History of Eugenics

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History of Eugenics
A misinterpretation and misuse of science
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Social Origins

• Great emigration after
• the Civil War from the
• South and southern
• Europe to cities resulting
• in inadequate housing,
• labor unrest, differential
• reproductive rate between the wealthy and the
  poor
• Introduction of progressivism and social Darwinism

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• Revelations in genetics led to the belief that
  science could cure all social maladies
• First wave of the gene for explanation
• Therefore, societal problems could be cured by
  properly managing human breeding

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• The wealthy supported research and applications
  aimed at cleansing society by diminishing the
  influence of labor unions, non-WASPS, socialism
• There was a combination of wealth and scientism

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Scientific Origins

• The term coined by Francis
• Galton in 1883
• The wealthy and intelligentsia should have more
  babies (positive eugenics)
• The poor and degenerate should be sterilized
  (negative eugenics) (In the U.S.A., Germany,
  Scandinavia)

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What Caused Degeneracy?

• Masturbation
• Toxics in the environment
• Inbreeding (many eugenists were agricultural and
  animal breeding scientists)
• Plain bad ancestry

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Research Methods

• The methodologies were
• developed after the
• rediscovery of Mendels
• laws
• The main tools were
• pedigree trees
• Many traits such as intelligence and depression
  are very difficult to measure

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• Numerous associations and institutions were
  created to promote eugenics
• IQ tests became widespread and used particularly
  among individuals in mental asylums, poor
  immigrants, and minorities
• Anthropometric data were also used
• The data was used to design forced sterilization
  and immigration laws

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Traits Studied

• Correlation between intelligence and eye colors
• Behavioral patterns
• Personality
• Ethnicity and social behavior

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Flaws

• Definition of traits
• Reification
• Poor surveys and statistical methods
• False quantifications
• Ignoring social and environmental influences

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Marriage Laws

• Laws against interracial marriage up to the
  mid-20th. century in the U.S.
• Racial definitions (a negro is a negro if one
  the parents is a negro even is the other is
  white)
• Similar laws were adopted by Nazi Germany
  regarding the Jews
• In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court stroke down all
  these laws

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Sterilization Laws

• First 1907 in Indiana
• By 1914 twelve states had passed laws
• One reason stated was to reduce taxes to pay for
  caring for the insane and feebleminded
• Even epileptics and felons were sterilized
• Up to the 1970s up to 33 states had sterilized
  60,000 people

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Immigration Laws

• 1882 Law prohibiting the immigration of Chinese
• 1924 A law restricted the number of Italians and
  Jews that could enter the U.S.
• That law remained in the books until 1965

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I.Q.

• Francis Galton heredity and human ability
• Hereditary Genius (1869)

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• Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet
  (1796-1874)
• Quetelet was the first to apply statistical
  methods to the study of human
  characteristics, and actually discovered
  the concept of normal distribution--the tendency
  for the bulk population to fall somewhere between
  two extremes, with numbers dropping sharply at
  either extreme. If plotted on a chart, these
  values assume a shape roughly like that of a bell

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• In the 1890s, an American student of Galton's,
  James McKeen Cattell (1860-1944), brought
  the idea of intelligence testing to America
• Cattell's work caused brief but intense mental
  testing in America. What proved to be the test's
  downfall, however, was that scoring well on the
  Galton test did not indicate if a student would
  do well on schoolwork, which was considered the
  practical proof of good mental ability

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• Meanwhile in France, a psychologist named
  Alfred Binet (1857-1911) devised tests to
  rate child intelligence
• Like Galton, Binet was passionate about
  testing and measuring human capabilities
• His understanding of intelligence evolved through
  intense trial-and-error testing with local
  students. Working with groups of average students
  and groups of mentally handicapped students,
  Binet discovered certain tasks that average
  students could handle but handicapped students
  could not
• Binet calculated the normal abilities for
  students at each age, and could pinpoint how many
  years a student's mental age was above or below
  the norm

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• The Paris educational authorities came across
  Binet's work and asked him to devise a test that
  could be used to separate normal children from
  special needs students
• These tests were held between an interviewer and
  a single student, with questions like "What is
  the difference between wood and glass?" and "Make
  a sentence using the words, Paris, fortune,
  gutter"

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• The idea that a test could determine a child's
  "mental age" became enormously popular
• Just before World War I, Wilhelm Stern, a German
  psychologist, suggested a better way of
  expressing results than by mental age--Stern
  determined his results by finding the ratio
  between the subject's chronological age and their
  mental age
• Therefore, a 10-year-old scoring one year ahead
  of their chronological age (110) would be not as
  significant as a 5-year-old scoring one year
  ahead (120)

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• An American psychologist named Lewis Terman
  (1877-1956) coined the term intelligence
  quotient (I.Q.) for Stern's Binet test
  scoring system
• An average IQ score on a Binet test was 100. Any
  score above 100 was deemed above average, while
  any score below 100 was below average

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• Recognizing that the Binet test had its
  limitations, both Binet and Stern doubted IQ
  scoring actually represented a fixed inborn
  quantity of intelligence
• As Stern wrote in 1914 "No series of tests,
  however skillfully selected it may be, does reach
  the innate intellectual endowment, stripped of
  all complications, but rather this endowment in
  conjunction with all influences to which the
  examinee has been subjected up to the moment of
  testing"

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• Despite reservations of these two pioneers, the
  Binet test was enthusiastically accepted in
  America
• In 1916, a Binet test was administered to a
  prisoner on trial for murder
• Because the prisoner fared so poorly on the test,
  the Wyoming jury acquitted him by reason of his
  mental condition

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• The greatest spurt in American IQ testing came in
  1917, when America entered World War I
• Binet's original tests were designed to be
  administered to children on an individual basis,
  but the U.S. Army was faced with the dilemma of
  sorting huge numbers of draftees into various
  Army positions
• To solve this problem, the Army put together a
  committee of seven leading psychologists to
  devise a mass intelligence test
• The chairman of this committee was Robert Yerkes,
  who later admitted he was chosen simply because
  he was president of the American Psychological
  Association that year

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• One of the seven selected psychologists, Lewis
  Terman, had a pupil named Arthur Otis, who had
  already begun constructed a group intelligence
  test when the Army decided it needed one
• The committee adopted the material Otis had
  already prepared, and in six weeks the tests were
  ready for the printers. A few weeks after that
  there was a trial run with four thousand men.
  Less than two years later, by the beginning of
  1919, nearly two million American men had taken
  the Army intelligence tests
• The Army scores were not expressed using the
  intelligence quotient, but instead by simply
  awarding points for correct answers. On the basis
  of these points, men were divided into one of
  five classes, ranked from A to E

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• One of the most intriguing results whites, on
  average, scored higher that blacks but blacks
  from the North scored higher than whites from the
  South
• The tests were culturally flawed
• In the late 1940s the U.S. Army became the first
  American institution in being desegregated
  nearly 30 years after the tests were shown to be
  flawed

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• Many companies began testing programs to
  determine who would be hired, promoted or
  transferred
• But the greatest market for intelligence tests
  was the schools. In the years following World War
  I, practically every school system in the country
  began some sort of intelligence scoring program
• Intelligence testing had its share of detractors,
  including Walter Lippmann, a well-known columnist
  and social commentator. In 1922, he wrote "One
  only has to read around in the literature of the
  subject...to see how easily the intelligence test
  can be turned into an engine of cruelty, how...it
  could turn into a method of stamping a permanent
  sense of inferiority upon the soul of a
  child...."

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• Before World War II, sterilization and even
  euthanasia of the mentally feeble became legal
  practices in many states (40,000 in California
  alone)
• Almost all treated were minorities and if
  whites, they were very poor
• The Nazis said they had copied the U.S. model (of
  course they took it many steps further)

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• In the 1960s and '70s, IQ tests began to fall out
  of favor, partially because of racially and
  culturally specific test questions
• In 1964, the New York City Board of Education did
  away with IQ testing entirely, and other boards
  of education followed suit, often reluctantly
• Many lawsuits related to job hirings and denied
  education also took place during this time,
  usually finding the IQ testers guilty of
  discrimination

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• The concept of intelligence has continued to
  evolve, despite problems with and misuses of IQ
  testing. In 1983, Howard Gardner argued that
  "reason, intelligence, logic and knowledge are
  not synonymous...", setting forth a theory of
  multiple intelligences
• Gardner defined seven distinct intelligences
  logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial,
  musical, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal and
  intrapersonal intelligences
• The concept of multiple intelligences helped
  broaden the idea of "intelligence" from a
  mathematical and verbal understanding, which had
  become cemented into American culture through
  years of national testing (i.e., the SATs)

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• Gardner's ideas have made their way into
  education, and are currently being used by many
  school districts
• But traditional intelligence and scholastic
  aptitude testing has continued to gain acceptance
  and force in U.S. education
• Today, certain colleges refuse to accept students
  below certain prestigious scores on the SATs and
  many private and premier public schools accept
  students almost solely on the basis of test scores

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Faking the DataThe Kallikak Family

• In 1906, Goddard was hired by the Vineland
  Training School to conduct research on the
  genetic causes of feeble-mindedness. In addition
  to translating and administering I.Q. tests, he
  sent research assistants into the homes of
  feeble-minded children to learn what they could
  through "careful and wise questioning.
• Goddard's research resulted in the publication of
  The Kallikak Family A Study in the Heredity of
  Feeble Mindedness (1912) and Feeble-Mindedness
  Its Causes And Consequences (1914)

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