Welcome back to the second module in the first lecture unit. This second module will be actually about one of my most favorite topics to talk about. The Eugenics movement. In this module what we will discuss is first the aims of the Eugenics movement. And how Eugenicist went about trying to achieve those aims. And I think most importantly, the impact Eugenics movement had, not only on the field of psychology but on the field of behavior genetics the core, subject matter of this course. If you remember from last module, we ended with the term eugenics. Introducing the term eugenics was actually Galton introduced in the, late 19th century. Eu, Greek for well. Genics, born. I think, from 100 years out, it's probably a little difficult for us to, to fully appreciate how it is that the eugenics movement ever gained in popularity. But gain in popularity it certainly did, in the late 19th and early 20th century. There are probably several factors that contributed to the growing popularity of the Eugenics movement at the time. The 18th century, the mid-18th century was really the end of the Industrial Revolution. And what happened in the Industrial Revolution, among other things, is people migrated into cities. And they migrated into cities because that's where the manufacturing jobs were. As people migrated into cities, populations grew more dense, and social pol, pathologies were magnified or amplified. And things like crime and poverty and crowding, prostitution were observed at levels that had never been seen before. And people were worried about how to address these social pathologies that were actually a consequence of people just crowding into cities. A second aspect of the Industrial Revolution that's important to understanding may be the growing popularity of the eugenics movement is something that demographers call the demographic transition. With the industrial revolution came affluence. And, once consequence we now know of affluence is declining reproduction. And, rates of reproduction decline most rapidly among the most affluent members of society. So what was happening in England. Let's say Galtin's England of the mid to late 19th century is this, the elite, the scholarly elite of the time saw what they thought were growing social pathologies. While they were reproducing at a much lower rate. And they did, and they argued that, that the typical way of trying to address the social pathologies would not work. Ethel Elderton was a very famous early statistician disciple of, of Francis Galton who argued that social conditions alone by improving social conditions. That would not be enough to address the pathologies that were a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. What we needed to do, according to Elderton and other disciples of Galton, was we needed to brea, breed people. We needed to make sure that the right people reproduced and the wrong people did not reproduce. Again, from, from our vantage point, it may be very difficult to understand how it is that this ideology ever gained any traction. But many very popular and influential intellectuals of the time, although they might not have been card-carrying eugenicists, were certainly very sympathetic to eugenic ideology. H G Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, John Maynard Keynes, the American president Teddy Roosevelt. And Margaret Sanger. Was he certainly eugenist. Margaret Sanger is kind of an interesting case, at least for me, maybe also for you, I think most of you probably know Margaret Sanger as the founder of what we in the United States now call Planned Parenthood. The movement to provide women with access to control their reproductive behavior, birth control. And, I don't think it's surprising to recognize that birth control, early birth control was wrapped up in the Eugenics movement. What I think that is interesting about Margaret Sanger, at least again from my perspective is, when I think about Margaret Sanger, I think about someone, who's, who is a great hero, a great champion for women. But if you look at what Margaret Sanger talked about in terms of eugenics, it's hard to argue that she wasn't a eugenicist. And how is it that somebody who was a hero could also be someone who subscribed to what we now believe is a very evil ideology? I think there's probably a lesson to be learned there, that, that certainly, I at least, in my opinion Margaret Sanger was not an evil person. But that she saw eugenics much like Teddy Roosevelt or, or HG Wells or the others, as something that really could address the pathologies that they were observing at the time. What did the eugenicists do? Well, they did various things to try to popularize eugenics. One thing they did, is they did elaborate pedigree, or family studies. they, they tried to identify very informative families that could illustrate, eugenic principles. So one of these famous families is the Kallikak family, from the United States. Martin Kallikak was a revolutionary era solider. And, when he went off to war. Yeah, it's a little bit hard to see in the pedigree here, but he made it with a barmaid. And she's listed as being a feeble-minded, which is a term that was used at the time. A feeble-minded girl, of unknown family. And he produced a line, of relatives from, this barmaid. And then when he went home, he married a upstanding young woman and produced a second line of relatives, descendants. And the eugenicists, when they studied Martin Kallikak's pedigree, what they argued is that the line from the barmaid included all kinds of social pathology. Lots of intellectual disability, prostitution and crime. But the, the other line produced virtually none of this. And they calculated the cost of this line to society and they, they made various cost-benefit analysis and argued that if only that this women had been sterilized, society would've been saved the cost of all this social pathology. Another thing they did and I don't, in your country you, you might not have this, but in the United States we have what are called State Fairs. And at State Fairs they're, they were originally agricultural celebrations, and you would bring your prized animals and, and, and crops and have them judged at the state fairs. Well, in the early 20th century, the eugenicists established what are called fitter family contests, where families were also judged, human families, just like prize cattle could, and, could be judged and given a blue ribbon. Prize families were judged, and so this is a family that won a blue ribbon for being a very eugenically illustrative family in, in the Texas State Fair in 1927. This is kind of interesting family that won a blue ribbon for being very average in some eastern state. Eugenicists were, were largely successful in, in popularizing their movement. Again, not a lot of people would have been members of Eugenic societies, but the broader public did take up the Eugenic beliefs. And one illustration of this is just, the popularity of the name Eugene in the United States given to baby boys. As you see, the name Eugene increased in popularity until it reached a peak in the late 1920s and 1930s and then decreased thereafter for reasons that we'll get to in a little bit. The Eugenicists were very successful with their pedigree studies in their fit or family contest of popularizing their goals. Another thing the Eugenicists attempted to do and were in part, successful, is to influence public policy. To enact legislation in the United States. They, for example, lobbied for immigration restriction acts. In the early twentieth century, most of the immigration to the United States was from Europe. And what the eugenicists argued is that the best individuals would be coming from northern Europe, and so they passed a law, or they lobbied to pass an immigration law in 1924 that restricted immigration from southern European countries. They also lobbied for sterilization laws. Most U.S. states and many countries, certainly most of the European countries, as well as several Asian countries, had sterilization. Eugenically motivated sterilization laws on their books. The Nazi mental hygiene laws. They were enacted in the early 1930s, were actually modeled on Eugenic sterilization laws that were passed ten years earlier in the United States. Remarkably, the sterilization laws in the United States were supported by the courts. In a very famous case called Bell versus Buck. A young woman named Carrie Buck, who at the age of 17, she lived in Virginia. And at the age of 17, she was raped by a relative. And as a consequence of that rape, she produced a child, Vivian Buck. And the State of Virginia decided that Carrie Buck was intellectually disabled as was her mother. And at the age of six months they decided that her child was also intellectually disabled. Although I think it's rather questionable whether or not any psychologists could judge whether or not a six-month-old child is intellectually disabled. And the state then moved against Carrie Buck at to attempt to sterilize her. Carrie Buck argued, got legal representation, and argued in court against the sterilization, her sterilization. And this case actually went all the way to the Supreme Court of the U.S., where it was upheld, the, the position of the state of Virginia, and Carrie Buck was actually sterilized. In a very famous quote the justice, Supreme Court Justice from the United States, Oliver Wendell Holmes concluded that three generations of imbeciles is enough. A rather harsh statement I, I, you have to admit. Oliver Wendell Holmes was actually an extraordinary jurist, a progressive, but he also supported eugenic, the eugenic ideology and movement. Ultimately I think as you probably know, what began as the eugenics movement in the United States and in Europe was taken by the Nazis to deprive, in an attempt to provide a foundation for their own mental hygiene, sterilization and ultimately the Holocaust. When it was recognized, or revealed that the eugenic movement influenced early Nazi policy. The Eugenic movement almost overnight became unpopular in the West. And along with them behavioral geneticists, who were once, because of Galton's works, the darling of early psychology, really became the pariahs, the outcasts. Nobody wanted to be seen to be doing any type of research that might in any way be used to support the Nazi regime. So just like the term, the, the use of the Eugene to name baby boys declined in the 30s and 40s. Here I've, I've graphed in blue the rate at which publications in the psychological literature talked about the inheritance of behavior. And what you see is it pretty much tracks the name Eugene, that as Eugene went up, so did interest in publishing studies on heritability but as Eugene went down psychologists' interests in inheritance declined rapidly as well. What Gaulden set out to try to accomplish, to establish psychology as Darwinian, was undermined by the eugenics movement. And by the 40's and the 50's, very, very few psychologists were interested in doing behavioral genetic research. This later will come that there is a, a rebounding of interest in genetics; which we'll talk about in the next lecture unit. That created a void within psychology, and that void was filled by an ideology I would say is every bit as radical as Henry Goddard's ideology of genetic determinism. The notion that we can become anything, that we're born blank slates. This is a quote, a very famous quote from an early psychologist, John Watson, who is the founder of the radical Behaviorist movement. John Watson argued that you could take a, he, if you gave him a baby, he could turn that baby into anything he wanted it to be. A beggar, a thief, a merchant-chief, a lawyer, an artist, anything. Nobody ever gave their baby to Watson, and indeed, Watson knew he couldn't really do this. But it didn't matter. Behavior genetics was totally discredited, so Watson and his disciples became ascended. And what the Harvard Psychologist Steven Pinker calls the blank slate model of human nature grew to dominate within Psychology for more than a generation. And this is reflected in the, the notion, for example, that schizophrenia is caused by the way you were parented. Schizophrenia by the famous psychoanalytic psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann argued that schizophrenia was caused by abnormal communication from parents to offspring by schizophrenogenic mothers. Or that autism was caused by refrigerator parents. Cold, unemotional parents. By the well-known autism research of Leo Kanner. So by the nine, the late 1930s, and well into the 60s and early 70s, behavior genetics has become discredited. And it was only in, when people started to do twin studies again in the late 60s and early 70s, something that we'll talk about later in the course, that psychology came to come back and to look at behavioral genetics. Next time, I think with this historical background giving us a foundation. I'll define the field of behavior genetics and give an overview of the specific topics I'm hoping to go through in this course. [BLANK_AUDIO]
