While Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was developed independently of ideas about eugenics and social policy, some later interpreted his work as supporting eugenics programs. Eugenics emerged in the late 19th century with the goal of improving human hereditary traits through policies like encouraging reproduction among the "fit" and discouraging it among the "unfit." Eugenics programs were implemented in several Western countries in the early 20th century, most notoriously by the Nazis in Germany. However, Darwin's theory does not inherently imply any social or political program, and many evolutionary biologists opposed eugenics. The relationship between scientific theories of heredity and evolution and their social interpretations is complex.

1. “Darwinism” and eugenics
John Wilkins, University of Queensland

2. The Eugenics Myth
• Or, Nazis ate my Evolution
• The claim is:
Eugenics is applied Darwinism.And it sticks out like a sore thumb that all of these
German eugenicists, preceding the Nazi regime, were enthusiastic Darwinists.
Margaret Sanger, of course, in this country of Planned Parenthood—enthusiastic
Darwinist. Hitler—that is the most amazing thing at all, that I could get through 12
years of government schools here in the United States, Cornell and Michigan Law
School, and with all of the chit-chat about what led to the Nazi regime, I never knew
about the link between Darwin and Hitler, until reading Richard Weikart’s book.And
once you see it, it’s one of those things you see that the truth has an inherent appeal
—the moment you hear it, suddenly it all makes sense. I mean, how is it that Hitler
could simultaneously seem to be anti-abortion, but be slaughtering six million Jews?
Well, that’s because he wasn’t against abortion for Jews. He was applying Darwinism.
He thought the Aryans were the fittest and he was just hurrying natural selection
along. I mean, Mein Kampf means my struggle, which he described in explicitly
Darwinian terms—the struggle among races.

3. Is this true?
• Did Darwin’s theory
of evolution lead to
the Holocaust?
• Is eugenics always
racist?
• What does this
mean for modern
technologies like
genetic counselling?

4. Darwin’s theories
• Transmutation of species
• Struggle for existence
• Natural selection
• Common Descent
• Sexual Selection
• Heredity
• Biogeography

5. Natural Selection
• There are more organisms born than can survive
• Traits vary in a population
• Some traits have a greater contribution to
survival and reproduction than others
• These traits are heritable
• Ergo, traits that are better adapted will spread
through a population

6. Types of selection

7. Common Descent
• Organisms fall into
groups within groups
• e.g., Mammals within
Vertebrates
• So the history of life is
like a tree

8. What Natural Selection
Isn’t in social terms

9. Social Darwinism
• Began 4 years before the Origin
of Species was published in 1859
• Based on the work of Herbert
Spencer
• Spencer aimed at a universal
philosophy based on evolution
• He therefore argued that
society was served by
elimination of the unfit

10. Evolution before
Darwin
• The first person to offer an
evolutionary theory was the French
physicist Pierre Maupertuis, in 1743
• Maupertuis also held that
inheritance came equally from both
parents, and was passed on in
discrete particles. He came up with
something very similar to
Mendelian ratios, based on a study
of polydactyly

11. Evolution before
Darwin
• Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus,
also proposed an evolutionary
theory in 1794
• He was followed by Jean
Baptiste de Lamarck in 1800–
1809
• Both theories involved
progress and a scale from
lower to higher

12. Progress and evolution
• The idea of a scale of
nature is called the Great
Chain of Being
• Racial classifications,
begun in the 1760s,
relied on races being
thought to be “higher or
lower”
• It was popular from the
15th century onwards
(Lullius, right, from 1550)

13. Racial classification
before evolution
1799
1770
1854

14. So when evolution was
• We get this:
• Note that the left-
to-right order
matches racial
rankings:African,
Australian,
Mongolian, European

15. Racialist evolutionism
• Ernst Haeckel developed
“Darwinismus”, a mix of Lamarck,
Darwin and Goethe
• He believed that
evolution was
progressive, and that
races were part of a
spectrum from apes
to Aryans (mid-
Europeans)

16. Racialist evolutionism
after Haeckel
• In the period from 1890 to 1930,
there were many racialist evolution
books and pamphlets
• About this time, genetics developed
• Many early geneticists were both
evolutionists and eugenicists
• But not all: a famous opponent of
eugenics was the leading
evolutionary geneticist,Theodosius
Dobzhansky

17. Dobzhansky wrote in
1935
“The eugenical Jeremiahs keep constantly before our
eyes the nightmare of human populations accumulating
recessive genes that produce pathological effects when
homozygous. These prophets of doom seem to be
unaware of the fact that wild species in the state of
nature fare in this respect no better than man does with
all the artificiality of his surroundings, and yet life has not
come to an end on this planet. The eschatological cries
proclaiming the failure of natural selection to operate in
human populations have more to do with political beliefs
than with scientific findings.”

18. The origins of eugenics
• Term coined in 1887 by Francis Galton,
Darwin’s first cousin
• From eu- a Greek prefix meaning “good” or”
well”, and genos, meaning “tribe” or “race” or
“kind”, related to the term genes, meaning
“stock” or “birth”: hence “well born” or
“good stock”

19. Before Galton
• There is a tradition of breeding humans the way
livestock are bred going back to the Spartans
• Plato argued for it in The Republic around
380BCE
• The western tradition of the Aristocracy (“rule
by the best”) spoke of “good breeding” and
“good (and bad) blood”, at a time when
inheritance was thought to involve the blood

20. Galton on Hereditary
Genius
• Published in 1869, this book aimed to match
achievement (by “professional men”) with
families, in order to establish how social traits
were passed on
• No simple distinction between biology and
culture at this time
• Galton invented “biometrics” (measurement of
biological traits) and started the development of
modern statistics, such as the “normal curve”

21. Eugenics in America
• From 1907, the United States
introduced eugenics legislation,
along with other English speaking
countries such as Australia,
Canada, South Africa and others.
• The charge was led by Charles
Davenport, who headed up the
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories,
where he started the Eugenics
Records Office

22. Eugenics in America
• Connecticut enacted marriage laws with
eugenic criteria in 1896 to prevent the
“epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded” from
marrying
• William Graham Sumner, a social
Darwinist sociologist, argued
against state support for the
“defective” portion of society, who
should be allowed to sink or swim
on their own, and that
“delinquents” should be eliminated
by sterilisation

23. • Eugenics became something of a cause celebre
amongst educated people
• Davenport was influenced strongly by Galton,
and Pearson and Fisher at the Galton Institute
in London
• In 1927, the Supreme Court decided in Buck v
Bell that the “feeble-minded” could be forcibly
sterilised by the state, declaring of one family
that “four generations of idiots are enough”
Eugenics in America

24. The Eugenics Movement
– 1921

25. Eugenics in America
• The last sterilisations occurred in America in
1967!
• In Canada and Australia in 1972!
• Interestingly, in the land of its birth – the
United Kingdom – church pressure ensured
that legislation for eugenics was never
passed

26. Eugenics in Germany
• The original Nazi legislation in 1933 was
deliberately modeled on the US legislation
• In 1942 the Final Solution was commenced,
killing six million Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and
“mentally unfit” in industrial scales
• The Nazis also practised a positive eugenics,
giving state subsidies to those who were
Aryan to have more children

27. “This person with hereditary
defects costs the community
60,000 Reichsmarks in his
lifetime. Fellow Germans, that is
your money too”
“We do not stand alone” – listing
the countries that have eugenics
legislation like the 1933 German
law

28. So, is evolution to
blame?
• The counter-evolutionary nature of eugenics:
• Natural selection doesn’t need intervention by
definition; this is artificial selection
• Natural selection defines the “fit” – if the Irish,
or the working class, etc. are outbreeding
other classes or nationalities, then they are by
definition more fit
• Might makes right: the drawing of moral or
values from what is “natural”.The Naturalistic
Fallacy

29. Is evolution to blame?
• The science from which eugenics
was drawn was genetics, not
evolution. Evolutionary theory
and genetics did not become
harmonised until 1930...
• By Ronald Fisher, who devoted
some one-third of his seminal
work The GeneticalTheory of
Natural Selection to arguing for
eugenics

30. Different kinds of
eugenics
• Two kinds of eugenics:
• Positive eugenics, in which the “fit” are
encouraged to breed and given incentives
• Negative eugenics, in which the “unfit” are
sterilised, prevented from breeding, or
killed (“euthanised”)
• State involvement:
• Laissez faire versus enforced eugenics

31. Back to Social
Darwinism
• Herbert Spencer is often called a social
Darwinist
• But he predated Darwin, and was appalled at
the use of his ideas by American industrialists
to justify their materialism
• Sumner was a social Darwinist, but arguably
the only one
• The term “social Darwinism” has no generic
content; it was a term used to smear
opponents, particularly by the Left

32. Not all Darwinian applications
to society are evil
• “Darwinism” is a mythical creature
• If it means Darwinian theory, then it has no
moral consequences
• If it means anything, it is Haeckel’s
Darwinismus
• But the odour of social evolutionary theory
and eugenics affected attempts to apply
Darwinian evolution to society

33. Social biology
• Early social evolution
theories were based on non-
Darwinian views, such as the
neo-Lamarckians’
• In the 1970s, Ed Wilson
published Sociobiology, in
which he argued that
behaviour is genetically
determined
• Critics called this “eugenics”

34. Genes and health
• Since the rise of molecular genetics, it has
become common to screen for genetic
illnesses such as Porphyria,Tay-Sachs, and
Trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome), so that
parents can decide to abort
• Recently, gene screening has started for
insurance and employment purposes

35. Natural selection and
Nazism
• Did the Nazis employ natural selection?
• Their view of competition was between
nations and races, not individuals as Darwin
(mostly) thought
• They rarely appealed to evolution, and when
they did, it was of a progressive kind
• They also appealed to Christianity, pagan
religion, and genetics, as well as an old
tradition called Volksphilosophie.

36. Discussion