- So to kick off with, it's all about eugenics.
What does eugenics mean?
- Eugenics is a sort of formalization or sciencification
of a much older idea,
which is our attempts to control reproductive biology
and shape societies using strictures
that effectively say who and who cannot reproduce,
who should be having sex with whom.
And it's an idea which is as old
as anything in the Western canon.
So it's first described really in Plato in "Republic."
He describes gold-standard women would be paired
with gold-standard men,
and they would reproduce and have gold-standard children.
But there are other examples from the classical world
in which you get a similar sort of description.
Sparta is the most famous one,
where babies that were deformed would be thrown
off Mount Taygetos into the Apothetae, the deposit,
and children would be exposed overnight or dunked in wine.
And those that survived had passed the first hurdle
for selection into this society,
which was dominated by military might.
Now, we don't even know whether that happened or not,
but it becomes this mythologized, fetishized version
of a society where breeding, selective breeding
and infanticide are what makes them so strong.
What happens in the 19th century is,
in the landscape of changing demographics,
of Industrial Revolution,
of expanding colonies and immigration,
in that terrain,
eugenics becomes the science version of population control.
If we can breed animals and plants,
as we have been for the last 10,000 years, and shape them
so that they have characteristics that we find desirable,
then why can't we do that with humans too?
- And so what were the characteristics
that they would deem to be the desirable traits?
- Well, eugenics, from its inception and to this day,
remains a political ideology,
which is the powerful on those without power.
And so it's formulated by Francis Galton,
a Victorian polymath.
He's a racist and a white supremacist in ways
which were typical though not universal for that time.
But as ever, it is that.
It is the maintenance and the development
of the characteristics of what they regarded
as the greatest people who could exist on Earth
at that time, which is white men, white European men.
As soon as you apply value judgments about who is desirable
and what characteristics are desirable,
it means that there are people
at the other end of that spectrum,
and they are being selected against.
Very soon after that, it becomes,
well, it's these people who have those characteristics,
and therefore we don't...
We find characteristics such as disability undesirable,
and then the criteria for what is disability expand.
And then it includes vague pseudo-psychiatric definitions,
like feeble-mindedness or imbeciles or morons.
These are all contemporary terms.
We use them as playground insults now,
but at the time, they were diagnostic.
And then it becomes women with menstrual troubles,
and then it becomes inebriates,
and then it becomes epileptics,
and then it becomes the Jews,
and then it becomes the Slavs.
And in every case where we see eugenics
being talked about or enacted, that's the pathway.
- And then there's the...
I don't even know if "debate" is the right word,
but there's the constant interest
within the general population
of the idea of nature versus nurture.
How much can genes even control your likes and dislikes,
what you're good at, what you become?
- "Nature versus nurture" is a phrase
that Francis Galton invented in thinking about heredity.
He means nature, which he didn't have.
We didn't have genetics in the 1870s and 80s.
But he means the innate,
which we now understand as being encoded in DNA,
and nurture being your environment.
Now, Galton and the original eugenicists,
they sometimes get called hereditarians,
which is that he attributes our behaviors
far more to nature than to nurture.
So every characteristic has a gene.
This is their theorizing,
which we now don't think is correct.
Every characteristic, every trait is controlled
by a unit of inheritance that we think of now as genes.
And if you can identify how these run
through families and through societies,
then we have a template which we can adopt.
This is not how biology works.
Maybe a better way to think of it is nature via nurture
because our genes are expressed in the environment,
and there are infinite variables that can determine
or that can influence what your DNA says in your lived life.
You could think of your DNA as a film script,
but your lived life is the performance,
the screen that you see,
which involves not just the words on the page
but how they're performed and the lighting
and the camerawork and the direction.
- Well, Adam, it's been such a pleasure to chat to you.
There is so much to explore in this book.
I've enjoyed it very much, so thank you so much.
- It is a super fun book, isn't it?
- [Holly] Yeah, super fun.
(soft music)