A Case Against ‘Genetic Over-Simplification’
Who are we? Why do we behave as we do? What explains why some die of illness at the age of 50 while others live past 100? How can we improve the human condition?
Published June 1, 2002
By Fred Moreno, Dana Van Atta, Jill Stolarik, and Jennifer Tang
Academy Contributors

The answers to these questions are coded in our genes — or so the story goes in the popular media and in some corners of the scientific establishment.
“It’s a heroic story with a dark side,” said Garland E. Allen, Ph.D., Professor of Biology at Washington University and a specialist in the history and philosophy of biology, at a recent gathering at The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy). Harking back to the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, modern genetic science is fraught with both promise and danger, Allen said, and “genomic enthusiasm” should be tempered with a good dose of historical awareness.
Eugenics in Context
Charles B. Davenport, the father of the eugenics movement in the United States, defined his fledgling field as “the science of human improvement by better breeding.” In attempting to apply Mendelian genetics to society’s ills, Davenport and his fellow eugenicists believed the problem — whether alcoholism, mental illness, or the tendency to simply “make trouble” — was in the person, not the system. The real culprit, therefore, was the individual’s defective biology, and biologists held the key to fixing the defect.
During the first four decades of the 20th century, eugenics gave credibility to American elites in their efforts to restrict the inflow of immigrants of “inferior biological stock” from southern and eastern Europe, culminating in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. The new science also provided a rationale for the compulsory sterilization of institutionalized individuals considered unfit for reproduction.
By 1935, 30 states had enacted sterilization laws that targeted habitual criminals, epileptics, the “feebleminded,” and “morally degenerate persons.” Their proponents saw them as preventive, not punitive. In their view, higher fertility rates among the less productive, genetically defective members of the population posed a threat to society, not least because of the high cost of maintaining them in prisons, in mental institutions, or on the dole.
“Social history in the United States between 1870 and 1930 was characterized by a search for order,” said Allen. “It was a period characterized by the maturation of the Industrial Revolution, rapid urbanization and growing social problem. There was a widespread sense of disorder, and many felt there was a need to do something about it.” This collective malaise made eugenics the “magic bullet” of its day.
As American as Apple Pie
Eugenics peaked during the 1930s, at the height of the Depression. Interestingly, the new science and its attendant policy program appealed to members of all social classes. Eugenics validated wealth and privilege as the birthright of the genetically superior. The rising union movement, arguably the greatest threat to the status quo, was rife with Italians and Jews, two of the groups deemed “socially inadequate.” At the same time, with competition over scarce jobs at an all-time high, eugenics fed into the anti-immigrant sentiments of the working class.
With their blatant racism, xenophobia, questionable ethics and tendency to blame the victim, eugenicists might impress us today as screwballs on the lunatic fringe of science. Actually, however, nothing could be further from the truth.
Theodore Roosevelt was just one of many highly regarded Americans who praised the science of eugenics. In his 1913 letter to Charles Davenport, Roosevelt wrote: “Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from their worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum.” Alexander Graham Bell himself served on the Board of Scientific Directors of the Eugenics Record Office, founded in 1910 as the country’s leading eugenics research and education center. In its day, the eugenics movement was mainstream and as American as apple pie.
Scientific Underpinnings
Taking its cue from advances in agriculture, eugenic science also emulated the efficiency movement in industry. “Eugenic reproductive scientists were the counterparts of the efficiency experts on the factory floor,” said Allen. In the early 20th century, farmers and industrialists alike turned to science for guidance in bringing about control and standardization.
If popular for the wrong reasons, eugenics nonetheless increased our understanding of human beings as genetic organisms. Davenport and other eugenically-minded human geneticists helped illuminate the genetic origins of a number of physical disabilities, for example, including color blindness, epilepsy and Huntington chorea. Instead of proceeding cautiously, however, Davenport and his colleagues applied the new genetic paradigm zealously and indiscriminately. All human intellectual and personality traits, they hypothesized, were ultimately reducible to heredity.
As it turns out, their methods were just as flawed as their theories. Commenting on a family study of epilepsy — rigorous for its time — Allen pointed to two methodological weaknesses: First, humans have small families compared to animals, which makes statistical modeling difficult at best. Second, research in the early 20th century was hampered by a lack of accurate information. Interviews, anecdotal accounts, and rumor were the stuff of scientific data at a time when medical record keeping was relatively haphazard.
Finally, the absolute privileging of heredity over environment trapped eugenicists in a form of circular thinking. If pellagra, a condition caused by vitamin B deficiency, was observed to run in a family, the disease must be genetically based, they thought, rather than rooted in poverty and shared nutritional deficits.
A Call for Balance
Allen warned that the genetic myopia of yesterday’s science is being recapitulated today. From shyness to homosexuality and from depression to infidelity, everything is in our genes, if we’re to trust the information in recent cover stories in Time, Business Week, and U.S. News & World Report, among other reputable publications. “These claims are as tenuously based now,” asserted Allen, “as they were in the 1920s.”
The most serious dangers of all, however, lie in the policy implications of the new genetic determinism. If a person is genetically predisposed to sensitivity to smog, why should the government commit itself to cleaning it up? Why should parents bother spending time and energy on raising a child who carries the criminality gene? And why should insurance companies pay for the care of those with genetic mutations that “cause” bipolar disorder, diabetes or cancer? We’ve seen this unhealthy marriage of scientific and political agendas before, Allen said.
Allen also argued for a more integrated approach to research. Social and biological scientists have been studying different groups, and never the twain shall meet. We’d gain a more complete picture of problems and their causation by funding integrated studies that join the perspectives of sociologists and biologists, he said. This approach would correct the current fixation on genes as bearers of the whole truth.
When it comes to the lessons of eugenics, Allen said the “that was then, this is now” attitude is worst of all. It can, indeed, happen today. He concluded by encouraging scientists who reject simplistic genetic ideas to step forward, articulate a balanced point of view and oppose the “geneticization” of the public discussion and its potentially dangerous consequences, sooner rather than later.