James D. Watson with Andrew Berry
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003
$39.95
446 pp.
Reviewed by Leslie Jones
In his Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883), Sir Francis Galton deplored the suffering and waste of life contingent on evolution by natural selection. As regards man, he advocated more merciful and rational methods of selection. Yet Galton also acknowledged the “…present imperfect knowledge of the limitations and conditions of hereditary transmission.” This disjuncture between the ambitious goals of eugenics and its earlier exponents’ limited understanding of how heredity worked is explored in James Watson’s new book. Published on the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the double helix, DNA: The Secret of Life is a manifesto for a new, libertarian eugenics based on our enhanced understanding of heredity.
DNA: The Secret of Life commences with a chapter that purports to be an objective history of eugenics but has the contentious title “Beginnings of Genetics: From Mendel to Hitler.” Watson recalls that in 1948, when he first came to Cold Spring Harbor, the location of the Eugenics Record Office, nobody would use the “E word” and that human genetics had “a major public relations problem” because of its previous association with eugenics. This is something of an understatement.
The author’s critique of eugenics consists of two main elements. First, he questions its scientific status. He has some particularly harsh words for one of his predecessors as director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the biologist Charles B. Davenport. In 1910, Davenport established the Eugenics Record Office nearby and appointed Harry H. Laughlin as its superintendent. Mendel’s laws had been rediscovered in 1900, and Davenport applied Mendelian analysis to the pedigrees that he assiduously constructed.
Had Davenport confined his research program to such simple traits as albinism and Huntington’s disease, Watson would have no complaint. These traits are caused by a particular mutation in a particular gene and are barely affected by the environment. But Davenport also applied Mendel’s laws to complex behavioral traits, such as alcoholism, that are affected by many genes and by environmental factors. In Watson’s judgment, Davenport’s research was “deeply flawed.” The author also maintains that because the science driving eugenics was “bogus,” it became a vehicle for the racial and social prejudices of its supporters.
However, Rushton (2002a) has examined the archives at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the Laughlin archives in Missouri. He acknowledges that many of the behavioral traits that interest scientists, notably intelligence, are not transmitted as “unit characters” in simple Mendelian fashion but are inherited polygeneically. He nevertheless insists that Davenport’s research orientation was scientific. He also points out that the heritability of human behavioral traits, as posited by Davenport, is beyond question. Professor Lynn (2001) concurs. He notes that Davenport discovered that a single dominant gene causes Huntington’s disease. Lynn concludes that despite the errors of certain eugenicists, notably psychologist Carl Brigham’s inference from the U.S. Army Tests that the Alpine and Mediterranean races are genetically inferior to the Nordics, eugenics was predominantly scientific. And Resta (1998) remarks that the two major clinical genetics journals in the United States continue to employ the Davenport pedigree style.
The academic world is currently tyrannized by political correctness, in Watson’s opinion. Ironically, the second element in his critique of eugenics, the exegesis of its “horrendous…consequences,” illustrates this contention. The author uncritically endorses Kevles’s canard as to the links between American eugenics and the Nazi Holocaust. Kevles (1995) claims that Laughlin’s influence ensured the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 that restricted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. The tragic unintended consequence of this act, according to Watson, was the abandonment of German Jewry to its fate.
Kevles and Watson discern a further connection between American eugenics and the Nazis. They argue that the German sterilization law of 1933 was based on the model elaborated by Laughlin (as did Laughlin). En passant, Professor Watson makes a pointed reference to the latter’s expertise in chicken breeding.
Daniel Kevles, Watson’s principal source on the history of eugenics, states, “The Nazi horrors discredited eugenics as a social program.” He thereby conflates eugenics and German National Socialism. Yet although there were contacts between the American, British, and German eugenicists (Mazumdar, 1998), the eugenics movement was always pluralistic, to quote Rushton’s apt description (Rushton, 2002a). Support for eugenics spanned the ideological spectrum, despite Watson’s attempts to associate it exclusively with the “white supremacism” of Madison Grant and the “racist ranting” of Hitler.
Lynn (2001) disputes the responsibility of the German scientific eugenicists, let alone their American counterparts, for the “final solution.” Self-evidently, compulsory sterilization in the United States was a far cry from genocide. The conflation of eugenics and the “final solution” also involves assigning what Rushton (2002a) calls “guilt by remote association.” Witness Watson’s observation that Laughlin received an honorary degree from Heidelberg University in 1936 and his gratuitous comment that Laughlin “had his fans among the Nazis.”
Somewhat fittingly, Watson has himself become a victim of “guilt by remote association.” Despite his forthright condemnation of Hitler’s program of medical killing, Watson has been accused of emulating the Nazis! His zealous advocacy of extensive genetic screening and of a woman’s right to abort a fetus with “deleterious genes” reminded the president of the German Federal Chamber of Medical Doctors of the concept of “life not worth living” (lebensunwertes Leben), as employed by the Nazis but elaborated before 1933 by the jurist Karl Binding and by Alfred Hoche, professor of psychiatry at Freiburg.
Although Watson does not deny the influence of nurture, he is struck by its limits. These are most dramatically expressed in cases of profound genetic disadvantage. He cites the example of boys with severe Fragile X syndrome. Boys affected are mentally retarded and can suffer from a distressing range of behavioral problems. Medicine can do nothing to help them. In The Lives to Come, Philip Kitcher eloquently describes the “unending anguish” of their parents.
For the author, the slow learner is another example of the limits of nurture. He disputes the theory that poverty is the cause of low IQ. As he observes, no amount of extra tuition will enable a slow learner to excel. Children will inevitably get left behind if we assume that all individuals have the same potential for learning. James Watson does not mention A. R. Jensen by name but he is evidently familiar with his work. By taking ability differences into account, Jensen (1998) contends that educators could design far more effective programs of education.
Genetic enhancement is the improvement of a child’s intelligence and personality by inserting suitable genes into the fetus soon after conception. Watson believes that it is both desirable and eminently feasible. He dismisses the notion that what is natural is best.
Francis Fukuyama, for one, fears that genetic enhancement could destroy our already fragile sense of a common humanity (Pinker, 2003). Other doomsayers envisage an immutable genetic caste system. They emphasize the existing unequal access to medical resources and claim that selfishness and nepotism are hardwired into human nature. Watson suspects that “the dark passage of the eugenics movement” encourages this visceral opposition to genetic enhancement.
Yet regardless of these reservations, Watson believes that genetic enhancement will inevitably arise on the foundations of an existing biotechnology that cannot be suppressed. Lynn (2001) likewise argues that in the market economies, the demand for the eugenic use of biotechnology will eventually become irresistible, given the understandable wish of couples to have children with desirable genetic characteristics. Like Lynn, Watson predicts that authoritarian states such as China will have no compunction about using embryo selection and the techniques of gene therapy to increase the intelligence of their populations and thereby enhance their power.
Quahistory, DNA: The Secret of Life is flawed. How does it rate as futurology? Pinker (2003) has underlined the frailty of most technological predictions, including those transformations deemed “inevitable.” Watson acknowledges the risks and dangers of gene improvement and Pinker discerns here a major obstacle to its development. What parent, he demands, would accept a small risk of retardation in the hope of achieving a moderate amount of improvement? Because humans are selfish and nepotistic, genetic enhancement is arguably undesirable. And because parents love their children, contra Watson it may not be inevitable.
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