Eugenics and the Nature–Nurture Debate in the Twentieth Century

Eugenics and the Nature–Nurture Debate in the Twentieth Century Aaron Gillette 2007 Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Part I The Rebirth of Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology 1 Foundations for a “New” Synthesis 21 2 Recent Studies on Human Sexuality 27 Part II The Birth of Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology 3 The Animal Nature of Humans 41 4 Earlier Studies on Human Sexuality 61 5 Evolution, Ethics, and Culture 95 Part III The Death of Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology 6 The Rise of Environmental Behaviorism 107 7 Evolutionary Psychology under Attack 121 8 The Death of Evolutionary Psychology 135 viii CONTENTS 9 Lost in the Wilderness 157 Conclusion 163 List of Abbreviations 169 Notes 171 Bibliography 201 Index 219 Acknowledgments y sincere thanks go to Elof Carlson, Geoffrey Miller, and Jonathan MSpiro for discussions on various aspects of this work. Jeff Jackson, Brian Alnutt, David Weiden, and Michael Gelb read and offered very helpful suggestions on parts of the manuscript. The staffs of many libraries and archives played a key role in the completion of this work. Especially noteworthy is the assistance of the inter-library loan staff of George Mason University and the University of Maryland College Park. Judith May-Sapko, Special Collections Librarian/ Archivist of the Pickler Memorial Library, Truman State University, cheer- fully spent many hours helping me obtain documents. Above all, Shannon Cunningham and the inter-library loan staff of the University of Houston- Downtown were truly remarkable in their dedication to obtaining the materials used in this work. Patrick Kerwin of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, Marianne Kasica of the University of Pittsburgh Archives, and Mott Lin of Clark University Archives provided help at crit- ical moments. Holly Heighes graciously provided invaluable assistance uncovering important information in the Robert Yerkes Papers of Yale University. Funding for this project came from George Mason University Department of History and Art History and the American Heritage Center of the University of Wyoming. Introduction The keystone of the new social structure, the pivotal factor of advancing civilization, the guide of the new religion, is biology; for man is an animal, and his characteristics, his requirements, his reactions, can be recorded and studied quite as carefully and precisely as those of any other animal. Edward M. East, Heredity and Human Affairs, p. 13 Man has never understood man, and the worst feature of this failure is that his misunderstandings have been fraught with incalculable evils throughout the course of human history. Samuel Jackson Holmes, “Darwinian Ethics,” p. 119 Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. Friedrich Nietzsche, Humans All too Human, p. 63 n February 15, 1978, Edward O. Wilson sat on the stage of an Oauditorium, waiting to address an audience. Suddenly, a young woman leapt onto the stage, grasped a pitcher of ice water, and poured it onto Wilson’s head. Others ran onto the stage and waved anti-Wilson placards, chanting, “Wilson, you’re all wet.”1 Several weeks before, two of Wilson’s colleagues, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, wrote an attack against him in the New York Review of Books.2 They claimed that Wilson was an ally of eugenicists, and his theory was a dangerous pseudoscience associated with “the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.”3 Wilson was a professor of biology at Harvard University. The meeting at which he was attacked was the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This is not how scientists are supposed to act. But such was the case with the nature–nurture debate of the twentieth century. 2 EUGENICS AND THE NATURE–NURTURE DEBATE When the century opened, most biologists were convinced that much of human behavior had a hereditary basis. Over the course of the next three decades, a coherent body of research developed from the union of that premise with the concepts of natural and sexual selection as conceived by Charles Darwin the century before. By 1930, a group of biologists had substantial evidence to support the premise that some aspects of human behavior were the products of evolutionary adaptation. By then, the theory of evolution in one form or another was almost universally accepted in the scientific community. And humans were, after all, animals. It seemed that some of the mysteries of human behavior were finally yielding to the insights biology could provide. Biology helps us understand ourselves, in body and in mind. How could it be otherwise? Contrary to what we might wish to believe, science does not always follow clear paths illuminated by reason. Certainly the nature–nurture debate of the early twentieth century stands out as an example of science guided by ideological preconceptions. Rivalries, hatreds, and insinuations poisoned the science of human behavior in the years after World War I. In the first thirty years of the new century, many scientists studying human behavior were amassing evidence that some aspects of human behavior were influenced by heredity, driven by evolutionary forces. Charles Darwin had suggested that such was the case. Experimental evidence and theoretical refinements over the next several generations strengthened the argument. However, a strange twist of fate emerged to damn the work of these evolutionary psychologists. They were, with few exceptions, also eugenicists. Their work had been inspired by their belief in the promises of eugenics to mold the human species. Eugenics was a pseudoscience, an epiphenomenon of a number of sci- ences, which all intersected at the claim that it was possible to consciously guide human evolution. Springing from the platform that human behavior was tied to evolutionary heredity, eugenics made the disturbing claim that human traits could be accurately measured, quantified, and assessed for social desirability. Given that these traits were supposedly inherited, manipulating the reproduction of people with these traits could spread or diminish the prevalence of these traits in later generations. As became increasingly clear, eugenics could be dressed up as an apparently humane solution to a variety of social and medical problems. However, careful consideration of its methods and aims revealed deep layers of flawed assumptions and immoral agendas. Some scientists refused to see the moral dangers inherent in eugenics. To them eugenics seemed to offer the promise of a world engineered by coolly logical scientists. Such a world, they naively assumed, could only be for the better. Thus, with one hand they offered the world their scientific work as evolutionary psychologists. INTRODUCTION 3 With the other they blithely offered a eugenical program to make practical use of the new knowledge and remold the human species. It may have been possible to evaluate and accept the scientific work, while sternly rejecting the pernicious eugenic fantasies. This did not happen. There were other students of human behavior in the early twentieth century who had never accepted that “nature” had much to do with the human mind. This group was wedded to the assumption that environment shaped virtually all behavior. They caught on quickly to the deep flaws of eugenics, and did the world a service by exposing these flaws. However, their distrust of the possible links between heredity and behavior, though in some ways salutary, became exaggerated. Environmental behaviorists4 eventually attacked any suggestion that human behavior could be influenced by heredity. Their “anti-nature” attitudes, driven by ideological con- viction, stifled important early work on evolutionary psychology. By the 1930s, the nature–nurture debate was definitively resolved in the United States and Britain. “Nature” theories of human behavior were now seen not simply as bad science, but as immoral science. Human nature was only—nurture. Those who questioned this new truth did so at their own professional peril. By the 1960s, however, nagging questions demanded answers. Since World War II, a growing body of evidence supported the existence of instincts in animals. Did this not have some application to human beings? Had not scientists once agreed that humans were, in the fact, animals? In 1975, Edward O. Wilson published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis: This work was an extensive compendium of recent research that gave the world a new “nature” theory called sociobiology. Its sister theory, evolutionary psychology, would be born a decade later.5 And so the nature–nurture battle once again raged in the scientific world. However, the casualties from years before would not be resurrected. The early pioneers in the biology of human behavior, whose solid scientific work had been tainted by their simultaneous advocacy of eugenics, remained forgotten, their work unknown. In a sense, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology had died before World War II, only to be reborn decades later in a new guise. Unbeknownst to the new scientific generation, some of the most important theoretical and empirical work conducted in the late twentieth century in the name of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology had already been accomplished half a century earlier. This book will examine the vicissitudes of the nature–nurture debate of the twentieth century, and the ideological underpinnings of the debate. On the broader scale, it will consider the extent to which science, in its “real world” context, was driven by ideological imperatives in the twentieth century. 4 EUGENICS AND THE NATURE–NURTURE DEBATE Many in the American public retain the notion of the “scientist” as an individual whose life is devoted to the discovery and advancement of knowledge, perhaps oblivious to the ethical implications of his or her dis- coveries. Scientists, supposedly, are unafraid to challenge the boundaries of social convention and the current mental frameworks that support those conventions.

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