Читать книгу Superior: The Fatal Return of Race Science - Angela Saini, Angela Saini - Страница 10

THE PAST IS BUILT of the things we choose to remember.

The Max Planck Society, with its headquarters in Munich, Germany, has an illustrious history. It has been the intellectual home of eighteen Nobel Prize winners, including the theoretical physicist Max Planck, after whom it’s named. With an annual budget of 1.8 billion euros, its institutes employ more than 14,000 scientists, producing over 15,000 published scientific papers a year. By any standards, it’s one of the most prestigious centres of science in the world. But in 1997 biologist Hubert Markl, then president of the Max Planck Society, made a decision that would threaten the reputation of his entire establishment. He wanted to scratch beneath its glorious history to reveal a secret that had been hidden for fifty years.

Before 1948, the Max Planck Society existed in a different incarnation, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Established in the German Empire in 1911, it was as important then as it is now, cementing Germany’s place in modern scientific history. Even Albert Einstein did some of his research at one of its institutes. But it was later, as the Nazis took power and began to act on their own scientific priorities, that things took a disturbing turn. We know that figures from within science and academia must have played a role in developing Adolf Hitler’s ideology of racial hygiene, which argued that those of pure, ‘Aryan’ racial stock should be encouraged to breed, while others were gradually eliminated – an ideology that culminated in the Holocaust. It couldn’t have been done without scientists, both to provide the theoretical framework for such an audacious experiment, and to carry out the job itself. On the practical side, there would have been those setting up concentration camps and gas chambers, as well as determining who should die. And then there were all the gruesome human experiments known to have been carried out on people who were eventually killed, plundering them for biological data.

There were rumours that staff from within the Kaiser Wilhelm Society had been involved, that they were maybe even party to murder and torture. In hindsight, they must have been. Under the regime, notes writer James Hawes, half the nation’s doctors were Nazi party members. For a decade, German universities had taught racial theory.

But whatever went on was quietly forgotten after the Second World War. Although there was undoubtedly a story to be uncovered, it was thought wiser to leave it alone. By the Max Planck Society’s own admission, it had a tradition of glossing over its ignominious past in favour of celebrating its greater scientific achievements. By the 1990s, however, there was too much pressure from the public to ignore that past any longer. And anyway, older members of staff who had been alive during the war – who might be affected by such revelations – had almost all died. The time had come. So Markl resolved to lift the lid, appointing an independent committee to investigate what German scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society might have done during the war. It would be an investigation into the very darkest corners of race science. Younger researchers at the Max Planck Society justifiably worried whether the body of scientific work they had inherited might bear bloody stains.

They were right to worry. The past turned out to be dripping with blood. A few years after Markl launched the investigation, historians began publishing their findings, and they were devastating. Some had assumed that the Nazis were ignorant of or hostile towards science. Historical evidence proved this wasn’t true. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society’s scientists had willingly cooperated with the Nazi state, marrying academic interests and political expediency, helping to secure financial support and social standing for themselves. ‘Such research not only literally built on the spoils of war, it also led scientists deep into the abysses of Nazi crimes,’ wrote a reviewer. At least one prominent scientist helped draft and disseminate the legislation relating to racial ideology.

Those who weren’t opportunistic were often complicit, displaying moral indifference when they could see inhumane or criminal acts happening right in front of them. When moves began in 1933 to expel Jewish scientists from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Einstein abandoned Germany that same year, leaving for a conference and wisely never returning), staff made little effort to stand in the way. At least two of its scientists and two other staff members ended up dying in concentration camps.

And then there were those who wholeheartedly supported the Nazis from the beginning. The work of Otmar von Verschuer, head of department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, makes for chilling reading. Until the war, von Verschuer was a widely respected academic, his research on twins as a means of understanding genetic inheritance funded for a few years by the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. He was once invited to speak at the Royal Society in London. But he was also, it transpired, an anti-Semite who openly praised Hitler and believed in a biological solution to what he saw as the Jewish threat to racial purity. According to American anthropologist Robert Wald Sussman, von Verschuer became one of the Nazis’ race experts when it came to addressing the ‘Jewish question’, actively legitimising the regime’s racial policies. One of his former students, the doctor Josef Mengele, went on to become infamous for his cruel experiments on twins and pregnant women at Auschwitz concentration camp. British writer Marek Kohn has documented in his 1995 book The Race Gallery that among the samples sent to von Verschuer from Auschwitz were ‘pairs of eyes from twins … dissected after their murder … children’s internal organs, corpses and the skeletons of murdered Jews’.

In 2001, the Max Planck Society at last accepted responsibility for historic crimes committed by its scientists. In its apology, the society admitted, ‘Today it is safe to say that von Verschuer knew of the crimes being committed in Auschwitz and that he, together with some of his employees and colleagues, used them for his purposes.’ Markl added in his speech, ‘The Kaiser Wilhelm Society tolerated or even supported research among its ranks that cannot be justified on any ethical or moral grounds … I would like to apologise for the suffering of the victims of these crimes – the dead as well as the survivors – done in the name of science.’

This came too late for justice, of course. Those involved had died already. What was remarkable was that it had taken so long to root out the facts, to even find the will to do it. Scientists complicit with the regime had been skilled at covering their tracks, evidently. But maybe it was also easier for their colleagues to pretend that fellow scientists couldn’t possibly have been active participants in murder and torture. Perhaps, they imagined, they were just bystanders, caught up in the mess while trying to get their work done.

The truth – that it is perfectly possible for prominent scientists to be racist, to murder, to abuse both people and knowledge – doesn’t sit easily with the way we like to think about scientific research. We imagine that it’s above politics, that it’s a noble, rational and objective endeavour, untainted by feelings or prejudice. But if science is always so innocent, how is it that members of such a large and prestigious scientific organisation could have sold themselves to a murderous political regime as recently as the middle of the twentieth century?

The answer is simple: science is always shaped by the time and the place in which it is carried out. It ultimately sits at the mercy of the personal political beliefs of those carrying it out. In the case of some Nazi scientists, particular experiments may have been perfectly accurate and rigorous. They may even have produced good science, if goodness is measured in data and not human life. Other times, researchers didn’t care about the truth or other people’s lives, choosing instead to give the illusion of intellectual weight to a morally bankrupt ideology because it suited them.

Now, decades later, the horrors of the Second World War still have a warping effect on how we think about race science. Many of us choose to remember Nazi scientists like Otmar von Verschuer as some kind of uniquely evil exception, nothing like those who found themselves on the winning side of the war. The Holocaust and the twisted scientific rationale behind it are thought to belong to that time and place alone, purely the work of ‘the bad guys’. But there was one question that went unanswered after the investigations into the bloodstained history of the Max Planck Society: Were scientists in the rest of the world so blameless?

To file away what happened during the war as aberrant, as something that could only have been done by the worst people under the worst circumstances, ignores the bigger truth. This was never a simple story of good versus evil. The well of scientific ideas from which Hitler and others in his regime drew their plans for ‘racial hygiene’, leading ultimately to genocide, didn’t originate in Germany alone. They had been steadily supplied for more than a century by race scientists from all over the world, supported by well-respected intellectuals, aristocrats, political leaders and women and men of wealth.

Among the most influential of them all, as far as the Nazi regime was concerned, was a pair of statisticians working at 50 Gower Street, Bloomsbury – not in Germany, but in the famous old literary quarter of London.

*

‘You have biologists who say there is no such thing as race, we need to get over it, forget it,’ Subhadra Das tells me in an angry whisper. ‘But then, if there is no such thing, why did you just say “race”? Where did that idea come from?’

Das is a curator of the University College London Medical and Science Collections, moonlighting occasionally as a stand-up comedian. Her dark wit betrays a fury fed by the things she’s learned from her research. We’re in the heart of Bloomsbury, recognisable by its peaceful garden squares and smart Georgian townhouses. Once a meeting point for artists and writers, including Virginia Woolf, it is still home to a large slice of London’s universities and colleges. Outside, busy Gower Street is jam-packed with students heading for lectures, but where Das and I are it’s library quiet. We’re seated at a small table inside the Petrie Museum, named for Sir Flinders Petrie, an Egyptologist who, before he died in 1942, used to collect heads from around the world to shore up his ideas of racial superiority and inferiority.

‘Scientists are socialised human beings who live within society, and their ideas are social constructions,’ she continues. She wants me to hear this, setting the scene before she begins unfolding the packets of objects in front of us, which she has pulled from the archive. Among the first is a black-and-white photograph of a well-dressed older man, his bushy eyebrows resting in a canopy over his eyes, long white sideburns trailing down to his collar. Underneath is his autograph: it is the biologist Francis Galton, born in 1822, a younger cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton, she tells me, is the father of eugenics. He coined the term in 1883 from the Greek prefix ‘eu’ for ‘well’ or ‘good’, to describe the idea of using social control to improve the health and intelligence of future generations.

Galton considered himself an expert on human difference, on the finer qualities that make a person better or worse. Not quite the genius that Darwin was, he certainly aspired to be. ‘I find that talent is transmitted by inheritance in a very remarkable degree,’ he had written in an essay titled ‘Hereditary Character and Talent’. His idea drew on his cousin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, that individuals in a population show a wide variety of characteristics, but those with the characteristics most suited to the environment will survive and breed, passing on those beneficial traits. Galton thought that a race of people could be more quickly improved if the most intelligent were encouraged to reproduce, while the stupidest weren’t – the same way you might artificially breed a fatter cow or a redder apple. For him, this would speed up human evolution, driving the race closer to mental and physical perfection.

As an example, he drew on the fact that brilliant writers were often related to other brilliant writers. He noted that of 605 notable men who lived between 1453 and 1853, one in six were related. The ingredients for greatness must be heritable, he reasoned, choosing to overlook that being notable might also be a product of connections, privilege and wealth, which these men also had. ‘If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create!’ Galton dreamed of a ‘utopia’ of highly bred super people, and he made creating one his lifelong mission.

The first challenge would be to measure people’s abilities, to build up a bank of data about who exactly were the most intelligent and who the least. In 1904 he convinced the University of London to set up the world’s first Eugenics Record Office at 50 Gower Street, dedicated to measuring human differences, in the hope of understanding what kind of people Britain might want more of. University College London jumped at the chance, replying to his request within a week. After a short time the department became known as the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics.

Eugenics is a word that’s no longer used around here. Long after Galton’s death, his laboratory was renamed the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, housed in the Darwin Building. And this is where Subhadra Das steps in. Among the vast collection of objects she is responsible for at the university is Galton’s archive, containing his personal photographs, equipment and papers, tracking the genesis and development of eugenics. She also looks after objects belonging to his close collaborator, mathematician Karl Pearson, who became the first professor of national eugenics in 1911 after Galton died. ‘Pearson’s greatest contribution, the thing that people remember him for, is founding the discipline of statistics. A lot of work on that was done with Galton. Galton, if you’re going to bring his science down to anything in particular, is a statistician,’ she tells me.

But before he settled down into science, Galton had been an explorer. He was lavishly funded by the estate of his father, who had made a fortune from supplying weapons that helped support the slave trade, and later from banking. An expedition in 1850 to Namibia, then known as Damaraland, earned Galton a medal from the Royal Geographical Society. Always proud of his appearance (there’s a hand mirror and sewing kit among his possessions in the collection), he donned a white safari suit, becoming one of the first to cultivate what is now the classic image of the white European in Africa. ‘If I say to you “African explorer”, the picture that pops into your head? That’s him,’ Das tells me.

What was unusual about Galton was that travel failed to broaden his mind. His encounters with people in other countries didn’t help him to see their common humanity. ‘If anything, his racist assumptions were made stronger by his time in Africa.’ As Galton told the Royal Society on his return, ‘I saw enough of savage races to give me material to think about all the rest of my life.’

In London, racism combined in his scientific research with a passion for data. Galton was obsessed with measuring things, once using a sextant to size up an African woman’s proportions from a distance. Another time, he came up with the mathematical formula for the perfect cup of tea. Through eugenics he saw a way of using what he thought he knew about human difference, shored up by Darwin’s theories of natural selection, to systematically improve the quality of ‘the British race’. ‘Darwin said that humans are animals like any other animal. Galton said, well, if that’s the case then we can breed them better,’ Das explains. ‘What he was concerned about was what he saw as the degeneration of the British race and how that could be prevented and improved.

‘You have to call Galton a racist because the work that he did is fundamental in the story of scientific racism. So not only is he a racist, he is part of the way we invented racism, and the way that we think about it.’

*

Eugenics is a cold, calculated way of thinking about human life, reducing human beings to nothing but parts of the whole, either dragging down their race or pulling it up. It also assumes that almost all that we are is decided before we are born.

The origins of this idea – that everything is inherited, that it’s in the genes – date back to the middle of the nineteenth century when Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar in Brno, Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, became fascinated by plant hybrids. Working in the garden of his monastery, Mendel took seven strains of pea and bred them selectively until each one produced identical offspring every time. With these true-bred pea plants, he began to experiment, observing carefully to see what happened when different varieties were crossed. Nobody knew about genes at this point, and Mendel’s paper on the topic published in 1866 went largely unnoticed within his lifetime. But his experimental finding that traits such as colour were being passed down the generations in certain patterns would form the linchpin of how geneticists in the following century thought about inheritance.

Once scientists understood that there were discrete packets of information in our cells that dictated how our bodies were built, and that we got these packets in roughly equal measure from each parent, the science of heredity finally took off. And it took almost no time for the political implications to be recognised. In 1905 the English biologist William Bateson, Mendel’s principal populariser, predicted that it ‘would soon provide power on a stupendous scale’.

Mendelism became a creed, an approach to thinking about human biology which suggested that it is largely set in motion as soon as an egg is fertilised, and that things then go on to work in fairly linear fashion. If you crossed one yellow-seeded pea plant with one green-seeded pea plant and you could predict which colours subsequent generations of pea plant would turn out to have, then it stood to reason that you might be able to predict how human children would look and behave based on the appearance and behaviour of their parents.

Through a narrow Mendelian lens, almost everything is planned by our genes. Environment counts for relatively little because we are at heart the products of chemical compounds mixing together. We are inevitable mixtures of our ancestors. Just as Bateson foresaw, this idea became the cornerstone of eugenics, the belief that better people could be bred by selecting better parents. ‘Mendelism and determinism, the view that heredity is destiny, they go together,’ says historian Gregory Radick, who has studied Mendel and his legacy.

But there was a problem with Mendel’s pea plant research. At the beginning of the twentieth century Mendel’s paper became the subject of ferocious debate, says Radick. ‘Should the Mendelian view be the big generalisation around which you hang everything else? Or on the contrary, was it an interesting set of special cases?’ When Mendel performed his experiments, he deliberately bred his peas to be reliable in every generation. Before he even began, he filtered out the aberrations, the random mutants, the messy spread of continuous variation you would normally see, so every generation bred as true as possible. Peas were either green or yellow. This allowed him to see a clear genetic signal through the noise, producing results that were far more perfect than nature would have provided.

Raphael Weldon, born in 1860, a professor at the University of Oxford with an interest in applying statistics to biology, spotted this dilemma and began campaigning for scientists to recognise the importance of environmental as well as genetic backgrounds when thinking about inheritance. ‘What really bothered him about the emerging Mendelism was that it turned its back on what he regarded as the last twenty years of evidence from experimental embryology, whose message was that the effects a tissue has on a body depend radically on what it’s interacting with, on what’s around it,’ explains Radick. Weldon’s message was that variation matters, and that it is profoundly affected by context, be it neighbouring genes or the quality of air a person breathes. Everything can influence the direction of development, making nurture not some kind of afterthought tacked onto nature, but something embedded deep down in our bodies. ‘Weldon was unusually sceptical.’

To prove his point, Weldon demonstrated how ordinary pea breeders couldn’t come up with the same perfectly uniform peas as Mendel. Real peas are a multitude of colours between yellow and green. In the same way that our eyes aren’t simply brown or blue or green, but a million different shades. Or that if a woman has a ‘gene for breast cancer’, it doesn’t mean she will necessarily develop the disease. Or that a queen bee isn’t born a queen; she is just another worker bee until she eats enough royal jelly. Between the gene and real life is not just the environment, but also random possibility. Comparing Mendel’s peas with the real world, then, is like comparing a soap opera with real life. There is truth in there, but reality is a lot more complicated. Genes aren’t Lego bricks or simple instruction manuals; they are interactive. They are enmeshed in a network of other genes, their immediate surroundings and the wider world, this ever-changing network producing a unique individual.

Sadly for Weldon, the ferocious debate for the soul of genetics ended prematurely in 1906 when he died of pneumonia, aged just forty-six. His manuscript went unfinished and unpublished. With less resistance than before, Mendel’s ideas were gradually incorporated into biology textbooks, becoming the bedrock of modern genetics. Although Weldon’s ideas have since slowly been reincorporated into scientific thinking, there still remains a strain of genetic determinism in both the scientific and the public imagination. Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin has called it the ‘Central Dogma of Molecular Genetics’. It is a belief that all that we are is set in stone in the womb.

In the early twentieth century, before the advent of modern genetics but with Mendel’s findings prominent in their minds, Francis Galton’s theories seemed to make good sense to many. They had a logical appeal that stretched across the political spectrum. We associate eugenics today with the fascists who perpetrated the Holocaust, but before the 1930s, many on the left saw it as socially progressive. Galton himself was certainly not considered a crank. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, and an anthropometric laboratory he set up in 1884 to catalogue people’s measurements enjoyed support from the British Medical Association. Eugenics belonged firmly to establishment science, and amongst intellectuals, it wasn’t just mainstream, it was fashionable.

The fly in the ointment was how to carry it out. Galton observed that the poor seemed to be outbreeding the rich, and he saw the poor as poor for the simple reason that they were congenitally unfit. Responsible action was necessary to address the problem and ensure genetic progress. On the one hand, the rich needed to step up their baby-making game. On the other, society’s dregs, particularly those described as mentally feeble, physically weak, and criminal types, needed convincing to have fewer children. Managing reproduction was the linchpin of eugenics, even attracting a fan in women’s rights activist and birth control pioneer Marie Stopes. To support her first clinic, Stopes founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. Philosopher Bertrand Russell, too, suggested that the state might improve the health of the population by fining the ‘wrong’ type of people for giving birth.

Eugenics was more than a theory, it was a plan in search of policymakers. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, was welcomed as vice-president at the first International Eugenics Congress, held at London’s grand Hotel Cecil in 1912. Other vice-presidents included the Lord Mayor of London and the Lord Chief Justice. Delegates came from all over Europe, Australia and the United States, including Harvard and Johns Hopkins University. The US state of Indiana had already passed the world’s first involuntary sterilisation law in 1907, informed by eugenicists who argued that criminality, mental problems and poverty were hereditary. More than thirty other states soon followed, with enthusiastic public backing. By 1910 a Eugenics Record Office was established at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island in New York, with support from oil industry magnate John D. Rockefeller and later funding by the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

A news item in the journal Science announced that one of the purposes of the new office in New York would be ‘the study of miscegenation in the United States’, the mixing and intermarriage of different racial groups. Its board of scientific directors included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, and the economist Irving Fisher. The hardware behind at least one of America’s most ambitious eugenics projects came from none other than IBM, the same company that went on to supply the Nazi regime in Germany with the technology it needed to transport millions of victims to the concentration camps.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, all over the world, eugenics began to be conflated with nineteenth-century ideas about race. In Japan, Meiji-period thinker and politician Katˉo Hiroyuki used Darwinism to make the point that there was a struggle for survival between different nations. In China in 1905, the revolutionary Wang Jingwei argued that a state whose members were of a single race was stronger than one comprising multiple races. Other politicians advocated sterilisation as a means of human selection, and racial intermarriage to produce children with whiter skins. Historian Yuehtsen Juliette Chung has noted that during this time, ‘China seemed to accept passively the notion of race as the West understood it.’

In India, too, European notions of racial superiority were easily absorbed by some, partly because they mirrored the country’s existing caste system – itself a kind of racial hierarchy – but also because Germany’s Aryan myth placed the noble race as having once lived in their region. The ideological quest for the true ‘Aryans’ remains alive in India, and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is a bestseller in Indian bookshops. Each nation utilised the idea of race in its own ways, marrying it with science if it could be of use. Eugenics, then, became just another tool in what were longstanding power dynamics.

By 1914 the word ‘eugenics’ was being used with such abandon that it had almost became synonymous with being healthy, complained American eugenics professor Roswell H. Johnson in the American Journal of Sociology. ‘A school for sex education is called a school of eugenics. Even a milk and ice station has been similarly designated,’ he grumbled.

*

In its early days, particularly for its mainstream supporters, eugenics focused on improving racial stock by weeding out those seen to be at the margins of society, the feeble-minded, insane and disabled. But as time wore on, the umbrella inevitably expanded. Karl Pearson, who succeeded Galton as the main force behind eugenics when he died in 1911 and shared his views on race, believed that since other races than his own were inferior, intermixing was also dangerous to the health of the population. By this logic, the very existence of those other races represented something of a threat. ‘Pearson’s argument is that if you have uncontrolled immigration the welfare of British people is at stake,’ Subhadra Das tells me.

At the time, despite the mainstream popularity of eugenics, some did notice the slippery slope. This is one reason why, despite all the support it attracted from politicians and intellectuals and how popular it became in other countries, eugenics never managed to gain a firm toehold in Britain and was not implemented by the government. British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley argued that privilege and upbringing could surely more accurately explain why some people were successful and others weren’t. He noted that many remarkable people had unremarkable relatives. Another vocal critic was biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had come from humble beginnings to become an important and well-loved researcher, credited with formulating evolutionary theory at the same time as Darwin. ‘The world does not want the eugenicist to set it straight,’ he warned. ‘Give the people good conditions, improve their environment, and all will tend towards the highest type. Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant, scientific priestcraft.’

But it’s important to remember that history might well have gone another way. Das pulls out another object from the archive. It’s a narrow tin box, resembling a cigarette case but twice as long. It was brought to London by Karl Pearson, but had been designed by Eugen Fischer, a German scientist who had been director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. The box still bears Fischer’s name. Inside is a neat row of thirty locks of artificial hair, ranging in colour from blonde (numbers 19 and 20) and light brunette in the centre, to bright red hair at one end and black Afro hair (number 30) at the other. At first glance it looks innocuous, like a colour chart you might find at the hairdresser’s. But the disturbing story behind it is betrayed by the order in which the hair samples are placed. The most desirable colours and textures have been placed in the middle and the least acceptable at the margins. This simple little gauge tells a story of pure horror.

‘Fischer used this device in Namibia in 1908 to establish the relative whiteness of mixed-race people,’ reveals Das. In what is now remembered as the first genocide of the twentieth century, in the four years preceding 1908, Germany killed tens of thousands of Namibians as they rebelled against colonial rule. According to some estimates, up to 3,000 skulls belonging to those of the Herero ethnic group were sent back to Berlin to be studied by race scientists. ‘Namibia was the first place that the Germans built a concentration camp. Depending on where your hair fell on the scale was the difference between life and death.’ Similar methods would be used again, of course, a few decades later. Fischer’s work would also go on to inform the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, outlawing intermarriage between Jews, blacks and other Germans. He became a member of the Nazi party in 1940.

Das takes out another box that belonged to Pearson, this time containing rows of glass eyes in different colours, framed in aluminium eyelids so eerily real that I fear one of them might blink. They are prosthetics of the kind that would have been fitted in patients who had eyes missing. In the context of eugenics, though, they served another purpose. ‘This object, I have seen its twin brother on display in an exhibition about race hygiene in Germany at the Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité. This device was appropriated by Nazi scientists and, again, used to judge or measure race, particularly in Jewish people,’ Das explains. ‘You’ll find photographs of Nazi scientists measuring people’s heads, measuring people’s noses, matching their eye colour.’

The eye and hair colour charts reveal just how slippery the dogged mantras of rationality and objectivity can be when it comes to studying human difference. ‘Any scientist who claims that they are not politicised, or that they are asking questions out of pure curiosity, they are lying to themselves,’ she continues. ‘The structure in itself is fundamentally, structurally racist, because it has always been taken at its face. Never going back and taking apart those underpinnings.’ What does it matter if one person has black hair and brown eyes, and another has blonde hair and blue eyes? Why not compare heights or weights or some other variable? These particular features matter only because they have political meaning attached to them.

In the United States, arguably the most racially charged place in the world at the time, evolutionary theory and eugenics came along at just the moment when intellectual racists could deploy them to full effect. Immigration into the US from countries considered to be undesirable had been curbed by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the country’s first major law restricting immigrants. Twelve years later, three Harvard College graduates formed the Immigration Restriction League, arguing in favour of a literacy requirement for those who wanted to come to the US. The group’s secretary, Prescott Farnsworth Hall, used Darwin’s ideas of natural selection to caution against allowing into the country ‘undesirable’ immigrants who weren’t ‘kindred in habits, institutions and traditions to the original colonists’. In a lengthy racist tract in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1904, he added, ‘The doctrine is that the fittest survive; fittest for what? The fittest to survive in the particular environment in which the organisms are placed’ (his emphasis).

By 1907 the Bellingham riots would see hundreds of white men, themselves recent arrivals from Europe, attack Indian immigrants living in the city of Bellingham in the state of Washington, blaming their ‘filthy and immodest habits’. Reportedly, seven hundred Indians had to flee. The local Bellingham Herald complained, ‘The Hindu is not a good citizen. It would require centuries to assimilate him, and this country need not take the trouble.’

It was against this backdrop that a new ideologue emerged. In 1916 a wealthy American law graduate named Madison Grant published a book that took eugenics to another level. Grant was known as a conservationist (as one of the co-founders of Bronx Zoo in New York, he had lobbied to put Congolese man Ota Benga on display among the apes there in 1906) but he wasn’t a scientist. He recognised, however, the power of the language of science. In The Passing of the Great Race: or The Racial Basis of European History