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Prove all things..(1 Thesa.5:21)
Test Spirits..(I John 4:1)
Like the Bereans, check whether things are so(Acts 17:11)
Tuesday, 3 March 2015
Why racism is not backed by science : Marie Stopes: a turbo-Darwinist ranter,
Barely a week goes by without some dispiriting tale of racism seeping into the public consciousness: the endless stream of Ukip supporters expressing some ill-conceived and unimaginative hate; football hooligans pushing a black man from a train.
I am partly of Indian descent, a bit swarthy, and my first experience
of racism was more baffling than upsetting. In 1982, my dad, sister and I
were at the Co-op in a small village in Suffolk where we lived, when
some boys shouted “Coco and Leroy” at us. Fame
was the big hit on telly at the time, and they were the lead
characters. My sister and I thought this was excellent: both amazing
dancers and supremely attractive: we did bad splits all the way home.
As someone who writes about evolution and genetics
– both of which involve the study of inheritance, and both of which
rely on making quantitative comparisons between living things – I often
receive letters from people associating Darwin with racism, usually citing the use of the words “favoured races” in the lengthy subtitle to his masterpiece, On the Origin of Species.
Of course, Darwin doesn’t discuss humans in that great book, and
“races” was used to describe groups within non-human species.
Contemporary use of language must be taken into account.
Darwin was not a racist. He did not, unlike many of his
contemporaries, think human “races” might be separate creations or
subspecies. He was a staunch abolitionist, impressed and influenced by
his friend and taxidermy tutor John Edmonstone at Edinburgh, who was a freed black slave. However, Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton,
most certainly was a racist. He wrote that the Chinese were a race of
geniuses, that “Negroes” were vastly inferior, that “Hindoos” were
inferior in “strength and business habits” and that the “Arab is little more than an eater up of other men’s produce; he is a destroyer”.
Obviously, these views are as absurd as they are unacceptable today,
as bewildering as calling two half-Indian kids the stage names of two
African-American actors. Galton is a problem figure, simultaneously a
great scientist and a horror. Among his myriad contributions to science,
he invented statistical tools we still use today, and formalised
biometrics on humans in new ways. He coined the phrase “nature versus
nurture”, which has persistently blighted discussions of genetics,
implying that these two factors are in conflict, when in fact they are
in concert. It was Galton who gave us the word “eugenics”, too, an idea
that didn’t carry the same poisonous stigma it does today. He was
enthusiastic about improving the British “stock”, prompted by the
paucity of healthy recruits for the Boer war.
Churchill desired the neutering of the ‘feeble-minded’.Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty
Many prominent figures were influenced by Galton: Marie Stopes argued forcefully for the compulsory “sterilisation of those unfit for parenthood”. Both Theodore Roosevelt
and Churchill desired the neutering of the “feeble-minded”, as was the
parlance in Edwardian days. At University College London, Galton founded
the Eugenics Records Office, which became the Galton Laboratory for
National Eugenics. By the time I studied there in the 1990s, it had long
since dropped that toxic word to become the Galton Laboratory of the
Department of Human Genetics.
Genetics has a blighted past with regards to race. Even today, important figures from its history – notably James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix – express unsupportable racist views.
The irony is that while Galton spawned a field with the intention of
revealing essential racial differences between the peoples of the Earth,
his legacy – human genetics – has shown he was wrong. Most modern
geneticists are much less like Galton and more like Darwin. A dreadful book published last year by former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade
espoused views about racial differences seemingly backed by genetics.
As with Watson, the reaction from geneticists was uniformly dismissive,
that he had failed to understand the field, and misrepresented their
work. ‘A horror’: Francis Galton.Photograph: Corbis
We now know that the way we talk about race has no scientific
validity. There is no genetic basis that corresponds with any particular
group of people, no essentialist DNA for black people or white people
or anyone. This is not a hippy ideal, it’s a fact. There are genetic
characteristics that associate with certain populations, but none of
these is exclusive, nor correspond uniquely with any one group that
might fit a racial epithet. Regional adaptations are real, but these
tend to express difference within so-called races, not between them.
Sickle-cell anaemia affects people of all skin colours because it has
evolved where malaria is common. Tibetans are genetically adapted to
high altitude, rendering Chinese residents of Beijing more similar to
Europeans than their superficially similar neighbours. Tay-Sachs disease, once thought to be a “Jewish disease”, is as common in French Canadians and Cajuns. And so it goes on.
We harvest thousands of human genomes every week. Last month, the UK launched the 100,000 Genomes project
to identify genetic bases for many diseases, but within that booty we
will also find more of the secret history of our species, our DNA mixed
and remixed through endless sex and continuous migration. We are too
horny and mobile to have stuck to our own kind for very long.
Race doesn’t exist, racism does. But we can now confine it to
opinions and not pretend that there might be any scientific validity in
bigotry.
Marie Stopes: a turbo-Darwinist ranter, but right about birth control
Marie Stopes may have
held distasteful views on eugenics, but her legacy and influence in the
birth control debate is what matters. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty
Attempts to erode the terms of the 1967 Abortion
Act have taken numerous forms over the past 10 years. Currently, the
strategy is to destroy the credibility of abortion providers and medical
opinion, to which end, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS)
and Marie Stopes International are being portrayed as ruthless
profiteers. It's a ridiculous position, since they're both charities.
When I defended Marie Stopes International in a column earlier in the week,
someone on the Guardian's Comment is free website said: "Is that the
same Marie Stopes who supported Hitler, and cut her son out of her will
because he married a disabled person?" This comment has now been removed
by a moderator, but it definitely isn't defamatory. Supporting Hitler
wasn't the half of it. No wonder the charity, when you ask it about its
founder, says delicately: "We tend to keep our distance."
Marie
Carmichael Stopes was born in 1880 and, until she was 40, led an
exemplary life as a feminist pioneer: at 22, she got a first in botany
and geology from UCL; two years later, a PhD from Munich University; and
became Manchester University's first female academic, as a palaeobotany
lecturer. She wrote two books in 1918, Married Love and Wise
Parenthood, in which she adumbrated some of her eugenicist views.
But
the really eye-popping stuff is in Birth Control News, a self-published
extremist fanzine which she set up in July 1922, with this stirring
editorial: "Sterilisation of the unfit raises a hornet's nest, but no
one worries at all about the daily sterilisation now going on of the
fit. Young married men of the professional classes are today often
forced by conditions to remain sterile, though they passionately desire
the healthy children they could have if they did not have hordes of
defectives to support in one way or the other." Her eugenics programme
was actually slightly to the right of Hitler's, just because her
definition of defective is so broad. There are certainly issues of Birth
Control News that seem to suggest, just with their news agenda, that
some people should be sterilised for nebulous reasons of defectiveness,
like not being rich enough. As you might expect, there are strong
strains of racism: she described the southern Italians as a "low-grade
race"; she was accused of anti-semitism even by her birth-control
allies; and in a stinging attack on the French who, in the early 1920s
tightened their laws against contraception, she said that if they really
wanted to repopulate their nation, they should "eliminate the taint of
their large numbers of perverted or homosexual people".
The
newsletter wasn't totally turgid. She got a brilliant column out of
George Bernard Shaw, in which he concluded that "the woman who has
learned how to control her fertility is as much less likely to be
mischievous as a woman who has learned how to control her temper."
Mainly though, the pamphlet – which you can read in its original form in the Women's Library
in east London – is fulminating rightwingness, peppered with
self-publicising, a proto-Melanie Phillips with an extra PhD. She writes
of herself: "Impregnably honest, utterly fearless, incorruptible by the
worldly lures which tend to weaken and deflect most reformers, yet
sane, scientific and happy, Dr Stopes, hating all conflict, is fighting
on behalf of others."
Many of her opponents saw her views on
poverty as the most dangerous thing about her, but steadily, between
1922 and 1929, the labour movement took up the call for birth control.
Only its women though. At the Labour party conference in Margate in
1926, the national executive voted not to discuss it. Birth Control News
ran with: "Women insist on reopening question and recall the fact that
at their own conference they had twice made the demand [for birth
control], the voting being 1,000 in favour and 6 against."
One
thousand to six. It's good, isn't it? You can't argue with a margin like
that, though the male-dominated unions continued to do so. By July
1927, both Liberal and Labour women were in favour of birth control. To
put this in context, Thomas Robert Malthus still loomed huge over the
terrain during this period, and the control of populations was a
constant theme. This, conflated with a kind of turbo-Darwinism, made
eugenics a common feature of the national debate, and it was not at all
unusual for judges and politicians and other notables to wish, out loud,
like Leslie Scott, the solicitor general, that "by a stroke of the pen
it could be ordained that from today onwards no mental defective should
be allowed to breed". Nevertheless, even by these standards, Stopes was
clearly an extremist.
But her views were never the influential
thing about her: it was in her clinic at 61 Marlborough Road, north
London, that her real social impact was taking hold. It didn't do
abortions – though abortion and birth control were often conflated in
the rhetoric of the era – but it was the first birth-control centre in
the British empire. The current range of services, which still include
contraception, but also abortions and vasectomies, has been building up
since the legalisation of abortion in 1967.
By 1923, the east
London clinic was overwhelmed: women were walking across London,
waiting hours, crying in the streets when they were turned away because
there wasn't time to see them. She started fundraising: "£10,000 are
asked for" ran her editorial, casting one vividly back to a time when
pounds were referred to in the plural if you wanted more than one.
In
1925, the clinic moved to a larger site in central London. The women
she provided with contraception didn't care whether she thought they
were scum who should leave the breeding to the master race. They didn't
care whether eugenics was considered the natural endpoint of any
interference in nature's course. They just wanted not to have 18
children. They just wanted the choice.
