TITLE: The Dangerous Resurgence of “Bad Genes” Language
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/misinformation-desk/202410/the-dangerous-resurgence-of-bad-genes-language
EXCERPT: Science journalist Carl Zimmer traces the history of eugenics in the United States in his powerful book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh. This book about genes includes the story of a young unwanted girl, Emma Wolverton. In 1897, at just 8 years old, Emma’s mother dropped her off at the Vineland Training School, a home for “feeble-minded children” in New Jersey.
By all accounts, Emma was not feebleminded. In fact, Emma was abandoned at the behest of her mother’s new husband, who did not want to raise any children who were not biologically his. As Zimmer wrote, “visitors commented on how normal she seemed.”
Emma’s life changed when she was 17 years old, and psychologist Henry Goddard became the first Director of Research at the Vineland Training School. Soon after his arrival, Goddard began to categorize the children of Vineland, misusing an intelligence test that was not designed for the purpose of categorization. He grouped the children into the existing categories of “idiot"— those with the lowest intelligence—and “imbecile,” the next level.
When there were children at Vineland whose intelligence was not deemed low enough to fit into these categories, Goddard invented the new term “moron.” Emma Wolverton was classified as a moron despite her obvious skills in many areas, from reading to woodworking. Unfortunately, Goddard believed that intelligence, and especially feeblemindedness, was largely hereditary. So he sought out evidence to support this belief, recruiting fieldworkers to trace Emma’s family, tracking almost 400 Wolvertons back to the family patriarch, John Wolverton. (Spoiler alert: The findings from this “research” would later turn out to be false.)
Goddard gave the family pseudonyms, choosing the surname Kallikak as a combination of the Greek words for good and bad. So, Emma became Deborah Kallikak and John became Martin Kallikak, Sr. in Goddard's best-selling book, The Kallikak Family. Goddard outlined two branches of Martin’s family tree: 1) the mostly “feebleminded” descendants from a liaison with “a nameless feebleminded girl” that led eventually to Emma, and 2) the mostly “normal” descendants from John's marriage to his “lawful wife” who was of “normal” intelligence. Holding up the supposed divergent genealogies as evidence for his theory, Goddard wrote: “The biologist could hardly plan and carry out a more rigid experiment.”
As scientists now recognize, eugenics research, including that described in The Kallikak Family, was used to justify a range of harmful practices. It was used as a basis for the Immigration Act of 1924, which prevented groups seen as undesirable from entering the United States. And in 1927, it was used to support mandatory sterilization laws for those perceived to be lower in intelligence, almost always applied to women rather than men. Among those perceived as undesirable based on eugenics were people from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as those who were Jewish, Black, Indigenous, Latino/Latina, and Asian (Chatters et al., 2022). Unfortunately, for several decades, these badly researched and false ideas were mainstream.
As Zimmer wrote in his 2018 book, the popularity of eugenics slowly decreased in the United States through the 1930s, and The Kallikak Family was out of print by the end of that decade. Disastrously, it had been translated into German in 1933 and was specifically credited for the development of Nazi policies. A film in Germany even juxtaposed the Kallikak family tree with quotes from Adolf Hitler. These ideas from the United States, including some from Goddard, were used by the Nazis to justify the sterilization of people with a range of disabilities, the murder of people with disabilities, and the sterilization and then murder of many others, including Roma people and Jewish people.
This dark history reminds us that any resurgence of eugenics, including referring to genes as “good” and “bad,” is dangerous. Indeed, Goddard referred to the “good side of the Kallikak family” and attributed low intelligence to “bad stock” (Smith & Wehmeyer, 2012). And remember that even the pseudonym, Kallikak, combines the Greek words for good and bad.
In her 2019 book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, science journalist Angela Saini argues that eugenics and race science never really went away, despite efforts to banish them after the Nazi atrocities of World War II. She describes current race scientists as hiding behind a veil of academic freedom, and she details the embrace of race science by authoritarian leaders to justify discriminatory and White supremacist policies. Relatedly, Linda Chatters and her colleagues (2022) discuss the historical undercurrents of modern-day White supremacy, including “The Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that White European people in the United States are being replaced by non-White people. Chatters and her colleagues describe these beliefs as “based in fears about immigration and declining [W]hite political power” and “prompted [by] anti‐immigration and pro‐eugenic attitudes.”
We see this resurgence of ideas and language from race science right now in right-wing politics in the United States.
TITLE: How Trump’s racist talk of immigrant ‘bad genes’ echoes some of the last century’s darkest ideas about eugenics
https://theconversation.com/how-trumps-racist-talk-of-immigrant-bad-genes-echoes-some-of-the-last-centurys-darkest-ideas-about-eugenics-241548
EXCERPTS: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly denounced immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally and the danger he says that poor immigrants of color pose for the U.S. – often using hateful language to make his point.
In early October 2024, Trump took his comments a step further when he questioned immigrants’ faulty genes, saying without support that “Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they are now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
It was far from the first time Trump has invoked eugenics – a false, racist theory that some people, and even some races, are genetically superior to others.
In 1988, for example, Trump told Oprah Winfrey during an interview: “You have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.”
In 2016, Trump said that his German roots are the reason behind his greatness:
“I always said that winning is somewhat, maybe, innate. Maybe it’s just something you have; you have the winning gene. Frankly it would be wonderful if you could develop it, but I’m not so sure you can. You know, I’m proud to have that German blood, there’s no question about it. Great stuff.”
And in 2020, Trump again alluded to his belief that bloodlines convey excellence:
“I had an uncle who went to MIT who is a top professor. Dr. John Trump. A genius. It’s in my blood. I’m smart.”
Trump’s repeated and countless comments about white people’s racial superiority to people of color have prompted some comparisons to the Nazis and their ideology of racial superiority.
In April 2024, Trump used dehumanizing language to express his apparent belief that immigrants are unworthy of empathy. “The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals.’”
Trump has also promoted eugenicists’ obsession with Scandinavia and the superiority of white people.
In 2018, Trump spoke about immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa, saying “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”
In the same meeting, Trump also reportedly suggested that the U.S. should instead draw in more people from countries like Norway.
In April 2024, Trump again embraced this idea of Scandinavian superiority, saying that he wants immigrants from “Nice countries. You know, like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”
A person running for president in 1924 would seem more likely than a candidate in 2024 to espouse this now-discredited point of view.
President Calvin Coolidge ran for election on an “America First” platform in 1924, with the slogan only falling out of favor after groups like the Ku Klux Klan embraced it around the same time.
The idea of America First, at the time, denoted American nationalism and exceptionalism – but also was linked to anti-immigration and fascist movements.
When Coolidge signed the heavily restrictive 1924 Immigration Act into law he stated, “America must remain American.”
One hundred years later, Trump calls to mind an America First mentality, including when he regularly reads the lyrics to a song called “The Snake” during his rallies as a way to explain the dangers of welcoming immigrants into the U.S. The civil rights activist Oscar Brown wrote this poem in 1963, and his family has said that Trump misinterprets the song’s words.
‘I saved you,’ cried that woman.
‘And you’ve bit me even, why’
‘You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die.’
‘Oh shut up, silly woman,’ said the reptile with a grin,
‘You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.’
TITLE: Trump’s talk of ‘bad genes’ is rooted in eugenics. Experts explain why it’s making a comeback
https://www.statnews.com/2024/10/28/eugenics-in-political-rhetoric-open-science-movement-expert-analysis/
EXCERPTS: When Donald Trump talks about undocumented immigrants, he often brings up genetics.
Immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” he said at a rally last year.
“Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” he said earlier this month. “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
The former president also has a history of statements suggesting that certain people are genetically superior. A 2016 documentary pointed out Trump’s father, Fred, introduced him to “racehorse theory” as a child — the idea that “that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get superior offspring.” He’s used this idea to promote his own intelligence as well. “I had an uncle who went to MIT who is a top professor, Dr. John Trump. A genius. It’s in my blood. I’m smart,” he told CNN in 2020.
This way of talking about genetics is rooted in a long history that begins with the English anthropologist Francis Galton, who took his cousin Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and applied it to humans, first using the term eugenics in 1883. The nascent field of eugenics matured into a full-fledged field of study in the United States. Much later, in the 1990s, the sequencing of the human genome inadvertently created a new surge in eugenics — emboldened by the idea that scientists could isolate genes responsible for complex behaviors, like poverty, crime and intelligence.
Those affiliated with the Human Genome Project hoped sequencing the genome would end notions that genetics created significant differences in different groups — “that it would lead us to this post-racial world,” said Aaron Panofsky, the director of the Institute for Society and Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“But it turns out that both scientists and the public spend all their interest in the 0.1% of genetic variation that makes us different, not the 99.9% that makes us the same.”
In promoting their research to the public and getting research funding from the government, geneticists often hyped up the role genes play in people’s lives. The Human Genome Project “was a huge public undertaking,” said Emily Merchant, a historian of science at the University of California, Davis. “It was almost $3 billion and took more than a decade to complete. So it needed a lot of popular support. The scientists who were trying to generate that popular support did it by promoting genetic determinism.”
This sentiment persisted in ensuing years because of popular genetic testing companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com, which marketed its products with the premise that an understanding of genetics held the secret to good health and could quantify people’s sense of belonging to racial or ethnic groups.
In the early 2010s, there was another shift in how mainstream academic circles discussed ideas that intelligence was genetic or that race had a biological basis. Richard Lynn, a psychologist who claimed that people from certain countries had lower IQs, promoted a biased dataset on IQ differences between countries that became increasingly widespread in academia. Another theory, called “differential K theory,” began to circulate around this time, stating that Black people have lower IQs and are more aggressive.
“The national IQ database, differential K theory, they should have died the death bad science deserves to die. They have no scientific merit,” said Rebecca Sear, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Brunel University who has documented the resurgence in eugenics in demography. “They’ve both been extensively critiqued. They are both currently thriving in the academic literature.”
While controversial among the scientific community, ideas like Lynn’s continued to spread in academia, in part because of the ethos of academic freedom — the idea that scholars should be able to research and debate any issues in their field, and that rejecting a paper based on problematic findings is tantamount to censorship.
“That’s a very, very problematic argument, but I think it is quite widespread,” Sear said. “Academic freedom isn’t the freedom to say literally anything in an academic forum. It’s the freedom to say anything with a sound methodological basis.”
While these ideas lacked scientific rigor, Sear explained, they were often not intended for other scientists. “Scientific racism really is not aimed at academia. It’s aimed at the outside world. And this, I think, is why it’s so often such bad science,” Sear said.
The open science movement around this time also proved to boost the spread of flawed research on race, ethnicity, and genetics. Academic journals increasingly were publishing papers without paywalls, so anyone could access them, and often requiring the data underpinning research to be available.
Some scientists had also begun posting early drafts of their work, called “preprints,” on public forums. By doing science in the public square this way, people with explicit political agendas could access, manipulate, and reinterpret published research in a way that sometimes took academics by surprise.
Online, white nationalists used popular genetic testing websites to prove how white they were, and reanalyzed scientific data with a bent to affirming biological differences between races. They also seized on uncertainty among biologists about how to discuss race in the academic literature. Discussion forums on the subject might lean on anti-science conspiracy theories, but users could sometimes make sophisticated arguments about statistical uncertainties or the distinction between correlation and causation.
“They read both against and with the scientific literature, and that’s the way in which it becomes a very complicated dance that they sometimes make,” said Panofsky, who has studied the ways that far-right movements weaponize genetics.
The solution to the weaponization of genetics isn’t gatekeeping research, experts studying the issue agree. But, they say that academia hasn’t confronted the ways science can be used to embolden bigotry.
“We have basically a metric for how much Nazis like your research,” said Jedidiah Carlson, a population geneticist at Macalester College who led an analysis of how preprints circulate among right-wing extremists online. But it’s not a feature many are interested in. He wants to see researchers more attuned to the long-term impact of their work.
Incentive structures in research are also responsible for the continued popularity of research on topics like the links between genetics and intelligence or educational attainment, Carlson said. It’s “easy to get money for it, because you can say this has immediate policy implications for education and immigration policy … It’s just treated as this generic ‘apolitical’ research when it never has been.”
The failure to deeply engage with the dark history of eugenics and the way it’s informed a number of academic fields is linked to current political hostility directed toward immigrants, according to Marielena Hincapié, an immigration scholar and lawyer at Cornell University who hosted a symposium on the 100-year legacy of eugenics and the Immigration Act of 1924.
She points to recent attacks on immigrant communities carried out by people that believe in the Great Replacement Theory, a conspiracy that posits there is a concerted effort to diminish the power and influence of white people in the United States. The gunman behind one such attack, in Buffalo, New York, directly cited genetics research in his thinking.
The incident sparked some soul searching within the genetics community, which has also pushed back on problematic use of its research. In one case, a genetics consortium challenged the use of its data by a private company to screen embryos. On another occasion, a now-defunct app claimed it could test users on whether they had genes associated with same-sex sexual orientation, drawing on a paper published in Science. That prompted a protest petition signed by more than 1,600 scientists.
There’s also growing interest in the scientific community in how social determinants, such as economic policies, racism, and climate change, shape people’s health, and in the field of epigenetics, which studies how the environment affects gene expression. These paradigms open up an understanding that “genes are not necessarily in the driver’s seat, but they’re in an interactive relationship with a whole bunch of other factors,” said Panofsky. “They seem to open a door to a post-deterministic biology and genetics.”
SEE ALSO:
The sprawling task ahead for Vermont’s historic truth commission
https://www.vermontpublic.org/local-news/2024-10-30/vermont-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-sprawling-task-history-eugenics