Part LIV: Racism in Science in the early 1900’s

In the last essay we learned the role that pedigrees have played in  tracking given traits or conditions from generation to generation.  We also  learned some different patterns of inheritance. I also dropped a hint or two that the eugenics movement of the early 20^th  Century had some lofty goals to improve humanity but soon took a turn down the wrong road to self-destruction that involved the dihybrid (two trait) cross .and was used to support the idea that genetic differences between “races” could be a rationale for prohibiting inter-racial marriages and more.  These social reformers called eugenicists  thought they could use Mendelian genetics to solve difficult social problems.

The dihybrid cross was introduced in Essay LII and combines two separate  and independent traits into one Punnett square.  You might recall the cross Mendel made involving seed color and seed shape in garden peas in which two hybrid plants heterozygous for both traits were crossed and resulted in  a 9:3:3:1 ration of:

9 yellow ,Round

3Yellow, wrinkled        

3 green, Round          

1 green, wrinkled                 seeds

As stated earlier, the only way the eugenicists could achieve their goal of irradiating genetic diseases, poverty, crime, alcoholism, mental illness, and sexual immorality was through controlled breeding , thus eventually eliminating harmful genes altogether.  They also believed they could raise the average intelligence level by preventing the feeble-minded from, reproducing by forced sterilization as described below.

The Supreme Court Ruling That Led To 70,000 Forced Sterilizations

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court decided, by a vote of 8 to 1, to uphold a state’s right to forcibly sterilize a person considered unfit to procreate. The case, known as Buck v. Bell, centered on a young woman named Carrie Buck, whom the state of Virginia had deemed to be “feeble-minded.”

Author Adam Cohen tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that Buck v. Bell was considered a victory for America’s eugenics movement, an early 20th century school of thought that emphasized biological determinism and actively sought to “breed out” traits that were considered undesirable.

“There were all kinds of categories of people who were deemed to be unfit “to procreate” Cohen says. “The eugenicists looked at evolution and survival of the fittest, as Darwin was describing it and they believed ‘We can help nature along if we just plan who reproduces and who doesn’t reproduce. “

All told, as many as 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized during the 20^th Century. The victims of state-mandated sterilization included people like Buck who had been labeled “mentally deficient ” as well as those who were deaf, blind, and diseased. Minorities, poor people, and “promiscuous” women were often targeted. (Cohen, A) 

Read on

 On June 4, 1924, a girl was admitted to the Virginia State Colony for epileptics and feeble-minded. She was white, dark-haired, and 17 years old. She became colony inmate 1692. The medical superintendent of the colony examined her. He declared her healthy, free of syphilis, able to read, write, and keep herself tidy. And then he classified her as feeble-minded of the lowest grade, moron class. With that designation, this young woman, who’d already lost more than many people could bear in a lifetime, was set on a path she didn’t choose. What happened next laid the foundation for one of the most tragic social experiments in American history, the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of people. (Blair, W.)

This story has resonance even today. It’s about how science and the law, tools that we have created to help improve our lives, can easily become instruments of prejudice and oppression. It’s a story of hubris and about good intentions gone awry. (Eugenics and the science of better breeding. Blair, W.)

  Some of the eugenicists including Francis Galton, (Darwin’s half- cousin) subscribed to the belief that there were hereditary differences between socioeconomic groups; some were over reproducing and would eventually lower the world intellect. According to Davenport: a “race is a more or less pure lived group of individuals that differs from other groups by at least one character, or strictly, a genetically connected group whose gene plasm is characterized by a difference, in one or more genes, from other groups ” (Davenport as quoted by Shotwell, M.)

 To borrow an example from Shotwell, Davenport believed “ a blue-eyed Scotchman belongs to a different race than  the dark skin Scotch, and by a strict criterion, could even be considered members of a different elemental species.” Wow!

  Furthermore, the races were thought to differ in temperament, behavior,  and, as suggested earlier, in mental ability. For example, Galton considered the I Q level of blacks to be two  grades below the average Englishman. Thus, the reason for intermarriage, was established.  The proper term “race crossing” was born. Davenport even believed incorrectly that skin color, eye color, and hair color were examples of Mendelian inheritance (one gene-2 alleles). Remember, this was his misguided thinking.

            White                         ×      black

            AABB                    aabb

            High IQ                               low IQ

            High ambition                    low   ambition

It has been known for a long time that each of these are the result of polygenic inheritance.  In fact, skin color results from the interaction of two gene pairs with at least two alleles each, .as shown in the table below. Considering the range of skin colors possible,  one can only imagine that there probably are more than just two alleles. Take the example of two people with medium brown skin (with AaBb or AAbb or aaBB genotypes)  for both parents, any two of the above may result in a range of skin color from very dark to very light phenotypes depending on the parents’ genotype . Two more human traits following polygenic inheritance noteworthy of mention  are height and eye color

Some human disorders resulting from polygenic inheritance include cleft lip and/or palate, hypertension, diabetes and schizophrenia.

As mentioned earlier, Davenport believed that intelligence, temperament, and personality, like physical traits, followed Mendelian inheritance patterns as did criminality and immorality.

                                  

 Eugenicists, including Davenport believed that race crossing between widely different races would result in “disharmonious” genetic combinations in future generations and would produce some incompetents. However, in-Davenport’s defense, he was a strong proponent of civil liberties for all races.  Many other eugenicists fervently. considered blacks  subordinate to whites both physically and mentally.  Two prominent eugenicists, Paul Popenoe and Roswell Johnson in their popular-textbook, Applied Eugenics (1918) claimed that  social discrimination was justified against blacks. They based their conclusion on several controversial arguments:

• Blacks had made no original contributions to the world’s civilization.
•  Discounting several studies that showed little difference between blacks and whites in mental abilities, they argued. that the differences could only be measured using newly developed “intelligence tests”.
• Popenoe and Johnson also concluded blacks were deficient in farsighted thinking, intuitiveness, imitative persistence, and sexual inhibition which were largely due to heredity.
• Finally, Black Americans seemed to lack resistance to tuberculosis and typhoid fever.
• They cited the 16-year deficit life expectancy that proved their lower Darwinian fitness.
• Popenoe and Johnson cited the fact that black-white interracial marriages were illegal. in 28 States. (Shotwell, M.)
  

Summary and my thoughts

Eventually the biased, slanted, pseudo-science of eugenics lost its luster as geneticists put science ahead of prejudices.

Now, to correct the flaws ‘in eugenicists thinking:

• They assumed that because a given trait was familial (appeared in every generation), the trait was  genetically determined. They ignored possible social and environmental influences on the trait.
• Their second mistake was in assuming that traits were inherited by a single gene with only two alleles-one dominate and one recessive, ignoring the possibility of several alleles with  each one contributing a small effect.
• Thirdly, the eugenicists allowed their prejudices to block out any semblance of objectivity.

Aside

   Have we Americans lost  all sense of objectivity. that when all (and I do mean all) evidence  and at least 31 court decisions,  numerous witness accounts under oath, video and audio  evidence, etc.). points us in a singular direction, that we still exist in a make believe world? Are we  so blind to the truth, have such tunnel vision, are so ignorant to the obvious, or just in denial  to the truth?  Yes, there are some skeptics who still say that President Kennedy survived the assassination attempt of November 22, 1963, that a man never walked on the moon, that Elvis (Presley) never died that August day in1977, and that there was widespread-voter fraud in the 2020 election. Oh, and also those summer Senate hearings are  a Hollywood movie.  Have we not heard enough. egotistical lies in the past six  years by a self-centered person who would advise people to inject a bleach-like substance into themselves to treat COVID, discredit the very science that saved his life, and who denies that climate-change exits. and that there is no anthropogenic component to said  process, all  by a prima donna who was recently characterized in a newspaper editorial that I read as “that’s what happens to a rich brat-when he grows up.”  . I would add this; “who was an embarrassment to the office that he held”. And this from a registered Republican (because in my county in a state that does not have open primaries, the Democratic ballot is practically a waste of papers. Some time ago I watched in horror a campaign speech prior to the 2020 election as the Republican candidate delivered a speech that caused chills up and down my spine. It reminded me of speeches made by Adolf Hitler in 1930’s Germany. The rhetoric, the fever pitch vocalizing, the fist pounding, and the mind manipulation were almost identical.

I’ll get off my soapbox now and return. to sum up my opinion about eugenics and the whole race issue.

For a long time, I have held that there is no biological basis for different races in Homo sapiens. We are all just one race.  Maybe we should remove- the word from our vocabulary. I have decided that in the future I will refuse to fill in that area on various forms.

References

Baumer, L. Essays on Science for the Common Good:  Part: LII Bluehost & WordPress

Blair, W.  February 18, 2019 The Eugenics Movement And Forced Sterilization: NPR WNIJ Northern Public Radio DeKalb, IL

Cohen, A March 7, 2015 The Supreme Court Ruling that Led to 70.000 Forced Sterilizations NPR WNIJ Northern Public Radio

Mader, S. Biology eighth edition, 2004 McGraw-Hill Boston

Shotwell, M.  The Misuse of Genetics:  The Dihybrid Cross & the Threat of “Race Crossing” The American Biology Teacher Vol 81 No 1 2019 The University of California Press Oakland, CA