Arguments on Eugenics
From Bryan Appleyard's Brave New Worlds

Nazism used biology to justify mass murder. In doing so it detonated biological complacency, shattered public and scientific confidence, and tainted the entire subject, especially genetics, for years afterwards, possibly for ever. Some would deny this. Recently, the British geneticist Steve Jones wrote: ‘Genetics is, at last, like Germany, ready to stop apologising for its past.’ But this shows a failure to understand the true depth of the problem revealed by Nazism. For Hitler demonstrated the appalling dangers implicit in science's invasion of the human realm.

At this point scientists will become angry and argue that Hitler’s science was not really science at all. Even when it wasn't completely wrong - which it was most of the time - it was absurdly oversimplified, they say. To condemn a science on the basis of one psychopath is like banning cricket because a bat was once used to murder somebody.

But this is to miss the point completely. It is a self-serving argument that can be used to free science from any responsibility at all. I believe it is essential that this argument be rejected. And here, in the contemplation of the catastrophe of Nazism, is a good place to do it.

First, as I have said, much of the basis of Hitler's biology was valid in the light of knowledge at the time. It was arguable but scientifically respectable. We may say it is wrong now, but we could say the same of most past science. For example, we can say Newton was ‘wrong’ because Einstein’s theories showed that his celestial mechanics were, in reality, a rough generalisation, not true In any absolute sense. In these terms most science is wrong most of the time - not just the ‘bad’ science of Haeckel, but also the ‘good’ science of Newton. Five hundred years from now virtually all the science of our day will be regarded as similarly wrong. It is, therefore, ridiculous to say that the institution of science is unaffected by the mistakes of the past because they werebased on wrong science.

Second, it was the very persuasiveness, the immense authority of science that convinced Hitler and his followers. For, in spite of being wrong most of the time, science always appears to be right. Indeed, it increasingly appears to be the only right thing available. This is in part because scientists always say they are right, but it is also because science is so extraordinarily effective. I cannot, by reading the Buddha's Fire Sermon or reciting Christian prayers, make a Boeing 747 fly from London to New York. By applying engineering and aeronautics, I can.

This staggering effectiveness convinces people that science is all-powerful and that if something is labelled ‘scientific’, it must be true or feasible. Scientists, of course, go along with this because it exalts their social status. Yet, in doing so, they are implicated in the outcome - whether it is pollution of the environment by some insecticide or the murder of six million Jews. Science is guilty in both cases because scientists said these things could or should be done. It provided reasons that were believed because science was believed to be the truth. The message should be clear: to perpetuate any gospel of the omnipotence or even the omniscience of science is to dip your hands in blood.

Third, the application of science to the human realm is always going to be fraught with dangers, no matter how well-meaning the scientist. Establishing truths of human behaviour is difficult because, on the one hand, the scientist is human; he has attitudes and opinions. As the history of eugenics shows, scientists invariably have a cultural bias which they apply to their observations. On the other hand, the human observed is changed in unquantifiable ways by the act of observation. When told, for example, of the existence of the subconscious by a Freudian psychoanalyst, you become a different person; in ways that are impossible to measure, your behaviour will be changed. This makes it all but impossible to be sure of any generalisation about human behaviour.

We should be warned by the crass absurdity of the supposedly scientific observations of humanity in previous generations. (For example, look at phrenology. We cannot assume we are so much smarter than the phrenologists.) James Watson and many other scientists have argued that we will not make the mistakes of the past because we know so much more. That is absurd, first because we will never be able to judge when ‘more’ becomes enough and second, because there is no reason to suppose that even perfect scientific information will make us behave any better.

And, finally, science tends towards radicalism. Science is reductionist. Its success is based on the assumption that the whole can be explained in terms of its parts. It aspires to discover the ultimate simplicity behind complex phenomena. Some scientists today are challenging this approach, but it is unarguable that the history of science is the history of reductionism. The conclusions of any reductionist process will inevitably appear radical. It is, for example, a radical idea that the table on which I am writing this consists largely of empty space. But it is, scientifically speaking, true. Marxism and Nazism were both based on the reductive radicalism of science. Just as the physicist says, against all the common-sense evidence to the contrary, that this table is largely empty space, so the Marxist says all human truth is history, and the Nazi says all human truth is biology. In the case of the table, the effect of this radicalism is only to give me a passing feeling of vertigo; in the case of Marxism and Nazism, the effect is to kill millions. In addition - and this is a crucial point - even if some ideology were to come along based on immaculate science rather than the dubious speculations of Marx and Haeckel, it may still kill millions. Science is under no obligation to produce morally acceptable outcomes. It would be best and safest, therefore, for us all to agree on its incompetence in the human realm. To quote that great historian of ideas, Sir Isaiah Berlin, ‘to claim the possibility of some infallible scientific key. . . is one of the most grotesque claims ever made by human beings.’

Tell the world that there is some scientific basis for differences between people - that there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ genes - and, as night follows day, somebody somewhere will use it as an excuse to start killing people. No geneticist working today can ignore this fact. All of which is to say that Steve Jones is quite wrong to imply that genetics can break free from its Nazi past. Neither Nazism nor Marxism were passing aberrations; they were catastrophes whose precise natures were defined by science. Clearly there have been other catastrophes that have had nothing to do with science. And I am not saying that science caused either of these appalling movements; obviously there were many other factors involved. But science was deeply implicated and, in both cases, provided the rationale for slaughter. Science is implicated in the wars of the twentieth century much as religion was in the wars of the Middle Ages. Indeed, science is implicated more if we include the fact that science provided the advanced weaponry that made our modern wars so destructive. To deny that or to forget it, as Jones suggests, is to risk making the twenty-first century as bloody as the twentieth - a century which has the dubious honour of being, so far, the bloodiest in human history.