• Born

• Student at Cambridge University
  • developed interest in geology

• Served as naturalist on board the Beagle

• Read Essay on ... Population by Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834)
• Lessons learned from Malthus:
  • "struggle for existence" involves:
    • struggle with environment
    • struggle with other species (predator/prey)
    • struggle with similar individuals
  • any advantage, however small, makes a difference.
  • any difference, however small, can be an advantage.
• Recognized artificial selection as practiced by breeders could be a practical model for natural process of selecting fittest individuals -- "natural selection".

• Darwin honed his argument for natural selection through rigorous study of barnacles

• Began work on massive treatise on natural selection and evolution

• published On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection ...

• Darwin proposed existence of gemmules (from Latin root word for "twinning")
• granules given off by all cells
• some are dormant, others expressed
• contain formula to program the growth of new cells
• travel to, and concentrate in reproductive organs

• Heredity is the passing on of these gemmules.

• Darwin proposed that any disturbance in this process, such as:
• environmental changes
• level of competition
• food supply...

• ... will cause some variation:
• if the number of gemmules is increased or decreased
• result -- ordinary variations
• manifestation -- individuality of people

• if the variation is a modification of the gemmules themselves
• result -- new structures
• manifestation -- major change in form and function

• It is this latter type of variation that natural selection acts on.

• coined phrase "survival of the fittest"

• reasoned that rate of human reproduction is inversely related to degree of:
• civilization
• intellect

• concluded that rate of population increase can be controlled by intelligent planning and choice.

• Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin

• interested in the mathematical treatment of heredity

• used statistical analysis to study human variation
• arranging measures of a physical trait in a population (height, e.g.) displays a bell-shaped distribution

• coined term "eugenics" -- science of improving the stock
• variations (deviations) included flaws as well as assets
• artificial and natural selection will shift median of distribution

• conducted survey (1882) to measure human intelligence (IQ)
• intelligence directly related to sensory sensitivity
• arranging measures of mental traits (IQ, e.g.) of population displays a bell-shaped distribution

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.

For humans to remain a successful species, we can no longer rely on natural selection:

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

• "unfit" reproduce at higher rate than "fit"

• encourage the "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

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

"Martin Kallikak" (Revolutionary War soldier) had

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.