Response to Bodmer and Charlesworth: Mendelian genetics and eugenics

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To the Editor: I thank Bodmer and Charlesworth for their ongoing assiduous analysis of my work. While not discounting ancient or early modern scholarship, the foundations of science today consolidated in the modern period in Europe effectively with various roughly simultaneous scientific, cultural, and political developments. In reference to “Hooke’s discovery of cells and Redi’s and Spallanzi’s [sic] disproofs of spontaneous generation,”¹ it is worth noting that in fact Hooke’s championing of Van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of the cell was impeded by the political snobbery of several Royal Society founders and that spontaneous generation limped on for two centuries after Redi and Spallanzani’s work.

Classical scholarship is important to study, but it could hardly be argued that contemporary scientists need make reference to Aristotle (who championed spontaneous generation) or Hippocrates (who formulated humorism) to elucidate biology. However, one of the most significant advances in the foundations of contemporary biology was the introduction of classification, most significantly with Linnaeus in Systemae Naturae in the 18^th century. This work outlines the binomial taxonomies we use today, despite cementing a pre-evolutionary model of immutable Platonic prima species. Linnaeus included humans, with four bogus phenotypic and racist behavioral designations that set the broadly continental and socially constructed idea of race still in contemporary use.² Linnaeus and indeed every further attempt at human classification for the next two centuries were not only taxonomically naive (which would only be revealed in the era of genetics, including work by Bodmer³), but hierarchical, with White Europeans supreme. This pseudoscience persisted in service of colonial expansion and today in the social categorisations of race.

As for the legacy of Mendel’s work, I agree with the sentiment that “the history of the relation between genetics and eugenics is more nuanced”¹ than in the short article and 12 minute speech on which it was based; many of their points are valid context. However, it is not correct that I “do not mention the criticisms of Davenport’s ideas at the time”¹: in my lectures and book (aimed at a popular not scholarly audience) that Bodmer and Charlesworth cite,⁴ I explicitly make reference to the hostility that Pearson showed to the hereditarian approach of Davenport and also the aggressive opposition to their work by (the American) T.H. Morgan, as well as J.B.S. Haldane, and the third Galton Professor of Eugenics, Lionel Penrose. Pearson, a brilliant man and virulent antisemite, contested the American ultra-Mendelian approach not because he opposed eugenics, but because its scientific incompetence hampered the development of eugenic ideology. In Germany, Nazis continued to cite specious US-derived Mendelian pedigrees in propaganda to justify their murderous policies.

It is incontestable that there are “innumerable examples of single major gene inheritance of traits in human pedigrees.”¹ However, emerging evidence suggests that initial focus on these traits as entry points for teaching genetics to school students (the majority of whom will not further pursue biology at all) results in them having outmoded views of human inheritance that are redolent of the early US eugenicists’ hereditarian ideologies and develop specious essentialist views with regards to race.^5,6

Celebrating science without contextualizing it is cheerleading, not history. We have plenty to be both proud and ashamed of. The role of historians is to analyze past events and people, not merely to lionize our intellectual forebears. I welcome scholarly criticism, especially when it is divorced from adoration of the great men on whose shoulders we stand. We must always carefully consider the politics of our past in our teaching, such that we minimize the risk of reinforcing and repeating their errors.

Declaration of interests

The author declares no competing interests.