Vladimir DOROKHOV
Especially for the “Analytical newspaper “Secret Research”, No. 11, 2015
Eugenics (from the Greek eugenes - “good kind”) is the doctrine of ways to improve the hereditary properties of a person. In the USA, eugenics was supposed to serve social goals, eradicate alcoholism, prostitution, and hereditary mental illnesses. In the Soviet Union, the emphasis was on the formation of a new human generation, “homo sovieticus.” In Germany, the Third Reich revealed genetics that had a mystical overtones and was aimed at destroying the “children of darkness” in the representatives of lower, non-Aryan races. Different countries pursued different goals. These were completely different forms of one scientific phenomenon.
Eugenics in its modern sense originated in England, its “father” was Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. It was Galton who coined the term eugenics. He intended to make eugenics, which, in his opinion, confirmed the right of the Anglo-Saxon race to world domination, “part of the national consciousness, like a new religion.”
However, eugenic practices existed many centuries before Galton. In the 4th century BC. Plato in his Republic raised a number of eugenic questions in the spirit of Galton, preaching both positive eugenics, stimulating the birth rate of the best gifted, and negative eugenics, limiting the birth rate of those considered inferior.
Lycurgus, three centuries earlier, was the first to embody this in his reform of Spartan society. The state, represented by senior advisers (ephors), decided who was not worthy to belong to the “society of equals.” Infanticide was not alien to either Greek or Roman society. Seneca agreed that “we destroy deformed offspring and drown weak and abnormal newborns.” Thus, the state appropriated to itself the functions of the “father of the family,” who in Athens and Rome strictly implemented these eugenic measures in his family clan: especially gifted people were accepted into the clan, and the untalented were expelled. Abortion and murder of children by mothers were condemned not for moral reasons, but because this violated the inalienable right of the head of the family.
What heredity is was poorly understood in ancient times and people constantly argued about what it depended on. In the rational medicine of Hippocrates in the 5th century BC. The idea of panspermia appears, which became widespread in the Greek world. It made possible the assumption of the progressive improvement of the people on the basis of selection for the reproduction of the best specimens.
According to Plato, “semen comes from all parts of the body, from healthy - healthy, from sick - sick. Therefore, as a rule, bald fathers have bald sons, fathers with blue eyes have sons with blue eyes, and cross-eyed fathers have cross-eyed sons; the same applies to the rest of the figure.”
Ideas about heredity continued to be preached in the late Middle Ages, which led to the development of the doctrine of temperaments, according to which character and mental abilities depended on which of the four main temperaments predominated: choleric, phlegmatic, sanguine or melancholic.
These are just a few examples of the many eugenics projects that have been carried out throughout human history. Galton's eugenics program was quickly recognized by Victorian society at the end of the 19th century, and later by the whole world. It included not only previous attempts to achieve similar goals, but also a huge number of unrelated factors.
Eugenics in the USA
At the beginning of the twentieth century. earlier emigrants from northern Europe saw themselves overwhelmed by waves of immigrants from the European east and south. For American society, this looked like a clear threat that mixing with Indians and blacks would lead to a decrease in the average intellectual level of Americans and to the spread of various vices, such as alcoholism, crime and prostitution.
American eugenics was largely based on the widespread and arbitrary use of intelligence tests developed by Alfred Bene to determine “the mental level that each individual can achieve according to the type of chromosomes in the germ cells.” Strict immigration laws were developed based on these tests, especially after the passage of the Immigration Act, which severely restricted the entry of persons not belonging to the “Nordic race” and introduced programs of forced sterilization of the hereditarily defective.
By 1914, such laws were already in effect in 12 states. It is known that in the state of Indiana, as of July 1911, 875 sterilization operations were performed. In California, from November 1910 to the summer of 1912, 268 people were sterilized. However, in December 1921, Indiana banned sterilization operations as a “cruel, unconstitutionally punitive measure.” The name of this state began to be called the widely discussed state in the 1920s. the idea of depriving a person of the ability to reproduce (hence sterilization is sometimes called the “Indian idea”). By 1924, there were 3,000 involuntary sterilizations in the United States.
The Carnegie Institution was at the cradle of the American eugenics movement, establishing a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. Millions of cards with the data of ordinary Americans were stored here, which made it possible to plan the methodical liquidation of families, clans and entire nations. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated among American legislators, social services, and national associations.
After eugenics took hold in the United States, a campaign was launched to impose it in Germany. This was largely facilitated by Californian eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and distributed them among German officials and scientists. At the dawn of the Third Reich, American eugenicists welcomed the achievements of Hitler and his plans as the logical conclusion of their many years of research.
Californian eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda materials for distribution in America. They also staged Nazi science exhibitions, such as the one at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in August 1934. In addition to providing a plan of action, America funded scientific institutes working on eugenics in Germany.
After World War II, it turned out that eugenicists do not exist in the United States and never have existed. Biographers of celebrities and politicians did not mention the interest of their “heroes” in this philosophy, and sometimes did not remember it at all. Eugenics has ceased to be a subject in colleges, although some argue that its ideas continue to exist in modified forms.
Eugenics in Russia and the USSR
The term "eugenics" became common in Russia beginning in 1915. Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius had been translated forty years earlier, and new ideas in Western medicine and biology gradually took hold in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as did Darwin's theory of evolution. , which has been much debated.
Many works of Russian psychiatrists and neurologists were devoted to the problems of degeneration: insanity, crime, psychopathology and alcoholism. The 1917 revolution and the subsequent civil war became a decisive period for young researchers. The new regime was confident that it would be able to improve the human condition through scientific progress. Materialism and Marxist scientificism did not in any way contradict the eugenic ideal.
In November 1920, the Russian Eugenics Society was created, with Koltsov becoming its chairman. In the same year, the Russian Eugenics Journal began publication; it was published three times a year until the early 1930s. This journal raised the same topics that Western eugenicists dealt with: demography, crime, sterilization, analysis of the heredity of mental and nervous diseases (schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychoses), epilepsy, alcoholism, syphilis and a tendency to violence, the practical organization of statistical and anthropological analysis etc.
Soon the scientists split. Some, like Koltsov, did not hesitate to publish articles about the “higher mind” of party members and the need for them to pass on this “higher mind” to their numerous offspring. Others, like Filipchenko, who was first expelled from the eugenics movement in 1926, insisted on studying the genealogy of the bourgeois elite of the old regime.
In the mid-20s. a new generation of Marxist scientists (Volotsky, Serebrovsky) set out to transform eugenics into a purely Bolshevik science. There were three items on the agenda: sterilization, improving hygienic conditions and increasing the fertility of “outstanding” individuals. In 1923, Volotsky published a book, Raising the Vitality of the Race, in which he called on Soviet Russia to urgently adopt a sterilization program. His proposal was met with hostility by some scientists who rallied around Filipchenko in Leningrad. Ultimately, it was not moral, but demographic arguments that forced the Soviet authorities to abandon sterilization; in the country, the death rate exceeded the birth rate, so eugenic measures were not at the time.
In 1926, geneticist A.S. Serebrovsky founded, together with Solomon Levit, the Bureau of Human Health and Heredity. To this end, Serebrovsky proposed creating a sperm bank and developing a wide program of artificial insemination: “One talented and efficient producer can thus have 1000 children. Under such conditions, human selection will make a leap forward.”
But the eugenics program came up against the first five-year plan (1929 - 1933), when Stalin gained a foothold in power. This was the era of continuous industrialization and collectivization of the country, the first political processes, organized famine, patronage of science and discrediting of bourgeois specialists. The Eugenics Society was dissolved in 1930.
In the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in 1931, eugenics was called a “bourgeois science” suspected of “fascism.” The Eugenics Society disappeared, giving way to the “Laboratory of Racial Research”, founded in Moscow in March 1931. This laboratory outlined a number of research programs in collaboration with German scientists who sent expeditions to Transcaucasia. A remarkable fact: in March 1933, the Hitler regime allowed the continuation of German-Soviet cooperation, approved in April by the Soviet People's Commissariat of Health. Only in 1938 did the Germans recall their scientists. In addition to this union of two regimes in the field of race, Soviet eugenics survived Stalin's reforms, changing its name. She became a “medical geneticist.”
Eugenics in Germany
In Nazi Germany, the Law on the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which came into force on July 14, 1933, was passed in conjunction with the Lebensborn (Source of Life) eugenics program promoted by Himmler. By selecting educated Aryans for breeding and education, he wanted to raise the future leaders of the Third Reich, capable of subjugating or destroying all “inferior” races and nations. To implement this law, special “hereditary health courts” were created, which consisted of two doctors, a judge and a chairman. According to the verdict of this court, men and women whose bad heredity was considered established were subjected to a violent operation that prevented the possibility of childbearing. Total from 1934 to 1937 197,419 people were sterilized.
In 1935, this was supplemented by the Nuremberg Laws, which provided for legal discrimination against Jews, as well as a ban on marriage or sexual relations between Jews and Aryans, which were punishable as “racial defilement.”
The German sterilization program, like the American one, was based on the concept of “congenital mental retardation.” It was in this category that 77% of the nearly one million forcibly sterilized by the decision of the Hereditary Health Tribunal belonged; 18% were hopeless alcoholics and only 5% were people with other hereditary diseases.
A major feature of the Nazi regime was the step taken on September 1, 1939, to introduce the euganasia program, which pursued the eugenic goals of physically eliminating persons deemed “undesirable” by the Aryan society of the Third Reich. It was planned to exterminate twelve million people in concentration camps, not only non-Aryans such as Jews or Gypsies, but also Poles and other Slavs, people with physical and mental defects, and hopelessly ill people. The same list included persons “of no vital value”, “alien to society”: political oppositionists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, criminals, homeless people, tramps, prostitutes, beggars, drug addicts, etc.
Carrying out a strict eugenic policy, the National Socialists were faced with a difficult situation for them when it turned out that carriers of hereditary diseases were not only representatives of “lower” races (Jews, gypsies), but also purebred Aryans. Facing this fact, racist eugenics was helpless. Children of Aryan origin who inherited schizophrenia, dementia or other ailments from their parents had to study in special schools of correctional pedagogy. If it turned out that correction attempts did not lead to success, the child could end up in so-called “shelters”, where the disabled child was physically destroyed.
Since 1939, all doctors and obstetricians were required to report the birth of every handicapped child. The fate of such a child was determined by a special commission, but most likely he would face physical destruction. The most humane way was to deprive a child of food. Thus, the ideology of racial intolerance came into conflict with eugenic practice - a purebred Aryan child could be born with the same disease as a child in a Jewish family.
The program to kill “inferior” people, starting in the fall of 1939, quickly gained momentum. On January 31, 1941, Goebbels noted in his diary that 80 thousand mentally ill people had been liquidated and 60 thousand were to be killed. Overall, the number of those sentenced was significantly higher. In December 1941, a report from the medical service reported approximately 200 thousand weak-minded, abnormal, terminally ill and 75 thousand elderly who were subject to destruction.
In September 1941, the director of the psychiatric hospital, Dr. Valentin Falthauser, began to use the practice of “cruel” dieting, killing patients by starvation. This method was also convenient because it caused increased mortality. Diet E seriously increased hospital mortality and continued until the end of the war. In 1943–1945 1,808 patients died in Kaufbeuren. In November 1942, a “low-fat diet” was recommended for implementation in all psychiatric hospitals. “Eastern workers” – Russians, Poles, and Baltic states – were also sent to hospitals. The total number of deaths during the implementation of the program by the time of the fall of the Third Reich, according to various sources, reaches 200 - 250 thousand people.
In addition to the elimination and sterilization of “inferior” ones, the Third Reich began to implement programs for the selection of “complete” ones for their reproduction. With the help of these programs it was planned to create a “master race”. Racially, Hitler and Himmler were not satisfied with the German people that existed by that time. In their opinion, a lot of work had to be done to create a “race of demigods.” Himmler believed that Germany would be able to give Europe a ruling elite in 20-30 years. The racologists of the Third Reich compiled a map that clearly shows that not the entire population of Germany was considered completely “full-fledged”. The “Nordic” and “Falian” subraces were considered worthy, but the “Dinaric” in Bavaria and the “East Baltic” in East Prussia were not “full-fledged”. Work was needed, including “refreshing the blood” with the help of the SS troops, to transform the entire population of Germany into “racially complete”. How it all ended is widely known...
Eugenics in Sweden
Sweden was the first country in the world where a state institute of racial biology arose. And the idea did not come from Germany. The struggle for racial purity unfolded here, in northern Europe, quite independently. The only difference between the Swedish welfare society and the Nazis was that the Swedes had been doing it longer.
In accordance with the letter of the law, residents of the country who were recognized by health or social welfare authorities as mentally or racially inferior were subject to sterilization. To be included in this category, it was enough to show a “persistent learning disability” or to have an appearance that did not meet the recognized standards of the Swedish nation. When the technology was debugged, they decided to expand the list of signs of inferiority and included “asociality” in it.
For most Swedes, the procedure for sterilizing mentally handicapped people was as natural as the rules of the road. The operations stopped for the same reason they started. The global trend has changed. The mentally ill are no longer treated as second-class citizens. It has become generally accepted that their desire to be full members of society should be welcomed and encouraged. About the laws of the 30s. in Sweden they tried to forget, but looking at the representatives of their nation, the homogeneity of the types is striking.
The Racial Purity Law in Sweden was repealed only in 1976. Between 1935 and 1976, more than 63,000 people were sterilized under the Racial Purity Law.
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Since the late 20s. XX century Eugenic excesses in democratic countries, based on class or racial theories, began to be criticized, including by the leaders of the eugenics movement themselves. They reached their peak in the 1940s, when, after the end of World War II, the undeniable atrocities committed by the Nazis based on the tenets of eugenics became known. Many of the criticisms have been confirmed by modern knowledge of genetics and heredity.
Nowadays, they try to avoid the very term “eugenics” as a negative one due to the dark memories of history. Today, new scientific achievements are combined with a political refusal to carry out any practical experiments with the population or to introduce changes into the gene pool of the population. These goals are considered reprehensible, and in practice they turn out to be unrealistic. This is proven by population genetics, based on the current level of its knowledge. But who knows where science will turn tomorrow...
EUGENICS
EUGENICS
(from Greek eugenes - noble)
the doctrine created by Francis Galton and going back to Plato’s Republic about the conditions under which offspring are born that are successful in their physical and spiritual characteristics, and the birth of an unsuccessful generation is prevented.
Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary
. 2010 .EUGENICS
EUGENICS - a set of social and political measures aimed at improving the hereditary characteristics of human populations.
The term “eugenics” was proposed in 1883 by Francis Galton. According to him, eugenics is one that is designed to develop methods of social control that “may correct or improve the racial qualities of future generations, both physical and intellectual” (Galton F. Inquines Into the Human Faculty L, 1883, p. 44).
In the 1st half. 20th century Eugenics ideas gave rise to influential scientific and political influences. Many prominent biologists, supporters of eugenics, acted as consultants to the governments of various countries on issues of emigration, abortion, sterilization, psychiatric care, education, etc. According to supporters of eugenics, in modern society, through the development of medicine, social support for the disabled and improvement the quality of life of natural selection weakened, resulting in the danger of racial degeneration. “Subnormal” individuals participate in reproduction, polluting the nation’s gene pool with “poor quality genes.” Eugenic methods are aimed at stopping the genetic population.
There are negative and positive eugenics. Negative eugenics involves depriving inferior citizens of the opportunity to procreate and inherit “subnormal” genes. Positive eugenics aims to provide advantages (eg financial) for the reproduction of the most physically or intellectually gifted. Historically, alcoholics, psychiatric patients, drug addicts, patients with syphilis, criminals, “sexual perverts,” etc. were considered the main objects of negative eugenics. The first forced sterilization was adopted in 1907 in the state of Indiana (USA). Sterilization was permitted on genetic grounds. Later, similar laws were passed in almost thirty US states. In total, about 50,000 cases of forced sterilization were recorded in the United States before World War II. At that time, many American states introduced laws prohibiting interracial marriage on eugenic grounds. A person was considered a “negro” if he had only 1/32 “negro blood.” Thus, a more rigid racial definition was used than that used to determine “non-Aryan origin” in Nazi Germany, where a “Jew” was recognized as having more “Jewish blood.” Eugenics programs, including methods of forced sterilization, also existed in Canada and many Western European countries.
The ideas of eugenics had a significant influence on the formation of fascist racial theory. German specialists in the field of eugenics introduced “genetic health” to the nation, and also developed a specialized branch of preventive medicine - “racial hygiene”. In 1933, the “Law for the Protection of Offspring from Genetic Diseases” was passed, the application of which led to more than 350,000 cases of forced sterilization before the collapse of Nazi Germany. Genetic counseling in Nazi Germany was a prerequisite for permission to join.
After World War II, the ideas of eugenics were discredited for a long time. A new wave of discussion of the problems of eugenics (and related concerns) is emerging and intensifying in connection with the rapid progress of molecular genetics in recent decades, in particular, with the possibilities and prospects for detecting at the stage of embryonic development and even at pre-embryonic stages many genetically determined diseases and defects. In recent years, eugenics as a public policy has been developing in Singapore. It aims to stimulate fertility among educated women and among uneducated women. Certain eugenic activities are also legalized in Japan and China. Eugenic research (often acting as an integral part of social hygiene) actively developed in the USSR in the 1920s and the beginning. 1930s, including such prominent scientists as N. Koltsov and Yu. Filipchenko. However, in the USSR, eugenics never became part of state policy. Moreover, in the 1930s. During the ideological pressure on genetics that began, it was actually banned. Nevertheless, the ideas of eugenics (for example, medical genetic consultation rooms) entered the arsenal of modern medical genetics. Violent measures and coercion became especially acute in eugenics. Not all eugenicists were supporters of such measures. Thus, British eugenicists promoted the ideas of voluntary eugenic activities. From the point of view of conservative liberals, an action can be considered free (that is, not containing signs of coercion) if there are no legal or other formal (for example, administrative) barriers to its choice and implementation. Within the socialist framework, it is believed that there is no coercion when a person practically has to agree or refuse to carry out a certain action.
In the United States and Western Europe, the goals of medical genetics are now shifting from serving the interests of the population to more fully taking into account the interests and values of individual patients and their families. What emerges is what R. Wright called “homemade eugenics.” At the same time, social and economic forces of coercion, which can significantly influence the formally free personal life of individuals, must be responsibly used and controlled. The mass “fabrication” of children with genetic qualities voluntarily chosen by their parents bears the mark not only of personal preferences, but also of the pressure of certain economic and social factors. The problem for modern society is that these factors can be regulated based on the good of the population, or, conversely, they can be manipulated for corporate and group interests.
Lit.: Filipchenko Yu. A. Ways to improve the human race (eugenics). L., 1924; Chan S. K. Eugenics on the Rise: A Report From Singapore. - In the book; Ethics, Reproduction and Genetic Control, ed. by R.F. Chadwick. L.-N.Y., 1987, p. 164-172; Nelkin D. Tanwedi L. Dangereuse Diagnostics. The Social Pour of Biological Information. N. Y, 1989; Levantin R. C. Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA. N.Y., 1992; Are Genes US? Thé Social Consequences of the New Genetics, ed by C. F. Cranor. New Bruswick-New Jersey. 1994, p. 155-180; Herrnstain R. ], Murray Ch. Thé Beîl Curve Wars. Race, Intelligence and the Future of America. N. Y, 1995.
P. D. Tishchenko
New Philosophical Encyclopedia: In 4 vols. M.: Thought. Edited by V. S. Stepin. 2001 .
See what "EUGENICA" is in other dictionaries:
- [Dictionary of foreign words of the Russian language
EUGENICS- (from the Greek she is good and gen nos genus), as defined by its founder Galton, “the discipline that studies which factors improve and which worsen the innate qualities of the race.” E. is based on the study of the laws of heredity, genetics (see) ... ... Great Medical Encyclopedia
Big Encyclopedic Dictionary
- (from the Greek eugenes purebred) improvement of the human species through control of the gene pool, author F. Galton. One of the main tasks is to increase the birth rate of gifted people. The main developments are carried out in the following directions: ... ... Psychological Dictionary
EUGENICS, a discipline dedicated to the improvement of the human race through SELECTION, created in the 19th century. Francis GALTON. He proposed to “improve” the human race by establishing social control over marriage and encouraging parents to... ... Scientific and technical encyclopedic dictionary
- (from the Greek eugenes of good kind) a theory about the hereditary health of a person and ways to improve it. The principles of eugenics were first formulated by F. Galton (1869), who proposed studying influences that could improve hereditary qualities... ... Political science. Dictionary.
eugenics- EUGENICA (from the Greek eugenes of noble origin, purebred) the doctrine of improving the human “breed” by selection methods used in animal husbandry. The idea of E. itself is very ancient. For example, in “The State”... ... Encyclopedia of Epistemology and Philosophy of Science
When we hear the word “eugenics” (the study of ways to improve a person’s hereditary properties), we most often think about the policy of the Third Reich, aimed at exterminating the “children of darkness” represented by representatives of “lower” races. In Nazi Germany, the law “On the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases” came into force on July 14, 1933. To implement this law, special “hereditary health courts” were created, which consisted of two doctors, a judge and a chairman. According to the verdict of this court, men and women whose bad heredity was considered established were subjected to a violent operation that prevented the possibility of childbearing. Total from 1934 to 1937 197,419 people were sterilized. The crimes of the Nazis are well known to everyone. However, it is rarely stated in the media that eugenics was a common practice in many countries of that era. Thus, in the USA, eugenics was supposed to serve social goals, eradicate alcoholism, prostitution, and hereditary mental illnesses. In the Soviet Union, the emphasis was on the formation of a new human generation, “homo sovieticus.” Different countries pursued different goals. These were completely different forms of one scientific phenomenon.
Propaganda poster in Germany
Eugenics in its modern sense originated in England, its “father” was Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. It was Galton who coined the term eugenics. He intended to make eugenics, which, in his opinion, confirmed the right of the Anglo-Saxon race to world domination, “part of the national consciousness, like a new religion.”
However, eugenic practices existed many centuries before Galton. In the 4th century BC. Plato in his Republic raised a number of eugenic questions in the spirit of Galton, preaching both positive eugenics, stimulating the birth rate of the best gifted, and negative eugenics, limiting the birth rate of those considered inferior.
Francis Galton
Lycurgus, three centuries earlier, was the first to embody this in his reform of Spartan society. The state, represented by senior advisers (ephors), decided who was not worthy to belong to the “society of equals.” Infanticide was not alien to either Greek or Roman society. Seneca agreed that “we destroy deformed offspring and drown weak and abnormal newborns.” Thus, the state appropriated to itself the functions of the “father of the family,” who in Sparta and Rome strictly implemented these eugenic measures in his family clan: especially gifted people were accepted into the clan, and the untalented were expelled. Abortion and murder of children by mothers were condemned not for moral reasons, but because this violated the inalienable right of the head of the family.
What heredity is was poorly understood in ancient times and people constantly argued about what it depended on. In the rational medicine of Hippocrates in the 5th century BC. The idea of panspermia appears, which became widespread in the Greek world. It made possible the assumption of the progressive improvement of the people on the basis of selection for the reproduction of the best specimens.
According to Plato, “semen comes from all parts of the body, from healthy - healthy, from sick - sick. Therefore, as a rule, bald fathers have bald sons, fathers with blue eyes have sons with blue eyes, and cross-eyed fathers have cross-eyed sons; the same applies to the rest of the figure.”
Ideas about heredity continued to be preached in the late Middle Ages, which led to the development of the doctrine of temperaments, according to which character and mental abilities depended on which of the four main temperaments predominated: choleric, phlegmatic, sanguine or melancholic.
These are just a few examples of the many eugenics projects that have been carried out throughout human history. Galton's eugenics program was quickly recognized by Victorian society at the end of the 19th century, and later by the whole world. It included not only previous attempts to achieve similar goals, but also a huge number of unrelated factors.
Eugenics in the USA
At the beginning of the twentieth century. earlier emigrants from northern Europe saw themselves overwhelmed by waves of immigrants from the European East and South. This for American society looked like a clear threat that the influx of new immigrants would lead to a decrease in the average intellectual level of Americans and to the spread of various vices such as alcoholism, crime and prostitution.
American eugenics was largely based on the widespread and arbitrary use of intelligence tests developed by Alfred Bene to determine “the mental level that each individual can achieve according to the type of chromosomes in the germ cells.” Strict immigration laws were developed based on these tests, especially after the passage of the Immigration Act, which severely restricted the entry of persons not belonging to the “Nordic race” and introduced programs of forced sterilization of the hereditarily defective.
The first law in the United States regulating the right of citizens to marry is considered to be an act adopted in 1895 in Connecticut. The document covered people defined in it as “epileptics, imbeciles and feeble-minded people.” If we were talking about women, then the restrictions applied only to those of them who were under 45 years old - it was believed that starting from this age the female body almost completely lost its ability to reproduce.
However, the law did not contain a ban on entering into marriage as such. Moreover, the document still provided for the possibility of cohabitation of “second-class” people, but only with the permission of their guardians. Otherwise, the bride and groom were simply denied a marriage certificate. If blacklisted citizens still managed to get married, they faced a prison sentence of up to three years. Those who helped them circumvent the law could end up behind bars for five years and also receive a fine of a thousand dollars.
Similar laws were passed in many other states in subsequent years. Basically, they mentioned the same categories of citizens as in Connecticut, but there were some differences. For example, in Georgia and a number of other states, restrictions were imposed on “idiots and crazy people,” and laws passed in Indiana and Ohio also applied to “heavy drunks.” In rare cases, “forbidden” categories were determined on the basis of social rather than medical characteristics. Thus, the authorities of Delaware did not allow marriages between low-income people, and the law in Virginia prohibited white people from creating families with representatives of other races.
Procedural nuances could also differ from each other. In Nebraska, to more effectively suppress illegal marriages, the authorities created registries of “defective” citizens in advance. They were helped to do this by a rule that obligated employees of schools, hospitals and other public institutions to report those suspected of dementia. In New Hampshire, “second-class” marriages were allowed if the participants were sterilized.
Along the way, in many states, special institutions were created for undesirable elements. In essence, these were psychiatric hospitals and a kind of colony for people with mental and, less often, physical disabilities. However, the definitions of dementia and other deviations were so vague that those who were simply distinguished by extravagant habits also fell under them. The condition for leaving such institutions was often the same sterilization, and patients of these institutions were especially actively subjected to such operations with the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929: a sharp reduction in the financial capabilities of the state coincided with an increase in the number of patients.
However, sterilization as a method of controlling unwanted genes was used not only as a forced measure to relieve the burden on colonies for the mentally ill. In a number of states, laws depriving “second-class” people of the opportunity to leave offspring were adopted as independent acts based on eugenic research.
The first state where sterilization received legislative support was Indiana: the corresponding act was adopted in 1907. Moreover, some researchers claim that this law is the first of its kind in the world. Its “target audience” was declared to be idiots and imbeciles, as well as repeat criminals and rapists. Later, in 1927, the scope of the law was somewhat narrowed: now the law applied only to the insane, feeble-minded and epileptics. Sterilization was applied to these groups in the state until approximately 1974. During this time, about 2.5 thousand people were deprived of the opportunity to leave offspring.
As with marriage restrictions, the forced sterilization laws passed in more than 30 states generally targeted roughly the same categories of citizens, who could be broadly divided into two groups. The first of these included people who were determined to be genetically defective based solely on medical characteristics. It included the already mentioned madmen, feeble-minded people, epileptics, imbeciles and idiots.
The second group consisted of citizens recognized as socially unreliable; Moreover, their deviant behavior was considered the result of bad heredity. On the one hand, these were criminals, on the other hand, people who were diagnosed with various kinds of sexual disorders. These included, in particular, homosexuals, as well as women recognized as intemperate and indiscriminate when choosing sexual partners. In addition, this category also included the poor, which sometimes included representatives of racial minorities.
Medical examination of Mexican immigrants at the border
In general, if you look at the statistics, it was women who were sterilized more often. The proportion of women sterilized was particularly high among African Americans; one of the most active campaigns against them was waged in North Carolina. The authorities believed that black women, due to their natural inclinations, were less able to control their sex lives, which, in their opinion, led to the uncontrolled expansion of black families. By sterilizing them, in addition to eugenic goals, the authorities also pursued financial goals, reducing the base of potential applicants for social benefits. Similar policies were pursued towards the Native American population.
The widespread practice of sterilizing people who were “unfit” to bear children lasted until about the mid-1960s, when the anti-eugenics vote reached a critical level. However, in some states its supporters continued to maintain influence subsequently. Thus, in Montana, operations were performed until 1972, in North Carolina and Indiana - until 1973 and 1974, and in Virginia and Oregon - until 1979 and 1983, respectively. The largest number of operations was performed in California: from 1909 to 1964, more than 20 thousand people there lost the opportunity to have children.
The Carnegie Institution was at the cradle of the American eugenics movement, establishing a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. Millions of cards with the data of ordinary Americans were stored here, which made it possible to plan the methodical liquidation of families, clans and entire nations. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated among American legislators, social services, and national associations.
After eugenics took hold in the United States, a campaign was launched to impose it in Germany. This was largely facilitated by Californian eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and distributed them among German officials and scientists. At the dawn of the Third Reich, American eugenicists welcomed the achievements of Hitler and his plans as the logical conclusion of their many years of research.
Californian eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda materials for distribution in America. They also staged Nazi science exhibitions, such as the one at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in August 1934. In addition to providing a plan of action, America funded scientific institutes working on eugenics in Germany.
After World War II, it suddenly turned out that eugenicists did not exist in the United States and never had existed. Biographers of celebrities and politicians did not mention the interest of their “heroes” in this philosophy, and sometimes did not remember it at all. Eugenics has ceased to be a subject in colleges, although some argue that its ideas continue to exist in modified forms.
Eugenics in Russia and the USSR
The term "eugenics" became common in Russia beginning in 1915. Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius had been translated forty years earlier, and new ideas in Western medicine and biology gradually took hold in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as did Darwin's theory of evolution. , which has been much debated.
Many works of Russian psychiatrists and neurologists were devoted to the problems of degeneration: insanity, crime, psychopathology and alcoholism. The 1917 revolution and the subsequent civil war became a decisive period for young researchers. The new regime was confident that it would be able to improve the human condition through scientific progress. Materialism and Marxist scientificism did not in any way contradict the eugenic ideal.
In November 1920, the Russian Eugenics Society was created, with Koltsov becoming its chairman. In the same year, the Russian Eugenics Journal began publication; it was published three times a year until the early 1930s. This journal raised the same topics that Western eugenicists dealt with: demography, crime, sterilization, analysis of the heredity of mental and nervous diseases (schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychoses), epilepsy, alcoholism, syphilis and a tendency to violence, the practical organization of statistical and anthropological analysis etc.
Soon the scientists split. Some, like Koltsov, did not hesitate to publish articles about the “higher mind” of party members and the need for them to pass on this “higher mind” to their numerous offspring. Others, like Filipchenko, who was first expelled from the eugenics movement in 1926, insisted on studying the genealogy of the bourgeois elite of the old regime.
In the mid-20s. a new generation of Marxist scientists (Volotsky, Serebrovsky) set out to transform eugenics into a purely Bolshevik science. There were three items on the agenda: sterilization, improving hygienic conditions and increasing the fertility of “outstanding” individuals. In 1923, Volotsky published a book, Raising the Vitality of the Race, in which he called on Soviet Russia to urgently adopt a sterilization program. His proposal was met with hostility by some scientists who rallied around Filipchenko in Leningrad. Ultimately, it was not moral, but demographic arguments that forced the Soviet authorities to abandon sterilization; in the country, the death rate exceeded the birth rate, so eugenic measures were not at the time.
In 1926, geneticist A.S. Serebrovsky founded, together with Solomon Levit, the Bureau of Human Health and Heredity. To this end, Serebrovsky proposed creating a sperm bank and developing a wide program of artificial insemination: “One talented and efficient producer can thus have 1000 children. Under such conditions, human selection will make a leap forward.”
But the eugenics program came up against the first five-year plan (1929 - 1933), when Stalin gained a foothold in power. This was the era of continuous industrialization and collectivization of the country, the first political processes, famine, patronage of science and discrediting of bourgeois specialists. The Eugenics Society was dissolved in 1930.
In the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in 1931, eugenics was called a “bourgeois science” suspected of “fascism.” The Eugenics Society disappeared, giving way to the “Laboratory of Racial Research”, founded in Moscow in March 1931. This laboratory outlined a number of research programs in collaboration with German scientists who sent expeditions to Transcaucasia. A remarkable fact: in March 1933, the Hitler regime allowed the continuation of German-Soviet cooperation, approved in April by the Soviet People's Commissariat of Health. Only in 1938 did the Germans recall their scientists. In addition to this union of two regimes in the field of race, Soviet eugenics survived Stalin's reforms, changing its name. She became a “medical geneticist.”
Eugenics in Sweden
Sweden was the first country in the world where a state institute of racial biology arose. And the idea did not come from Germany. The struggle for racial purity unfolded here, in northern Europe, quite independently. The only difference between the Swedish welfare society and the Nazis was that the Swedes had been doing it longer.
In accordance with the letter of the law, residents of the country who were recognized by health or social welfare authorities as mentally or racially inferior were subject to sterilization. To be included in this category, it was enough to show a “persistent learning disability” or to have an appearance that did not meet the recognized standards of the Swedish nation. When the technology was debugged, they decided to expand the list of signs of inferiority and included “asociality” in it.
For most Swedes, the procedure for sterilizing mentally handicapped people was as natural as the rules of the road. The operations stopped for the same reason they started. The global trend has changed. The mentally ill are no longer treated as second-class citizens. It has become generally accepted that their desire to be full members of society should be welcomed and encouraged. About the laws of the 1930s. in Sweden they tried to forget, but looking at the representatives of their nation, the homogeneity of the types is striking. The Racial Purity Law in Sweden was repealed only in 1976. Between 1935 and 1976, more than 63,000 people were sterilized under the Racial Purity Law.
Since the late 20s. XX century Eugenic excesses in democratic countries, based on class or racial theories, began to be criticized, including by the leaders of the eugenics movement themselves. They reached their peak in the 1940s, when, after the end of World War II, the undeniable atrocities committed by the Nazis based on the tenets of eugenics became known. Many of the criticisms have been confirmed by modern knowledge of genetics and heredity.
Nowadays, they try to avoid the very term “eugenics”, as it has a negative connotation due to the dark memories of history. Today, new scientific achievements are combined with a political refusal to carry out any practical experiments with the population or to introduce changes into the gene pool of the population. These goals are considered reprehensible, and in practice they turn out to be unrealistic. This is proven by population genetics, based on the current level of its knowledge. But who knows where science will turn tomorrow...
What is eugenics and how did it come about? With the development of biology, humanity has tried to find new ways to increase the yield of cultivated crops and improve the performance of domestic animals. To achieve these goals, selection methods were used. At the same time, there was a growing desire in scientific circles to use the acquired skills to improve their own gene pool. Attempts to bring these ideas to life were reflected in the new doctrine - eugenics.
Basic Concepts
What is eugenics? Can this direction be called scientific, and does it have a future? There is still debate about this. Some call eugenics a pseudoscience, others call it the science of the future. For many in the genetic improvement community, the line between research and racism is too thin. This teaching intersects ethical and social norms, so it cannot be perceived only as science.
The term “eugenics” refers to scientific activities aimed at preserving and improving the hereditary characteristics of the human body. The word is of Greek origin and literally means “good race.” Thus, eugenics is a science that studies the influence of various environmental and hereditary factors on the innate qualities of a person. The goal of the activity is to identify negative indicators and reduce their presence to a minimum.
Many scientists at different times sought to separate external factors from genetic ones. However, as research has shown, this is impossible. These factors interact with each other. For example, climatic conditions shape such properties of the body as skin pigmentation, and the society in which a person lives has a significant impact on his psyche as a whole.
Types of eugenics
It is customary to distinguish two main directions:
1. Positive eugenics. In this case, improvement of hereditary characteristics is achieved by stimulating the spread of disease-free genotypes that can be transmitted from generation to generation.
2. Negative eugenics. This direction is considered tougher and more categorical. It prevents the spread of the negative gene pool.
Positive eugenics is more benign. However, it did not become widespread, and methods for its application were never formed. The reason is that until now there is no clear understanding of how to breed and preserve a valuable gene pool.
With negative eugenics, things are much simpler. There is a rich practice of identifying undesirable hereditary qualities that can be successfully applied. Unfortunately, the experience of using these methods is quite sad. What is negative eugenics in practice? It was precisely this that Nazi Germany used, trying to destroy, in its opinion, asocial representatives of society. In the USA and some European countries, criminals, the mentally ill and other people disliked by society were forcibly sterilized.
Background
Selection of the human species was first discussed seriously after the publication of Darwin's theory on the origin of species. It was then that questions of evolution and the search for ways to influence it were discussed in all scientific circles.
It should be noted that ideas for improving the gene pool have existed since ancient times. For example, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato believed that defective and vicious people should not be treated, and “moral degenerates” should be executed. Weak and sickly children in Sparta and the Scandinavian countries were killed in infancy, as it was believed that they would not be able to cope with the harsh living conditions. The reformer Tsar Peter the Great even issued a decree stating that “fools who are not fit for any science or service” should not reproduce, since they did not have a “good heritage” and could not be passed on to their children.
History of origin
The questions and tasks of human eugenics were first formulated by the naturalist Francis Galton from England. He was of noble birth and was Charles Darwin's cousin. Beginning in 1863, he studied the pedigrees of noble families, trying to identify the pattern of inheritance of mental and physical characteristics by descendants. His first findings were published in 1965 in the article “Hereditary Talent and Character.” Four years later, his book “Inheriting Talent” was published.
The terms and basic principles of the new science were formulated in 1883. They concerned the selection of agricultural crops, improvement of the breed of domestic animals, preservation and improvement of the human species. These aspects were described in the first book on eugenics, published that same year.
It should be noted that similar scientific research was also carried out in Tsarist Russia. The doctor and writer Vasily Markovich Florinsky published his work “Improvement and Degeneration of the Human Race” in 1866.
Formation of eugenics as a science
In 1907, Francis Galton defined eugenics as the science that deals with improving the innate characteristics of a race. From that moment on, she began to deal exclusively with issues of the human gene pool. Another definition of eugenics also appeared. This is a science that uses methods of social influence on the evolution of the human species.
Despite the fact that Galton preached positive measures for the improvement of the race, negative eugenics became widespread in almost all developed countries in the 20th century. In 1920, the Russian Eugenics Society was formed in the USSR, in which leading geneticists and doctors of that time participated. In European countries, forced sterilization was actively used. This measure was also used in the USA.
At the beginning of the last century, a stable phrase appeared - the Indian method. In the history of eugenics, this was the first experience of using a negative direction. The name of the method was given by the state of Indiana, where this practice was originally applied. Later it spread to other states. Since 1904, according to a law officially adopted in the United States, people “undesirable to society” were subjected to forced sterilization. These were criminals, drug addicts, alcoholics, and the mentally ill.
Eugenics in the USSR
The history of Russian eugenics began in 1920 with the founding of the Russian Eugenics Society. This group was headed by an innovative biologist, corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences Nikolai Koltsov. He was also the editor of the Russian Eugenics Journal.
Active research activities were carried out within the walls of the Society. Participants studied human phenotype and genotype. They collected data from Russian family chronicles and conducted a survey of people with outstanding abilities. The purpose of these studies was to search for patterns of inheritance and acquisition of certain human abilities.
The cardinal difference between Russian eugenics and the eugenics of other countries is that in the USSR measures were not taken to sterilize and exterminate carriers of unwanted heredity. In Koltsov’s work on improving the human breed, the idea of creating a creative person (HomoCreator) was formulated. The biologist believed that artificially reducing the birth rate would lead to a negative result in improving the gene pool. The right method, in his opinion, was to create a favorable environment to support carriers of good heredity.
Geneticist Yuri Filipchenko and eugenicist Mikhail Volotsky, on the contrary, considered the eugenic experience of sterilization used in the USA to be the most successful. Psychiatrist Viktor Osipov considered alcohol to be the main factor influencing the degeneration of the Russian nation.
The scientist Serebrovsky proposed creating separate eugenics for each class. This was quite logical, because each social group had a certain set of positive and negative qualities that had developed over generations. In general, he argued, to achieve the goals pursued by eugenics, it was necessary to improve the living conditions of citizens. He also proposed creating a sperm bank with samples of seminal fluid from representatives of the social elite for artificial insemination of women.
With Stalin coming to power, science underwent a number of changes. The society, formed in 1920, collapsed. Eugenics degenerated into medical genetics.
Science and Nazism
In the first half of the 20th century, forced sterilization was also popular in Germany. However, the eugenics measures of the Third Reich were much stricter than in other European countries. Not only sick and unreliable citizens were prohibited from having offspring. This fate befell the Gypsies and Jews. The same measures were taken regarding people with communist views. Then it was decided not only to sterilize people objectionable to the Third Reich, but also to exterminate them physically. Initially, such measures were carried out only in Germany, but later extended to the lands captured by the Nazis.
The Germans believed that such “eugenics” would prevent the degeneration of the Aryan race, of which they were the only representatives. However, this was genocide at its most brutal.
After World War II, attitudes toward eugenics changed dramatically. The shadow of fascism and the horrors that occurred under the leadership of Hitler fell heavily on her. Since that time, people who are not privy to the intricacies of science and the history of its origin have inexorably associated it exclusively with the Third Reich. This is the main reason for the negative attitude towards science.
Eugenics problems
At the Nuremberg trials, eugenicist scientists of the Third Reich were ranked among the executioners for experiments carried out on prisoners, and the strictest taboo was imposed on the teaching itself. In addition, some of the methods proposed by eugenicists were criticized in society. In the Soviet Union, for example, it was proposed to introduce artificial insemination of women.
The main problem faced by eugenics is the lack of information about the transmission of positive and negative hereditary traits from generation to generation. There is no formula that determines or predicts whether children will have a high level of intelligence or talent in any area. It follows from this that positive eugenics is built on hypotheses and has no scientific confirmation. And the negative direction met with sharp criticism from society.
Eugenics as a scientific activity began to revive many years later. Preference is given to research in a positive direction. Modern scientists are mostly inclined to believe that this science has lost its meaning today. The set goals were never achieved, and the activity, which was initially positioned as purely scientific, was closely intertwined with the norms of ethics and morality.
Eugenics and human rights
Everyone knows where the road paved with good intentions leads. This is what happened with eugenics. Science collides with morality. The fact is that the process of improvement begins with defining a standard to strive for. In this way, good qualities and bad ones are identified. In eugenics, a division occurred into people worthy of living and procreating, and those unworthy.
It should be noted that the number of those undesirable to society significantly exceeded the number of those who had positive heredity. After all, among them there were not only patients and criminals. Selection took place for a number of traits, which often had nothing to do with heredity. It could be religion, social affiliation, level of income.
To avoid infringement of human rights and freedoms, a number of legal measures were taken. European countries have signed conventions and declarations on this topic. According to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000), eugenics has become a prohibited science.
Eugenics today
In the modern world, the problems of eugenics are solved by the science of genetics. Couples who want to have a child, but are afraid that the baby will develop hereditary diseases, can, with the help of specialists, analyze their data and assess the risks. Such counseling allows you to calculate the likelihood that the offspring will/will not have a particular defect.
Prenatal diagnostic methods are widely used. Examination of the fetus developing in the womb helps to identify most hereditary diseases and pathologies. If necessary, a woman has the opportunity to terminate her pregnancy in the early stages.
Genetic engineering is directly concerned with finding and researching ways that could improve the gene pool and rid humanity of inherited diseases.
Other eugenics
If you seriously search for information about eugenics, on the pages of information resources you can find answers that have nothing to do with science. The following phrases appear in the drop-down list: “eugenics Instagram”, “eugenics didyulya”, “eugenics singer” and the like. What do these phrases mean and what do they have to do with human selection? Absolutely none.
Evgenia Didyulya hides under the sonorous pseudonym Eugenika. "Singer. Actress. Model. TV presenter. Wonder wife,” she writes about herself on social networks. She is currently involved in the DiDuLa project. In addition, she is a blogger and often appears on various talk shows.
Evgenia has two higher education degrees in vocals, is married, and has a daughter. Her husband is Valery Didulya, a famous virtuoso guitarist, composer and showman. He is also the producer of the beauty.
On her blog, Evgenika Didulya reads various sarcastic poems. The authors of these poems are director Oleg Lomovoy, online poetess Yulia Solomonova and others.
Creativity of Eugenics
The singer released her first album in the summer of 2017. It's called "Optimist". Eugenics' songs are filled with humor and simplicity of life. According to the performer herself, they fully reflect her character and outlook on life. The singer's videos are also humorous. In addition, she is not shy about appearing to the public both in revealing outfits and in a masculine look. A striking example of this is the video for Eugenics’ song “Women.”
In 1883 (from the Greek Eugenés - “thoroughbred”) to designate scientific and practical activities to breed improved varieties of cultivated plants and breeds of domestic animals, as well as to protect and improve human heredity. Over time, the word “eugenics” began to be used in the latter sense. Kellycott defined eugenics as “the social control of human evolution.”
There are positive and negative eugenics. The goal of positive eugenics is to increase the reproduction of individuals with characteristics that can be considered valuable to society, such as high intelligence and good physical development or biological fitness. Negative eugenics seeks to reduce the reproduction of those who may be considered mentally or physically underdeveloped or below average.
In recent decades, many of the basic premises of eugenics have been scientifically discredited, and the eugenics movement has lost its influence as a social force (although it retains some adherents). At the same time, thanks to modern advances in biomedical sciences and technology, some of the goals of eugenics have been partially achieved. For example, genetic counseling helps expectant parents if there is reason to fear that their child will inherit a serious disease such as hemophilia, sickle cell disease or Huntington's chorea. Having assessed the degree of risk, spouses can take an adopted child or decide to have their own. Moreover, diagnostic testing of the fetus using amniocentesis and other tests can detect a range of genetic defects before the baby is born. If serious anomalies are detected, parents have the opportunity to terminate the pregnancy in a timely manner.
This article touches on the provisions of genetics only in connection with eugenics in its traditional sense. On the modern development of medical genetics.
Historical aspect.
Social control of human evolution is not a new idea. Many peoples practiced infanticide to rid society of deformed or defective individuals and to prevent their numbers from increasing. This distinguished the ancient Spartans, who used many of the quite modern eugenic measures to maintain dominance over the helots (serfs). Thus, for members of the ruling class, emigration was limited, marriages and births were encouraged by the state, and bachelors were subject to a special tax. A harsh system of physical education was maintained, which the weak and crippled could not withstand. Periodically, mass beatings of helots were carried out to reduce the number of this, considered inferior, part of the population.
Plato's proposals for a eugenic structure of society are well known. He believed that children with defects or those born from defective parents should not be raised. Chronically disabled people and victims of their own vices should be denied medical care, and moral degenerates should be executed. On the other hand, to improve the "breed" it is necessary to encourage temporary unions of selected men and women so that they leave high-quality offspring.
Problems of eugenics.
The examples given are sufficient to identify the essence of the basic issues that arise when attempting to “socially control human evolution.” What is the nature of heredity that eugenics seeks to change? How successfully and in what ways can it be changed? What goals should eugenics aim at?
We know that at first each individual is a fertilized egg, during the development of which, in addition to individual characteristics, characteristics are formed that are common to all members of a given species, race and family. Thus, a fertilized egg has the potential and ability to develop in a certain direction, but within the limits imposed by the environment. This means that we must understand, firstly, the mechanism of heredity (i.e., how a fertilized egg realizes its capabilities) and, secondly, the relative influence of heredity and environment on the formation of an individual’s characteristics.
Heredity.
Regarding the first problem, genetics teaches us that heredity is determined by genes. These hereditary units are present in equal numbers in both sex cells (egg and sperm), which are united during fertilization. Thus, heredity is formed by two parents. It is important that each gene inherited from the mother corresponds to a similar gene inherited from the father. In such pairs, the genes are not always the same, since new variants arise as a result of rare but irreversible changes called mutations. When paired genes differ (a condition referred to as heterozygous), one of them, called dominant, has a decisive effect on the trait being determined; the manifestation of the second gene - the recessive one - will be hidden, although it is passed on from generation to generation without changes. A person with a pair of genes (Bb), one for brown eyes (B), the other for blue eyes (c), will have brown eyes, and the presence of the gene causing blue eyes will remain completely invisible. A blue-eyed person must inherit two blue eye genes, one from each parent. (The presence of identical paired genes is referred to as homozygosity.) Dominance is not always achieved, and in some cases it is possible to observe the manifestation of both genes acting together. For example, a pair of genes, one of which determines blood type A, and the other determines blood type B, together give blood type AB. Nevertheless, each individual apparently possesses many recessive genes, but most of them are in a heterozygous state and therefore do not appear. The significance of this situation for eugenics is quite clear: a significant part of the genes of any person, and accordingly the entire population, is hidden, and in relation to them eugenic measures must be taken blindly.
Many traits, particularly intelligence, are determined not by two genes, but by a particular combination of dominant genes (from different pairs), perhaps together with some homozygous recessive genes. These combinations are very rarely inherited entirely and unchanged for the reason that an individual does not inherit all genes from one parent, but only half from each, or more precisely, one gene from each pair of parent genes. The choice of a specific gene from each pair is random. Genes located in different chromosomal pairs are selected by chance and, even being in the same pair of chromosomes, can be partially recombined. Therefore, the greater the number of genes that determine a given trait, the less likely it is that their specific combination will be transmitted unchanged to the next generation. Almost all combinations disintegrate during the maturation of germ cells, and when the egg and sperm unite, new combinations are formed. This reassortment and recombination of genes has a very special significance for eugenics, since most of the socially significant characteristics of a person depend on many genes, the combinations of which cannot be preserved, regardless of whether they are good or bad. Moreover, a certain gene that gives an unfavorable effect in most combinations can be beneficial in some one combination, and vice versa. It is very rare that we can assess the full effect of a gene; it has to be judged by the final result of the interaction of genes.
Heredity and environment.
Galton was the first to try to evaluate the relative influence of heredity and environment on the formation of individual characteristics of an individual. A study of family cases of genius and special talents convinced him that “nature prevails over the influence of education in those cases where education does not differ greatly among the people being compared... [i.e.] when the differences in the conditions of education do not exceed those that are usual take place between people of the same social status in the same country.” Subsequent studies confirmed this conclusion. This is especially true for monozygotic, so-called. identical, twins who develop from one fertilized egg and therefore have identical heredity. It has been shown that even when twins are separated in early childhood, they remain remarkably similar. This similarity is most pronounced in physical characteristics (eye and hair color, blood type, baldness, etc.), which are virtually identical in twins of this type.
The inheritance of mental abilities began to be studied intensively after standard intelligence tests were developed. Identical twins show very similar results. If one of a pair of twins is mentally retarded, then in 88% of cases the second one is too. Among fraternal twins, a match for this trait occurs in only 7%. The IQ correlation for identical twins reared together is almost as high (0.881) as the correlation for body weight (0.917). On the other hand, the IQ correlation between identical twins reared apart is no higher than that of same-sex fraternal twins reared together. This means that identical external conditions have approximately the same weight in achieving similar indicators of intelligence as genetic differences between fraternal and identical twins. Of 20 pairs of identical twins reared apart, ten pairs were virtually identical, six pairs differed by 7–12 IQ units, and four pairs differed by 15–24 IQ units. The latter figure comes from a pair of twins, one of whom studied 13 years more than the other. Thus, no significant differences were found between identical twins reared apart, except in cases where there was a very large difference in the length of education and the cultural level of the families.
When it comes to the most common mental illnesses, there are slightly larger differences between identical twins. For schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis and epilepsy, coincidences were recorded in identical twins in 68% of cases, while in fraternal twins - in approximately 15%. Inheritance of the unusual electrical activity of the brain in epilepsy is determined by one dominant gene; but the appearance of epileptic seizures, although they are observed only in people with this type of electrical activity, may also depend on some external influences. This is an example of a gene with reduced “penetrance” (likelihood of expression). Low penetrance, like recessivity, is one of the most important factors reducing the effectiveness of eugenic measures, since in some individuals it will hide the presence of the gene.
Even with regard to such characteristics as social behavior and character, identical twins show significantly greater similarity than same-sex fraternal twins. Five studies of delinquency among twins yielded similar results. Of the total sample, including 104 pairs of identical and 113 pairs of fraternal twins, the coincidence rate for the former reached 67%, and for the latter – 33%. These results, of course, do not mean that crime, mental illness, mental abilities and other similar traits are inherited in a fixed and unchanging way, but, on the contrary, provide sufficient reason to believe that life experience and external conditions can suppress, reduce or change the manifestations of such traits . In general, twin studies show that similar genetic makeup tends to lead to similar characteristics unless individuals are exposed to very different environmental conditions. Only extremely carefully conducted experiments could establish whether a given specific difference in external conditions is capable of influencing a given trait or not; such connections must be established for each characteristic separately. In the formation of an individual's characteristics, the environmental effect is intricately intertwined with the influence of genetic factors.
Genetic changes.
Eugenics is primarily interested in the frequency of certain traits in a given population and, accordingly, specific genes that determine these traits or influence their formation. The study of evolutionary processes has shown that gene frequencies change under the influence of four main factors: 1) mutations; 2) natural or artificial selection; 3) case; 4) isolation or, conversely, migration.
Mutations.
As a result of mutations, new gene variants appear, without which there cannot be a long process of evolutionary changes, neither eugenic nor any other. Mutation of a specific gene usually occurs very rarely. Mutation frequencies have been determined for several human genes; their average is approximately 1:50,000 per generation. This means that, for example, in a population of 50,000 people, one person will have the hemophilia gene, not inherited from parents, but resulting from a mutation in the gene that determines normal blood clotting. Therefore, unless a way to prevent this mutation is found, no measure to remove the gene from the population will be successful. In the best case, its frequency can be reduced to the level of the mutation rate. Therefore, it is impossible to completely get rid of hemophilia; its lower limit is determined by the mutation frequency of 1:50,000.
Selection.
Carriers of unfavorable hereditary traits are less likely than normal to reach adulthood and have offspring; or they, having reached maturity, have fewer descendants due to celibacy or sterility. In any of these cases, the frequency of the corresponding genes decreases in the next generation. However, many favorable genes are also lost, since selection rejects individuals, i.e. the entire set of genes, and not just the gene that causes the most harm.
The rate at which the frequency of a gene decreases under the influence of selection depends on the percentage of people in the population in whom the gene appears. For example, if a completely dominant gene reduces viability by half (and accordingly is transmitted to the next generation half as often as a normal one), then after 20 generations, or approximately 500 years, its frequency will be 1 million times less than the original and ultimately almost will undoubtedly reach a level where it will be maintained only by newly emerging mutations. As a consequence, any harmful dominant trait will be very rare as a result of natural selection, so there is no point in fighting it with eugenic measures. However, reduced penetrance may slow the removal of a dominant gene from a population; The manifestation of the gene in later periods of life also leads to the same result. For example, Huntington's chorea is the result of a single dominant gene. This is undoubtedly a serious nervous disease, but since on average it begins at 35 years of age, it does not have a significant effect on vitality and fertility. On the other hand, for a recessive trait that determines half the viability, the frequency of the gene after 20 generations will decrease by only 40%. Moreover, the extent of this reduction in frequency will fall with each successive generation as more and more carriers of the gene become heterozygotes.
Factors of randomness and isolation.
Random changes in gene frequencies and the isolation effect are not significant in our time, since they are noticeable only in small populations, where even a harmful gene can randomly spread, and a beneficial one can be eliminated. In small populations there is also a closer degree of relatedness between those entering into marriage. In itself, such inbreeding does not change the frequency of genes, but increases the proportion of homozygotes, as a result of which recessive genes become the field of selection. Inbreeding is not harmful if the line does not have harmful recessive genes. Since the Middle Ages, small populations have merged into large ones; Along with this, migration processes, which acquired in the 20th century. unprecedented scale, lead to the mixing of diverse populations. As a result, a significant part of recessive genes has become heterozygous and does not experience selection pressure, and therefore can significantly increase its frequency.
By creating a social environment, humanity unwittingly smoothed out the rigidity of natural selection. The price we will ultimately have to pay for the advances of modern medicine is an increase in the frequency of a number of unfavorable genes whose effects we have learned to mitigate. Many thousands of diabetics, previously doomed to death in childhood, are now saved by insulin, can lead relatively normal lives and pass on the genes responsible for this disease to their descendants. Myopia is also not a significant disadvantage for life these days. Probably no one would like to restore the opposite picture, but medicine itself is constantly increasing the burden that it has to bear.
Ethical considerations.
Despite the fact that eugenics is based on genetics, it is not itself a science, since it is guided primarily by social values. Perhaps there could be general agreement that the absence of significant physical and mental defects and the presence of good health, high mental abilities, good adaptation and nobility of soul are worthy goals that eugenics should set for itself (although it is still likely that diversity nature is better than uniformity of type). But how permissible is the restriction of human freedom associated with the control of reproduction? From the point of view of genetics, and not only that, “there is so much bad in the best of us and so much good in the worst of us” that it is very difficult to assess the manifested hereditary characteristics of a person; Numerous hidden recessive genes or genes with low penetrance make a general assessment of heritability almost impossible. It is also impossible to determine to what extent the characteristics of an individual are the result of environmental influences, especially when we are talking about qualities that are of primary interest to eugenics: good health, high intelligence, etc. The underworld sometimes provides terrible examples of human degeneration, but what would people with a perverted psyche become in a favorable environment? Are their defects an inevitable consequence of genes? This is highly doubtful. The answer can only be given by an experiment in which the negative influence of the environment is excluded from childhood. It is easier to create optimal living conditions for people than to change gene frequencies through clever selection.
