Making Sense of Eugenics

Abstract

Eugenics, long deemed "guilty by association" with its terrible misuses, is inherently no more than a means to the general end of inclusive fitness -- maximizing one's reproductive legacy -- the biological goal of all living organisms. Misperceptions about eugenics and its history are presented as background for a discussion of how nature, through the mechanism of evolution, has conducted what amounts to a hugely successful program of eugenics (by which we can judge our own poor efforts).

Original metatheoretical analysis of the principles underlying evolution provides insight into how and why the process works -- as well as clues to how we can objectively justify a direction for future applications of eugenics. (This is important. A misguided sense of direction was the most serious flaw of the eugenics movements of the early 1900s.)

The fact that eugenics can be (and has been) misused dictates caution and responsibility, but not its abandonment. Indeed, the forces of "rogue hedonism" (the pursuit, as ends in themselves, of desires, drives, appetites, etc. -- abandoning their evolutionary "purpose" of promoting inclusive fitness) have diverted us so thoroughly from the real business of life (as revealed by evolutionary biology) that eugenics provides an overdue, welcome, and probably necessary focus -- without which we run the serious risk of abandoning the future of our species.

Introduction

One of the most disgraceful chapters of human history was written when, during a period centered on the 1930s, much of Western civilization embarked upon programs to "better" the human race. The injustice and inhumanity perpetrated upon individuals and groups who failed to measure up to the standards of these programs will, one hopes, never be forgotten.

These movements rode a wave of enthusiasm over monumental advances in the understanding of our genesis and nature as humans: Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's theory of genetics. The theories, though incomplete, were sound; they have been added to, but never successfully disputed within the scientific community. How, then, did they come to be used in such an horrible way?

"Eugenics" is variously translated from its Greek roots as "good in birth," "well-born," and "noble in heredity." It was coined by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, in 1883 -- nearly 20 years after he first began publishing on the subject of how the methods used for breeding animals and plants might be applied to a higher end: "Could not the race of men be similarly improved?"¹ Over the next half century interest in applying the knowledge and methods of science to human breeding grew in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere.

But there is an inherent problem: "A knowledge of human natural history cannot provide us with goals."² Knowledge informs, but it does not motivate; values motivate us, and the values that drove these movements were woefully misbegotten. My purpose here is to examine, in the light of a much more mature science of biology (focused by philosophical analysis), which values perverted the pursuit of eugenics -- and also those values that were (and remain) justifiable, but have been rejected, pronounced guilty by association with disastrous ones.

The value of improvement cannot be blamed. Who does not wish a better life for her children than she has had? And who can deny that inherited traits differ from one individual to another (e.g., how well some internal organ functions, to be minimally controversial), and determine largely whether we can do specific things -- or anything at all?

Nor is the value of purposeful action at fault. Our needs are rarely filled by waiting for some agency to provide them; our nature requires that we act in pursuit of what we want.

Eugenics, then, minimally conceived as purposeful action for improving the genetic inheritance of future generations, appears to be benign. The obvious conclusion is that the prevailing conceptions of what constituted genetic improvement, and/or what action should be pursued, were simply erroneous.

Biology provides important insight into how and why this happened. So informed, we may be able to separate our justified disapproval (and grief) over the consequences of misguided eugenics from our judgment of the motivations guiding the eugenicists of the era. It is easier to forgive (and learn from) the errors of the past when they stem from inherited, automatic, and unconscious influences. We can then go about learning how to anticipate and counteract such influences in the future -- for our future will undoubtedly include the pursuit of eugenics, which is not only with us today, but has guided much of our ancestors' behavior since long before they became humans (or even mammals!).

Nature has been running its own eugenics program³ for hundreds of millions of years. We owe our very nature to it, and we appreciate that legacy. But we also abhor the brutality of its methods. In many ways it has been harsher than any human eugenic atrocities. Nature shows no concern for the well-being of any individual organism, and most creatures die what would, from our perspective, seem horrible deaths -- before they ever have the opportunity to reproduce.⁴ No creature alive today had ancestors who failed to reproduce, and (by and large) the traits we have inherited are those that permitted our ancestors to succeed. We have also escaped inheriting the worst liabilities of our ancestors' unsuccessful kin. These facts create an uncomfortable moral tension for us: we are glad not to be burdened by liabilities we might have inherited, yet we deplore the plight of individuals who failed to pass them on.

Our attitudes toward other animals reflect this tension in a different way. We have been breeding domestic animals for centuries, with little concern for the lost reproductive opportunities of those individuals that lacked desired traits (or possessed unwanted ones). We probably sympathize with the frustrations of the "also-rans" that are not bred, but accept them as necessary for maintaining a healthy breed. When our breeding programs produce healthy animals who thrive as our companions, we approve of those results. Yet the "also-rans" have no less interest in reproduction than humans do. Indeed, as we'll see, passing on one's genes to future generations has been the only fundamental concern of living organisms. What, if anything, justifies our different attitude, with respect to this fundamental concern, for humans as opposed to other animals? And if the difference is unjustified, which attitude was mistaken?

The History of Eugenics: Perception and Reality

The eugenicists of the 1930s clearly intended to apply the principles of biological science to the breeding of human beings. Beyond that core purpose, there is considerable discrepancy between the popular public perception of eugenics and the historical reality.

Mark B. Adams has identified four popular myths about eugenics that have persisted since World War II. The first of these is that "eugenics was a single, coherent, principally Anglo-American movement with a specifiable set of common goals and beliefs." The second is that eugenics was "somehow intrinsically bound up with Mendelian genetics" (as opposed to Lamarckism, which treated acquired traits as heritable). The third myth is that "eugenics was essentially a pseudoscience" -- that is, respectable scientists of the day recognized its scientific flaws and therefore repudiated it. And the fourth is "that, politically, eugenics was essentially right-wing or 'reactionary'."⁵

Adams describes a resurgence of interest in the subject of eugenics in the mid-1980s that has produced much historical research dispelling these myths, examining eugenics programs in Germany, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, France, Austria, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Cuba in particular, out of some thirty movements worldwide. There were significant differences even between the views of British and American eugenicists⁶, and even more pronounced variations of belief and aims worldwide, influenced by parochial cultural, economic, social, religious, and professional values. It was hardly the monolithic discipline popularly imagined today.

As for the second myth, non-Mendelian, Lamarckian theory dominated eugenics movements in Russia, France, and Brazil -- and the demand for eradicating undesirable acquired traits (e.g., criminal tendencies or alcoholism), assumed to be heritable, inspired pressure for sterilization that was just as insistent as was to be found in Mendelian movements.

The third myth is especially revisionist. Many of the most respected geneticists and biologists in the world (some say nearly all of them)⁷ were avid supporters of eugenics. Many of their opinions, later discovered to be mistaken, were nonetheless based upon honest differences of interpretation with respect to facts about genetic diseases. So if they appeared to forget to apply the well-known Hardy-Weinberg principle, for example (that selection is ineffective against rare single-gene defects), it may have been because, on their reading, the principle simply didn't apply -- say, that the defect wasn't actually rare. Scientific judgment may not have always prevailed, either -- being clouded (or simply trumped) by other influences -- but that is hardly a problem restricted to this particular discipline. The problems in eugenics were those of a science in flux, not of a pseudo-science out of control.

The myth of right-wing orientation falls in the face of strong support for eugenics among socialists, communists, and feminists. Anti-Semitism was offset by the presence of Jewish eugenicists as well as those who used the Jews as an exemplar of superior breeding. Racism had at the opposite pole eugenicists who advocated racial interbreeding to induce "hybrid vigor." In some movements the working class and proletariat were especially promoted. A "reform eugenics" emerged almost immediately in reaction to Nazi abuses. Concern with "race" was rejected; concern for "the population," and seeking the most valuable characteristics from all social groups and encouraging their development, were the guiding principles:

Eugenics in a democracy seeks not to breed men to a single type, but to raise the average level of human variations, reducing variations tending toward poor health, low intelligence, and anti-social character, and increasing variations at the highest levels of activity.⁸

The point of dispelling these myths is not to deny any of the stereotypical eugenic abuses that clearly did occur, but rather to demonstrate that eugenics does not necessarily entail any particular political, social, cultural, religious, or economic agenda.

Approaches to Eugenics

Though the attitudes of eugenicists have historically spanned a continuum, two primary strains of eugenics are readily identifiable: conservative and liberal. They are distinguished by the justifications they offer for eugenics programs. Conservative eugenicists have advocated reducing the economic drain on society, and the genetic liability for posterity, from those possessing deleterious traits; they may also be motivated to reduce competition by groups competing with their own for society's resources and for reproductive dominance. Liberal eugenicists, on the other hand, have idealistically touted the improvement of mankind and the elimination of suffering from genetic defects. Both camps have used methods that are classified as positive and negative eugenics.

Positive Eugenics

Positive eugenics is directed toward encouraging the spread of desired traits. The idea dates back at least as far as Plato, who proposed in the Republic that the best young men should have greater access to women, increasing the number of children they can father.⁹ Heinrich Himmler similarly encouraged members of the S.S. to breed with "racially preferred women" -- and the mothers of S.S. children, married or unmarried, were given special medical care in homes called the Lebensborn. Approved young couples in Germany were given loans, and the indebtedness was reduced by one quarter upon the birth of a child. Subsidies were sometimes given for third or fourth children of "sound" families.¹⁰

Today's technology brings more advanced methods of positive eugenics than simple incentives and subsidies for breeding:

Artificial insemination. The first of these technologies to emerge is worth looking at in some detail, for it shows how old and how deep interest has been in assisting reproduction by technical means. With artificial insemination (AI), a woman receives sperm either from a donor (AID), from her husband (AIH), or a mixture of the two (AIHD -- so that her husband might at least believe he could be the father). In use with humans since the mid-nineteenth century, AI was proposed as a eugenic technique ("eutelegenesis") by the English socialist Herbert Brewer in 1935. By that time in the U.S., however, as many as 3,000 woman annually were requesting the procedure -- usually for eugenic purposes. If true, stories of women in the Soviet Union who volunteered for a proposed human-ape crossbreeding (AI) program may indicate how popular the concept of eugenics was in the early 1930s. Preservation of sperm by freezing was developed in the 1950s, increasing at once the number of sperm available in a treatment, the odds of fertilization, and the variety of possible donors. The technique became almost commonplace in the 1970s, and was symbolized by Robert Graham's founding of the Repository of Germinal Choice, nicknamed the "Nobel Sperm Bank" because of its reliance upon scientist donors.¹¹

Here, in less detail, are other positive eugenics technologies:

In vitro fertilization. Eggs are fertilized "out of body" in a laboratory procedure, then one or more healthy embryos are implanted into the womb (any remaining embryos are discarded). Obviously, both eggs and sperm may come from individuals other than the parents who seek this procedure.¹²

Surrogacy. A fertile woman who, for whatever reason, does not wish to carry a child may hire a surrogate mother, into whom the woman's egg (fertilized in vitro) is implanted.¹³

Cloning. The nucleus from any normal human cell can be placed into an egg from which the nucleus has been removed ("exnucleated"). The resultant offspring will be genetically identical to the individual from whom the original nucleus was taken. This technique is the only one that allows infertile individuals the opportunity to reproduce.¹⁴

Gene therapies. Techniques are being developed to insert specific genes into an individual's DNA. Somatic therapies have already been implemented in humans, whereby genetic disease is treated with an infusion of "healthy" genes, which replace enough of the individual's faulty genes to provide relief from the disease. Changes introduced by somatic therapy are not transmissible to offspring. Germ line therapies are still in animal trials; here, genes are added to germ cells, which pass the new genes along to "daughter cells" in the developing individual -- including germ cells which can transmit the new gene to offspring. Typically, however, the gene is added to (does not replace) a faulty gene of the same type, and is randomly inserted on the chromosome; this can cause deformities and other problems. Until techniques are developed that can directly replace faulty genes in germ cells, germ line therapy will be of little practical use. Enhancement therapies address not diseases, but desires. They would introduce extra genes (perhaps genetically altered) with the intent to enhance an existing trait (e.g., an gene for the production of growth hormone might be added to increase an individual's size). This approach is obviously highly controversial, and is not likely to be practically available for some time. Finally, eugenic therapies might introduce genes that would not be found in a "normal" individual. This most controversial method is even more remote.¹⁵

Trait Selection Technologies. While this category can include AI, in vitro fertilization, and certain forms of gene therapy, it deserves mention as a broader category. People have been selecting for particular traits in their children for a long time -- particularly for sex. (Reproductive strategies that favor boys or girls are discussed below.) Modern methods of sex selection include segregating X-bearing from Y- bearing sperm based on differences in weight, size, and motility.¹⁶

Negative Eugenics

Negative eugenics is concerned with identifying and removing deleterious genes from the gene pool. The first approach to negative eugenics was preventing those who carried unwanted traits from having children (or at least from "infecting" the main gene pool), and a number of social controls have been implemented at various times and places to this end:

Immigration controls sought to prevent the arrival of "undesirables," and in the U.S. included the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924.¹⁷

Miscegenation laws promoted racial purity.¹⁸

Incest laws address the problems of inbreeding (and, as we'll see, may be biologically redundant).¹⁹

Segregation laws not only applied to restricted interaction among races, but were also used to detain "mental defectives" to prevent them from breeding.²⁰

Sterilization laws directed against the reproduction of mentally retarded persons eventually were implemented in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and one canton in Switzerland. Half the states in the U.S. enacted such laws, leading to more than 20,000 sterilizations, and providing an example that Nazi Germany exploited with a vengeance in 1933 with a Eugenic Sterilization Law that compelled sterilization for all people with allegedly hereditary disabilities. By that time it was estimated that some 150 million people were living under sterilization laws.²¹

Contraception, being much preferable to sterilization, was heavily promoted by eugenicists -- often under the more general banner of "population control."²²

Finally, abortion has only recently been used as a negative eugenics method with any frequency. Avoided as inhumane or downright criminal by early British and American eugenicists, it is now a voluntary option when a genetic disease has been detected in utero.²³

Diagnosis and Decision

Both positive and negative approaches to eugenics require some means of diagnosis and decision making. Early on, diagnosis merely consisted in noticing that someone suffered from a genetic disease; counseling was limited to telling prospective parents what the odds would be of having a healthy child, based on family genetic histories (and sometimes genetic registers of known carriers of genetic diseases). Modern technology has produced a variety of genetic testing and screening methods that allow prospective parents to be tested for specific genes (pre- conception),²⁴ and amniocentesis can detect genetic flaws in utero (post-conception).²⁵ Genetic counseling is now much more sophisticated, and includes discussion of many of the techniques we have just covered.²⁶

Whose Genes Are They, Anyway?

A last crucial distinction between approaches to eugenics is whether they are voluntary or compulsory. In the broadest general terms, one can see that positive eugenics programs involve methods that are likely to be a matter of individual choice -- while negative eugenics methods have often been made compulsory. The choice of voluntary or compulsory methods hinges on the issue of proprietorship: is the quest for better offspring an individual interest, or is it an interest of society or the state? The former is essentially a liberal perspective, and the latter conservative.

The conservative view has historically dominated the course of eugenics, first promoting the purity of race (or at least opposing the introduction of "undesirable" ethnic groups into a society's breeding population), then defending the "gene pool" in general. This latter approach developed largely from the concern of a growing "genetic load" of defects accumulating in the gene pool due to a lack of selective pressures in modern society combined with a steady (or increasing) rate of new mutations.²⁷

Early eugenics operated on a "single gene" model of traits: there was supposedly a gene "for" each trait we possessed. This is now known to be untrue for most of our traits, but, for a number of serious genetic diseases (sickle-cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease, cystic fibrosis, phenylketoneuria [PKU], hemophilia -- and about 900 others that were discovered before 1971²⁸) it was the case. For these diseases, there were two forms, or alleles, of the gene -- one of which coded for the disease, while the other was benign. An individual who inherited a disease allele from one parent and a benign allele from the other parent (i.e., was heterozygous) would be symptomatically free of the disease, but could pass the disease allele to a quarter of his offspring, even if his mate carried only the benign allele.²⁹ Only individuals who inherited the disease allele from both parents (i.e., were homozygous) would suffer the effects of the disease.

This poses a serious problem for eugenics. Even for single gene diseases (only about 3 percent of the total), eugenic techniques can economically address only the relatively small number of homozygous individuals. For the many heterozygous carriers of genetic diseases, only a program of universal genetic screening would identify the lurking disease alleles. And even if that were possible, no treatments are yet available to eliminate the disease allele from heterozygotes. To appreciate the full import of the situation, consider that each of us carries five to 10 disease alleles in our genotype!³⁰ Our genetic load looks nearly unassailable -- for now.

The Power of Reproductive Issues

There is a very good reason why social issues involving reproduction (e.g., eugenics and abortion) are so politically "hot." As I mentioned before, reproduction is the only fundamental concern of living organisms; it's time to explain what that means. What follows is a distillation of current biological theory drawn from many sources.

Evolution is driven by two forces: variation and selection. Variation occurs automatically, as a statistically predictable number of genetic mutations occur within a given population. Many variations are immediately lost because they lead to early mortality -- they are selected against by demands of the environment that their owners can't meet. "Environment" is a term that applies to more than just the great outdoors; the organism itself is an environment for a new gene, which may fail due to incompatibility with the larger demands of organic function. Similarly, the prenatal environment will reject some variants by miscarriage, and the pre-conception environment will relegate flawed gametes to the genetic scrap heap. Other organisms, too, are a part of one's environment -- so the ravages of disease or predation, or social (reproductive) rejection by one's own kind, may eliminate one from the game who otherwise does quite well at dealing with the mechanics of survival.

Herbert Spencer's phrase "survival of the fittest" symbolizes a caricature of evolutionary theory that persists to this day, casting survival as the ultimate goal of organisms, which only the "fittest" could achieve. Also contributing to this caricature was Darwin's title, The Origin of Species, by which naive laymen infer that species are the "units" of evolution. Finally, there is the common belief that evolution is about progress, from simple organisms to complex ones, from "lower" ones to "higher" ones (e.g., from apes to humans) -- producing improvements with each new species, and culminating in the pinnacle of evolution, Homo sapiens, the ultimate goal of the entire process. None of this is even remotely correct.

Science today has a very different picture of evolution, which differs from the above caricature in these key ways:

(1) Survival is merely the necessary means to the real fundamental goal of organisms: reproduction -- or, more precisely, inclusive fitness, which simply means passing one's genes to as many reproductively successful descendants as possible. Over evolutionary history, survival without reproduction has always been merely a dead end.

(2) Not just the "fittest," but also the mediocre often survive quite nicely unless the environment is particularly harsh. The real payoff for being among the "fittest" is differential reproduction: the healthiest, strongest, or otherwise most attractive individuals tend to get more (and better) mates, command a larger share of resources, and thereby contribute more offspring to the next generation.

(3) The units of evolutionary selection are individuals, not species; the only way groups are selected for or against in nature is according to the individual levels of success of their members. The technical term for "individual" is phenotype, which is contrasted with genotype, the more easily defined of the two terms. Genotype is simply the sum of one's genes; aside from cloning, the only way humans can share the same genotype is if they inherit the exactly the same genes from both parents -- and that happens only when they are identical (monozygous) twins, developed from the same fertilized egg. The phenotype develops from the genotype, but includes acquired traits that depend upon many factors that come into play at all stages of life, from conception to death (e.g., prenatal exposure to drugs, adequacy of childhood nutrition, amount and quality of interaction with adults as a child, learned helplessness, trauma, disfigurement, etc.).

The relation between genotype and phenotype was perhaps best explained by C.H. Waddington's metaphor. The genotype is like a landscape, and the phenotype is like a collection of balls (traits) that roll along that landscape. Some of the balls roll down steep trenches, from which no external pressure can divert them (determinate traits such as eye color). Some balls roll down valleys that divide into separate tracks occasionally; a small nudge from an external force (such as social pressure to become right-handed for a child who is a natural "lefty") can easily change the ball's direction at these points. Some furrows are quite shallow, so that the ball can be diverted at any point by a mere breeze. Where our collection of balls happens to be at any given time (what the individual is currently like) is a function of both the terrain and outside influences.³¹

There is a perennial battle raging over the relative importance of "nature vs. nurture" in human development, and the flames have reached new heights in reaction to the growing consensus (stemming primarily from E.O. Wilson's 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, and variously called sociobiology, evolutionary biology, or evolutionary psychology) that the complex social behaviors displayed by organisms, particularly including humans, are greatly influenced genetically.³² Spurious accusations of "genetic determinism" (an unchampioned view that genes determine all aspects of behavior) have frequently been leveled at subscribers to this consensus.³³

(4) Evolution has effects, not goals; its course is determined by the interaction between organism and environment. At times the environment may favor simpler rather than more complex forms (as was partly the case following the cataclysm that destroyed the dinosaurs -- and much else -- at the end of the Cretaceous period). Humankind is no pinnacle of evolution, but just another species -- one that is continually accumulating genetic changes that might eventually make us very different from what we are now; but these changes are only rarely sorted out by large-scale selective pressures (such as epidemics, famines, predation, etc.) In fact, we have succeeded remarkably in reducing the severity of selective pressure exerted by the environment on our kind -- living now largely in manmade cities devoid of predators, growing our own food rather than having to seek it out, and enjoying the benefits of medicine and a resultant doubling of life expectancy over just a few centuries. As we've seen, reaction to that success is partly responsible for the rise of eugenics.

It should not be a surprise, then, that seemingly "eugenic" behaviors have arisen in organisms. Behaviors that increase the reproductive success of one's offspring thereby increase one's inclusive fitness. And, since reproductive success is nature's only measure of quality, such behaviors lead by definition to better offspring.

A prime example is sexual selection, which corresponds to positive eugenics. Organisms have a vested interest in mating with the best-endowed individuals they can attract, so that their offspring will inherit traits that will make them, in turn, attractive mates. Qualities treated as desirable are not always conducive to long-term survival; a peacock, for example, might be fatally hampered by a large plume, yet be highly prolific before he meets his demise.³⁴

A contrasting example of natural negative eugenics is the common practice among birds and mammals of abandoning or killing young that are malformed, unhealthy, or otherwise "defective." Less brutal, but still in the mold of negative eugenics, is the near-universal "incest taboo."³⁵ Clearly, any behavioral tendency to avoid mating with close kin would reduce the incidence of genetic problems that stem from inbreeding,³⁶ and would likely be transmitted quickly throughout a breeding population. But what mechanism accounts for our aversion to incest? One might guess that we simply avoid mating with individuals we know to be closely related to us; but the best evidence indicates that, instead, we avoid mating with anyone with whom we had a close social bond while growing up. So, for example, in Israeli kibbutzim, unrelated children who grow up together later avoid mating with one another just as though they had been siblings.

Science tells us, then, that we have a reproductive interest in life. Is this news? People will readily admit to having an interest in reproduction. But they are not likely to say that their ultimate aim is inclusive fitness! Instead, they will talk about wanting to watch their kids grow, to have companionship and care in their old age, to carry on the family name, to get a special fulfillment from childrearing, to experience the love of a child, to fulfill a religious duty, to increase the strength of one's clan, to strengthen the bond with their spouse, to have an heir, to be complete as a wo/man, for someone to accomplish what they can't, for someone to help around the house or farm, etc.

But consider: Nature could not instill in simple (or even complex) organisms a direct appreciation of the value of inclusive fitness; that would require developing intelligence long before most comparatively simple behaviors emerged. Instead, any behaviors, attitudes, instincts, drives, and beliefs that promoted inclusive fitness -- however they arose -- tended to be passed on with a vengeance. Just as a caterpillar doesn't understand the biochemistry of nutrition, but instead simply has the urge to eat certain varieties of vegetation, so adult creatures (birds or mammals, say) have urges to engage in sexual activity, to build nests, to suckle young, to regurgitate food on cue, to lure predators away from nests or lairs, etc.

The upshot is this: Creatures like us pursue their perceived interests, while their actual interests may remain completely unknown to them. Perceived interests -- the urge of the moment, the object of awareness -- are the proximate cause of behaviors undertaken to pursue them. But the ultimate cause of those behaviors, and of the perceived interests themselves, is the blunt fact that they all serve inclusive fitness.

Several interesting phenomena have been discovered among humans and our kindred species that demonstrate differences in reproductive strategy according to gender and socioeconomic status. One of these is hypergamy, the tendency of females to marry either at their same social station or higher.³⁷ Because females mate more or less at will (given an abundance of willing males), they would be best served in terms of inclusive fitness if they produced male offspring while they were young and healthy (so that those males would most likely also be healthy, and hence reproductively successful), then begin producing more daughters as they grew older and less healthy (for the daughters are likely to reproduce even if moderately unhealthy). Indeed, this pattern is evident. In fact, it is culturally enhanced by the practice of infanticide: in the upper classes, daughters may be killed in order that their mothers might more quickly bear sons, who will attract many lower-class mates. Conversely, low-income mothers are more likely to breast-feed daughters than sons, and to breast-feed daughters for months longer than sons they do breast- feed. ³⁸ All this, of course, happens unintentionally (or even unconsciously); it is the other gender- based strategy: the effect of socioeconomic status on sex ratio of offspring.³⁹ In the U.S., for example, parents in the upper classes have an 8 percent higher chance of having a son than do parents at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale.

Let's return for a moment to the reasons people want children. It's a varied list of motivations, which reflect an important sensitivity to circumstance: the motivations we experience depend very much upon our immediate situation in life. A wide-ranging, cross-cultural study of such motivations, called "The Value of Children," was undertaken in the early 1970s.⁴⁰ Sons were typically wanted "to carry on the family name" or because "it is natural or instinctive to want children." People also usually wanted a son as first-born. These findings agree with the foregoing strategies -- but there were other findings that beg for a different interpretation.

The study identified three distinctive profiles of motivation, delineated by socioeconomic status: urban middle class, urban lower class, and rural.

For the urban middle class group, the motivations for having children were largely psychological and emotional. The fulfillment and pleasure of having a child, the personal growth as a parent, and the companionship and fun a child can provide were most commonly cited. Daughters were wanted for the psychological rewards they would bring, while sons were usually wanted to carry on the family name.

For the urban lower class, the emotional/psychological motivations were encroached upon by economic motivations. It was anticipated that sons would provide economic help, and daughters practical help, for their aging parents.

For the rural group, economic motivations were even stronger than for the urban lower class, and expectations of receiving economic help from children were the highest of all three groups.

Something seems to be working counter to inclusive fitness here. Why would parents want or expect their adult children to divert economic resources to them that would otherwise likely go to their grandchildren? Shouldn't they be promoting their inclusive fitness rather than their personal security and comfort?

I think this is probably an example of a situation that occurs periodically in evolution. A trait (say, a desire for personal security) that has served inclusive fitness for many generations (by promoting the survival to reproductive age of those who had it) comes to function as an end in itself due to a change in circumstances. And there has been a whopper of a change for humankind in recent generations: we now have old age.

Evolution has simply not had time to respond to the fact that we now routinely live beyond the births of our grandchildren. Sure, inclusive fitness would be very well served if we encouraged our children to devote all their economic resources to raising their own kids (rather than consuming part ourselves). Even assuming that such a tendency already exists in some of us, how long would it take for it to spread through the population?

What we appear to have here is a case where a perceived interest (security and comfort in old age) trumps the age-old actual interest of inclusive fitness. There are many other such cases. We indulge our tastes for fat and sweets (once valuable appetites for rather scarce commodities) despite a hugely detrimental effect on our health and attractiveness. Sex itself is primarily a recreational pastime. Senior citizens drive along in their recreational vehicles that sport the bumper sticker, "We're Spending Our Children's Inheritance." These are examples of what I call "rogue hedonism."

I'm not arguing here that pleasure should never be pursued for its own sake. My point is that, for our ancestors, it was just a tool "designed" by evolution to keep us healthy and reproductive in service to inclusive fitness. It is now something like a screwdriver that, though designed to drive screws, is co- opted primarily for use as an awl, a chisel, and a butter knife. It may poke holes, chip wood, and spread condiments to our great satisfaction -- but it would behoove us occasionally to look around for screws that need tightening.

A Question of Direction

One great benefit of eugenics for us, then, is simply to draw our attention back to the game -- to get us thinking about reproduction, what it means (in a cosmic, not personal, sense), and what we might want to do about it. But there's the rub: when it comes to action, what direction should we pursue?

Such decisions will be, as always, determined by our values. But we need to consider for a moment what "value" is. In the overriding sense today, "value" is a verb that expresses an attitude toward something. In the most important sense for our discussion, "value" is a noun that expresses a benefit (or a detriment) that something might impart to an organism. The stipulation "to an organism" is crucial, for there is no value except with respect to an organism. If something is good, it is good for some creature. (Try to imagine something reasonably called "valuable" in a universe without life!)

Value (the noun), then, is a matter of fact -- an objective relation that obtains between a thing and an organism, which relation is independent of the existence or quality of any phenomenal reaction the organism has to the thing in question. Food, for example, is valuable to us (and all creatures) whether or not we know it or appreciate it. And we value (the verb now) food because, ever since some remote ancestor was accidentally born with a vaguely positive attitude toward food, nature has differentially blessed any descendants possessing that attitude in greater degrees.

My claim that a value is part of nature may seem to violate the Naturalistic Fallacy: you can't derive an "ought" from an "is."⁴¹ That is, we can't claim something should be a particular way just because it is (or has been) that way. I agree completely with this in its normal context of mundane propositions concerning the trappings of life (e.g., the fact that a Democrat is president doesn't imply that a Democrat should be president), but not necessarily with respect to more cosmic propositions (e.g., the fact that the universe is the way it is may indeed imply that it is the way it ought to be). But there's another, stronger version of the Naturalistic Fallacy: an "ought" is wholly independent of, and irreducible to, naturalistic facts. This version is in conflict with my claim -- and I think it's just plain wrong. An "ought" derives from a complex causal matrix of naturalistic facts -- first, from objective relations of benefit and detriment, and second, from the evolutionary forces that formed the ability to think "ought" in response to such objective relations. It is this strong version that I call the Naturalistic Fallacy Fallacy....

Before we decide what sort of values should determine the direction of any proposed eugenic change, we need to think a bit about what change is. This requires some simple metatheory that, since I have found none in the scientific or philosophical literature, I have developed to clarify the abstract relations that govern selective systems like evolution.

Change is one of the constants of the universe. As far as we know, everything is changing on some time scale or other; even protons decay -- so there is no precise opposite of change that we might call "stasis." The functional opposite of change is continuity or persistence. Molecules, planets, and galaxies are all forms that persist, and their mode of persistence is individual: they form, continue for a while, then dissolve. Life persists in a unique and wonderful way, and its mode of persistence is generational. While individual organisms have fleeting individual existence, they are distinguished from non-living things by their ability to pass their form on, frequently with variation, to new generations. If this ability is lost, life disappears. No wonder reproduction is important to us: life is reproduction!

Change is of two varieties: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative change is expressed by an increased number of forms, and we conceptualize quantitative change in the positive direction as diversification, and its result is diversity. Qualitative change is expressed by the possession of a lesser or greater degree of an existing property, and we conceptualize such change in the positive direction as improvement, and its result is excellence. Excellence and diversity combine into two important mixed modes: versatility (the diversity of excellent abilities) and adaptability (excellence at acquiring diverse abilities).

Let's apply this metatheory now to examine how organisms establish their own directions of development.

Reproductive strategy. The extremes of parental investment represent the two basic reproductive strategies. One involves no parental investment in nurturing offspring, and relies upon a huge number of offspring from which only several on average will survive to reproduce. The other involves a large parental investment in nurturing, and therefore requires that there be fewer offspring among which to divide parental attention. Note that the former approach emphasizes quantity of offspring, while the latter depends on quality.

Life plan strategies. Some organisms are very specialized in how they eke out a living from the world. Vampire bats, for example, are specialized to live primarily on blood as a food source. Goats, on the other hand, will eat just about anything; they are dietary generalists. Specialists focus on quality, while generalists are primarily concerned with versatility. Some species rely for their overall success on individual abilities. Leopards generally hunt alone, and must do so well if the species is to continue. Bees rely instead on group abilities, with each caste playing a particular role in the hive, and no individual (not even the queen, who can be replaced quickly enough) is very important in the overall scheme of things. Where group abilities are paramount, individuals tend to be specialists focused on quality; when individual abilities matter, versatility and adaptability are the most valuable strategies.

Humans, for better or for worse, are well established in a particular combination of these strategies: we are committed to the high-parental-investment reproductive strategy; we are generalists who tend to specialize in a variety of pursuits; and we depend upon individual abilities for most of our needs. For us, then, versatility and adaptability are the cardinal virtues. They represent a direction of development already set for us by nature -- one that we might profitably pursue through eugenics.

Having hinted at a direction for future eugenics, let's make a metatheoretical comparison of nature's successful program of eugenics and the historical failures of human eugenics.

Nature introduces diversity by the automatic process of genetic variation, and selects for excellence according to a single standard: what works to promote inclusive fitness. The individual, of course, is the unit of selection.

Errant eugenicists, on the other hand, often attempted to expunge diversity, selecting for "excellence" according to arbitrary standards having only occasionally a relationship to inclusive fitness. (Programs directed against feeble-mindedness, for example, bore a relationship to inclusive fitness, whereas programs directed against miscegenation did not.) The individual, again, was the unit of selection.

What went wrong with eugenics? There are two obvious candidates, and one that is not so obvious.

First, there is a clear difference with respect to the attention paid to diversity, and there are several reasons this could be important. Diversity, foremost, provides a fall-back position whenever a conception of excellence proves false (or, in nature, environmental conditions no longer favor the form of excellence that had, up to that time, been developed through selection): when one strain fails, others remain to carry on. Secondarily, diversity provides a route to exploit new (or existing) environmental niches.

Secondly, there is the question of what constitutes excellence. Unless a human conception of excellence is grounded in inclusive fitness -- a precedent standing for billions of years -- there is a tremendous burden of justification that must be met by advocates of that conception.

Finally, there is the matter of individual selection. Brutal as that method is, nature has had no option but to follow it; it simply had no means to select for individual traits. We, on the other hand, are rapidly developing such means -- and we need to begin thinking about how we might implement them.

The Future of Eugenics

Broadly speaking, we have two choices. We can continue to ignore our actual, fundamental interest of inclusive fitness, and concentrate as usual on the perceived interests of our rogue hedonism, squabbling over arbitrary, conflicting values, and trusting that nature won't eventually dismiss us as irrelevant to the business of life. Alternatively, we can consciously pursue our actual reproductive interests, either according to the strategies we've inherited -- our best bet, I think -- or according to a new strategy or strategies (and what they might be I simply can't imagine).

Let's assume that we stick with our existing strategies for reproduction and life plan. How do we pursue them via eugenic methods without repeating the mistakes of the past?

(1) First, we can stop selecting against individuals. It's unnecessary and brutal. It's time to develop the methods whereby we can select directly for or against traits.

(2) Identify traits that enhance or promote versatility and/or adaptability, the hallmarks of the human life plan. Because our mental faculties are the primary source of versatility and adaptability, we might concentrate on traits like creativity, objectivity, intelligence, open-mindedness, and skepticism.

(3) Identify the genetic components for these traits, then apply TSTs according to individual preferences for particular ones.

(4) NEVER abandon diversity in favor of excellence. A "free market" of reproductive choice should in most cases suffice to maintain diversity. Should our conception(s) of excellence prove to be in error, we don't want to lose entire breeding populations as a result.

(5) Maintain a focus on inclusive fitness. Don't get sidetracked by fads (for eye color, designer skin patterns, exotic cosmetic traits from animal genes, etc.).

(6) Don't legitimize narrow reproductive interests -- e.g., by selecting for skill at getting away with rape, production of pheromones, or propensity for multiple births (all of which may increase inclusive fitness, but do so with short-term tricks that contribute nothing to the overall fitness of humankind).

(7) Plan so that human nature is always compatible over the very long term with its ecosystem(s). No species is an island.

(8) Develop and pursue voluntary negative eugenics programs to eliminate genetic diseases. This may eventually include universal availability of genetic screening and inexpensive gene replacement for heterozygous carriers of genetic diseases.

Law and Social Policy: Recommendations

Current law in the U.S.,⁴² Britain⁴³, and even internationally,⁴⁴ favors individual reproductive autonomy -- and, perhaps by extension, voluntary use of TSTs.⁴⁵

Reproductive rights vs. state interest. In general, voluntary eugenics honors the former, compulsory eugenics the latter. Voluntary eugenics provides the advantage of a "free market" of choice, which protects the principle of diversity. I think the role of the state is best conceived as protecting individuals' rights (including reproductive ones), while perhaps providing incentives for social goals by providing (or withholding) support for specific options that individuals can choose. Compulsory eugenics is ill-suited as a general framework, for it risks ignoring the principle of diversity and invites the pursuit of arbitrary, politically motivated conceptions of excellence -- which would be to repeat the tragic errors of the past. There may still be a limited place for compulsory methods, however, in defense of children's rights -- such as requiring female drug addicts of reproductive age to take a long-term contraceptive such as Norplant.⁴⁶

Rights of children. Indeed, the rights of children is an important but difficult issue. Evolutionary biology offers no support for the notion of a right to be born; offspring in nature are merely parents' investments in inclusive fitness.⁴⁷ This is reflected in current law; common law views the unborn child as a person in being only -- entitled to inherit property, but not to recover damages for injury in utero. Wrongful death (due to third party negligence) litigation on behalf of the unborn child failed when first attempted, but has since been successful -- at least for fetuses that are viable at the time of injury.⁴⁸ But our knowledge of biology would indicate that the parents should be able to recoup damages for injury to their unborn children -- their life's most valued investment.

Yet children certainly have interests no less important than those of parents. Perhaps the best forensic standard for determining where one's legal rights begin and end as an individual would be the ability to take purposeful action. But is more needed? What about provisions to protect the eventual interests of children as yet unborn? Should we any more be allowed to set in motion a deliberate course of events leading predictably to harm for a viable child (who happens to be unborn when the action is taken) than for an adult, who would obviously be entitled to redress for any harm caused?

Evolutionary biology points to a long-standing precedent: parents invest only in those offspring who are likely to enhance the parents' own inclusive fitness. Any requirement that parents invest resources in children who are not likely to reproduce successfully must be justified on other grounds. The question (unanswered so far as I know) is whether society's dominant sense of what is humane, a relic of evolution in service to inclusive fitness, will demand policies that actively reduce inclusive fitness by commandeering resources for rejected or neglected children that parents would otherwise have invested in other children.⁴⁹

Legal models for the protection of as-yet-unborn children are already here. Is there a right to bear a genetically disadvantaged child (predictably disadvantaged because of one's own genetic liabilities) simply for "personal fulfillment"? The biological precedent upholds this notion, but only as automatic, short-sighted reproductive strategy. If children in such cases can be enhanced via eugenic procedures, should there be an obligation to do so?

Wrongful life suits and claims of negligence by parents or medical professionals are approaches that have already been explored, with mixed results.⁵⁰ I think these approaches are important because parents and their children ultimately have the same interest in inclusive fitness, and parents need to be somewhat constrained from unthinkingly abandoning that common interest to their mutual disadvantage. Laws making parents responsible for damage they do to their children's through negligence or recklessness may somewhat deter such damage, to the benefit of all. More controversial would be laws requiring parents to make use of whatever eugenic techniques might enhance their children's inclusive fitness; here again, voluntary compliance with such goals is probably the best policy.

Rights of donors and surrogates. There is also a problem of determining what rights AID donors and surrogates might have. The latter is trickier from a biological standpoint, for the donor has a reproductive interest in the child. However, there is little support for enforcing a donor's putative right to be involved with the child after it is born, for the archetypal male reproductive strategy is primarily one of minimal personal investment in offspring. If the offspring's survival is guaranteed (by the biological mother and foster father), the donor's reproductive interest has been protected. Should he wish to provide economic resources to the child, perhaps arrangements could be made for that to be done anonymously.

Surrogates are an easier case. They have no direct reproductive interest in the child; their only interest is due to emotional attachment that is nature's tool to guarantee proper attention to children by their parents. In these cases, the attachment is sadly, but understandably, misplaced. On these grounds, no special rights for surrogates can be supported.

Eugenics per se. For our purposes, the most important legal issues relate to the application of eugenic measures. Aside from the conflict between reproductive autonomy and compulsive measures, already discussed, there remains whether positive measures should be allowed on a voluntary basis -- and if so, which ones?

There is a single, broad answer to this question implied by evolutionary biology: those techniques that will enhance an individual's inclusive fitness are legitimately pursued by the individual. The most important caveat to this position is that our judgments about what will enhance our inclusive fitness may be in error, resulting in injury to our offspring's reproductive interests. Absent omniscience, all that can be counseled here is prudence and perhaps moderation. Legal availability of voluntary positive eugenics, undertaken in a "free market" atmosphere that preserves the principle of diversity, is probably the best policy. There is still a place, however, for social pressure -- public disapproval, for example, of the pursuit of trivial, cosmetic, or trendy genetic alterations.

Conclusion

Eugenics, long deemed "guilty by association" with its misuses, is inherently no more than a means to the general end of inclusive fitness -- the biological goal of all living organisms. The fact that eugenics can be (and has been) misused dictates caution and responsibility, but not its abandonment. Indeed, the forces of "rogue hedonism" have diverted us so thoroughly from the real business of life (as revealed by evolutionary biology) that eugenics provides an overdue, welcome, and probably necessary focus -- without which we run the serious risk of abandoning the future of our species.