When eugenics was the exciting new field of science
Scholars who study the interactions of science and society often lament the public’s ignorance of the history of science. And they bemoan the public’s gullibility in accepting the latest announcement of a supposed new scientific discovery. So it’s good to see Dan Vergano‘s piece in USA Today online about a genetics journal shining a bright light on the darker recesses of its past–the heyday of the eugenics movement.
The Annals of Human Genetics, which began life in 1925 as the Annals of Eugenics, has opened its archive for the first 29 years of its existence, during which it was one of the premier vehicles of scientific evidence that led to the forced sterilization of at least 60,000 people. The Annals was also a leading champion of scientific racism. The journal is also publishing reports by historians on what they find in the archive.
It’s a sordid history–by today’s standards–and Vergano does a fine job in reminding us of its details and surprising some of us that the founder of the original journal was a pioneer of legitimate statistical methods, creating such still-useful tools as the P-value and the chi-square test.
What Vergano and the journal’s housecleaning makes clear is that eugenics was not pseudoscience. It was horribly wrong in many ways, but it was widely accepted among researchers as good science.
–Boyce Rensberger
April 26th, 2011 at 4:41 am
There’s certainly much we can learn from the principles behind eugenics. I personally believe that the ethical route is to improve education and encourage self-learning to solve the problems that would otherwise require unethical practices (sterilization, etc). Education is longer-term, so it is much harer to quantify, but I feel the results would be much more solid and create a quality foundation.