The power of man over animal life, in producing whatever varieties of form he pleases, is enormously great.

It would seem as though the physical structure of future generations was almost as plastic as clay, under the control of the breeder's will.

It is my desire to show more pointedly than--so far as I am aware--has been attempted before, that mental qualities are equally under control.

Graph showing the distribution of variations in a particular trait (height, e.g.) in a large population.
 
 
 

± 1 standard deviation
68% of population
 
 
 
 

± 2 standard deviations
95% of population
 
 
 
 

± 3 standard deviations
99.7% of population
 

• Eugenic selection results in drift toward desirable end.

• Dysgenic selection results in drift toward undesirable end.

Aim--"to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable"

Can no longer rely on natural selection:

• unfit survive to childbearing years
• advances in medicine
• comforts of civilization
• social welfare

• unfit reproduce at higher rate than fit

• encourage fit to have children

• prohibit unfit from having children

• Galton protégé

• introduced a new science:  "Biometrics" which integrated statistics with evolutionary theory 

• established Biometric Laboratory at University College (1895)

• appointed first Galton Professor of Eugenics (1911)

• advocated social imperialism -- "superior" races and countries should produce more offspring than those considered to be less developed

The right to live does not connote the right of each man to reproduce his kind....  As we lessen the stringency of natural selection, and more and more of the weaklings and the unfit survive, we must increase the standard, mental and physical, of parentage.

--Karl Pearson, Darwinism, Medical Progress and Parentage (1912)

Max Juke (18th c Dutch farmer) had

709 descendents by mid-1870s, including:

106 illigitimate births
181 prostitutes
142 beggars
  64 in public houses
  70 criminals, 7 of whom were murderers

Conclusions: 

• pauperism and criminal behavior are hereditary traits

• between 1730 and 1874, Jukes family had cost New York state $1.3 million

143 mentally deficient
  36 illigitimate births
  33 sexual deviants
  24 alcoholics
  82 infant deaths
    3 epileptics
    3 criminals

all good citizens (doctors, lawyers, judges) who married into good families with exception of 3 described as "somewhat degenerate"

Conclusion:  feeble-mindedness is a hereditary trait

• 1902 met with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson

• wanted to establish his own eugenics research laboratory in US 

• 1904 persuaded Carnegie Institute to donate $10 million to establish a "Station for Experimental Evolution" at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island

• Harry Laughlin (1880-1943) selected to be ERO's assistant director

On Tuesday, a state Senate committee is scheduled to hear a historical truth that might shock most Californians:  Almost 100 years ago, their state practiced a form of eugenics that helped inspire Hitler's Nazis.  "California was the second state to pass eugenics laws in 1909," two years after Indiana made it legal to sterilize the "feeble-minded," according to University of Virginia bioethicist Paul Lombardo.  Lombardo is an expert on eugenics, a school of thought popular around the turn of the 20th century.  Eugenicists thought they could improve the human species through selective breeding, which meant preventing habitual criminals, inmates of insane asylums and sexual deviants from having kids.  When Lombardo briefs the Senate Select Committee on Genetics, committee chairwoman Sen. Dede Alpert, D-Coronado (San Diego County), expects his talk will raise eyebrows.  "I'll be the first to admit I had no idea this went on in California," said Alpert, adding that when Lombardo's state of Virginia confronted its history of eugenics, it prompted the state's governor to offer a public apology.  "That may be the appropriate response here, but that's something that would come after we get the chance to hear it," Alpert said.  Lombardo sketched out his two-hour presentation, "Eugenics: Lessons From a History Hidden in Plain Sight." As he explained it, it was around the turn of the last century when scientific thinkers, notably Sir Francis Galton, cousin of evolutionist Charles Darwin, began arguing that allowing the unfit to have children might weaken the human herd and should be controlled by law. After Indiana passed a pioneering statute allowing state officials to sterilize those deemed unfit to breed, California enacted an even stricter eugenics law.  California made it legal for state officials to asexualize those considered feeble-minded, prisoners exhibiting sexual or moral perversions, and anyone with more than three criminal convictions.  As Lombardo explained, by using the term "asexualization" instead of "sterilization," California's law went beyond ordering vasectomies in men or tubal ligations in women.  California made it legal to castrate a man or remove the ovaries from a woman, permanently preventing reproduction.  Lombardo said California's asexualization statute passed unanimously in the state Assembly, drew only one dissenting vote in the state Senate and was signed into law by Gov. James M. Gillett in 1909.  It was amended at least twice, in 1913 and 1917, to shift the focus of California's eugenics program away from the castration of prisoners and toward the sterilization of insane asylum inmates.  "If you look at the numbers of people from 1909 through 1950 sterilized in California, it's something on the order of 19,000, evenly split between men and women," Lombardo said.  "My guess would be most of those were not castration but were vasectomies or tubal ligations, which are a lot cheaper, faster and safer."  By the time state law was revised in 1951 to greatly narrow the state's authority to forcibly prevent procreation, eugenic sterilization had already fallen into disfavor, thanks to public revulsion at the revelations of Nazi atrocities before and during World War II, Lombardo said.  But in the years after the state embraced eugenics, California intellectuals--including Stanford's David Starr Jordan and Louis Terman, popularizer of the IQ test--were leading advocates of the movement, he said.  California was such a prominent practitioner of forced sterilization that it was held up as a model by the Eugenics Record Office, the Long Island think tank that was the movement's unofficial headquarters.  The Eugenics Record Office, in turn, had links to the Nazi party during the 1930s.  "There's lots of connections between the Germans interested in sterilization and the Americans," Lombardo said, adding that after Hitler took power in 1933, "the very first law passed by the Reichstag was the law for the sterilization of the hereditarily diseased."  Lombardo cites an incident in which California's sterilization practices were held up as models for the Nazi regime.  In 1935, Eugenics Record Office leader Harry Laughlin was invited to an international conference on eugenics in Germany.  Unable to attend, Laughlin instead sent his German hosts a diagram displaying the pedigree of "a feeble-minded woman sterilized by the state of California." 

The chart shows how the woman was born to a mother deemed by state officials to be "neurotic (and) feeble-minded" and a father termed a "drunkard (and) gambler (with) low mentality."  The woman's ovaries were removed, a permissible form of asexualization under California law.  The Germans were far more aggressive than their California contemporaries in practicing eugenics, Lombardo said.  "They sterilized at the rate of 50,000-70,000 (people) a year, compared with California's slightly more than 4,000 in 1927," he said.  While the Nazis practiced eugenics to "purify" their race, Americans had more pragmatic reasons for trying to prevent certain people from having children.  "This was about saving money.  It was the economic motive," Lombardo said, encapsulating the view of American eugenicists in these words:  "We don't want you generating any more kids we'd have to pay for, and we don't think you could take care of the kid if you had it."  The Nazi horrors revealed after World War II put the final kibosh on this paternalistic practice.  But Lombardo has pulled together official documents indicating that as late as the early 1960s, judges in San Diego and Los Angeles counties were still ordering orchidectomies--removal of the testicles--as a condition for paroling sex offenders.  One such letter, written in 1962 by the Los Angeles County probation department, mentions one judge who ordered more than 50 former prisoners, most of them guilty of child molestation, to undergo complete bilateral castration as a condition of parole.  "The Supreme Court held that each defendant was free to refuse the proffered conditions of probation and to choose instead the punishment provided by law for the offense of which he was convicted," states the letter dated 41 years ago Wednesday.  Looking ahead to his state Senate presentation, Lombardo said he fears that Americans, who have forgotten their eugenic excesses, could be beguiled into thinking modern science can cure social ills like poverty, crime and disease.  "There's an impulse toward eugenics that is very much alive today," Lombardo said.  "The basic belief that we can use science to engineer social progress is an idea that many Americans believe in.  "The point of my presentation is not to paint science as something scary and Frankensteinian," he said, adding that "at least as we forge ahead in the new genetics we should take our history into account." 

Lombardo is scheduled to speak from 10 a.m. until noon in Room 113 in the State Capitol in Sacramento.  The hearing is free.

SACRAMENTO--It was a dark chapter in American history.  For more than half a century, California and other states forcibly sterilized 60,000 mentally ill people as part of a misguided national campaign to eliminate crime, "feeblemindedness," alcoholism, poverty and other problems blamed for dragging society down. On Tuesday, Gov. Gray Davis apologized, placing California in a small group of states that have issued formal regrets. "To the victims and their families of this past injustice," Davis said in a statement, "the people of California are deeply sorry for the suffering you endured over the years.  Our hearts are heavy for the pain caused by eugenics.  It was a sad and regrettable chapter ... one that must never be repeated." As eugenics was practiced in California and 31 other states between 1909 and 1964, when it was stopped, individuals considered defective included alcoholics, petty criminals, the poor, disabled and mentally ill. About 20,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in an attempt to prevent their genes from being passed on to another generation. In 1929, California became the second state to adopt forced sterilization and accounted for a third of the total cases nationally during the 35 years that eugenics was state policy, said Paul Lombardo, an expert on eugenics.... The policy was horribly misguided and resulted in the human rights of thousands being routinely violated by a coercive government with the support of the Supreme Court, said Lombardo, a scholar on eugenics and a professor at the University of Virginia medical school.... He told the hearing of the Select Committee on Genetics, Genetic Technologies and Public Policy that Adolf Hitler's Third Reich borrowed generously from U.S. laws when it imposed forced sterilization on "undesirables." Lombardo, a lawyer and historian, said eugenics started with the goal of encouraging development of a world of healthy individuals who would pass along their best traits to the next generation. He said that many leading minds of the late 1800s and early 1900s supported eugenics. Contests were held to determine "perfect children," movies publicized the movement, and major foundations financed eugenics research, Lombardo said. He said supporters were successful in persuading the Los Angeles Times to run a series of favorable articles about eugenics in its Sunday magazine. Lombardo said eugenics was an "incredibly popular movement" and a household word in America because Americans "all wanted to help the children."  Eugenics was defined as "to be well born" and to have a "happy heritage." "This was something that was going to clean up the gene pool," Lombardo said. At the time, the mantra was, "Let's get rid of crime and poverty.  Let's have healthy children.  Who could argue against it?"

Many early supporters of eugenics became disillusioned with the movement, Lombardo said, when it got sidetracked into a policy for selective breeding.

Unless conditions change, the population of the United States will, on account of the great influx of blood from South-Eastern Europe, rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art, given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex immorality and less given to burglary, drunkenness, and vagrancy than were the original English settlers.

   --Charles Davenport (1911)

• tied quotas to 1890 immigration numbers

• tied quotas to distribution of national ancestry in 1920 census

I'm sure that occasionally mistakes occur as a result.  But the possibility of excess and error is still no proof of the incorrectness of these laws.

--statement attributed to Adolf Hitler by Otto Wagener, head of National Socialist Party Economic Policy Office (1931-1933)

• scheduled to be held in Moscow.

• canceled because of new Soviet policy against genetics

• real struggle for existence is not animal vs. animal organisms win by cooperation and mutual aid, not competition Mendelian genetics is foreign and unacceptable laboratory work on fruitflies is a waste
• only true tests of theory are those conducted in the field
• heredity of plant can be shaped by shock treatment

• changing plant's environment shatters its heredity

• new species may result

• germinate winter wheat in cold temperatures wheat will become "hardened" treatment ("vernalization") shatters the heredity of winter wheat and converts it into spring wheat

• repeating process will permanently change seeds

In our present view there are neither winter nor spring varieties; there are only grains and grasses with varying degrees of "winterism" ... and we can artificially overcome "winterism."

• farmers can avoid risks of fall sowing

• increase crop yield (winter wheat normally gives a greater yield than spring wheat)

1935--difficult to be a Mendelian geneticist in USSR 1937
        --Lysenko rose to highest rank of Soviet science
        --remained in power until Khruschev deposed (1964)