The dark history of genetics - with Adam Rutherford (2023 HBS Haldane Lecture)

I would have saved it for last because you said exciting and entertaining and you know, last week I published a children's book aimed at 9-15 year olds and that's actually a lot of fun. entertainment version, this one chosen to attend a one hour

lecture

, 75 slides that are mostly about genocide, so I hope you enjoy it, thank you very much for this honor, it is a great honor and privilege, to receive this award, and I am particularly grateful to EA mcer Professor EA mcer from Trinity College Dublin who nominated me for this award but she is not here because she has covid so I think she might be watching Haifa thank you now I don't have a great track record of receiving such honors and by that I mean that I have a sort of very childish streak of schoolboy rebellion in me that I haven't managed to shake off, uh, at the age of 48, and what this manifests itself in is a slight perhaps lack of grace in the fact that they invite me to prestigious awards. conferences that happen relatively frequently for me, so for example last year I was asked to speak on eugenics at the Crick Institute, the amazing Research Institute named after the great Francis Crick um, and it was going to be on eugenics, but I felt compelled to point out that Francis Crick, well into the '70s, was quite interested in eugenics and in this private letter, the quote is that eugenics gave the Nazis a bit of a bad name and I think we should try to make that it be respected again, is not ideal, by the way, the hdan recipe. award last year Matthew Cobb is writing the definitive biography of Francis CRI Crick and I have read parts of it and it is really juicy, this is just the thin end of the wedge, another example is that in 2016 I was asked to give him the award.

lecture

for humanists um uh British humanist humanist UK uh voler being one of the great voices of the Enlightenment and I felt compelled to point out that Vol was an astonishing racist, a polygen who believed that sub-Saharan Africans were a different species to white people. .

They still gave me the award in the end and in fact two years later I was elected president of the Humanist UK, at which point I was invited to give a speech at my maiden presidential presentation on humanists and I felt obliged to do so. Point out that previous humanist presidents were also amazing racists and eugenicists, no no, so that joke only works if Alice is in the room, but unfortunately she's not feeling very well either, but I have to verify with her that she's not a eugenicist. . in fact, I am referring to Julian Huxley, a great figurehead in science and evolutionary biology, initially a scientist who later became a science communicator, a writer alongside HG Wells, produced some amazing work in the 1920s and 1930s and then became The BBC television programs on

genetics

, on evolution, uh, and I was were directed by a young David Asbra, now again, what an amazing life, an amazing figurehead, um, and he was once President of the Humanist UK or became the Humanist UK, so there are some similarities between him and me, apart from the fact that he remained a great eugenicist throughout his life, driven by his left-wing politics and you can see in this quote that he makes the classic mistake of eugenics, which is comparing humans to livestock and then follows up with suggesting that we should stop our inevitable decline by using eugenics now in the course of this talk.

I'm going to be quite rude about many of our intellectual prejudices and I know that some of you will be thinking of one or all of the following feelings that arise when we talk about the ideas of our intellectual ancestors, we are in an era where we are evaluating our intellectual ancestors and I think this is really important, not just because it's interesting and not just because it's the

history

of our field and I've become sort of a de facto historian of evolutionary

genetics

, but because it really forms the way how we practice science today and how structural biases in society seep into science and our practices and how

history

has served them.

It's up to us, but more importantly and something I will address later is how these legacies of these great men of science persist in the way we teach genetics today. Some of the lies, some of the warnings that come with this kind of discussion are like These angry men on the Internet are screaming at me: You're rewriting history. I'm going to go over each of these and, um, break them down. I'll do it pretty quickly. You are rewriting history. It is possibly the most fatuous thing you can say to a historian history is rewriting the past you are literally the definition of history is rewriting what has already happened you cannot change the past but we continually reevaluate with new evidence and contemporary values ​​what has already happened rewrite History is what historians do.

The second you are proposing history, well, no, we are creating history. History is the analysis of the past and by doing that analysis we are actually documenting history, so again we are not erasing it, we are exposing it, of course you can. Judging people by today's standards is kind of a central element of history and it's true, but it's used almost exclusively to close conversations about our historical ancestors, our intellectual ancestors, um, you can, you can evaluate opinions and the actions of people from the past contextualizing them with their contemporaries and who wrote that um um aligns with the often shouted good that they were men of their time, which I think is an equally fatuous thing to say because it's pretty impossible not to be a man of your time. time um but again it's designed and expressed to close conversations that look at our ancestors um and not only that, but it's also um oh, what was I going to say?

You had a really important point here and it completely disappeared, right? I want my money back here, take it back, um, this was about being a man of your time and I should take better notes for this, um, it was an important point and I'll come back to, I'll come back to in two slides of time and I'll I'll interject on this, but what's really important is that we should be interested in the scholarship of our fields, not just because it's interesting, as I said, but because the history of genetics influences it. how we have conversations about genetics about evolution and how we teach it today and that's the most important thing and then there's one more which is that individuals' personal views are irrelevant to their scientific practices and that's one that I'm going to address.

I'll address it in some detail over the next hour or so and also keep in mind that you know we're in these privileged positions and it's all very well that I'm here now 100 years later and saying that these men had terrible opinions and they were values ​​of yours. time and 100 years from now people will be on this same stage and do the same thing for us and that's okay and that's how history should think about things that will be canceled because of the obvious. is our actions on climate change are eating meat, which I still do, but there are a lot of other things that we think we will think about in 50 or 100 years.

God, can you believe we used to do that now? One of the things and why I think the important thing to have this discussion now is that the field of biology as a broad discipline, but more specifically evolutionary biology and ultimately genetics, was not founded in parallel with political ideologies but in the service of them, which is why Jonathan mentioned from the beginning that I have written. There is a lot about the history and invention of scientific racism that occurred in the 17th or 18th centuries and this is a statement and phrase that I have said often in the last few years since I wrote a book.

It's called How to Argue with a Racist and what I find is that if you tell historians this, they will find agreement and if you tell Genesis, they will say, it really is like that, but it is absolutely true that the invention of race occurred. at a time when European expansion and colonialism were the political ideology of the West and that the classification system that was designed by Caraus when applied to humans was not specifically simply to introduce classification and taxonomy to humans but to introduce a classification hierarchical to humans and so in its tenth edition of system minur, the book in which it tries to describe all living beings, animals, plants, but also minerals that were not really realized using the Latin taxonomic system B which we continue to use until today genus and and species in the tenth edition introduced Homo sapiens and with that introduced four subcategories that we could have called uh subspecies later, although I think most evolutionary biologists reject that subcategorization today, but it introduced four subcategories for humans and these are homo sapiens americanus. asiaticus and Africanus and the first phenotype used to classify them is a physical trait, it is skin pigmentation and the second is hair color and texture, so they have two physical characteristics that are used to taxonomize humans and not I'll read them, you can read them for yourselves, but I've only included three in there and you can see that what follows from the physical characteristics of skin color and pigment and hair color and texture are unequivocal value judgments that are racist in any era and, of course, the fourth was Homo sapiens.

Europeans, with white skin and blue eyes, are gentle, sharp, inventive and governed by laws. Now every attempt to classify humans from this point onwards until the 20th century was hierarchical, it was not simply a classification or taxonomic, it was hierarchical and there is not just one. example of this taxonomy that doesn't put white Western Europeans at the top of that tree, we now know that and this is a good and celebratory trajectory for genetics. We now know that genetics is the only field that has dismantled this, but the intellectual one. The legacy of this in our culture is that these are still, broadly speaking, the terms and classifications that we use for the socially constructed social taxonomy that we continue to use today, it was characterized and defined by Lenus in the 18th century and his legacy persists in our behaviors today and I always like to add in the 11th edition, he added a fifth category Homo sapiens monstrous which included wild children, alpine dwarves, wolf children, wolf children and what he described as monoids H hoses, do I need to explain what what does that mean?

Alright? well hot and tots was an old fashioned and archaic word for the people of the koi koi or koian tribes of southern Africa, that was what we used to call them in the 18th century um um Orchid why are orchids called orchids? Do the testicles look and what do they look like? So, orus is the Greek word for testicles and the roots of an orchid look like testicles. So what is a mon mono orchid? Hotten tot Yeah, I mean, there's a reason for this, um, we thought, um. when our colleagues Ruth Ma have speculated about this, which is that in certain African tribes identical twins are considered cursed and at that time, in the 18th and 19th centuries, identical twins were thought to be the progeny of the sperm of one of each one of a man's testicles, so single, Bal men were Bal, sorry, bald, not like hairless, monorchid men were this.

I didn't plan this talk to be like this, okay, so the foundations of biology are not an academic field but a field serving a political um of a political ideology of European expansionism race is invented to serve racism now the main type of central thesis of this branch of my work can be summarized on the next title slide, which is that scientists are bad historians, there are a lot of scientists in the room here, including my boss and my boss's boss and most of my department, so I don't know what this will be like tomorrow, but this statement, my opinion here is based on two ideas and the first is that scientists I often think that history is easy and that the evidence of history is not taken so seriously. serious as the evidence we collect and analyze in our own data and I believe this is a failure of scientists to understand the academic discipline of History that it is.

We deal with it much older than the scientific disciplines and we see it all the time, we see it in the way we analyze the great men of our past that I will talk about today and we see it in the fact that scientists can think. They can understand the history of a field by looking at a Wikipedia page or reading a biography, and historians—real historians—look at scientists' analysis of their own history and find it laughable. I know this through my own experience and I have become a de facto historian, but it is difficult because it is an academic discipline that I think most of us as scientists.

I'm looking for all the UCL people here, so I keep looking at them. I'll talk to you people here, um, we. We stopped doing academic historywhen we were 16 or 17 years old and it turns out that there is a lot of academic history, techniques and tools that need to be learned after that, but we still find ourselves in situations where scientists talk about history and they are mostly wrong and I think that mainly because they do not take data and evidence seriously. Here is a great example from James Watson, the co-discoverer of the double helix in 1953. Now many of you will know the work of James Watson, many of you will also know that he is possibly best described as a troubled man.

I think his racism and misogyny are not very well hidden. But I'm not here to argue that. In his classic 1968 book, The Double Helix, the description of it, his personal description of the discovery of the double helix in 1953 to get to it later, which is a fantastic book and worth everyone's time in this room. It really is a great story and that's what it is. It is a story that many of us now know. It is fictional and its analysis is still ongoing and another biography of Watson is being written today in which the approach is taken by a historian of science called Nathaniel Comt Comfort, the approach taken is that this must be read. and understood as a novel, we know, for example, that Francis Crick never walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge and declared that we had discovered the secret of life.

We know this because James Watson told us that in 2008 his team revealed that this had never happened. and he made it up because it was a good line. Now the biggest story that comes out of this and the one that has become more politically charged than anything else is the way it describes Rosn Franklin and me. The narrative that emerges from the book itself is that Watson is deeply misogynistic towards her and frequently says horrible, sexist things about her appearance now he he he he um he apologized for several of those in the second edition, but they remain in print in the original text unchanged, but the repercussions of that is that there has been a massive backlash against the way Rosin Franklin is treated in that book and the problem with that is that it is equally fictional and that's why most of the narratives about what Rosn Franklin actually did from 1952 well into the 60s. era in which the stories we tell each other are equally flawed and we continue to play into the James Watson narrative as a result of him weaving a bunch of misogynistic lies into his book and as a result we responded with a bunch of equally inaccurate statements about what their role is and again Matthew cob is documenting this very accurately and he and Nathaniel Comfort published a paper that was published in Nature earlier this year which is a much better description of what really happened and what Watson and Crick really thought about Franklin and the truth of the matter is that it makes her a more interesting character, it makes her a better scientist, it exonerates Watson's misogyny a little bit, but only a little, so here we have a situation where how many years have we gone from this 50 to 60 years later? the events themselves we are still correcting the story of the story that we continue to tell ourselves about this momentous event in the history of science and why because we have not analyzed the data correctly because we read this book that should be understood as a novel and we read it as a fact and that is why for the last 50 years we have been telling ourselves a story in the service of one person and that is the narrative of James Watson.

Scientists are bad at history. The second reason, I think, is that there has been a great reluctance among scientists to abandon the theory of the great man of history, so the theory of the great man of history is an idea that was formalized in the 1840s. by a writer called Thomas Carile and it basically consisted of the innate abilities, heroic acts and divine inspiration of individuals who are always men. This is how history could be explained. Now my opinion is that in science we continue to be enchanted by the theory of this great man in academic history this is an idea that was largely abandoned 20 30 maybe 40 years ago because it doesn't explain history and it doesn't explain history, which happens to most people, but we continue in our teachings of the history of science drawing straight lines from Aristotle to the Nobel Prizes, the Nobel Prizes along with the Oscars, I think they are the only prizes that are recognized worldwide by everyone and I think they are fundamentally lost, is there any Nobel Prize winner in the audience?

I don't care, I think the funds fundamentally misrepresent how science is done and continue to perpetuate myths about how science is done. done reinforcing the notion of great man uh Theory and as for the Oscars, well you know Citizen C was defeated because of how green my valley is so that's nonsense isn't it now when it comes to science and the history of science and the field that I have some experience in the great man theory, which first focuses and identifies in Francis Gton and I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about Francis Gton, he actually also pays my salary, so I'm kind of grateful for that, but I think it's pretty funny that I spend most of my life being rude to him anyway, so Francis Goon's first work before turning to eugenics was a travel book.

He toured the world after his father died and traveled mainly through Africa and went into the Middle East and came back even more racist than when he left, but his second book and his first kind of um wander through what became Eugenics came in 1869 and it is a book called hereditary genius in which he set out to demonstrate something that no one had done before but he set out to demonstrate using statistics and new statistical techniques that he himself had invented that the great men in history were great because it came from their family. in a they didn't have the word genetic but in a biological way and he set out to show that he was not particularly interested in women, so in this book there are only men, women according to gton at this time are simply uh vles in which um um incubate great men, so he speaks of the judges of England. in the time of George III, the prime minister, that is, the prime ministers for the last 100 years, but also commanders, men of literature, men of science, painters, poets and musicians, and then, because all of these are intellectual activities, has a brief chapter on Orman's classes. and fighters and with this he demonstrates using statistical techniques that there is a constant proportion of men in societies that will be great basically through a standard deviation, a bell curve of abilities and these great men represent um two standard deviations above the average and at the other end of the scale you have the same proportion of people who are undesirable, they have qualities that are undesirable to the British population and this was for him the founding idea of ​​eugenics, the idea that we should move. the dial towards great people um using biological means because he was hereditary he believed that these are biological characteristics and much less socially mediated than we might think today.

Now a lot of my work is about eugenics. I'll talk about it a little more. specifically in just one minute, but this is not a specific lecture on eugenics. What I'm interested in talking about for the purpose of this conference is the fifth of my angry phrases, which is that their personal views, the views of these men of science. These great men of science are irrelevant to the science they created. This is a very interesting question and I imagine some of you are thinking about this right now. Why do I spend all my time talking about this?

Ok let's go. through this period of reassessment of our intellectual forefathers, but at UCL we have had a specific moment in the last three or four years because there was an official inquiry into eugenics because as a result of Francis Gon's legacy at UCL in founding effectively the department that would become the genetics department Evolution and ecology what environment what is the name of our department genetics what is genetics The evolution environment should leave that right in front of my boss um but there was a reckoning that ended just before the pandemic in 2020 and The naming conventions at UCL on campus were one of the results of that investigation: those names would be removed, so that's the gton lecture theater, the Pearson lecture theater and the ra Fisher Centre, all Those names have been changed and are also part.

The result was that they now created a salary for me by answering or attempting to address the question of whether their personal views affected their scientific work. Quite simply, he was an unequivocal white supremacist and a racist, which was not unusual, quite typical. but pretty extreme for Victorian times, but again, oh, I remembered the point I forgot on the other side, um, what was the line, it was um, God, I just won an award for scientific communication, what was it that did the men? of their time, yes, they got it right, so they are men of their time, the point is that that phrase, their men of their time, implies that everyone thinks the same in every era, right, it implies that everyone is equally racist or white supremacist . today or then, if 100 years from now you said oh, they were people of their time.

You think this is one of the most politically divisive eras in history. You can't just say what everyone in this room, well, maybe everyone in this room, but but. You know, maybe everyone in the country has wildly different views and that's what I mean by contextualizing their views right now and that's why saying they're people of their time is kind of fatuous, but to gon It is easy because he was quite explicit about it, he dedicated the rest of his life from about 1869 onwards to promoting the ideology of eugenics, which he claimed was an ideology, and to using science using new statistical techniques that he invented to justify the improvement of the British people using biological means and This is a quote from 1909 and this is the first time I've seen the word Jihad used outside of the context of the 20th century, sorry, 21st century, um, repercussions after 9/11, but there it is. at 199, but it's going to say that we need. have a religious fervor associated with eugenics to improve the quality of the British people, so the notion that the science he invented is independent of his political ideologies is obviously false.

He was doing science to serve his political ideas now. one of his legacies was that he created, in addition to the financial legacy that he created at UCL, he created the Goon chair and the first part of the tenure was that the first bully professor was Carl Pearson here is Carl Pearson Carl pearon unequivocally one One of the most important that has ever existed for multiple reasons. He invented most of maybe half of the statistical techniques that most of the modern world depends on, mainly in the 1910s and 1920s, but before that, an amazing scholar, he was a professor of German folklore. in Berlin before to become a professor of physiology also in Berlin, but he got bored of Berlin, so he moved to London, where he became a professor of law and decided that he did not want to be a lawyer, so he decided to take up a chair. in mathematics, which is not the same path my career has taken.

He wrote a book in 1890 called Grammar of Science, which was a bestseller and is the first description. I think I'm happy to be corrected on this, but I think it's the first description that anyone describes matter and energy as interchangeable, and we know because Einstein wrote about it that Einstein read this book in the 1890s and 15 years later After its publication, Einstein publishes Special Relativity in which he describes Pearson's influence. in science, not only in the creation of statistical techniques or in the effective invention of many of the foundations of population genetics, he was also in the formation of special relativity, which is why Pearson is an incredible figure in our field.

I feel like this is not going to be a surprise at this point, he was also an incredible racist, an incredibly racist man, particularly anti-Semitic in his outlook, so this is the first quote that is a reaction to the Boredom War in 1890 in 1896, you can read it yourself and the second, um, that's a tremendously anti-Semitic thing to say now, can Pearson's work be separated from his grotesque racism and support for eugenics? No, you can't, because when he handed in his upon retiring from Gton's professorship in 1933, he, he, gave a lecture, um. in which he stated quite unequivocally that he was his, he developed these statistical techniques to promote the ideology of eugenics, he said the climax culminated in Gon's preaching of eugenics and the founding of the chair of eugenics, I said culmination, no, that lies more in the future perhaps with Reich advisor Hitler and his proposal to regenerate the German people, so there is Carl Pearson and I think I feel good in saying that it is impossible to separate the um, the Genesis of his work with his political ideologies now in In that speech, he is handing over the Goon chair toRonald Elmer Fischer, Goon's second professor, and I think all I believe is fair to say that almost all the statistical techniques that KL Pearson didn't invent were invented by Ronald Fischer, probably the greatest. statistician who ever lived the founder one of the three founders of the modern synthesis the process by which Darwinian natural selection merged with the new genetics to create our contemporary understanding of evolutionary biology um he was a brilliant man um he wrote in 1930 , the seminal text of population genetics, the genetic theory of natural selection, is an absolutely turgid book, I mean, unreadable, um, and has anyone read it?

Has anyone in this room actually read it? I mean, I've done the best I could. Someone raised their hand. Oh well, he's my PhD student, so you better start on Monday, so how's it going? Yes, yes, yes, now again, it won't be a big surprise. He was very interested in eugenics and, um, this is well documented. It is well documented in one of my books and in another work, he was a co-founder of the Eugenics Society in 1812 when he was a student at Gonville and he entered Cambridge and began writing for the first Eugenics Journal, which was for the Education Society.

Eugenics around 1918 and some of those texts are absolutely fascinating because some of them clearly include the seeds of some of his great work later on, the first description of what is known as runaway selection of fishermen, they are described in an article from 1918 , that's why you know that deer have huge males, and male deer have huge antlers, and peacocks have huge tails and things like that, but even reading those early texts you can see the seeds of great evolutionary biology, but he he absolutely conflates it with human traits, which is why he equates it with selection, including things like ruddy cheeks in men and halosis.

I mean, I guess halosis is a good example of a negative selection if you're in a bar um, but I don't think it necessarily fits their paradigm, so I'm grappling with the question of whether their political views are associated with their scientific works. I know Fischer was a big fan of eugenics. I think the way he expressed his views on race is much more subtle. I don't think he was particularly racist any more than a lot of upper middle class men of that era and that's not the case. it's not Express um like KL Pearson's was, but he was very interested in eugenics, now that book, the genetic theory of natural selection of a person, the two people in this room who read it will know very well that only the first seven of the 12 chapters in it are about population genetics, the last five chapters are about eugenics, they are a little crazy and there are some kind of fantasies about the fall of the Roman Empire, which is a kind of cornerstone of eugenics in this era. and also policies, um suggestions about taxing people who have fewer children, etc.

There are five chapters on this and we don't really mention this because they are completely crazy and they are completely irrelevant to the fundamental population genetics text that happens in the The first seven chapters none of you have read, but they are really important, um, now, so you might say you might suggest that maybe it's just a label, this is your pet, this is your workhorse, that's why you want to add. in his big textbook and if you look at the reviews of the last almost 100 years of this book, most of them ignore the fact that the last five chapters are actually about eugenics, but some work by um uh, a chaper historian. of Fisher at the University of Oxford and this has only happened in the last few years Alex Elwood and he has been kind enough to share with me these slides for this talk which looked through the Fisher archive and which no one else has really done and which is kept in Adelaide , where Fisher died, um, and in that he discovered the 1990 1919 draft of an untitled book that becomes the genetic theory of natural selection and the very interesting thing about this is that the first chapters of the first draft are the final chapters from the published one.

So it seems like Alex's argument that I think is that Fisher's initial intention was to write a book on genetics and then use his made-up population genetics to justify it and it was only much later in 19 when he was writing it in 1928 and 30. um which moves those chapters to the end and we can actually see that, so this is what chapter one was, uh, which you can see, this is the index of the first published edition, but you can see that the movement of the chapters from the draft version in the final version includes the eugenics chapters to be honest now.

I think this is pretty compelling evidence that Fisher's motivation was to write a book about eugenics and how to change the quality of the British people now. Fisher has been Fisher's legacy. He has been re-evaluated in recent years not only at UCL but also at Keys, where he was a student and later teacher, and it appeared in the news that the stained glass window of him in the Chapel dining room in live I don't know something Cambridge I really don't I understand. He was removed after a campaign by first year university students and this was a new story and this got the ball rolling at UCL to reassess Fisher's legacy and his standing on campus and indeed throughout America.

Well, the American Statistical Society removed Fisher's name from several awards and conferences like this and the interesting thing about Fisher, oh yeah, here's another point, part of that removal and part of that reevaluation was a compromise that I think is described generously as incredibly wrong which began in the 1930s, with his interactions with a man, a scientist named otma frar f fure and he was a kind of behavioral geneticist who had followed goon's work on invented goon invented twin studies andar um f fure followed this. particularly interested in lung diseases and during the 1930s, which is obviously a tumultuous period in German history, here he is with some um measuring calipers, he joined the Nazi party in 1940, but in the pre-war period fiser He corresponded with fiser and guest fiser With London they lost correspondence during the war and after the war, as often happened, German scientists sometimes destroyed records that associated them with acts of atrocity or associations with the Nazi party and it was surely considered in their densification judgment. a mifer, then a traveling companion, a Nazi traveling companion and he had F 600 marks.

What I haven't mentioned is that he probably had a PhD student during the war whose name was Joseph Mangay, yes, now we have no idea because the records were destroyed if for sure any of the fabrics that we know Mangay had taken from um were used. people murdered in aitz there are no records of it, it seems unlikely to me that he did not do it or was not aware of it, but that is speculation because the evidence no longer exists, so when he was surely trying to rehabilitate his own reputation after the war, he wrote to Fisher and several others to obtain letters of recommendation for professorships, there are now two letters that somewhat condemn Fisher's response. um, one of which is shown here and the quote is there, well, you can read it yourself.

I have no doubt that the Nazi party seriously wants to benefit the ger races, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't doubt that Fua gave as he should have given his support to such a movement, it's no big deal to say, and this has been part over the last four or five years of the reassessment of Fisher's intellectual legacy, I think it's generously described as deeply misguided. , but here's the What Fisher Was, I think I read a lot about him. I think he was a frustrated policy wonk. I think he wanted to have influence on eugenics, culture and society, but in reality he didn't have much influence and became a great scientist.

A great statistician, but no one read the last five chapters of the genetic theory of natural selection and no one really paid much attention to his views on eugenics, partly related to some of the history I'll talk about in a moment, but in the UK we never had a eugenics policy, in the US they embraced it wholeheartedly, so I think along with Pearson, who until the day he died was a eugenicist but also didn't think the data was good enough to justify interventions. to justified state policies, so in the UK we were prevented, for various reasons, from implementing eugenics partially by people who wanted it to happen but thought the data wasn't good enough and I think fiser was one of those who were He was frustrated by his ineffectiveness in promoting eugenics, but these are the reasons why he has been removed from various campuses around the world and I think this is ironic because we have canceled him for the wrong reasons.

This is an image of the offer in the 1950s and In this image something very significant happens: he is now smoking a pipe. Fisher was a very enthusiastic smoker, as were many people at that time, and we must bear in mind that in the 1950s the tobacco industry, especially in the United States, was facing a crisis of catastrophic proportions because smoking had been categorically related to the dramatic rise in lung cancer and for decades before this health concerns had been raised, but in the early 1950s and you will know the name Richard Doll, epidemiological evidence was emerging that there was a very There was a large expansion and consolidation of scientific methods showing that smoking caused lung disease, as well as other serious respiratory and heart diseases, and led to death, and these were being published in large peer-reviewed medical journals and were reported in the mainstream media that the tobacco lobby and the tobacco industry were having an existential crisis about it.

Now the medical establishment was quite slow to adopt this and in 1953, between 40 and 45% of doctors were still smoking more than 20 cigarettes a day. day, but the tobacco industry was aware that they were facing this existential crisis and that it was born from scientific data. Now the evidence that cigarettes cause cancer is quite striking, it is not just epidemiological from this point of view and it is not new at this stage. So Müller at this stage in 1939 had the first suggestions that, um uh, in cohorts, smoking a significant number of siggies, so more than 20 a day, resulted in an increase in lung cancer and that really took hold in a series of controlled case styles that culminated in doll work. in 1954, which broadly concluded that smoking more than 35 cigarettes a day increased the chance of getting lung cancer about 40 times, but we also had animal models before, so in 1931, Rafo in 1931 put concentrated tobacco extract on the skins of mice and observed tumor formation. had cellular pathology, we know that smoke destroys cyia and that this had been observed in tissues and in animals um and that in 1954, sorry, 56 uh, research had shown that smokers suffered from pulmonary cyia stasis, which is the cause of death. of cia in their lung tissue and we also knew that the chemicals in cigarette smoke also contained known carcinogens and this had been known since the 1930s, so the evidence was actually quite strong and multifactorial and was that cigarette smoking is not only associated but which actually functionally causes lung cancer, it's now difficult to know why Fisher took such a strong objection to this, mainly because Fischer's only real biography was written in the 1980s by his daughter, so that's another example. of how we should analyze the story by considering the source and considering who wrote it, why they wrote it, who the intended audience was, etc., the absolutely standard pillars of making good history, but Fisher was absolutely opposed to this view that smoking causes cancer and he did it using data that he published in five articles over the course of 1956 to 58 two in nature one review article and two in other journals and let me show you all the data that's all these were Fisher's data now the first table actually comes from the work of otar frar Fon fure Joseph Mangle's PhD supervisor, Fisher, does not go into further detail about the provenance of this data.

I present to you the entirety of Fisher's data, the evidence to resist the notion that smoking causes cancer, that's all, and when he says, for example, they are not equal, smoking habits are not equal. that's the entirety of the description, so I think we can agree that this is poor, it's not good science and I think it's interesting because it's reasonable to say that Ronald Fischer was one of the greatest statisticians of all time, definitely en It is reasonable to say that his books and articles are impenetrable because they are very complex and technical and were born from a man with a colossal brain, so it is a little disconcerting to look at this and thinkthat you opposed an overwhelming tsunami of data using this to say something that was becoming obvious that smoking causes cancer and it required very, very visceral opposition to that.

Why did he do it well? We can assume that he did not like authority figures. Smoking or smoking was considered and anti-smoking was considered leftist. The correct political argument at the moment is a bit like other issues today. He had expressed animosity towards Public Health intervention, so he had a sort of iconoclastic streak and he was a smoker, but you know a lot of people smoked at the time, so it's quite difficult to understand why he took such vitriolic hatred for this idea of that smoking causes cancer. Here are a couple of quotes from one of the articles that you can read for yourself, so Fisher here is certainly whether you like it or not It's a significant part of the scientific misinformation that caused people unexplained pain as a result. of his personal prejudices which we don't quite understand why and this is the really interesting part as a result of his work and his stance being exploited by the industrial complex of The tobacco industry knew at the time that the contribution to health and happiness overall was significantly negative.

In 1953, Tobacco, a joint cohort of tobacco companies in the United States, employed a public relations agency, hen nton um, and went through several years of crisis management. how to deal with the fact that there was all this evidence coming out that smoking causes cancer and they had started to discover that if you told people that scientists and doctors were wrong, this was ineffective, so they invented a new strategy that was sow seeds of doubt, they don't have to say they're wrong, all they have to say is we really don't know, some people think we do, some people think we don't, and they recruited Fischer for this. he was paid, but only £400 or so, which I don't think is a huge amount of money and therefore doesn't fully explain it.

I don't think it's fair to say it's financially motivated for Fer, but as a result of this. They launch a marketing campaign that says the world's greatest statistician doesn't say smoking causes cancer, but rather the alternative theory that Fisher came up with, which is fascinating for a hereditary, for a guy who thinks genetics plays a bigger role. important than culture or society or the environment in the behavior of people and biology itself. Fischer came up with an alternative theory which was based on the idea that most people who smoke do not get lung cancer correctly, which is correct, and that there is a genetic predisposition to getting lung cancer, which is correct. which is also correct, but what he assumed and what he theorized was that people who have a genetic predisposition to get lung cancer when they start to develop tumors develop an itch that he described as itchy lungs and that the only way could alleviate that feeling was by smoking cigarettes, so Hill and Nola's clever years of marketing at The Tobacco Lobby discovered that the world's greatest statistician had come up with an idea that said not that smoking causes cancer but that cancer causes cancer. smoking and Fisher writes this quite explicitly in previous articles in a way interesting for statisticians which, as you know, should be analyzed by people who learn statistics if a is associated with B, you cannot assume that a causes B and, if does, you might as well assume that b causes a and Fisher took that to its logical extreme.

It's a national Inquirer report from around that time and there's the same image of Fisher smoking his C cigarettes. Now this all comes from Robert Proctor's work at Stanford and uh, he's um and he deserves credit for this, esteem, and ​I have no reason to doubt him, um, that smoking Cigarettes are the most lethal object that humanity has ever invented. He has calculated the speed at which they smoke. This is data from 2012 and is at the same speed as the International Space Station. I think six billion cigarettes are smoked a year, so. I'm not interested in cancel culture or whatever the harsh word is for dealing with these kinds of cultural war issues, but I find it fascinating that we continue to worship and then, well, cancel someone, I think probably for the wrong reasons, his impact on Eugenics Fisher's impact on eugenics is negligible, possibly zero, his impact on science in general is colossal.

We enormous branches of not only genetics but also psychology statistics, and in fact every data set that needs analysis using one of the techniques he invented comes from fer, but we can't. Denying the fact that he is intrinsically involved in one of the most destructive industries that has ever existed on this planet. It was his fault. We shouldn't know. Yes, I think we should know. And you will also know that this idea belongs to the merchants. The doubt is how it was characterized in a 2010 book that the tobacco lobby said that we do not sell two products, cigarettes and scientific doubts.

Hill and Nola continued to work in the 1970s for a different American industry, which was fossil fuels. Lobby where they also used the exact same technique that continues to this day, we don't have to say that you guys are wrong, we just have to say that we really don't know and there is enough scientific doubt that you can try it. this is a part of it, I think he is ah, I have another 40 slides to look at, anyone who has seen me before will know this is not unusual, right, let's do eugenics quickly, so Francis, you come up with the idea of ​​the eugenics. uh, meaning you come up with the science of a much older idea that through biological means, whether it's fanticide or arranged marriages, you can improve the quality of a people.

He starts describing it in 1869 and then formalizes it over the next 20 to 30 years and it becomes an incredibly popular idea across political, social and cultural divides. The social context of the rise of eugenics in Britain at least includes these things. Here we have a massive expansion of cities as a result of the Industrial Revolution. We have a much more visible vision. poor and with a visible poor you have much more visible diseases, we have the transfer of responsibility from the people at the base of society from the church to the state and a massive increase in the number of institutions, we also have the Empire in its absolute form.

The peak really comes in 1923, where the British Empire is at its geographical maximum, and as a result of that increase in immigration, we have declinism, the endless idea that everything in the past was better and everything is getting worse, we have a nice Universal scientific racism. Almost everyone thinks that, in the sense that race is a real, biological phenomenon and that white supremacy is part of that configuration, and then we have what is characterized in the 1920s as Grand Placement Theory , which is the The idea that living populations become decadent and have fewer children and, as a result of that, poorer populations begin to infiltrate them and have greater wealth and will eventually replace them.

It's an old idea. It is described in Plato. It is described in Gibbon. the fall of the Roman Empire, which I think a lot of these old guys read in the 19th century or at least read the cover where it describes it, I mean six volumes and it's really boring, but it becomes one of those kind of cornerstones of the style eugenic St Style think now eugenic the word itself means something like Well born, good, Genesis, birth, so initially it is classified C as something positive, people want to improve society, but to do so you have to classify people according to by some means of categorization and if you have to categorize people, it means that there are some people at the top and some people at the bottom, so what immediately happens every time eugenics is enacted or thought of in countries of 31 countries around the world? the 20th century had eugenic policies in their legislature, what actually happens immediately starts out as a good thing and immediately becomes good, these are the people we want and these are the people we don't want, so the people subject to the eugenic selection are negative.

Eugenic selection always includes rationalized groups, it includes people with disabilities, it includes people with specific medical diagnoses and um non-specific diagnoses that are historically difficult to understand, like feeble-mindedness, and it includes women with menstrual problems and then it's just people who don't. They like alcoholics, epileptics, sex workers and criminals, and the popularity of this idea that now seems so toxic to us is almost, but not completely, universal in British culture in the Edwardian era. Here are a couple of examples of those subway ads on the left. The right side on the right is a Valentine's Day card, I mean, you know, and they say romance is dead, and this is often considered Ed's right-wing ideology, but that's not true, it was equally adopted by the leftist thinkers of the time.

Also, now I used to put up this slide and offer students or the public a free book if they could name all the people, but no one got it, so now I put their names, but in the top row are leftist or progressive thinkers who They are eugenesis enthusiasts of this era and I think it is important to recognize that these are the founders of ideas that are part of our contemporary discourse. Virginia Wolf. I think A Room of One Zone is one of the most important essays ever written. George Beraw. a pretty good pigmon production at the Old Vic at the moment Sydney and Berus Webb are part of the founders of the Fabian Society, left-wing thinkers and development of the labor movement which eventually becomes the basis of the welfare state in the NHS years later on the bottom row you have Arthur Balfor conservative prime minister in 1912 he is former prime minister 19112 Winston Churchill is the foreign secretary in the asth government so you have the former and future prime minister and Mary Stopes, who is that?

I know her name from being the founder of women's reproductive rights at the Married Stokes clinics now called MSI because Mary Stopes wasn't really interested in women's reproductive rights, what she was interested in was the eradication of the Irish, the slaves and the Jews. she in London until 1938 she wrote love poetry and sent it to Hitler about how horrible the Jews were. So I'm doing this pretty quickly. So eugenics is not universally popular, but it is among socialists on the left and right and uh and conservatives embrace eugenic thinking. It's basically normalized in society. Churchill is the main political promoter of eugenics.

He read a pamphlet in 1907 from the Indiana Reformatory in which a man named El, a doctor named LC Sharp, claimed that he could uh. vasectomized 300 men a day without anesthesia and without repercussions, which I don't think, um, Churchill, William Churchill, Winston Churchill, if you're going to make a typo, you might as well do it with Churchill, um, we know Churchill read the pamphlet of Sharp. because he has highlighted passages in which he describes the V imization of undesirables um and Churchill goes on to propose legislation several times around this time during his years in the aswith government for the involuntary sterilization of people deemed undesirable, including, for example, in 1912 , suggesting the use of Ren it includes the involuntary sterilization of the feeble-minded but due to the campaign work of an MP, Josiah Wedgewood, also part of Darwin's clan of thugs that was removed from the legislation and that's how close we came in this country to having eugenics in the legislation of this country, um, Churcher was the great driver Wedgewood was the filibuster that eliminated it in the United States, they had a different history, they embraced eugenics with much more enthusiasm and much earlier, it is an example of in 1912 192 is a crucial year for eugenics Teddy Roosevelt wrote to Charles Davenport, who I will talk about this in a moment, I suggest that this is the duty of right-minded citizens, to eliminate undesirables from our society.

Now the funding bodies of what becomes the Eugenic Records Office are also Long's great East Coast philanthropists. Island, the people on whom the characters in The Great Gatsby are based and include Mary Harman, the richest woman in this period, the widow of railroad magnate Elel Harman, and John Rockefeller, who is probably the richest man who ever lived. existed in the history of the United States. With money from these people and also from the carnis um Davenport who had met gton in 1900 in London, he traveled back and established the Eugenics Rec Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor associated with the Cold Spring laboratoryHarbor, one of the great research centers and still one of the best genetic research institutes on Earth and you can see from this headline from 1912 that this is not just a scientific research establishment, it is a social one.

You can see that it is about addressing social problems using biology. It is now called the Eugenic Records Office. because it has two clear objectives, the first is generally to promote the idea of ​​eugenics among the American people, but the second is to harvest the national family pedigree from the records of the American people and that is exactly what they did, they sent people, mostly women, who I've been trained to go to state fairs in places like Kansas, Iowa and Indiana, to rural state fairs and to organize eugenics competitions, fitter family competitions, better baby competitions, they said things like there you are judging Hallstein and the fans, but you We should also judge the Robinsons and the Joneses and this is what the 1920 Kansas State Fair is.

Now my colleague and friend, Professor Jennifer Raph, who works at the University of Kansas, I bought a of these medals and sent it to her house, which I then felt was a bit like, you know, buying Nazi souvenirs, she's on sabbatical with us now. I'm going to pass that round, by the way, I need this B, but, this becomes normalized again in society if you can breed animals to be better. so why not breed humans to be better too? This was generated by the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Records Office under the leadership of Charles Davenport, one of Francis Gton's acolytes directly and, aside from Nazi Germany, the United States has the most enthusiastic embrace of eugenics of any country, We estimate that between 70 and half a million people were sterilized against their will or knowledge during the 20th century. 31 states had involuntary eugenic sterilization on their state books for most of the 20th century.

Century the last law was repealed in Oregon in 1986, so people who were sterilized under eugenics laws in America are now alive, this is what the map looked like in 193, okay, my timing is terrible, here it is one of my favorite images from The History of Science, who is it? that mendle Gregor mendle the founder of genetics actually described as Austrian the Moravian he was not a monk he was a friar they are different In a way I don't care Gregor mendle the Moravian friar uh there he is holding what kind of plant not petunia I don't know why what holds a petunia.

A p is a very reasonable answer to that question, but it's a petunia. We often see this framed photo of him, but I really like to show the rest of his literal brothers here because I think they're having a really fancy time and this guy look what this guy's doing I don't know, check me out and I don't know, da a little scary, so mendal does his amazing work, what I think is probably one of the biggest experiments in the history of science in the 1850s and 60s, where he crossed 29,000 PE plants and with that emerge statistical patterns that They demonstrate that characteristics are transmitted in discrete packets in predictable statistical formations from generation to generation.

You already know in school what peas are. Being wrinkled or smooth or the leaves, the petals are purple or white and do not mix, they come out in discrete phenotypes and these are the fundamental principles of the units of inheritance that become characterized in 1900 as genes, correct foundations of genetics, the work is written in german and was translated into english in 1900 and then becomes part of the pantheon of 20th century biology, a kind of founding part, there is nothing wrong with this and menal is exonerated as far as i know , he's not a bad guy, so he gets a full pass from me on this, but his work lands in Davenport's lab at exactly the right time for Davenport or at the wrong time for undesirable American citizens because he suddenly gets to Davenport and the Eugenics Records Office at C Spring Harbor a mechanism upon which they can act, a pivot upon which they can act, promulgate their eugenics ideas and their davp report and Americans in general at this time are They obsess over the notion that every characteristic in humans is defined and determined by a single gene, just as there is a gene for wrinkles or softness in peas or a gene for purple or white petals, a dominant or negative.

You remember this from GCSE biology. Davenport becomes obsessed with the idea that all human characteristics also follow this pattern of inheritance now what is the characteristic the human characteristic that we use to teach Mendelian inheritance in humans what are the first characteristics that we teach children hey col eye color true, we all know it true, there is a gene that is or an Al more exactly that codes for blue eyes and is recessive for brown eyes, so you draw a small square punet table and put Big B, small B, Big B, small B, Big B, Big B, Big B, little B, you know who the person was.

The one who first published and described this work was Charles Davenport in 197 The inheritance of eye color in man This pattern is first described in this article by Davenports Now you know it's not true, right? doing your GCS now you write what's in the document um, but it's not true, there are dozens of genes involved in influencing, not determining eye color and parents, it's probabilistic because genetics is probabilistic and not deterministic, but really you can not. accurately determine your children's eye color based on their parents' eye color um and beyond that, eye color is not a binary thing, there are no blue eyes and brown eyes, they have different eye patterns in the same eye, some people have heterochromia where they have different eye color in both eyes, so it is probabilistic and you can make predictions about what eye color will be based on the genotype, but they are predictions, they are not deterministic patterns, but the idea of which is deterministic. specifically from Davenport himself now, in referencing the fact that there are not only blue eyes and brown eyes, he acknowledges that in the original article and says, and this is a direct quote from this original article, that hazel eyes exist, but We assume they are blue.

I don't really know what to make of that, um, what's the second human characteristic that we write to describe a human who is um dominant or negative, not moving your tongue is good? Oh, so all the geneticists here, so hearing loses. it's one that comes after don't roll your tongue that's also uh no oh come on I was going to do I was going to do hair color come on ginger your nervousness so mc1r is a gene that is that recessive alal for which um they are responsible for uh Redhairedness now this also comes from Davenport published in 19 09 where he describes the inheritance pattern of Ginger Hairness um this is a title of a joke report from I don't know can you see it red hair is created by an endangered gene these babies are chickening out because genetics are coming to get them um now Davenport didn't have molecular genetics or large scale observers to help him with this, but in the most recent I assessment of hair color um from the UK's Bier bank, one of the One of the big sets of genetics data that was published, I think it was in 2018, showed that over 75% of people who have two Als that supposedly code for red hair don't have red hair, we don't really know what hair color is like and eye color and these are the most obvious and easiest examples of Mendelian inheritance in humans, they are the basis of how we teach genetics to school children and yet they both come directly from the father of American eugenics with the specific intent to show that Mandelian inheritance inherited in man in humans, but he said that in man, um uh, it was something that we could act on and that we could breed people to have traits that were more desirable and breed people that They had traits that were undesirable.

He also did a job that he showed. As far as he was concerned, sexual proclivity was also Mendelian, monogenic and deterministic, so based on work with sex worker public relations institutes, and also that maritime fairing was hereditary in Ming-style families, it was the first person to publish the um melan pattern. of inheritance for Huntington's disease and you actually got the inheritance mechanism or pattern for this right, it's autosomal dominant um Woody GTH died of Huntington's um but in the abstract of this article he attributes the origin of Huntington's to three immigrants Brothers, of 100 years ago, we don't know if they existed or not, but it is clearly associated with the politics of the time in which eugenics was considered a facet of immigration.

I still have 10 slides left, thanks friend. I don't know who you are, but I like you. Now contemporary research on this is really important and this is one of the most important reasons why we need to know this and study this, and it is based on the idea that over the brief history of genetics we have gone from this Mendelian one-to-one relationship between monogenic deterministic thinking to a complex multifactorial idea that many genes interact with EnV with the environment and epigenetic factors is the complete symphony of what becomes the phenotype and behaviors of individuals, so this is the trajectory of genetics over a hundred years, but we keep teaching mendal first, we keep teaching eye color and hair color and that genes are these discrete factors that are inherited in these same patterns of clear inheritance, which is basically not true now that research has started to emerge in the last five years in classroom cohorts in the United States and a small clue-based study has proven what the result is of teaching this type of biology, this type of Genetics for school-age children and what they found was prepared by Brian Donovan.

The article is Carver Al 200 17 um, the work shows that if you take a cohort and you teach them in a traditional way, you start with mendal and move on to complexity and diseases. later, you take another cohort and you teach them complexity and diseases first, but the total amount of content is the same, you end up with cohorts where the first one you teach Mendelian inheritance ends up with a much more racialized essentialized view of genetics. than the second now these are preliminary studies. I have no reason to doubt them, but we need to do more research on this, but if they hold up in the next few years, we have basically not only been teaching genetics wrong for a century, but we have been offering a disservice to the genetics community by teach a version of genetics that is not only incorrect but reinforces ideas of racial essentialism that have been outdated for decades, so we are not only doing a disservice to students of biology and genetics, but also to Mendel, who He pointed out in his original article that those flowers and plants were not wild type, they were already bred for those characteristics to be expressed in a controlled environment and he also goes on to say that they do not apply.

This to humans because humans are really complex, but we have ignored all of that for 100 years and instead embraced the eugenicists' view that all characteristics are determined by single genes and that is what we teach children in the schools. I could stop there. I mean there's a natural break for me to stop there, do you want or want me to do the Nazi thing? I'll do it quickly, okay. Now that monogenic deterministic thinking is culturally embedded in our society, I believe it is older than Davenport. I think it just dates back to the idea that things are inherited.

The first example of monogenic deterministic inheritance is actually described in the Talmud where hemophilia is described, written in the 3rd century BC, but in the press, and this is during the kind of golden age of Gene Discovery, as a result of the studies of the Genoid Association, you can see that this idea is so catchy that the press on the left and right just clings to it. I tried to get this called Rutherford's law for vanity reasons, but it didn't work if you want to help me with that, I'd appreciate it, but the idea of ​​a headline saying that the gene for It's a complex human trait, it's not like that, the gene doesn't exist and scientists haven't figured it out, it may be Rutherford's law, okay, let's get on with it, so there are some examples you can know about, crazy like this one in the bottom of the Atlantic, a gene that predicts what time of day you will die.

I don't know how that works if you get hit by a bus the middle three here The gene that will scare the hell out of you the gene that makes you politically abandoned and a gene that makes you unfaithful to your partner are all in the Daily Mail and the good thing about that is which is all the same gene Dr. nd4 imagine having that as a permanently terrified liberal love rat phenotype but the negative, we joke, that's funny, right, um in 1912 Herbert Godard, who was the first person to translate the The Test of coefficientEnglish scholar from French was working on the study, a case study of a woman named an 8-year-old girl named Deborah Cak under her care, whom she described as a standard, weak-minded child, the type that fills our reformatories and decided try to understand why she was weak-minded, where this came from and she did this by tracing her family tree and she traced back eight or nine generations and discovered that she was the progeny of a hero returning from the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, called Martin Cakak, who upon his return from the Revolutionary War stopped at a bar, a tavern, and impregnated what he described as an attractive but weak-minded, nameless Barate, and then returned home to his Quaker, an excellent wife and he had a large family, but the attractive but weak-minded offer also had a family and Deborah Cakak was the last terminal branch of that family that was full of evildoers, criminals and people with developmental disorders, while the family he had with his legitimate Quaker wife was full of lawyers, doctors, scientists and bankers and I think this became the founding myth of American eugenics.

This becomes a textbook for many years. The book itself is called The Calac Family. A study on weak mentality published in 1912 becomes a bestseller, but as it progresses. As late as 1955 it is in the undergraduate textbooks where you can see that he is caricature married to a worthy Quaker DED with a feeble minded tavern girl on the left side, has 10 known children one of whom is known as old horror, um, but on the other side, seven honest and worthy children now have that thought for a second because we're going to change to England in 1912, which again was a crucial year in the history of these types of ideas because is the incidence of the first International Eugenics Conference held at a site that is now Imperial College and this is the booklet, it is a fantastic summary and for the scientists in the audience it describes talks, some of which are illuminated slide presentations flashlights, a bell will ring with 3 minutes left and again. with 30 seconds left, sorry Jonathan, um and also describe places where you can get sandwiches in the back.

Now there is no official wording for it, but it is not there textually. I want to show you some of the cast list of the people there to show you how influential this kind of thinking is right now, read it for yourself, but you have Darwin, you have David Star, Jordan, the founder of Stanford University, a Bateson, founder of the Genetic Society, we, um, Director. at Eaton Arthur Bala, former Prime Minister Bala goes on to say that at the dinner he gives the keynote speech at the dinner and then awards the first chair of genetics on Earth, the Balfor Chair which still exists to this day and is carried just. by a Ferguson Smith who I must emphasize is not a eugenicist um um but the first one was given to Reginald Punet um in Cambridge in Punet Square the thing about you taking the color out of your eyes and I have to confess that he was in my middle - 1930s when I discovered that Reginal Punet designed and thought it was named after strawberry boxes.

I blame my educators at UCL, but Reginal Punet speaks at this conference and says he says something that when you read the notes you think, God, thank God, he said. Until then, he says I don't think we have enough knowledge about the inheritance patterns of most human conditions to justify eugenic intervention and I first read it a few years ago and finally someone said he's separated by commas. due to mental weakness that is monogenic and deterministic and on which action must be taken immediately. I don't know if he read Godard's book on the Cove, but it was published the same year and we know that Godard had a position and was not present. but he had a position at that conference now again they were men of their time fatuous argument they were fatuous arguments and there are fatuous arguments there because here we have Archeugenesis Pearson pointing out that the American model of monogenic men, the deterministic thinking for this is not accurate, it should be dismissed, it's not that he wants it to be dismissed.

Since he's opposed to eugenics, he wants it to be dismissed because he doesn't think the data is up to par, so you know, he published three articles over the course of 10 years saying that the American model was bad, um Thomas Hunt Morgan, another one. The founding father of genetics also points out that these are not just genetically inherited conditions, but are communicated rather than inherited. the offer never existed he had been invented the calac family was a completely different family unrelated to martin cakak himself uh so this whole founding myth of american eugenics was actually based on a completely fraudulent story its impact is good , we will see its impact. because for the last two minutes I will be covering Nazi Germany, this is Alfred please, he comes up with ideas independently and coins the word rassen hygiene, so racial hygiene, just like personal hygiene and hygiene public, they are there to protect individuals and the general public rassan.

Hygiene is there to protect the breed. He traveled as a socialist thinker to Iowa to work on a communal farm, but was so shocked by what he described as the quality of the people there that he returned and committed himself for the rest of his life to promoting ideas. of eugenics in Germany first via the first Second Reich then in vay es and then in the Third Reich itself now many books and many studies there is a whole literature on the emergence of eugenic and racial hygiene thought as part of the cornerstone of the the Third Reich and the Holocaust itself, but broadly these ideas developed during the 1910s and 1920s.

Nordic purity is a key idea here here 1920 Laban un verta labens is introduced in a textbook lives Unworthy of life um and one of the first laws passed by Hitler after he assumed the German chancellorship in February 1933 is the law for the prevention of hereditary diseases in offspring, which most people do not know and which he developed in other works and in other talks is that almost all of the scientific finance and legal foundations for Hitler's eugenics policies, his racial hygiene policies were derived specifically from the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor, which the Rockefeller Foundation funded them.

The model laws were taken from the Emergency Eugenics Records office and were inspired by Charles Davenport who was in Berlin during the 1930s, now the Germans were very good propagandists and part of the motivation for Hitler to go to war was to enact eugenics policies, so they were backdated in November 1939 to September 1, when, when. The invasion had occurred and cinema was a big part of the propaganda machine in Germany 1935 seven films seven short films 15 minute films were released to be shown as b-roll in front of major films in cinemas to promote ideas of hygiene racial code that were being promulgated by the Nazi regime and one of them was called Das Alba, which roughly means The Inheritance and in this a young searcher is observing two beetle beetles in heat, you know, fighting and she is not.

She doesn't know what they're doing, so she asks her supervisor, who sits her in front of a movie and shows her examples of the Darwinian struggle for existence, which includes deer fighting each other, cats hunting birds, and dogs that have They've been bred specifically to have hunting pedigrees and specific purposes and she half understands it, laughs and says, I get it. Nature also has its own racist policies, right after that the film cuts to the voiceover where they use the calac data from the cakak family tree to prove that mental weakness is hereditary and therefore this is a justification for the killing of babies and children under five, initially starting in 1935, who are considered unworthy, so you got this direct lineage that starts off well. it starts in early 1912, but the fraudulent data that comes from Godard and that is based on this monogenic deterministic thinking propagated by uh Davenport that comes from mendle of all these ideological ideas starts there and ends in the Holocaust, two more slides. hdan's lecture hdan wrote this book in 1938 heritage and politics now halan gets a good pass from us because he was a fantastic writer and he was also a funny writer and in this book he takes apart the eugenics policies of the nazis and the americans and he says that on the first page I do not believe that our current knowledge of human heredity justifies such steps.

He was a left-wing thinker and I think we give him a big pass for that, but he actually wasn't a left-wing thinker. he was not at all a revolutionary communist he was a Stalinist in fact a Soviet who supported Stalin's policies Stalin's policies well into the 1950s, by which time we knew that Stalin was a bad guy and these are policies that were anti-scientific, anti-evolutionists and anti-evolutionists. gentics and caused the death of tens of millions of people, so thank you for the hdan award and I will leave you with someone who is much easier to forgive, thank you very much.