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1B: The Eugenics Movement

Course video 2 of 65

Unit # 1: Course Introduction and OverviewOverview: Unit # 1 provides an overview to the field of human behavioral genetics and to this course. We will begin by discussing the early history of the field and how behavioral genetic research influenced and was influenced by the eugenics movement. Once this historical context has been established, we will define the field of behavioral genetics and use this definition to provide an overview of the course. This week’s lectures will end with two case studies that illustrate the importance of behavioral genetic approaches. The first is the famous John/Joan case, where one member of a monozygotic twin pair was raised as a boy and the other as a girl. The second is the human genetic disorder Phenylketonuria (PKU), which has been recognized as a paradigm of human genetic disease since its discovery in 1934.Unit Objectives: At the end of this unit you should know• The history of the founding of the field of behavioral genetics• What the eugenics movement was and how it impacted psychology and behavioral genetics• What the field of behavioral genetics covers• How the John/Joan case represented the extreme of the “Blank Slate” mentality within psychology• Why Phenylketonuria is considered a public health success and model of human genetic diseaseLecture Modules:A. The Nature-Nurture Debate and Founding of Behavioral GeneticsB. The Eugenics MovementC. What is Behavioral GeneticsD. The John/Joan CaseE. Phenylketonuria (PKU) F. Huntington Disease (Supplemental)

Behavioral genetic methodologies from twin and adoption studies through DNA analysis will be described and applied to address longstanding questions about the origins of individual differences in behavioral traits.

Skills You'll Learn

Psychology, Genetic Counseling, Genetics, Behavioral Medicine

Taught By

Matt McGue
Regents Professor

Transcript

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.

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