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One of the things that Epstein was really interested in was collecting scientists is
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C
the bad science that fuels genocides back.
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B
America is the country that embraces it the most, apart from Nazi Germany. But I think the idea really didn't ever go away.
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C
A tool of empire, racial hierarchy, sterilization and genocide.
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D
People love historical precedent, love telling people this isn't new if it was. Lowborn and deformed is what Plutarch says, that infants should be exposed, it should be thrown off of a cliff. You can't use Plutarch in this way.
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Elon Musk and Silicon Valley discussions about human optimization.
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Tech Bros. Autocrats are also very interested in these ideas.
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What was wrong with the science?
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B
Well, everything is the answer to that. This stuff is nuts.
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C
It's one of the most dangerous ideas in in history. At its simplest, eugenics means trying to improve future generations by controlling reproduction, encouraging the people deemed desirable to have children, and preventing the people deemed undesirable from doing the same. But who decides what is desirable? And how did an idea about good birth become a tool of empire, racial hierarchy, sterilization and genocide? Once Nazi Germany turned eugenic thinking into racial hygiene and mass murder, the word eugenics understandably became toxic. But the idea did not disappear. It migrated into other arguments about immigration, population collapse, embryo screening and human optimization. In Silicon Valley, even Jeffrey Epstein held court with scientists about reproductive fantasies. The most surreptitious part might be that eugenics is often cloaked in language that sounds humane. Reducing suffering, improving health, strengthening society. Many of today's arguments hide behind the misuse of science. So that is exactly where we need to start. What is eugenics? Where did it come from? And does the science stack up to the claims? This is the focus of geneticist and author Adam Rutherford's research.
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B
You have to think about eugenics as not really a sort of description, discrete set of ideologies that occurred in the late 19th century and through the first half of the 20th century, but really a way of thinking. And it's a way of thinking about. Well, in a sort of attempting to be positive way about improving the quality of your people, of a population, but really that involves ranking people who you consider to be better or worse or desirable or traits that are undesirable with the intention of purging the undesirable from that society. So whilst the word itself, eugenics means, it means well born really. So it's an attempt to be a positive ideology about improving people. It instantly also means you have to judge people as being unworthy. And that occurs every time it's discussed or enacted around the world through history. Now after the events of the Second World War and the revelations of the Holocaust, the, the word eugenics goes out of fashion and becomes toxic over the next 40 or 50 years. And now it's, you know, it's an insult. To refer to someone as a eugenicist is a slight, but I think the idea really didn't ever go away. And what we're beginning to see again with the changing landscape of politics over the last 10 or 15 years or so and the return of populism and particularly the association, I'm arguing the association between right wing populist views and technocrats largely centered around Silicon Valley, what we're seeing again is the emergence of the types of conversations which are very similar to ones that occurred in the 1910s and 1920s in America and around the world. And they revolve around questions of there is a demographic crisis, people are not having enough babies, women are becoming over educated and not having enough babies and as a result of that there's going to be population collapse. This is one of Elon Musk's repeated sentiments over the last five years or so. He's constantly talking about how global population collapse and demographic collapse is a greater problem than climate change. I mean it isn't because globally the population continues to increase and will we think continue to increase until maybe 2050 or a bit later where it's estimated to peak at something like 9 billion.
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C
What he actually means, but not all phenotypes equally.
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B
Exactly, exactly. So many countries around the world, many countries in the west do have lower than population replacement levels of fertility. And that's the people that he's talking about now.
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C
You are mentioned in the Epstein files. Congratulations. In a non nefarious way. What did we discover about elite or influential circle discussions about eugenics or neo eugenics?
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B
Well, I feel like I have to qualify. What?
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C
You know, go ahead.
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B
Yeah, I mean the first thing is to say that what does it say about the relationship with elite scientists and Jeffrey Epstein is that I'm not one of them. I mean basically I'm in a round robin marketing email from 2016 for a talk I was giving at the sort of, not the beginning of my career, but the Epstein file. For people who haven't looked at them, the Epstein files are millions of emails and deconvoluting. They're not very well structured when you're searching them. So many of them are email chains where instead of it being one document, every single document is every single reply in that email chain and then thousands of them are simply marketing emails from companies, advertising talks and so on. So yes, I am mentioned once in the Epstein files and I think that's worth clarifying.
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C
Yes, certainly we'll keep that in.
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B
So what was the second half of the question? Well, I exonerate my second half of
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C
the question is what did they reveal about discussions around eugenics or neo eugenics that were being had between him and other scientists or figures in influential circles?
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B
Yeah, well, we've begun talking about since the last tranche of the Epstein files were released, we've begun talking about the Epstein class. And so this sort of cadre of people who are characterized by being extraordinarily wealthy and as a result of being in that class and being invited into Epstein's world have had a sense of impunity from. Well, from many things that I probably shouldn't be too specific about, but everyone knows what we're talking about. But one of the things that Epstein was really interested in was collecting scientists. And he ran these salons sometimes on his private island where he would both run and fund scientific discussions amongst a particular class of almost exclusively male, almost exclusively white, and over the age of 50, but high profile scientists whose careers tended to include very sort of big ideas. And he styled himself, Epstein styled himself as a sort of a benefactor of big ideas thinking in science. A lot of it was cosmology, A lot of it was sort of the future of humanity type ideas. A lot of it was sort of big ideas in evolutionary psychology, which is a field that many scientists find very problematic for reasons that I don't need to go into here. But part of that as well was discussions about genetics, human enhancement and breeding programs that were more generally fall under the umbrella of eugenics. The improvement of people talking about how better to improve IQs, possibly through genetic engineering, quite often talking about racial differences in IQs but attributing them to genetic reasons, which we don't think is true in genetics. I'm sitting in my office at UCL where we do a Lot of this type of research and those types of ideas have been debunked for decades. But there in the files there are repeated discussions with scientists, mostly not geneticists, mostly not experts in those specific fields. In fact, I think I'm right in saying exclusively not experts in those specific fields, but having these sort of broad discussions about iq, about race, about improving human humankind. And when they talk about humankind, it's not clear which members of humankind they're talking about. But given their overall views on hierarchies and exclusivity as a result of extreme wealth, I think we know who they're talking about. That Venn diagram really overlaps very much with the same Venn diagram that I'm talking about in terms of the Tech Bros. Silicon Valley autocrats who are also very interested in these ideas. In fact, I think I'm right in saying that that Venn diagram is a circle.
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C
Now that circle seems to repeat over time. We will rewind in just a second to talk more about the ancient and modern antecedents of this. But you have Plato, Plutarch, Aristotle, and then obviously if you zip forward in time, you've got elites in the 1800s and then you have political leaders in the 1900s. Why do you think these ideas are attractive to that type of person? Somebody who is powerful, who is wealthy across time?
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B
Well, I think they're about maintaining power and maintaining power for the status quo. So it's a. I sometimes describe it in the 19th century when eugenics becomes a sort of formalized science. They thought it was a science. We now think of it as a pseudo science because it's not really based on scientific, correct scientific ideas. But at the time it was viewed as a science. These are views held by people who are already wealthy, probably through inheritance, because that is the structure of society. And as always in the history of history, people often turn to science or scientific ideas in order to reinforce the ideas that they already have. And this is a sort of non controversial thing to say to a historian of science. But the birth of my field. I study evolutionary genetics, but the birth of the field of biology in the 17th and 18th century was really specifically in service of the political ideology of European expansion. Now I'd imagine that some people listening to this will think what the hell are you talking about? It was for the pursuit of knowledge and for understanding the natural world. That's not really true. Parts of it were. But the classification systems introduced in the 18th century really were hierarchical in order to, to subjugate lower forms of Humans, where all classifications of humans for the next two or three hundred years were not just classifications, but hierarchical, with white people being superior. So the birth of biology itself is in service of the idea of race and European expansion and colonialism. Similarly, in the 19th century, the birth of genetics, the study of genes, the study of inheritance and families and disease and sex and all of those things, a big part of that was actually in service of the political ideology of eugenics. And again, it's an example of the politically powerful, a hegemonic power structure in the uk, in America, in various white western countries. Look to science to say, well, look, now we've got Darwin, we understand evolution and we have put humans on the evolutionary tree, so we are evolved beings as well. And that's a newish thing at this point in the mid 19th century. And then some people go, well, you can breed cows or sheep or roses or pigs to enhance the characteristics that we find desirable. And we do that through control, through biological reproductive control. So why don't we do that for people as well? And in Victorian Britain, it's a time when there's mass immigration, the colonies are expanding. We're seeing a lot of traffic from the colonies. We're in the wake of the industrial revolutions, so we're seeing urbanization, there's a transfer of care for the sick and the poor of each region from the church to the state. So you see lots of asylums being built and so on. So this is the landscape, and it's an incredibly rich, fertile landscape for powerful people, the hegemonic powers of the UK and elsewhere, to say, what is our justification? How do we prevent the poor, the disease, the people with mental health problems, racial minorities that we don't like, women with menstrual trouble, alcoholics, iterant criminals? How do we prevent them from reproducing? How do we eradicate them from society in order to promote the people that we do like? And, you know, in all cases, it turns out that the people we do like look remarkably like the people making those decisions. And that's why the powerful turn to eugenics and say, turn to the scientists and say, well, what can you guys do about it? And the scientists go, well, we've just invented this whole science ification of this old idea, which is reproductive control, and that's eugenics in a nutshell.
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C
One of the deepest ironies which you flesh out so well in your book control is that often the proponents of these theories, whether we're talking about Churchill or Hitler, would have been precluded under a lot of those eugenic perspectives in terms of the challenges that they experience psychologically, for example, or tendency towards alcoholism, which just I find so interesting. Maybe we can talk about that later, but let's focus on one of the big beasts of the field that is working around this time, which is, of course, Francis Galton. And you work in ucl, you teach there, so you're part of his direct institutional legacy. Who was he, what did he argue and what were the most important theories or studies that he contributed to the field of eugenics?
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B
I mean, it's better than me being in his direct legacy. I'm actually paid by him. So when, when he died, he set up a legacy fund at UTL here at ucl, and it funded various things at UCL for the next century. This is in 1911, and after the Eugenics Inquiry at UCL in 2022, the decision was taken to reallocate this fund to employ various positions, one of which is me. So, yeah, I'm actually surrounded. You can't see this, but these shelves are surrounded by his journals, his books. Literally, the first thing on my desk there is a list and the papers and correspondence of Sir Francis Galton. Anyway, Galton was Charles Darwin's half cousin and he was independently wealthy and already quite famous by the time the Origin of Species is published in 1859. Now, Galton had gone out as a young man into the dark heart of Africa, as he called it, and wrote a very successful travel book. Mark Twain said that travel is the thing that stops people from being prejudiced. Didn't work for Galton. He came back much more racist than he had been when he left. And one of the things he did was look to his cousin's work on evolution and say, can we apply this to humans? Now, Galton did a lot of other stuff, right? He did a lot of other stuff that we are indebted to in the modern age. He was the inventor of a huge number of statistical techniques that the world runs off to this day. He was the inventor of the first weather map, which was published in the Times on April 1, I think, 1874. From memory, he was interested in heredity. And one of the outstanding questions of heredity at the time was, are fingerprints inherited or are they unique to individuals? And he was the person who determined that they are unique to individuals, including identical twins. And that became the basic basis for forensic fingerprinting. There's a whole bunch of stuff that Galton was responsible for setting up that is how the modern world actually works. But his main legacy is that he was also the person who coined the idea, the word eugenics and became the person who it was. It was the driving, enduring passion of his life from the 1860s until he died. He set up, so he funded the lab that I am part of now, which was then called the Eugenics Education Society or Eugenics Laboratory, and then over the course of the 20th century, eventually changed into the Genetics department. It is now the Genetics department at ucl. But yeah, as you say, I'm three generation, three, four generations directly from Galton. I was an undergraduate in this department in the 1990s and it was called the Galton Laboratory back then. So he's an interesting figure. I mean a true genius, a true polymath, absolute white supremacist and eugenicist as well, but someone that I've spent half my life studying.
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C
A really good example too of how geniuses and scientists can still have very deep biases and unwitting prejudice, which I think sometimes people can overlook. Given that he was so formative in the field of eugenics, can you tell me a bit more about the context out of which this dangerous idea was born and codified in terms of where did society see itself at the time? What were the fears that were contributing to his thinking?
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B
Yeah, I mean that's a whole thesis question you've just asked there. And you're welcome to come to the course that I run at UCL which runs.
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C
I would love to.
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B
Two, two. You'd be welcome. 20 hours. So you've got this febrile environment in, in Victorian Britain which I, which I talked about a minute ago. There's lots of other things happening as well, which is the, the, the emergence of the Church in a slightly different way from through history. So less doctrinal and more a representation of a bottom up religion, a religion for, for the poor. I think you've got challenges for evolutionary theory as well because one of the things that eugenicists did then and continue to do to this day is obsess about classical civilizations. And I think there's many reasons for that. But one of them is that the great classical civilizations of Rome and Greece primarily, but also Egypt to a certain extent, to a lesser extent, were cultures in which the modern perception at that time was there is no social mobility. You are born into your status. The status of you in society is very rigid and it is patriarchal and there is a slave class. And you're born into those strata in society and you will not move from them. And then all of A sudden, in the 19th century, you've got working class movements, you've got the industrialization as a result of the industrial revolutions, you've got unionization. And I hypothesize, and other historians do, that what the hegemonic power structures are beginning to see is what is what. It's the culture out of which Marxism emerges as well is power being shifted from the total hegemonic powers of almost exclusively white rich men to poor people, the emancipation of women, the existence, the beginning of human rights. And all of a sudden the power structure is threatened. So it's again, that idea, I mentioned it earlier, this eugenics comes as a very radical solution to maintain the status quo. So those sort of. There's a perversity in that sentence. We have to do something extreme, radically extreme, in order to preserve how things are. And that's what it is. That's what it is in the 19th century into the 20th century, and then things radically change, as in the run up to the Second World War.
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C
And just before we get to that, can we pause for a moment on the science itself? And could you explain why these ideas, as geneticists have now discovered, were flawed to begin with and they're still espoused and promulgated today, this sense that, well, we can, if we don't allow certain traits to continue, we can eradicate them permanently. We could design our babies. We could not allow certain people to be born. Obviously, in the horrors of the mid-1900s, we had state projects to do that as well. But what was wrong with the science?
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B
Well, everything is the answer to that. And so there's many ways of approaching this. The first is that is to say that the most obvious and the most commonly given reason for justification for eugenics as a project is to use agriculture as an example. We have successfully bred organisms over the last 10,000 years or so to maximize the things that we want from them, whether that is turning hugely aggressive, massive aurochs, a type of ancient, now extinct cow, into the docile, fatty, large uddered beasts that we use for farming today. So the eugenicists went, well, if we can breed cattle, if we can breed cats and dogs or corn or strawberries or whatever, then we should be able to do it with humans. Now, there is a fundamental problem with this as an idea, which is pretty obvious when you say it. And farmers know this, right? So the eugenicists used agriculture as example, but they never really seemed to ever talk to any farmers. Farming is an incredibly brutal, inefficient process which Requires very, very controlled environments. The strength of human evolution. The reason we have been so successful as a species is because we're generalists. We don't exist in one environment. We can exist all around the world. And as we spread from our homeland in Africa, we spread around the world because we were adaptable. So agriculture is an absolutely terrible analogy for human breeding. We could modify the human race through agricultural processes, but it would require, like, a lot of murdering, a lot of infanticide, and a lot of very, very selective breeding to get the qualities that we would possibly want in this hypothetical. Need to stress that's a hypothetical. So that's one. The second thing is that genetics emerges at the beginning of the 20th century. So evolution comes in the 1850s. Genetics people probably remember being taught about Gregor Mendel and his pea experiments in what is now the Czech Republic, in Moravia, back then, where he bred peas together. And some of them were taught and some of them tall, some short, some of them had wrinkly peas, some of them have smooth peas, blah, blah, blah. He did like 29,000 crosses. And as a result of that, saw that the characteristics were encoded by units of biological information and that they were passed from generation to generation in discrete ways. And what he was talking about, although he didn't coin the term, it didn't come about until 1900, was the concept of the gene. Right now this lands. This idea lands right at the point where it's most useful to the eugenicists because they latch onto this idea that there are units of inheritance. Because if there are units of inheritance and we can study their pathway through generations, then we can choose the characteristics in people that we like and we can use through selective breeding, through control of breeding, we can enhance them and continue those characteristics. Now, the problem with that is that in the year 2026, I've been a geneticist now since 1994. The problem with this is that I don't really understand how human genetics works. I don't mean that in. I'm really bad at my job. Saying that I don't understand how human gen genetics works is an indication that I'm good at my job because we just don't really understand how basic genetics works. We've got really, really sophisticated understanding of the human genome, but still, there's just so much that we don't know. The American eugenics movement, they attributed every physical characteristic, hair color, eye color, body shape, all sorts of physical traits, but also behavioral traits, to exactly the same model. And some of them are nuts. I mean, just bonkers like. So some of them were things like epilepsy, alcoholism, diseases, various diseases, but also things like seafaringness.
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C
Right, Yeah, I read this. This is so strange.
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B
It's. Well, it makes perfect sense, right? Because being good at running boats, going to sea runs in families. You know, men, historically, the sons of sailors also turned out to be sailors. Ergo, there must be a gene for being good at being a sailor. And so they extended this to every single characteristic that they both liked and didn't like. Now, the problem with it is that, well, obviously seafaringness is not a genetic condition at all, but the attribution to simple traits like eye color, which today we don't really understand in 2026, but in 1909 when that was first published, they were confident enough that that was exactly the right answer, that it could be extended from that basic science, genes only having been named eight years before that, to the programs of involuntary sterilization for traits that were deemed undesirable in people. Now, you know, that confidence that, that overconfidence in science is the core of why this turned out to be such a, such a bad thing. Because you've got a bunch of people who say, oh, here's some new science that supports my pre existing political ideology and therefore we should implement social and legal policy that is in accordance with that and it's backed up by science. Problem is, it wasn't backed up by science.
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C
There's a really good example that stuck out to me in your book about this, where policies backfire, even if we suspend our humanity for a moment, like when the Nazis wanted to eradicate schizophrenia. And then even if in the immediate aftermath of their horrific atrocities, there may have been a dip, but in the decades that followed, there was an increase and a per capita increase in Germany compared to other countries, which shows the contribution of environment and trauma and everything else. And so as we get into that subject, when does eugenics, which proves itself quite politically promiscuous, it appeals to both left and right. When does it start to become a state project? And where.
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B
Well, I suppose the earliest examples really are the states in the United States. So the first involuntary sterilization laws are imposed in Indiana in 1907. They'd already had some less biologically focused but sort of marriage restrictions in certain states even in the late 1890s. But America is the country that embraces it the most, apart from Nazi Germany, which we can talk about in a minute because obviously there's a lot to talk about there in the UK having developed These ideas and having developed a lot of the scientific framework for it, much of which happened in this very building under Francis Galton and various people. We never actually had any eugenics policies. There's a reason for that which. So Churchill was the main political driver for involuntary sterilization of what was then referred to as the feeble minded, which is a very non specific sort of. It covered many aspects of mental health and developmental psychological problems. Difficult for us to say exactly what they were. He proposed several times when he was Home Secretary under the Asquith government, the involuntary sterilization of the feeble minded using X rays, which had only just been discovered a few years earlier. He proposed legislation on at least three occasions that would become the law, the policy of the country. But it never happened. It never happened, primarily because of the filibustering of one mp, a guy called Josiah Wedgwood, who's one of the Wedgwood clan. And Wedgwood was successfully lobbied by the writer G.K. chesterton, the comic writer and orthodox Catholic, who I think, I think successfully argued that all of these eugenics policies, the involuntary sterilizations, were not actually targeting specific groups of people such as those with epilepsy, those with who are iterant criminals, those with alcoholism or women with menstrual troubles, which is another favorite of these guys. All of the people that it targets targeted were the poor, right? So Chesterton recognized that this was an ideology which was directed at eradicating poor people, not eradicating poverty, but eradicating poor people. Chesterton lobbied Josiah Wedgwood. Wedgwood had the Churchill clause about involuntary sterilization removed from, from the act which passed in 1913. So we never had that policy in, in the UK itself, but it really takes hold in America. You get these different. You get the same principles with slightly different regional flavors where you see eugenics explored. Immigration is the defining political issue of, of this era in America. 15 million people have migrated into the States, mostly from Europe, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe in the years 1900 to 1915. And it is front page news every single day in the New York Times. It is the big issue of the day, as indeed it is today. So you get a eugenics policy in the US which is directed towards immigrants, whereas in Germany, beginning in the late 19th century and developing through the Weimar Republic years and then into the Third Reich era in 33, it's very much focused on disabilities. It's a very medicalized profession, or the medical profession is very supportive of eugenics. So you see these sort of regional differences. But in Germany, the story is, well, it's similar, but. But different. You get a lot of the ideas in German. Eugenics, which become policies of the third Reich, are actually generated in America. And there's a direct intellectual and financial and legal transfer of information from America into Nazi Germany. Because some of the Nazis who were interested in eugenics, they didn't use the word eugenics. They used the word rassenheig. Race hygiene looked to their American counterparts for intellectual support, but also financial support. So the eugenics center in dalem near Berlin was funded by the Rockefellers. The leader of the eugenics records office in cold spring harbor, Charles Davenport, was out in Berlin, in Dalem as well, giving them instruction. The first one of the first laws that Hitler passes in July 1933, which is the first of what we refer to as the Nuremberg laws, which limits reproduction and asks people to check the hereditary status of their partners. That was derived from American legislation written by people in the eugenics records office in the 1920s. So you've got this very, very direct transfer of ideas from America into Germany and they become, you know, the Holocaust was not a eugenics project, but eugenics was a fundamental artery in. In the. In the Holocaust.
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C
What was the mechanism for that? Was it just the. The misuse of science for a political aim, or had it truly inspired Hitler and those in control of the holocaust?
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B
Yeah, a bit of both. So that direct interaction is even more specific when it comes to Hitler as well. So one of the sort of cultural leaders of the eugenics project in America was a young writer, an aristocrat, bored aristocrats, extremely wealthy man called Madison Grant. Madison Grant wrote a book called the passing of the great race in 1916, which is this. It would be funny if it weren't so horrific, but extraordinarily white supremacist racist book, which is a best seller, in which he describes not only the hierarchy of the races, with white people being top, but within the white people. It's also where the concept of Aryans come from. But north German Nordic people were superior to others. He states that, you know, I said that thing about them being really obsessed with classical civilizations. He states that the civilizations of Greece, Rome and Egypt were founded by Nordic people, came down from their woodland idylls, set up Greek civilization and retreated back to northern Germany and let the Greeks and the Romans get on with it. He asserts that Michelangelo, Leonardo and Dante were all Nordic based on measuring their skulls in bus. So this stuff is nuts, right? It's an international bestseller. When Hitler's in the landsberg Prison in 1923, 24, after the failed the Beer Putsch. He apparently reads this book. We know this. He didn't read English, so we may have been a translation or he may have had someone read it to him. We're not sure of that. But after the war. Sorry, after he comes out of prison, but before 33, Hitler writes to, to Madison Grant and he describes the passing of the great race as his Bible. And so this is where Hitler's already a bad egg at this point. He also, he has many anti Semitic ideas, but that period is where he really develops the fervent anti Semitism which becomes core to the Holocaust and Third Reich. Many of the eugenicists of this time in Germany were philosemitic. So they were. Although anti Semitism was all around. Many of the eugenicists in Germany thought that because Jews had displayed disproportionate success. I mean, again, these are sort of racist tropes, but this is the language and the thoughts of the time because Jews had displayed such disproportionate success from such a small population that Germans should breed with them in order to further the, the Aryan nation. And it's only really after.
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C
I've never heard that.
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B
Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a very odd, it's a, it's quite disconcerting thing when you read that. And then they switch, Then they, then they just switch. And many of the people, many of the doctors that were involved in the eugenics project in the, in the run up to the, to the war were Jewish. And then they find themselves having to get out of Dodge pretty quickly because they're going to be exterminated. Recently there was a rather. Well, I don't know. I don't think it was. There was an interesting study which isolated the genome of Hitler. There's a TV program in the UK about it which wasn't very good. But one of the things that was identified in his genome was that he had a syndrome. He probably had a syndrome called Kalman syndrome, which may be associated with his, what is technically referred to as cryptorchidism, which is one undescended testicle. I don't want to go into that much further. Kalman was a German Jew. Kalman had to leave Germany after 1933 because he was going to be persecuted. Kalman was also responsible for the schizophrenia program that you mentioned earlier, which was the extermination or sterilization of all schizophrenic people in Germany, which they did successfully enact up until 1945. So you've got this really weird, perverse. You know, history has this incredible sense of irony there that Hitler apparently had a condition named after the person who discovered it, who was a Jewish man who also was instrumental in the specific eugenics policies of the Third Reich, and then had to leave the country and go and spend the rest of his career in New York.
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C
Now, after the Second World War, the word eugenics naturally becomes radioactive necessarily, but these policies, in their more subtle, less aggressive form, continue. And I was shocked to learn how recently they continued. Like sterilization laws.
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B
Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. So we like to think that the Holocaust happens and it becomes. That the horrors of the Final Solution make it into the public domain. And in the years after 45, there's a Nuremberg trial and the subsequent Nuremberg doctors trial the year after in which these sorts of ideas are discussed. And we like to think that it happens and everyone goes, well, we're done with that. That was a terrible idea that lasted 50 years. And we're not going back to that. The reality is that it happened much more slowly than that. Genetics labs were mostly eugenics labs and, you know, little clues like the genetics eugenics labs change their names quite slowly to genetics labs until that word becomes eradicated. And that doesn't really happen in the 40s. Sometimes it happens in the 50s, but it also continues to happen until the 1960s. I didn't have this as a prop in preparation for this, but I have the complete annals on my desk right here of, if you can see that, that says. Can you read that? That's the annals of.
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C
Oh, I can. Yeah, just about.
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B
Can you see what it says? That is the Annals of Human Genetics, which is a. Which is a. An academic journal that is still published today. I have published in it. Right. That issue is the one after this issue which says the Annals of Eugenics. Now, there is no mention in, in this. In. In the next. In the. In the. The first issue of the Annals of Human Genetics as to why there was a name change. But that was the type of thing that happened, and that is 1954. So 10 years after the Holocaust, people are still going, hey, you know, maybe we. Maybe we shouldn't. Yeah, maybe we need a rebrand eugenics anymore. But, but as. As you say, people continue to be sterilized in, In America and all around the world well into the 21st century. The most recent cases, we think happened in ICE detention centers in America. The numbers are very small. In China in 2010 there was a three month period called where they enforced the, what was known as the Iron Claw policy which was the involuntary sterilization of 10,000 women in three months if they had violated the one child policy. That is eugenics. The main form of contraception in America for women of a reproductive age today is long term sterilization and is mostly targeted at the working class. Now I don't know whether that is eugenics. I'm not sure it's helpful to call it eugenics, but it is certainly an idea which is redolent of eugenic practices of the early 20th century. And then there's now with new technologies that are associated with reproductive health and IVF and gene editing and embryo selection, there is a new emergence of types of conversations about how do we improve the quality of our children. Well, we do it by genetic means. I'm very hostile towards these ideas for both moral and scientific reasons.
- [42:29]
C
What is the line between eugenics and spending money to genetically edit a potential child or these new available technologies and wanting to prevent disease? Like those are three different things. But where would you put the line between each?
- [42:49]
B
I'm not sure there's a straightforward line and I know that's a very sciency thing to.
- [42:56]
C
Oh no, but it's true. That's fine. Tell us about the wiggly line.
- [42:59]
B
Well, you know, you know, you know the old joke about, I think it was Eisenhower who after being, after getting a consultant scientist in, he kicks him out and says next time can you get me a one armed consultant so that you can't say yeah.
- [43:11]
C
On the other hand.
- [43:12]
B
Yeah, so it's a bit like that. So the first thing is that I try not to get into arguments with my many antagonists who say that everything is eugenics because we don't mate randomly, right? We choose the people that we want to have children with in order. Well, part of the reason is that we want our children to have the best possible start in life. We want our children to be free of diseases. And 1979 was the first was the birth of Louise brown, the first IVF, first test tube baby. By 1980 we had already begun the process of selecting embryos that were free of diseases. Now the first time it was done, which is down in the Hammersmith Hospital not far from here, was to select for a form of psychological developmental problem which was then called X linked retardation. And the X linked bit means that it only affected boys, right? So that first round of selection of embryos to prevent Diseases in the offspring was simply to select the embryos that were female. Now is that eugenics? No, I don't think it is. I think it is the alleviation of suffering in individuals, children and their parents through reproductive technologies. I think it may be important, but I'm not sure about this. It may be important to reflect that eugenics tended to be a boy top down strategy. So it's a government policy rather than choice for potential parents. Nowadays we've got to the stage where we're not just. We're not just capable of selecting for specific diseases, which we do. If you go through an IVF process and your family has a history of specific diseases like cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease or Duchenne muscular dystrophy or a list of diseases that we understand the genetics of quite well, they tend to be single gene disorders. One gene causes the disorder. If you have a history of that disease in your family and you go through the IVF process to procreate, then I think it's perfectly reasonable and indeed desirable that you should choose embryos that are free of those diseases. Because if you don't, then your child will have a life which is harder than if they don't have it. So I think there is a moral obligation to do that. There are intricacies within that which are hard to, which are interesting. So for example, some people with genetic deafness who choose to have children with other people who are deaf and they have a rich cultural life which does not involve hearing. And there's been lots of discussions over the last 20 years or so about whether they have the right to have children who are also deaf because their children, they want their children to have the same rich cultural lives that they do now. That is a fascinating discussion and it is ongoing. People will have views on either way. 100 years ago, if you're deaf, you don't have a. And you're born in Nazi Germany or America, you don't have the right to reproduce. So it shows that our changing views about disabilities and about normality, human normality, do change over time. Again, are those things eugenics? I'm not sure it's useful to label them as such, but again, they are technologies that would have been of extreme interest to the classical eugenicists of that period.
- [46:53]
C
Adam mentioned something crucial. Early eugenicists idolized the ancient world. They believed the Greeks and Spartans had understood something that modern liberal societies had forgotten. That the state should shape reproduction for collective strength. Plato imagined a city where rulers organized mating. Aristotle wrote that impaired infants shouldn't be raised. Plutarch claimed that Spartan elders inspected newborns and sent the weak or deformed to die. Hitler later praised the supposed Spartan practice of destroying weak children as more humane than preserving lives he deemed degenerate. But a lot of what modern people think they know about Sparta and the ancient world and disability rests on later literary sources, not physical or first hand evidence. So was the ancient world really practicing some kind of proto eugenics, or did later thinkers project their own fantasies onto Greece, Rome and Sparta? Professor Debbie Sneed's work on disability in the ancient world investigates exactly this.
- [48:03]
E
Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance. And now we're customizing this rush hour AD to keep you calm, which could help your driving. And science says therapy is great for a healthy mindset. So enjoy this 14 second session on us. I think you've done everything right and absolutely nothing wrong. In fact, anything that hasn't gone your way could probably be blamed on your father not being emotionally available because his father wasn't emotionally available and so on. And now that you're calm and healing, you're probably driving better too.
- [48:30]
B
Liberty. Liberty.
- [48:31]
D
Liberty.
- [48:32]
B
Liberty.
- [48:33]
D
Tark is an interesting author. So he's writing in the Roman period in like the 2nd century CE or AD and he has this series, he's very prolific, but he has this whole series of writings that are essentially biographies of Greek and Roman men. And he wrote them in order to instruct Roman men in how to be leaders and how to be good moral men. And he says in one of them, in his life of Alexander, like Alexander the Great, that he's not trying to necessarily give a historical biography, but he's trying to create an impression as a model for people to follow. And that's important context for what these texts are. And there's one that gets used a lot, which is the life of Lycurgus. Lycurgus was a maybe real, maybe not real Spartan lawgiver who if he lived, lived sometime between the 9th and the 7th centuries BCE. So we're talking almost a thousand years before Plutarch's time. And he was, he had this reputation in the ancient world, this semi mythical lawgiver being very strict with his laws. And one of them, as detailed by Plutarch, and Plutarch is our only source of evidence for this is that he had this law that when infants were born, they were brought to a council of elders and the council of elders would determine whether or not that infant should be raised or if it was lowborn and deformed is what Plutarch says, that infants should be exposed. It should be thrown off of a cliff, basically. And this gets used by a lot of people as the evidence, right? This is our only source of evidence for this practice that the ancient Greeks, and particularly the Spartans, exposed or killed disabled infants at birth. But that's really the. That's the. This is the only place that it shows up. Even though earlier writers in the Greek period are talking about Lycurgus, they don't mention this like Plato and Aristotle, but it's really just Plutarch. And then that got taken up, right? And this is something that became really important to early eugenicists, but also some later ones, like Hitler, Hitler mentions in his secret book about this Spartan practice and how wise the Spartans were to do something like this.
- [50:57]
C
It's incredible, isn't it, that an ancient writer who is explicit about the fact that it's basically disputed whatever he's saying about this potentially mythical, potentially real figure can carry so much import millennia later. I just find that astounding and also not even accurately when we look at the other authors of the period or similar timeframes like Aristotle or Plato, what are they saying which is then taken up later for the Genesis cause?
- [51:35]
D
Yeah, Plato and Aristotle are these philosophers writing in the 4th century BCE and they both pen these treatises that are utopian, right? So they imagine what their perfect world would be, their perfect city would be, if they, the philosophers, could dictate its parameters. And so they both have one of these, Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics. And they both have these kind of references that are taken as kind of proto eugenic in their tone. Plato is a little bit. He's a little bit ambiguous. He says that there, if. If infants aren't of the right quality, that they should be hidden away. Right. Aristotle was a little bit more explicit when he says that if infants are, quote, unquote, deformed, that they should not be raised. Right. The implication there is that they should be killed. And these get used to support this idea that the Greeks practiced infanticide of disabled infants. And so it feeds into this narrative. People use it as a kind of basis for some of Plutarch's claims. But Plato and Aristotle are writing philosophical utopia, right? They're not describing. I mean, yeah, they're not describing contemporary life. They're kind of prescribing what they want out of life. As philosophers. They are in no way representative of 4th century thought. They are kind of coming up with their own ideas. And unfortunately, the legacy that we have on this is heavily influenced by Plato and Aristotle. Some of the other ideas that are circulating about life, about quote, unquote fitness, just didn't survive in the same ways. And it's because the sort of authority that we invest in Plato and Aristotle, so they have kind of an outsized influence in our understanding of ancient life.
- [53:29]
C
Something which strikes me as quite similar that maybe people can relate to who are interested in history, is when people today talk about Atlantis and Plato's references to Atlantis, because this generally is considered by historians to be an allegorical way of describing the rise and potential fall of an ideal society and what can go wrong. And like you say, this is a specific genre where people are writing about what could be or what would be, in their view, optimal and kind of experimenting with ideas. Is that right?
- [54:05]
D
Yeah, definitely. Atlantis is a great example of this. Plato makes it up. The person to go to for this is Dr. Flint Dibble, who is doing a lot of public archaeology and he's writing a book on the Atlantis myth. And it is interesting because a lot of Plato's ideas and indeed his ideals get taken up as if they are fact, which completely divorces them from the context in which they were created.
- [54:32]
C
So what does the actual bio archaeological and archaeological evidence tell us about how different types of people who may have been suffering from injury or ailments or physical or psychological maladies, how were they treated in the ancient world?
- [54:47]
D
Yeah, it's a great question and it really depends on a lot of factors about someone's life. But realistically, ancient life is just completely different than modern life. And so our kind of standards for what we consider a quote unquote good life are very different in the ancient world. And so we have plenty of evidence, Right. When we're talking broadly, we can't say whether an individual person, disabled or non disabled, was loved or liked. But broadly, we have sort of a picture of inclusion, right? And not in some sort of progressive neoliberal way, but basically people just have different expectations about what life should be and what the body should be able to do. And so there's just a lot more diversity in what bodies look like, because they don't have medicine in the same ways that we do, they don't have prostheses in the same ways that we do. And so people are just living really differently. And so when it comes to infants, we have a lot of evidence that infants who are disabled at birth or from very shortly after birth were actively cared for. And Assisted in order to promote their. Their survival. We've got plenty of archaeological and literary evidence that suggests this. We have a lot of evidence of people with congenital disabilities as adults, right? Which means that, of course, they were not killed at birth. And then when it comes to people who are disabled later on in life, which is the vast majority of people who are disabled today. So probably pretty similar in the ancient world. It just kind of depends on. Right. The ancient world is really flexible. It's not industrialized. They don't have capitalism. So this idea that you should be able to sort of replicate the activities of the person next to you, right, in some sort of assembly line, regardless of industry, it just doesn't exist in the ancient world. Everything is just a lot more flexible in terms of who's able to do what. And so it's more about what you're able to do than it is about creating a class of people that you want to exclude or include.
- [56:56]
C
Ancient Greece in particular, and Rome, you know, it's associated, I think, in the modern mindset with idealized bodies and it really being a space only for them. And in conversations, I rarely hear people talk about disability featuring in sculpture or art. But what does the evidence show? Is that a projection back from modern society based on what you just said, or is that really how they approached art and idealization?
- [57:26]
D
This Greek ideal was actually invented in the 18th century by the father of art history, Johann Winckelmann. So Winckelmann is sort of our first art historian. We refer to him as that sort of the father of the discipline, the founder of it. And he had, I think, seen no ancient sculptures in real life.
- [57:49]
C
Oh, excellent. So very, very much, very much appropriate to.
- [57:54]
D
I don't know, there were like four available at that time anyway, right. There just wasn't alone. And he created this idea, this notion of the ideal, which he tied into, basically into politics, right? He says that, you know, this idea of the Greek ideal can only emerge in the context of democracy. And so he situates it specifically in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, and he uses sculptures, particularly one of Apollo, called the Apollo Belvedere, as the sort of highest form of beauty, which he situates in the context of democratic Athens. And then everybody just kind of stuck with that, right? It shows up all over the place. So in the next century, the father of modern bodybuilding, this guy called Eugen Sandow, he takes up this idea of the ideal. He goes and he visits museums and he studies the statues and then develops exercises to make his body look like those statues. Right. And his photo book is just truly incredible. Really, really amazing pictures of him posing with the statues.
- [59:06]
C
Oh, my goodness. We've got to put some in this episode so people can see.
- [59:10]
D
Yeah, it's amazing. And it very quickly gets wrapped up into the notion of eugenics, because Eugen Sandow's book has this parenthetical at the end of the title that says a diseaseless world. Right. And so Winckelmann's notion of the ideal in the 18th century gets wrapped up into these notions of eugenics which are developing in the 19th century, which then obviously comes to fruition in the early 20th century. Kind of the practical application of that with the Nazis eugenic programs. They were not the inventors of this, but they did kind of put it into action in a very particular way. And so all of this is wrapped up, but it just isn't founded on anything. So Winckelmann had seen very few statues, and then nobody revised his ideas after that. People just kind of embraced it. And what ended up happening is that the ancient art that didn't fit into this paradigm was just kind of ignored or written off as a joke or a parody or caricature. So as an example, I just published an article on a sculpture that was dedicated on the Athenian Acropolis in the late 6th century BCE, around the same time that Athens instituted its democracy. Right. So there's a type of statue in the Archaic period called corai. It's the plural. And these are just female figures. Right. We don't really understand the full practice, but they're dedicated all over the Greek world at religious sanctuaries. They're also used as funerary markers. And we have about. There are like, more than 70 of them that survive from the Athenian apartment Acropolis. This is probably one of the most famous bodies of sculpture, like, as a sort of coherent body of sculpture from the ancient Greek world as these Acropolis cori. I think that they've garnered more attention and scholarship than any other body of sculpture. And they are idealized maidens is how you'll read about them. They represent feminine beauty that. The sort of height of female beauty in the ancient Greek world. And there's one in particular, Acropolis Core 683. That's what she's called. She's also known as the red slippers Kore. And she is largely unknown outside of, like, specialists in the field. I found out about her in 2021 When I attended a zoom lecture on Archaic Greek sculpture by Jeffrey Hurwit. Anyway, this is our single, like, Best, best evidenced dedication from the very famous Athenian Acropolis at this time. Right. We have her entire sculpture, we have the inscribed base that she was dedicated on, as well as a second figure that was included with the dedication. And you may wonder, okay, why, why don't more people know about this? If we're trying to understand dedication practices, if we're trying to understand these sculptures, if we're trying to understand the history of Athens at the, this pivotal point in its history, why not this one? And it's because her body doesn't fit with the rest of them. She is a representation of a dwarf woman. And so she just doesn't fit with the rest of them. And so she doesn't fit with the narrative that we tell about these statues. And so because of that, scholars just leave her out. Right? Because she raises more questions that are unanswerable in the context of the Greek ideal. And so it's easier just to leave it out. And probably there are a lot more diverse bodies, we might call them in our evidence, that just don't get the attention. Right. And so it's just a matter of kind of finding those. But when you actually look at the evidence that we have from the ancient world, there's a whole range of bodies that are depicted.
- [63:04]
C
I was going to ask you
- [63:07]
B
if
- [63:07]
C
it baffles you as to why eugenicists would co opt the ancient world to buttress their warped ideas. But from what you're saying to me, it sounds like because certain individuals and body types were omitted from the historic record, deliberately, unwittingly combination, that, that does seem to make a bit more sense. But like as the wholeness and the richness of the ancient world is, is, is elaborated on by experts like you, that becomes much harder to do.
- [63:43]
D
Yeah, I think it doesn't surprise me. So a lot of sort of European society is built on this idea that we are descended from the Greeks and the Romans. I mean, the Greeks and Romans show up as justification for lot of things. So if you read the Supreme Court decision for Roe v. WADE in the
- [64:02]
C
U.S. yes, I saw this in your work, that blew my mind.
- [64:06]
D
Yeah. So the Supreme Court justice who wrote the majority opinion, he starts with ancient history, right. And he talks about the historical precedents for sort of abortion restrictions. And it doesn't make any sense to do. Right, but it doesn't surprise me. And you can see it in everything, right? The word eugenics is, it's, it was invented by Francis galton in the 19th century, but it's, it's Greek, right? It means, like, well born. There's a very famous eugenic text about the Kallikak family. And it was used, right. Heavily by the Nazis, among others. That's a. That's a pseudonym. Kallikak. That is the Greek word for beautiful and ugly put together, right? They love implying, right, that a lot of this goes back to ancient Greece. It's a little bit ironic because Mediterraneans in the 19th and 20th century were among the degenerates that we were trying to keep out and prevent from polluting our body politic. But the ancient Greeks are lauded. They are hailed as kind of like the highest form of civilization. And so it doesn't surprise me that people want to rely on this as historical precedent. People love historical precedent. They love telling people that this isn't new, right? We've strayed from our mandate as humans, right? Even the ancient Greeks got it right. It feels like it has some authority when you have this historical precedent. So it doesn't surprise me. The evidence was available. So for a very long time, people have known that you can't use Plutarch in this way. I mean, Adolf Hitler is not a classical scholar. The rest of us are, though, and we know that you can't necessarily take Plutarch's work at face value. The problem is that because of our society, like, it feels true, right? It feels right that disabled people would be excluded from society and that disabled infants would be killed. We think of ourselves as very progressive and that because of our sort of progressive society, that we make allowances for people, right? We are benevolent, we are good, right? We have systems of charity. And so we think of ourselves as very good. But when we project backwards, we're like, they don't have progressive politics. Life is really hard. They don't have the time. They don't have the space to deal with these problems, right? The problem with that is that it starts with the basis that disabled people are problems without actually questioning that and whether or not ancients believed that, right? And so it's just this foundational claim, this foundational understanding of disability as disadvantage, disability as something bad, as if that's. As if that's universally true. And that's sort of what the problem is, right, Is that nobody questioned ever that foundational claim.
- [67:10]
C
The history of eugenics is not just the history of bad science. It's the history of how an idea can become powerful. And in this case, in part, it's because it hinted to elites that their status might be biological. And it also meant that a state could frame atrocities as a tool for the greater good. That's one reason why history matters and why it's key here. Because eugenics rarely returns wearing its old uniform, but its essence returns as optimisation, population panic, embryo ranking, the dream of building a better future by deciding which people have the right to exist in it. And that specific aspect is where the ancient world, the Victorian lab, the American courtroom, Nazi Germany and Silicon Valley meet. Because whenever human worth is measured by power, be that the states, the market, the scientists, the billionaire, or the algorithm, the line between improving life and controlling life can become dangerously thin. Thank you for watching History Uncensored. I'm Bianca Noblo and I'll see you next week. If you're into Tik, you will love this.
- [68:28]
D
TikTok is a live lab where users
- [68:31]
E
post instant reviews of the latest trends.
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B
Download TikTok and check it out.