Natural Design and Moral Constraints in Science
by Robert Pollack

In the first part of the last century, the eugenics movement brought together some of the best geneticists and physicians and the worst tinplate chauvinists in the Western world. It was — and for some, still is — easy to endorse their initial agenda: civilized people have an obligation to minimize the number of defective versions of genes in their chromosomes and in those of their descendants, replacing them with good, better and best versions.

Some eugenicists, however, were impatient with simple testing and counseling. Would it not be easier to cultivate the best selections of human genes, they asked, if the wasteful, genetically risky business of having children were put under rational control, and easier still if the results of genetic analysis were fed into a state apparatus that would decide who could be born and who not?

It is easy to see where the scientists and doctors of Germany went off the deep end. But only twenty years before Hitler came to power, eugenics was a recognized, legitimate branch of genetics. In Germany, the United States and many other countries, it drew the attention of reasonable, educated people at the very highest strata of society. Here, for instance, is United States President Woodrow Wilson, writing in his History of the American People of the shift in immigration to the United States at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, just as the eugenics movement was gaining force:

“Throughout the [nineteenth] century men of the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe had made up the main strain of foreign blood which was every year added to the vital working-force of this country or else men of the Latin-Gallic stocks of France and northern Italy, but now there came multitudes of men of the lower class and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland — men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor any initiative of quick intelligence …”

Andrew Carnegie, whose free libraries grace New York and many other cities, was a generous and enthusiastic supporter, as well, of the international eugenics movement. He founded the Carnegie Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, at the turn of the century. Charles Davenport, the director of the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory in the 1920’s, contributed heavily to Congress’s decisions in that decade to restrict immigration to the United States on “national” grounds. His testimony before Congress, and that of others, was full of eugenic contentions couched in the most scientific tone; for example, alcoholism, poverty and avarice were argued to be “genes” inherited by people born of Irish, Italian and Jewish parents, respectively.

The inaccuracy, intellectual sloppiness and prejudices of scientists like Davenport and like-minded members of Congress converged in the Immigration Law of 1926, which codified the most crudely racist and biologically foolish distinctions since the Constitution’s definition of an African slave as two-thirds of a human being. By the 1940’s, this eugenically based law had blocked the escape to the United States of many people who subsequently died in actions carried out according to the more activist racial laws of the Third Reich.

Germany was the country most hospitable to the eugenics movement in the 1920’s and 1930’s. As they thought of ways to accomplish the “weeding and seeding” of human genes, German eugenicists were first assisted, then taken over, by a political movement, a government and a leader all driven by the crudest and most naive notions of national and racial purity. In that time and place it was only a short walk for many physicians, and for some professors of psychiatry, anthropology, zoology and genetics, to go from theories of eugenics to the practice of mass murder.

Their downward spiral can be reconstructed from their writings and from the grim record they left behind in other ways. It began with an appreciation of Garrod’s discovery that certain inherited differences — recessive ones — reappear unexpectedly after generations of silence. It went from there through ambiguous clinical observations that certain mental diseases and physical deformities might be inherited in this way, to acquiescence in the nonsensical notion that some versions of some genes reflected national boundaries and religious distinctions. From there it went to the endorsement of the even more bizarre notion that within a country, a measurable set of versions of genes marked the national “type,” so that persons whose appearances, behaviors, cultures or religions revealed their lack of these versions of their genes, could never be brought into the national fold by naturalization, nor by conversion.

From there it became simply a matter of new law, that a life without proper National genes was not worth living, and from there it was only obedience to the law that led to participation in the banning of marriage, then the sterilization, and then the murder of hundreds of thousands of people in Germany presumed — on the basis of such markers as the desires of their heart or a history of epileptic episodes — to lack these versions of genes in their chromosomes. In the years between Hitler’s rise to power and the beginning of World War II, hundreds of thousands of Germans hospitalized with various genetic and mental ailments, others afflicted with behavioral problems like alcoholism, and still others with no particular problem but who were attracted to people of the same sex, were sterilized without their knowledge or consent.

The first wave of American eugenics was bad science, and it caused much suffering before it ran its course, but at least it was stopped short of completely overriding the American notion that acquiring citizenship was a matter of laws and not genes. In contrast, European eugenicists were given strength and legal standing by laws that inextricably linked full citizenship to notions of race and “blood.” This coincidence of political and eugenic agendas helped eugenics in Germany to go off the tracks, derailed by an explosive combination of two mistakes.

The first was the belief that an ideal human type exists. Scientifically, this makes little sense, as it flies in the face of the first tenet of natural selection: the survival of a species over the long term will depend above all on the existence of a maximum of variation from individual to individual. However, the notion of the ideal human type took hold, and from it came the German eugenicists’ notion of Ballastexistenzen, or “lives not worth living.”

The second mistake arose from the notion that versions of genes would identify an individual whose appearance approached a National ideal. In order for a program of controlled reproduction to be effective, ideal human types had to breed true. Appearances are more certain to breed true when they require the inheritance of two copies of the same version of a gene, one from each parent. These are the so-called “recessive” versions, because inheriting only one copy does not produce the desired appearance; rather, it recedes in the presence of another version of the gene that generates a different appearance. The versions of genes that show their effect when only one copy is inherited from one parent — dominant versions — cannot produce the surprise-free stability of behavior and appearance needed for a breeding agenda.

When German eugenicists planned to breed for versions of genes producing appearances of tall height, blue eyes, straight blond hair, small ears and a small nose, they chose appearances requiring recessive versions of many relevant genes from each parent. Each ideal appearance could, in any generation in the future, be overwhelmed by the inheritance of a single unwanted but dominant version of a gene. These might well come from short, dark-eyed, curly-haired, large-eared, long-nosed people, who might well have been around for a thousand years or more, ignoring or even enjoying their differences from these presumptive ideal appearances. That was enough to ignite the interest of Hitler — and anyone else in power as short and dark as Goebbels was — who had notions of ethnically cleansing Germany of such people in order to build a “master race” of tall, blond, blue-eyed people.

Under Hitler, the next step — marshaling the efforts of a nation behind a program of human breeding for recessive appearances — needed only one piece of scientifically meaningless, emotionally charged nonsense to throw the whole enterprise into malignant focus. This was the notion that in addition to all appearances, every Jewish potential parent was inevitably the bearer of an undesirable, alien, dominant version of a gene that would crush the ones Germany needed, the crazy idea that Jewishness was a single version of a single gene. However inarticulately stated by Hitler’s propagandists, and however confused it was by residual notions of “blood inheritance,” this was the academically certified eugenic argument for the destruction by bullet, gas and fire of German and then European Jewry, of Germans and others who had one or more Jewish grandparent.

German scientists and physicians did not have any simple choice in the matter: as employees and officers of the State, they were expected to comply with each set of new rules. For example Karl Bonhoeffer, father of the martyred pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the director of the famous Berlin University Clinic, the Charité, argued forcefully, but apparently ineffectively, for the exclusion from euthanasia of persons suffering from certain mental disabilities, on the argument that some of these resembled the mental effects of war, and so might not be fully inherited.

Eugenics Today

And what of today? The pathological application of eugenics in the Third Reich did not vaccinate us against other, similarly pathological, applications of biology to human affairs. Consider racism, the common use of skin color as a marker of complicated, partly inherited, partly culturally modulated aspects of human individuality, in particular the vastly complex traits of character and intelligence. This belief lives on even though there can be no impersonal, molecular shortcut to discovering a person’s abilities.

Indeed, many medical conditions — and most traits we dislike or qualities we admire — are not the products of single versions of single genes, recessive or otherwise. To the extent that they are inherited at all, they are the consequence of the expression of large and as yet unidentified assemblages of genes, as well as of a lifetime of unpredictable interactions with other people and the rest of our environment. Even today, we hear people use the simple but scientifically ungrounded phrase, “the gene for.” But a mutation associated with a disease would be “the gene for the disease” only if all the genes of the body, including the one in question, were not mutually responsible for the good health of a person. A gene’s normal function is wholly interdependent with the normal functions of the rest of the entire genome, and its expression depends on the person’s entire life experience. The false phrase “the gene for” is the ghost of eugenics, still haunting us all each time we hear it, or use it.

Intelligent design

We have seen the corruption of science in an American context, in the notion of “Intelligent Design,” and the debate on whether or not certain facts about nature should be taught to our schoolchildren. Religious thought has two terms that must be discussed here for us to see what we are facing: theodicy and eschatology.

Theodicy refers to matters that seem to challenge the notion of a God that is at once all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good. Students of theodicy distinguish between challenges of this sort that arise from our own avoidable actions — like the victims of Auschwitz — and challenges that emerge unbidden from nature — like the victims of the 2005 tsunami or Hurricane Katrina. Of these two kinds of evil, the challenges from nature are more difficult for us to fathom, as they are the ones we cannot control by making the right choices.

Eschatology deals with matters of endings, in particular with the implications of the notion that this world may end, but that if it does, it will not be the end of us. “Intelligent Design,” by arguing for the evidence of God in this world, seems to have little to say about eschatology. But on reflection, it is probably of interest to most people precisely as an expression of a particular eschatology, in which the theodicy problem above is reduced in importance by the notion that all suffering in this world — though it might well be part of God’s design — is but a preamble for a world to come. The promise of that world’s solace, peace and love is a way of reconciling the problems of evil, both human and natural, in this one. But that promise does not remove the responsibility to act well in this world, mortal and broken as it may be.
The absence of purpose, the impossibility of perfection and the centrality of individual mortality — the implications of Darwin’s fully confirmed model of Natural Selection — I will call the Natural Design of life. This Natural Design is simply the way things are. All that remains is to acknowledge it and act accordingly. That is actually not such a small thing: there is nothing in this Natural Design that prevents us from choosing to act in ways that ameliorate its punitive consequences. Rather, Natural Design gives us all our common humanity, and with it, our natural and absolute dependence upon the goodness of others for the entirety of our mortal lives. But it is much harder to know how to choose to act in good and helpful ways, let alone to take proper actions, when one does not acknowledge the reality of Natural Design.

This is why, as an article of faith, “intelligent design” is truly powerful and deeply troubling. As science, it is meaningless: nothing in nature supports it; nothing in nature demands it; nothing we can do will either prove or disprove it. But as a belief, it distracts us all from acts that we — as individuals but more important as families, faiths, nations and even as a species — can perform in this world, to diminish the catastrophic consequences of natural disasters and human cruelties. “Intelligent design” is an effective way of putting off facing the reality that we must act, even though we and every other living thing have all emerged through a process built entirely upon the certainty of eventual death at every level, from cells, to individuals, to populations, to species.

Our lives — every human life — is lived best in relationship with others; whether or not two persons think they are related, they are. These two aspects of Natural Design, though they do not relieve us of the burden of mortality, do point us in an unexpectedly liberating way, to a life of meaning.

What has this to do with eugenics?

Eugenics, by claiming to be able to order human diversity along an axis of greater or lesser nearness to some ideal of perfection, is both scientifically invalid, and deeply destructive of these natural impulses toward human interdependence. One cannot escape the burden of theodicy in this way, by reducing God’s purposes to ideas that are easily understandable but disproven. Instead, one can look again at Natural Design, with neither fear nor false certainty. Here is what one finds in regards to the ideas behind eugenics.

Go back only a few hundred generations or so, and all people — our species — really are one family. Though people tend to aggregate into groups of majority and minority populations, by the data of our genomes we are all members of genetic minorities that range in size for the millions of a founder population, to the dozens of an immediate family, to the irreducible minority of one.

Genetic differences among us nevertheless do account for many differences between one person and another. From any one person to another, unrelated one, the chances are that there will be more than one difference in any gene studied. We cannot imagine a text with that many variations from copy to copy having, in any sense, one canonical version. Similarly, there can be no biological data to support the racist notion of oneself as a member of a genetically privileged group.
Despite these DNA differences, the six billion different human genomes are all, in principle, capable of coming together with each other through sperm and egg to make another generation of people. The biology of us makes us all truly equal. More to the point, the history of our species’ DNA tells us that we are all the descendants of Africans. The evidence for this comes from many quarters, but DNA evidence is most interesting: because Africa is the first home of us all, people who are the least dispersed descendants of the original people — today’s Africans — have the greatest genetic diversity of all human subpopulations.

The rest of us are, in a sense, tribal offshoots, each the product of a migration carrying away only a fraction of the genetic richness of our species, which still remains where it began, in Africa. The irony of universal African patrimony only makes the core American racism more stupid, though not less dangerous, than any other dehumanization: only some of us are African Americans, but all of us are American Africans.

In the United States, racism has always been, and remains, an all-too-common behavior, and the choice to steer clear of it is a good example of the sort of act that makes one a full human being. The failure to properly evacuate and care for the beleaguered citizens of the Gulf coast was only lastly a failure of government efficiency. It was initially the predictable outcome of decades of persistent racism, the intentional dehumanization of the population of that area whose ancestors had come from Africa most recently as slaves, at the hands of others whose African ancestors had first stopped over in Europe some tens of thousands of years earlier.

U.S. courts have a phrase over their doors that precisely captures our freedom to choose to do good within the biological realities of Natural Design: “Equal Justice Under Law.” In his 1987 novel A Child in Time, Ian McEwan says of a senior civil servant, “The art of bad government was to sever the line between public policy and intimate feeling, the instinct for what is right.”

At a time when “Equal Justice Under Law” is freely mocked and the line between public policy and intimate feeling seems all but severed in our country, we must try to understand, and teach how to correct, the scandals of neglect and denial that embarrass our sciences and trivialize our faiths.

This requires a novel form of pedagogy, in which one does not teach to relieve ignorance, but rather to provide a means for someone to admit a fact they already knew, but found too disturbing to confront. At the Columbia Center for the Study of Science and Religion we have been pleased to find that when we have taught the facts of science to clergy, we have witnessed a transformation: understanding of the data of science enables clergy to put to rest common fears of the process of modern science. We hope to build upon this initial success to create a permanent program to provide clergy with powerful tools to keep alive embodied religious and scientific obligations to preserve a just and functional natural order.

Robert Pollack is Professor of Biological Sciences and Director, Center for the Study of Science and Religion at Columbia University. This article is excerpted from a talk presented to the Theology Faculty of Humboldt University and as well as the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Portions of it were taken from Pollack’s book, The Missing Moment: how the unconscious shapes modern science.