rates the equilibrium level of deleterious alleles attained in the mutation-selection balance model is always low, significantly less than one percent. Though rare, the deleterious recessive mutations are always there, a permanent fixture of the gene pool. This helps explain the bad effects of inbreeding, since close relatives have increased chances of carrying the same mutations. This result also says that negative eugenics can never clean up the gene pool completely. In particular, even if a society were to screen everyone every generation and prohibit any carriers of deleterious mutations from reproducing, that would still never completely eliminate the mutation - it would only reduce the frequency somewhat, at unthinkable social cost. Negative eugenics can't purify the human gene pool.
Conclusion
Since, according to Dr. West, we scientists have the power to dictate social policy, I guess Borrello and I should convene our scientific brethren to discuss the portentous question posed in the title of this essay. But, on second thought, the discussion won't be necessary. We're good Darwinists. We will follow his counsel and bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind. To do otherwise would be evil, and possibly damage the nobler side of our natures.
(See the companion editorial by Mark Borrello: Dancing with the Disco Institute)