(gentle upbeat music) (attendees applauding) - I would've saved that till the end. (attendees laughing) 'Cause you said exciting and entertaining and, you know, last week
I had a kid's book out aimed at 9 to 15 year olds. And that is genuinely good fun. This isn't. (attendees laughing) This is not the exciting
entertainment version, you've chosen to come
to an hour's lecture, 75 slides, which are
mostly about genocides. So hope you enjoy. Thank you very much for this honour. It is a great honour and a
privilege to receive this award. And I particularly want
to thank Aoife McLysaght, Professor Aoife McLysaght
from Trinity College Dublin, who nominated me for this award. But she's not here
because she's got COVID. I think she might be watching. Hi, Aoife. Thanks. Now, I don't have a great track record in receiving such honours. And by that I mean I have a sort of very childish schoolboy rebellion streak in me, which I have not managed
to shake at the age of 48. And how this manifests is a slight, perhaps gracelessness in being invited to give prestigious lectures, which happens relatively often for me. So for example, last year I was asked to talk about eugenics
at the Crick Institute, the astonishing research institute named after the Great Francis Crick. And it was to be about eugenics. But I felt compelled to point out that Francis Crick well into the '70s was quite keen on eugenics. (attendees laughing) And in this private letter, the quote is, "Eh, eugenics gave the
Nazis a bit of a bad name, "and I think we should try and
make it respectively again," not ideal. Incidentally, the recipient of
the Haldane Award last year, Matthew Cobb, is writing
the definitive biography of Francis Crick. And I've read parts of
it and it's really juicy. This is just the thin end of the wedge. Another example is that in 2016, I was asked to give the Voltaire
Lecture for the humanists, British humanists, Humanist UK, Voltaire being one of the great
voices of the Enlightenment. And I felt compelled to point out that Voltaire was an astonishing racist, a polygenist who believed that Sub-Saharan African
people were a different species to white people. They still gave me the
award at the end of it. And in fact, two years later, they chose me as the
president of Humanist UK, at which point I was
invited to give a speech in my inaugural presidential
introduction to the humanists. And I felt compelled to point out that previous humanist presidents were also astonishing
racists and eugenicists. (attendees laughing) No, no. So that joke only works
if Alice is in the room, but unfortunately she
also is not very well. But I do have to check with
her that she isn't a eugenics. No, in fact, I'm referring to Julian Huxley, a great figurehead in science
and evolutionary biology. A scientist initially who then became a science communicator, a writer alongside H.G. Wells, produced some astonishing
work in the 1920s and '30s, and then became a TV presenter, presenting the first TV
programmes on the BBC about genetics, about evolution, and was directed by a
young David Attenborough. Now again, what an astonishing life, an astonishing figurehead. And once the president of Humanists UK or what became Humanist UK. And so there are some
similarities between him and me, apart from the fact that he
remained a great eugenicist throughout his life, driven by his left-wing politics. And you can see from this quote that he makes the classic
error of eugenicists, which is to compare humans to livestock and then goes on to suggest that we should halt the
inevitable decline of us by using eugenics. Now over the course of this talk, I'm gonna be quite rude about a lot of our intellectual forebears. And I know that some of
you'll be thinking one or all of the following
sentiments which crop up when we talk about the ideas
of our intellectual forebears, we are in an era where we are assessing our
intellectual ancestors. And I think this is really important, not just because it's interesting and not just because it's
the history of our field and I've become a sort
of de facto historian of evolutionary genetics. But because it really forms the way we practise science today and how the structural
biases in society percolate into science and into our practises and how history has served them up to us. But most important, and something I'll touch on later is how these legacies by these
great men of science persist in how we teach genetics today. Now, some of the canards, some of the caveats that come with this sort of
discussion, go like this, angry men on the internet shouting at me, "You are rewriting history." I'm gonna go through each one
of these and break them down. I'll do it quite quickly. "You are rewriting history" is possibly the most
fatuous thing you can say to a historian. History is rewriting the past. It is literally the definition of history is to rewrite what has already happened. You can't change the past. But we continually
reassess with new evidence and contemporary values
what has already happened, rewriting history is what historians do. The second one, "You are erasing history." Well, no, we are creating history. History is the analysis of the past. And by doing that analysis, we are actually documenting history. So again, we're not erasing it, we're exposing it. Of course, "You can't judge
people by today's standards." Now this is a sort of
central tenet of history, and it is true, but it is used almost exclusively to shut down conversations
about our historical forebears, our intellectual ancestors. You can, you can assess the opinions and the actions of people from the past by contextualising them
to their contemporaries. And that aligns with the often shouted, "Well, they were men of their time," which I think is an equally
fatuous thing to say because it's quite impossible
not to be a man of your time. (attendees laughing) But again, it is designed and expressed in order to shut down conversations
analysing our ancestors. And not just that, but it also is... Oh, what was I gonna say? I had a really important point here and it's completely gone. Do you want the money back? Here. Take it. (attendees laughing) Take it back. It was about, one is
being a man of your time, and I should make better notes for this. It was an important point and it was... I'll come back to it, it'll come back to me in two slides time and I'll interrupt myself about this. But what is really important
is that we should be interested in the scholarship of our fields. Not just because it's
interesting as I say, but because the history
of genetics influences how we have conversations about genetics, about evolution and how we teach it today. And that is the most important thing. And then there's one more, which is that the personal
views of individuals are irrelevant to their
scientific practises. And that is one that I'm gonna be tackling in some detail over the next hour or so. And also bear in mind that, you know, we stand on
these privileged positions and it's all very well, us now, me standing here 100 years afterwards and saying that these
men had terrible opinions and they were values of their time. And in 100 years time, people will be standing on the same stage and doing the same for us. And that's fine and that's
how history should be. Have a think about the things
that we will be cancelled for. The obvious ones are our
action on climate change, eating meat, which I continue to do, but there are loads of other things that we will think in
50 or 100 years time, gah, can you believe
that we used to do that. Now, one of the things, and why I think this is important to have this discussion now
is that the field of biology as a broad discipline, but more specifically evolutionary biology and ultimately genetics
was founded not in parallel with political ideologies,
but in service of them. So Jonathan mentioned upfront that I've written a lot about the history and the invention of scientific racism, which occurs in the
17th or 18th centuries. And this is a statement and a sentence that I've said often
over the last few years since I wrote a book called
"How to Argue with a Racist." And what I find is that if
you say this to historians, they nod in agreement and if you say it to geneticists, they go, "Really, is that right?" But it is absolutely true that the invention of race occurred at a time when European
expansion and colonialism was the political ideology of the West. And that the classification system that was designed by Carl Linnaeus, when it was applied to humans, was specifically not simply
to introduce classification and taxonomy to humans, but to introduce hierarchical
classification to humans. And so in his 10th edition
of "Systemae Naturae," the book in which he attempts
to describe all living things; animals, vegetables, but also minerals that didn't really catch on, using the binomial Latin taxonomic system that we continue to use to this day, genus and species. In the 10th edition, he
introduced Homo sapiens and with that introduced
four subcategories. We might have called
them subspecies later, although I think most
evolutionary biologists reject that subcategorization today. But he introduced four
subcategories for humans and they are these:
Homo sapiens Americanus, Asiaticus, and Africanus. And the first phenotype
used to classify them is a physical trait. It is skin pigmentation. And the second is hair colour and texture. So they have two physical
characteristic used to taxonomize humans and I won't read them out, you can read them for yourselves, but I've only included three there. And you can see that what follows from the physical
characteristics of skin colour and hair colour and texture is unequivocal value judgments, which are racist in any age. And of course the fourth one
was Homo sapiens Europeaus, who are white-skinned with
blue eyes are gentle, acute, inventive, and governed by laws. Now, every attempt to classify humans from this point onwards until the 20th century was hierarchical. It wasn't simply
classification or taxonomic, it was hierarchical. And there isn't a single
example of this taxonomy, which doesn't put white Western Europeans at the top of that tree. Now we now know, and this is a good and celebratory
trajectory for genetics, we now know that genetics is the field, the only field which has dismantled this. But the intellectual legacy
of this in our culture is that these are still broadly the terms and the classifications that we use for the socially-constructed taxonomy that we continue to use today. It was characterised
and defined by Linnaeus in the 18th century and its legacy persists
in our behaviours today. And I always like to add
in then the 11th edition, he added a fifth category
Homo sapiens Monstroso, which included: Feral children, Alpine dwarfs, wolf children, and what he described as
mono-orchid Hottentots, which, do I need to
explain what that means? - Yes.
- Yes. - Right. Okay. Well, the Hottentots was an old fashioned, an archaic word for the
people of the Khoikhoi or Khoisan tribes people
from Southern Africa now. That was what we used to call
them in the 18th century. Why are orchids called orchids? - [Attendee 1] (speaks faintly) look like. - [Adam] What do they look like? - [Attendee 1] Because
of what they look like. - [Adam] And what do they look like? - Testicles.
- Testicles. So orchis is the Greek word for testicles, and the roots of an orchid
look like testicles. So what is a mono-orchid Hottentot? (attendees laughing) Yeah, I mean there is a reason for this, we think, one of our colleagues, Ruth Mace has speculated on this, which is that in certain African tribes, identical twins are considered cursed. And at the time, in the
18th and 19th century, it was thought that identical
twins were the progeny of sperm from one of each
of a man's testicles. So single-balled men were... Sorry, bald, not as in no hair. (attendees laughing) Mono-orchid men were... I did not plan this talk to go like this. (attendees laughing) Okay, so the foundations of biology are not as an academic field, but as a field in service of political ideology of
European expansionism, race is invented to serve racism. Now the main sort of central thesis of this branch of my work can be summed up in the next title slide, which is that scientists
make bad historians. There's a lot of scientists
in the room here, including my boss and my boss's boss and most of my department. So I don't know how this
is gonna go down tomorrow, but this assertion, my opinion
here is based on two ideas. And the first is that
scientists often think that history is easy and that the evidence of history
is not taken as seriously as the evidence that we collect
and analyse in our own data. And I think this is a
failure of scientists to understand the discipline, the academic discipline of history, which is, let's face it, much, much older than the
scientific disciplines. And we see it all the time. We see it in the way that we analyse the great men of our past that I will talk about today. And we see it in the fact
that scientists can think that they can understand
the history of a field by looking at the Wikipedia
page or by reading a biography. And historians, real historians
look at scientists' analysis of their own history
and find it reasonable. I know this through my own experience and I have become a de facto historian, but it is hard because it
is an academic discipline that I think most of us as scientists, I'm looking... All the UCL people are over here, so I keep looking over there. I'll talk to you people over here. We stopped doing academic
history when we were 16 or 17, and it turns out there's
loads of academic history and techniques and tools that
need to be learned after that. But nevertheless, we get into situations where
scientists talk about history and they mostly get it wrong. And I think mostly because
they don't take the data and the evidence seriously. Here's a great example of that, James Watson, the co-discoverer
of the double helix in 1953. Now many of you will know
of the work of James Watson. Many of you will also know that
he's possibly best described as a troubled man. I think his racism and misogyny
are not very well hidden but I'm not here to discuss that. In his classic 1968
book, "The Double Helix," his description, his personal description of the discovery of the
double helix in 1953, the run up to it and the aftermath, which is a fantastic book and well worth everyone
in this room's time. It really is just such a great story. And that's what it is. It is a story. We now know that lots of it is fictional and the analysis of it is still ongoing. And another biography is
being written of Watson today in which the approach is taken by a science historian
called Nathaniel Comfort. The approach taken is
that this should be read and understood like a novel. We know, for example, that Francis Crick never
went into the Eagle pub in Cambridge and declared that "We have discovered
the secret of life." We know that because James
Watson told us that in 2018, he revealed that that never had happened and he made it up because
it was a good line. Now, the biggest story
that emerges from this, and the one that has become
more politically charged than anything is the way that
he describes Rosalind Franklin and the narrative that emerges
from the book itself is that Watson is deeply
misogynistic towards her and says frequently
sexist, horrible things about her appearance. Now, he apologised for several of those in the second edition, but they remain in print in
the original text on unchanged. But the repercussions of that is that there has been a massive backlash against the way he treats
Rosalind Franklin in that book. And the problem with that is
that it's equally fictitious. And so most of the narratives about what Rosalind Franklin
actually did during the 1952 into the '60s era , the stories we tell each
other are equally wrong. And we continue to play into
James Watson's narrative as a result of that. He spun a bunch of
misogynistic lies in his book, and as a result, we responded with a bunch of equally
inaccurate statements about what her role is. And again, Matthew Cobb is documenting
this really accurately. And him and Nathaniel
Comfort published a paper that was published in
"Nature" earlier this year, which is a much better description
of what actually happened and what Watson and Crick
actually thought about Franklin. And the truth of the matter is that it makes her a more
interesting character. It makes her a better scientist. It slightly exonerates Watson's misogyny, but only slightly. And so here we have a situation where, how many years have we gone from this? 50, 60 years after the events itself, we're still correcting
the history of the story that we continue to tell ourselves about this momentous event
in the history of science. And why? Because we haven't analysed
the data correctly. Because we read this book, which should be understood as a novel and we read it as fact. And so for the last 50 years, we've been telling ourselves a story in service only to one person and that is James Watson's narrative Scientists are bad at history. The second reason, I think, is that there has been a great
reluctance amongst scientists to abandon the Great
Man Theory of history. So the Great Man Theory
of history is an idea that was formalised in the 1840s by a writer called Thomas Carlyle. And it was basically
that the innate abilities and heroic acts and divine inspiration of individuals; always men, that that is how history
could be explained. Now, it's my contention that
in science we remain bewitched by this Great Man Theory. In academic history, this is an idea that was
largely abandoned 20, 30, maybe 40 years ago because it doesn't explain history and it doesn't explain history
that happens to most people. But we still continue in our teachings of the history of science
to draw straight lines from Aristotle all the way
up to the Nobel Prizes. The Nobel Prizes, along with the Oscars, I think are the only prizes
that are recognised globally by everyone. And I think they fundamentally mis... Are there any Nobel Prize
winners in the audience? I don't care. I think they fundamentally
misrepresent how science is done and continue to perpetuate
myths about how science is done by reinforcing the notion
of Great Man Theory. And as for the Oscars, well, you know, Susan Cain was beaten by "How Green is My Valley." So that's rubbish, isn't it? Now, when it comes to science and the history of science and the field that I
have some expertise in, the Great Man Theory is
first really focused upon and identified by Francis Galton. I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about Francis Galton. He actually pays my salary as well. So I'm slightly grateful for that, but I think it's quite funny that I spend most of my
life being rude about him. Anyway, so Francis Galton's first work before he got into
eugenics was a travel book. He went around the world
after his father had died and he travelled mostly around Africa and into the Middle East and came back even more racist than he was when he left. But his second book and
his first sort of wander into what became eugenics came in 1869. And it's a book called "Hereditary Genius" in which he set out to prove, which no one had done before, but he set out to prove using statistics and new statistical techniques
that he himself had invented, that the great men of history were great because it ran in their families, they didn't have the word genetic, but in a biological way. And he set out to prove... He was singularly uninterested in women, so it is only men in this book. Women, according to Galton at this time, are simply vesicles in
which to incubate great men. So he talks about the judges of England, statesmen, at the time of George III, the premiers, meaning the prime ministers during the last 100 years, but also commanders, men of literature, men of science, painters,
poets and musicians. And because these are all
intellectual pursuits, he has a short chapter on the classes of oarsmen and wrestlers. And with this, he demonstrates using
statistical techniques that there are a proportion, a consistent proportion of
men in societies will be great across basically a standard deviation, a bell curve of abilities. And these great men represents
the two standard deviations above the average. And at the far end, the
other end of the scale, you have the same proportion
of people who are undesirable, they have qualities which are undesirable for the British stock. And this was the founding
idea for him of eugenics, the idea that we should move the dial towards the great people
using biological means. Because he was a hereditary, he believed that these are
biological characteristics and far less socially mediated
than we might today think. Now a lot of my work is about eugenics and I will talk about it
a bit more specifically in just a minute. But this is not a lecture
specifically about eugenics. What I'm interested in talking about for the purpose of this lecture is the fifth of my angry phrases, which is that their personal views, the views of these men of science, these great men of science are irrelevant to the science that they created. Now this is a very interesting question, and I imagine that some
of you are thinking about this right now. Why do I spend all my
time talking about this? Well, we are going through this period of reassessing our intellectual forebears. But at UCL we've had a specific moment in the last three or four years because there was an
official eugenics inquiry because as a result of
Francis Galton's legacy at UCL in effectively founding the department, which would become the
Department of Genetics, Evolution and Ecology, which... Environment. What is our department called? Genetics... What is it? Genetics, Evolution, Environment. Should get that right in front of my boss. But there was a reckoning, which finished just before
the pandemic in 2020. And the various naming
conventions at UCL on campus, one of the outcomes of that inquiry were that those names would be removed. So that's the Galton Lecture Theatre, the Pearson Lecture Theatre
and the R.A. Fisher Centre. All of those names have been changed. And also part of the outcome was that they created a salary for me. Now, in answering or attempting
to address the question of whether their personal views affected their scientific work, Galton is pretty straightforward. He was an unequivocal white
supremacist and a racist, which was, he was not unusual, fairly typical, but quite
extreme for the Victorian age. But again, oh, I remembered the point, the one that I forgotten
on the other side. What was the line? It was, God, did I just win an award for science communication? (attendees laughing) What was it? They're the men of their time. Yeah, got it. All right, right. So there were men of the time. The point is that, that phrase, "They're men of their time," it implies that everyone thinks the same in every era, right? It implies that everyone is equally racist or white supremacists today or them. If in 100 years time you said, "Oh, well, they were
people of their time," you'd think, well, this is one of the most politically
divisive eras ever. You can't just say what
everyone in this room, well, maybe everyone in this room, but, you know, maybe
everyone in the country has wildly different views. And that's what I mean by contextualising their
views at this time. And it's why saying "They
are people of their time" is a fatuous thing to say. But for Galton it's easy because he was quite explicit about it. He devoted the rest of his
life from about 1869 onwards to promoting the ideology of eugenics, which he said was an ideology and using science, using
new statistical techniques, which he invented in order
to justify the improvement of the British people
using biological means. And this is a quote from 1909, and this is the first time
I'd seen the word Jehad used outside of the
context of 20th century, sorry, 21st century, repercussions after 9/11. But there it is in 1909, but it is Galton saying we need to have a religious fervour
attached to eugenics in order to improve the
quality of the British people. So the notion that the science that he invented is independent of his political ideologies
is obviously untrue. He was doing the science in order to serve his political ideas. Now, one of his legacies
was that he set up, as well as the financial
legacy he set up at UCL, he set up the Galton Professorship. And the first part of the behest was that the first Galton
professor was Karl Pearson, here's Karl Pearson. Karl Pearson, unequivocally one of the most important
scientists who has ever existed. For multiple reasons. He invents most of the, maybe half of the statistical techniques that most of the modern world depends on, most in the 1910s and '20s. But before that, an astonishing polymath, he was a professor of
German folklore in Berlin before becoming a professor
of physiology also in Berlin. But he got bored of Berlin. So he moved to London where
he became a professor of law and he decided he didn't
want to become a lawyer. So he decided to take up a
professorship in mathematics, which is not the same pathway
that my career has taken. (attendees laughing) He wrote a book in 1890 called
"The Grammar of Science," which was a bestseller. And it is the first description, I think I'm happy to be corrected on this, but I think it's the first description that anyone describes matter and energy to be interchangeable, right? And we know because
Einstein wrote about it, that Einstein read this book in the 1890s and 15 years after it was published, Einstein publishes special relativity in which he describes that. So Pearson's influence on science, not just on creating
statistical techniques or effectively inventing many of the foundations of population genetics was also in the formation of
special relativity as well. So Pearson, an incredible
figurehead in in our field. I feel like this isn't gonna
be a surprise at this point. He also was an incredible racist, a breathtakingly racist man, particularly anti-Semitic in his outlook. So the first quote is in reaction to the Boer War in 1896. You can read it for yourself. And the second, just a wildly antisemitic thing to say. Now, can you separate Pearson's work from his grotesque racism
and support for eugenics? No, you can't because in handing over his, in retiring from the Galton
Professorship in 1933, he gave a lecture in which
he stated quite unequivocally that he developed these
statistical techniques in order to promote the
ideology of eugenics. He said, "The climax culminated "in Galton's preaching of eugenics "and his foundation of the
Eugenics Professorship. "Did I say culmination? "No, that lies rather in the future, "perhaps with the Reichskanzler Hitler "and his proposal to
regenerate the German people." So there's Karl Pearson for you, and I think I feel okay in
saying that it is impossible to separate the genesis of his work with his political ideologies. Now, in that speech, he's handing over the Galton Professorship to Ronald Aylmer Fisher,
the second Galton professor. And I think it's fair to say that almost all of the
statistical techniques that Karl Pearson didn't invent were invented by Ronald Fisher, probably the greatest
statistician who has ever lived. One of the three founders
of the modern synthesis, the process by which
Darwinian natural selection was fused with the new genetics in order to create our
contemporary understanding of evolutionary biology. He was a brilliant man. He wrote in 1930, the Foundational Text
of population genetics, "The Genetical Theory
of Natural Selection." It is an absolutely turgid book. I mean unreadable. (attendees laughing) And has anyone in this
room actually read that? I mean I've tried my best. Someone put their hand up up there. Oh, well, he's my PhD student, so (attendees laughing) he better have. (everyone laughing) You know, you start on Monday. So how are you getting on? Yeah. (attendees laughing) (Adam chuckling) Yeah. Now, again, not gonna be a great surprise. He was extremely keen on eugenics, and this is well documented, it's well documented in one of my books. And in other work, he was a co-founder of the
Eugenics Society in 1812 as an undergraduate at Gonville
and Caius in Cambridge. And he started writing for
the first eugenics journalism, which was for the Eugenics
Education Society in about 1918. And some of those texts
are absolutely fascinating because some of them includes the seeds, clearly the seeds of some
of his great work later on, the first description
of what becomes known as Fisherian runaway
selection are described in an article in 1918, which is why, you know, male
deer have massive antlers and peacocks have massive
tails and things like that. But even in reading those early texts, you can see the seeds of
great evolutionary biology. But he does fuse it
absolutely with human traits, that he equates with selection, including things like ruddy
cheeks on men and halitosis. I mean, I suppose
halitosis is a good example or negative selection if you're in a bar, but I don't think it necessarily
fits him with his paradigm. So I'm dealing with the question of whether their political
views are associated with their scientific works. We know that Fisher was
a great fan of eugenics. I think how he expressed his
views on race are much subtler. I don't think he was
particularly racist any more than many upper middle
class men of that era. And, like, it isn't expressed
like Karl Pearson's was, but he was very keen on eugenics. Now that book, "The Genetical
Theory of Natural Selection" of the one person, the two people in this room
who've actually read it, they will know quite well that only the first 7 of
the 12 chapters in it deal with population genetics, the final five chapters
are about eugenics. They're kind of mad and they're sort of fantasies about the fall of the Roman Empire, which is a sort of cornerstone of eugenics thinking of this time. And also policy suggestions
about taxing people who have fewer children and so on. There's five chapters about this, and we don't really mention this because they're completely bonkers and they're completely irrelevant to the foundational text
of population genetics, which occurs in the first seven chapters, which none of you have read. But they are really important. So you could suggest that
maybe that's just a tag on, this is his pet, this is his hobby horse, and so he wants to add it
into his great textbook. And if you look at the
reviews over the last, well, almost 100 years of this book, most of them ignore the fact that the last five chapters
are actually about eugenics, but some work by a chap, a historian of Fisher
at Oxford University, and this has only happened in the last couple of years, Alex Aylward, and he's been kind enough
to share these slides with me for this talk. He went through the Fisher Archive and which no one else has really done, which has kept in Adelaide
where Fisher died. And in that he's
discovered the 1919 draught of an untitled book, which becomes "The Genetical
Theory of Natural Selection." And the very interesting thing about it is that the first chapters
in the early draught are the final chapters
in the published one. So it appears in the argument
by Alex that I buy into, is that Fisher's initial intention was to write a book about genetics and then use his invented
population genetics to justify it. And it was only much later, when he was writing it in 1928 and '30, that he moves those chapters to the end and we can actually see that. So this is what was chapter
one, which you can see. So this is the index from
the published first edition. But you can see that the
moving of the chapters from the draught version
into the final version includes the eugenics
chapters being upfront. Now, I think this is
quite compelling evidence that Fisher's motivation was
to write a book about eugenics and how to change the quality
of the British people. Now Fisher's legacy has been reassessed over the last few years, not just at UCL, but also at Caius where
he was both undergraduate and subsequently master. And it was in the news that
the stained-glass window in their chapel, dining room, I don't know, something Cambridge that I don't really understand, was removed after a campaign by first year undergraduate students. And this was a news story and this sort of got
the ball rolling for us at UCL reassessing Fisher's legacy and his position on campus. And indeed all over America, the American Statistical Society removed the name of Fisher from various awards and
lectures such as this. And the interesting thing about Fisher, oh, yes, here's another point, right? Part of that removal and
part of that reassessment was some engagement that I
think is generously described as incredibly misguided, which starts in the 1930s with his interactions with a scientist called Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. And he was a sort of
behavioural geneticist who had followed Galton's work, Galton invented the twin studies, and Freiherr von Verschuer
followed this up. He was particularly
interested in lung diseases and during the 1930s, which obviously is tumultuous
period and German history, here he is with some measuring callipers. He joined the Nazi Party in 1940, but in the run up to the war, he corresponded with Fisher and Fisher invited him to London. They lost correspondence during the war and after the war, as often happened, German scientists sometimes
destroyed records, which associated them
with acts of atrocity or associations with the Nazi Party. And Verschuer in his denazification trial was deemed a Mitlaufer, so a fellow traveller,
Nazi fellow traveller. And he was fined 600 Marks. The bit I haven't mentioned is that Otmar Freiherr von
Verschuer had a PhD student during the war whose
name was Josef Mengele. Yes. Now we have no idea because
the records were destroyed, whether Verschuer used any
of the tissue that we know that Mengele had taken from
people murdered in Auschwitz. There are no records of it. It seems unlikely to me that
he didn't or was unaware of it, but that is speculation because the evidence
does not exist anymore. So when Verschuer was trying to rehabilitate his own
reputation after the war, he wrote to Fisher and
various other people in order to get letters of recommendation in order to get professorships. Now there are two letters which somewhat condemn Fisher's response, one of which is shown here. And the quote is, well, there, you can read it for yourself. "I have no doubt that the
Nazi party severely wished "to benefit German racial stock," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. "I do not doubt that Verschuer gave, "as I should have done, his
support to such a movement." It's not a great thing to say. (attendees laughing) And this has been part for
the last four or five years of the reassessment of
Fisher's intellectual legacy. It's, I think, generously described as deeply misguided. But here's the thing, Fisher was, I think, reading a lot about him. I think that he was a
frustrated policy wonk. I think he wanted to have
influence about eugenics and about culture and about society, but really didn't have much influence. And he became a great scientist
and a great statistician but no one read the last five chapters of "The Genetical Theory
of Natural Selection." And no one really paid a
great deal of attention to his views on eugenics at all. Partly to do with some of the history that I'll talk about in just a minute. But in the UK we never
had a eugenics policy, in America, they embraced
it wholeheartedly. And so I think that along with Pearson, who, until his dying
day, was a eugenicist, but also didn't think
the data was good enough to actually warrant interventions, to warrant state policies. So we were prevented for
various reasons in the UK from having eugenics enacted, partially by people who
wanted it to happen, but thought that the
data wasn't good enough. And I think that Fisher was one of those, he was frustrated by his ineffectiveness in promoting eugenics. But these are the reasons
that he has been removed from various campuses around the world. And I think this is ironic because we've cancelled
him for the wrong reasons. This is a picture of Fisher in the 1950s, and there's a very significant thing happening in this picture, which is that he's smoking a pipe. Now, Fisher was a very keen smoker, as many people were at this time. And we have to bear in
mind that by the 1950s, the tobacco industry,
particularly in America, was facing a crisis of
cataclysmic proportions because smoking had been
categorically linked to the dramatic rise in lung cancer. And health concerns have been raised for decades before this. But by the early 1950s, and you'll know the name of Richard Doll, the epidemiological evidence was emerging that there was a very
great sort of expansion and consolidation of scientific methods that demonstrated that
smoking caused lung disease as well as other serious
respiratory and cardiac diseases and those led to death. And these were being published in large, major peer-reviewed medical journals and reported throughout the general media. So the tobacco lobby
in the tobacco industry was having an existential
crisis about this. Now, the medical establishment
was quite slow to adopt this, and in 1953, about 43 to 45% of doctors still smoke more than 20 cigarettes a day. But the tobacco industry was aware that they were facing
this existential crisis and that it was born of scientific data. Now the evidence that cigarettes cause
cancer is pretty striking. It's not just
epidemiological by this view, and it's not new by this stage. So Muller at this stage, 1939, had the first suggestions in cohorts that smoking significant
numbers of ciggies, so over 20 a day resulted
in increased lung cancer. And that was really consolidated a number of case-controlled styles that culminated in Doll's work in 1954, which broadly concluded that smoking 35 plus cigarettes per day increased the probability
of getting lung cancer by about 40 times. But we also had animal models before that. So Roffo in 1931 who puts concentrated tobacco
extract on mouse skins and observed tumour formation. We also had cellular pathology. We know that cilia are destroyed by smoke and that this had been observed
in tissue and in animals. And that by 1954, sorry, '56 research had shown that smokers suffered from pulmonary ciliastasis, which is the death of
Celia in their lung tissue. And we also knew that chemicals
within smoke from cigarettes also contained known carcinogens. And this had been known since 1930. So the evidence really was
quite strong and multifactorial. And it was that cigarette
smoking is not only associated but actually functionally
causes lung cancer. Now it's difficult to know why Fisher took such
strong objection to this, mostly because the the only
real biography of Fisher was written in the 1980s by his daughter. So another example of how
we should analyse history by considering the source
and considering who wrote it, why they wrote it, who the
intended audience was and so on, the absolute bog standard cornerstones of doing good history. But Fisher took absolute
opposition to this view that smoking caused cancer. And he did it using data that he published in five articles over the course of 1956 to '58, two in Nature and one review article and two in another journals. And let me show you all of the data. That's it. (attendees laughing) This was Fisher's data. Now the first table actually comes from the work of Otmar
Freiherr von Verschuer, Josef Mengele's PhD supervisor. Fisher goes into no other details about the provenance of this data. I present to you the
totality of Fisher's data, the evidence for resisting the notion that smoking causes cancer. That is it. And when it says, for example, smoking habits not alike, that is the totality of the description. So I think we can agree that
this is substandard, right? This is not good science. And I think this is interesting
because it is reasonable to say that Ronald Fisher was one of the greatest
statisticians of all time. It's definitely reasonable to say that his books and papers are impenetrable 'cause they're so complex and so technical and born of a man with a colossal brain. So it's kind of baffling to look at this and think you took opposition to an overwhelming
tsunami of data using this to say something which
was becoming obvious that smoking causes cancer and took really, really
visceral opposition to it. Why did he do it? Well, we can guess. I mean, he didn't like authority figures, smoking was considered, or smoking and anti-smoking was considered a left-right
political argument at this time. A little bit like other issues today. He had expressed animosity towards public health interventions. So he had a slightly sort of
iconoclastic streak in him, and he was a smoker, but, you know, loads of people
were smokers at this time. So it's quite difficult to understand why he took such
vitriolic hatred for this, for this idea that smoking causes cancer. Here's a couple of quotes
from one of the papers on it, which you can read for yourself. So Fisher here is undoubtedly, whether you like it or not, a significant parts of
scientific disinformation that caused unaccountable pain for individuals as a result
of his personal biases that we don't quite understand why. And this is the really interesting bit. As a result, his work and his stance was exploited by the industrial complex
of the tobacco industry. Who knew at this time
that the contribution to global health and happiness
was significantly negative. In 1953, a joint cohort of
tobacco companies in America employed a PR agency, Hill and Knowlton. And they went through several
years of crisis management, how to deal with the fact that all of this evidence was emerging that smoking causes cancer. And they had begun to work out by '56 that if you told people that the scientists and
the doctors were wrong, this is ineffective. So they invented a brand new strategy, which was to sow seeds of doubt. They don't have to say that they're wrong, all they have to say is
we don't really know. Some people think it does, some
people think that it doesn't and they recruited Fisher to this. He was paid, but only 400 pounds or so, which I don't think is
a huge amount of money. And so it doesn't quite explain it, I don't think it's fair to say it's a financial motivation for Fisher. But as a result of this, they come out with a marketing campaign which says the world's
greatest statistician says not that smoking causes cancer, but the alternative theory
that Fisher had come up with, which is fascinating. So as a hereditarian, so a guy who thinks that
genetics plays a stronger role than culture or society or environment in how people behave and biology itself, Fisher came up with an alternative
theory, which was this, it was based on the idea that most people who smoke
don't get lung cancer, right? Which is correct, and that there is a
genetic pre-disposition towards getting lung cancer,
which is also correct. But what he figured and
what he theorised was that people who have a
genetic predisposition to getting lung cancer, when they begin to develop the tumours, they develop an itch, what he described as
an itch in their lungs. And that the only way they could alleviate that sensation was by smoking cigarettes. So the clever marketeers
of Hill and Knowla of the tobacco lobby worked out that the world's greatest statistician had come up with an idea, which said not that smoking causes cancer, but that cancer causes smoking. (attendees laughing) And Fisher writes this quite
explicitly in earlier papers in an interesting way for statisticians, which, you know, should be analysed by people learning stats. If A is associated with B, you can't assume that A causes B and if you do, you could
equally assume that B causes A. And Fisher took that
to its logical extreme. He's a report from the National Enquirer of roughly that time. And there is the same picture of fisher smoking his cigarettes. Now this all comes from the work of Robert Proctor at Stanford. And he deserves credit for this, he estimates, and I have
no reason to doubt him, that cigarettes are the
single most lethal objects that humankind has ever invented. He's calculated the rate at
which cigarettes are smoked, this is data from 2012, and it's at the same speed as the International Space Station. I think it's 6 trillion
cigarettes are smokes per year. So I'm not interested in cancel culture or whatever the word du jour is for dealing with these
sort of culture war issues. But I do find it fascinating
that we continue to venerate and then subsequently,
well, cancel someone, I think probably for the wrong reasons, his impact on eugenics, Fisher's impact on
eugenics are negligible, possibly zero. His impact on science overall is colossal with the huge branches
of not just genetics, but psychology, statistics and in fact, every data
set that needs an analysis by one of the techniques that
invented comes from Fisher. But we cannot deny the fact that he's intrinsically involved in one of the most destructive industries that have ever existed on planet. Was this his fault? No. Should we know about it? Yes, I think we should do. And you'll know as well that that idea, "Merchants of Doubt" is
how it was characterised in a book in 2010 that this tobacco lobby said, "We sell two products,
cigarettes and scientific doubt." Hill and Knowla went on in the '70s to work for a different American industry, which was the fossil fuel lobby where they also used
exactly the same technique, which continues to this day. We don't have to say
that you guys are wrong, we just have to say we don't really know. And there is enough scientific doubt that you can have a crack at this. Is Fisher part of that? I think he is. I've got another 40 slides to go. (attendees laughing) Anyone who's seen me before will know that this is not unusual. Right. Let's do eugenics quickly. Okay, so Francis Galton, he comes up with the idea of eugenics, meaning that he comes up
with a scientification of a much older idea that
through biological means, either infanticide or arranged marriages, you can improve the quality of a people. He begins to describe it in 1869 and then formalises it
during the next 20, 30 years. And it becomes an incredibly
popular idea across political, social, and cultural divides. The social context of
the emergence of eugenics in Britain at least includes
these things up here. We have massive expansion of cities as a result of the Industrial Revolution, we have a much more visible poor and with a visible poor, you have much more visible illnesses. We have the transfer of responsibility for the people at the bottom of society, from the church to the state, and a massive increase in
the number of institutions. We also have empire at its absolute peak. The peak really comes in 1923 where the British Empire is
at its geographical maximum. And as a result of that
increased immigration, we have declinism. The never ending idea that
everything in the past was better and everything is getting worse. We have universal scientific racism. Pretty much everyone thinks
along the lines of Linnaeus that race is a real and
biological phenomenon and that white supremacy
is part of that setup. And then we've got what becomes
characterised in the 1920s as the Great Replacement theory, which is the idea that living
populations become decadent and have fewer children. And as a result of that, poorer populations
begin to infiltrate them and they have higher fecundity and they will ultimately replace them. It's an idea which is old. It's described in Plato,
it's described in Gibbon, the "Fall of the Roman Empire," which I think a lot of these old guys read in the 19th century, or at least they read the cover page where it describes it. I mean, it's six volumes
and it's really boring, but it becomes one of
the sort of cornerstones of eugenic-style thinking. Now eugenics, the word itself
means sort of well born, eu; good, genesis; birth. So initially it is categorised
as a positive thing. People want to make society better. But in order to do that, you have to rank people by
some categorization means. And if you have to rank people, it means there are some people at the top and there are some people at the bottom. So immediately what happens, every time eugenics is either enacted or thought about in countries, 31 countries around the
world in the 20th century had eugenics policies
on their legislature. What actually immediately happens, it starts off as a good thing
and it immediately becomes, well, these are the people we want and these are the people
that we don't want. So the people subject to
negative eugenic selection always include racialized groups. They include people with disabilities, they include people with
specific medical diagnoses and non-specific diagnoses, sort of historically
difficult to understand, such as feeblemindedness. And they include women
with menstrual troubles. And then it's just people we don't like; alcoholics, epileptics,
sex workers and criminals. And the popularity of this idea, which now seems so toxic to us, is almost, but not completely
universal in British culture in the Edwardian era. Here's a couple examples of that. Adverts on the tube,
on the left-hand side, on the right is a Valentine's card for, I mean, you know... And they say romance is dead. (attendees laughing) And this is often thought
of as a right-wing ideology, but that's not true. It was equally embraced
by left-wing thinkers of the time as well. Now, I used to put this slide up and offer students or
audiences a free book if they could name all the people, but no one has ever got it. So I put their names up now, but on the top row are left-wing
or progressive thinkers who are enthusiastic
eugenicists of this era. And I think it's important to recognise that these are the founders of ideas that are part of our
contemporary discourse. Virginia Woolf, I think that "A Room of One's Own" is one of the most important
essays ever written. George Bernard Shaw, there's quite a good
production of "Pygmalion" on at the Old Vic right now. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, founders of the Fabian Society. So left-wing thinkers and development of the labour movement, which ultimately becomes the foundation of the welfare state in
the NHS a few years later. On the bottom row you've
got Arthur Balfour, Tory Prime Minister in 1912. He's ex-Prime minister. 1912, Winston Churchill
is the foreign secretary in the Asquith government. So you've got former and
future Prime Minister. And Marie Stopes, who is the... You know her name from being the founder of reproductive rights for women, the Marie Stopes Clinics now called MSI, because Marie Stopes
wasn't really interested in the reproductive rights of women. What she was interested in was eradication of the Irish and Slavs and Jews in London, up until 1938, she wrote love poetry and sent it to Hitler about
how awful the Jews were. So I'm doing this quite quickly. So eugenics is is not universally popular, but it's left wing and right wing, socialists and conservatives
embrace eugenic thinking. It is basically normalised in society. Churchill is the main
political driver of eugenics. He read a pamphlet in 1907 that came from the Indiana Reformatory in which a doctor called L. C. Sharp, claimed that he could
vasectomize 300 men a day without anaesthetic,
with no repercussions, which I don't believe. (attendees laughing) Churchill, William Churchill? (attendees laughing) Winston Churchill. If you're gonna fuck up on a typo, you might as well do it with Churchill. (attendees laughing) We know that Churchill
read Sharp's booklet because of the underlined passages in which he describes the
vasectomization of undesirables. And Churchill goes on to propose legislation
several times in this era during his years in the Asquith government for the involuntary sterilisation of people deemed undesirable, including, for example, in 1912 suggesting using
Rontgen rays, X-rays, only discovered, what, 16 years before that. He writes the early draughts of a bill, which becomes the Mental Deficiencies Act, which cedes parliament in 1913. And in the early draughts
that Churchill wrote, he includes involuntary
sterilisation of the feebleminded, but due to the campaigning work
of one MP, Josiah Wedgwood, also part of the Darwin-Galton clan, that was removed from the legislation. And that's how close
we came in this country to having eugenics on the
legislation for this country. Churchill was the big driver. Wedgwood was the filibuster
who had it removed. In America, they had a different story. They embraced eugenics
with much more enthusiasm and much earlier. Here's an example in 1912, 1912 was a pivotal year for eugenics. Teddy Roosevelt writing
to Charles Davenport, who I'll talk about it a bit, suggesting that this is the
duty of right-minded citizens to remove undesirables from our society. Now the funding bodies for what becomes the
Eugenics Records Office are also the great philanthropists of the East Coast of Long Island. The people that the characters are based on in "The Great Gatsby." And they include Mary Harriman, the richest woman in this period, the widow of E. L.
Harriman, railroad tycoon, and John Rockefeller, probably the richest
man who's ever existed in American history. And with money from these people and also the Carnegies, Davenport, who had met
Galton in 1900 in London, travelled back and set up
the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbour, associated with the Cold
Spring Harbour Laboratory, one of the great centres of research and still one of the best
genetic research institutes on earth. And you can see from this headline in 1912 that this is not just a
scientific research establishment, it is the social... You can see that it is about
addressing social problems using biology. Now it's called the
Eugenics Records Office because it has two clear aims. The first is generally to
promote the idea of eugenics amongst the American people, but the second is to harvest
the national family pedigree of American people, records. And that's exactly what they did. So they would send people, mostly women out who'd been trained, to go to state fairs in places like Kansas and Iowa and Indiana, to rural state fairs and to
run eugenics competitions. So fitter family competitions, better baby competitions. They would say things like, over there you're judging the
Holsteins and the Friesians, but you should also be
judging the Robinsons and the Joneses. And this is the 1920 Kansas State Fair. Now my colleague and friend,
Professor Jennifer Raff, who works at Kansas University. So I bought one of these medals and had it sent to her house, which afterwards I felt was a bit like, you know, buying Nazi memorabilia. She's on sabbatical with us now. I'm just gonna pass that round. I need this back by the way. But this, again, normalised in society. If you can breed animals to be better, then why not breed humans
to be better as well? And this was generated by the Eugenics Records Office
from Cold Spring Harbour under the leadership of Charles Davenport, one of the acolytes of
Francis Galton directly. And other than Nazi Germany, America has the most enthusiastic embrace of eugenics of any country. We estimate that somewhere between 70,000 and half a million people were sterilised against their will or knowledge
during the 20th century. 31 states had eugenics
involuntary sterilisation on their state books for
most of the 20th century. The last law was repealed
in Oregon in 1986. So people are alive now who were sterilised under
eugenics laws in America. This is what the map looked like in 1913. Okay. My timing is appalling. Here is one of my favourite pictures from the history of science. Who's that? (attendees speaking faintly) Mendel. Gregor Mendel, the founder
of genetics, really, described as Austrian, the Moravian. He wasn't a monk, he was a Friar. They are different. I sort of don't care. (attendees laughing) Gregor Mendel, the Moravian Friar, there he is holding what type of plant? - [Attendees] Peas. - No, a petunia. I don't know why he's holding a petunia. A pea is a very reasonable
answer to that question, but it's a petunia. We often see this picture
of him that is framed out. But I just really like showing the rest of his literal brothers here because I think they're just
having a really stylish time. And this guy looks on... I mean, what's this guy doing? (attendees laughing) Don't know, "Check me out." And I don't know, he's kind of scary. (attendees laughing) So Mendel does his amazing work. What I think is probably one
of the greatest experiments in the history of science
in the 1850s and '60s, where he breeds together
29,000 pea plants. And with that statistical
patterns emerge that demonstrate that characteristics are
passed in discrete packages and predictable statistical formations from generation to generation. You know, from school, it's peas being wrinkly or smooth or petals being purple or white. And they don't blend. They come out in discreet phenotypes. And these are the foundational
principles of inheritance, units of inheritance, which
become characterised in 1900 as genes, right? Foundations of genetics. The work is written in German and it's translated into English in 1900 and then becomes part of the pantheon of 20th century biology. A sort of founding part of it. There's nothing wrong with this. And Mendel is exonerated. He's not a bad guy as far as I'm aware. So he gets a full pass from me on this. But his work lands in Davenport's lap at exactly the right time for Davenport, or the wrong time for
American undesirable citizens because it suddenly gives Davenport and the eugenicists of the
Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbour, a mechanism on which they can act, a pivot on which they can
enact their eugenics ideas. And Davenport and the Americans in general at this time become obsessed with the notion that every
single characteristic in humans is defined and
determined by a single gene. Just like there is a gene for wrinklies or smoothness in peas or a gene for purple or white petals, a dominant or negative, you
remember this from GCSE biology. Davenport becomes obsessed with the idea that all human characteristics also follow this inheritance pattern. Now, what is the characteristic? The human characteristic that we use to teach Mendelian inheritance in humans? What is the first characteristics
we teach to children? - Eye colour.
- Eye colour, right? We all know this, right? There is a gene or an
allele more accurately that encodes blue eyes and
it's recessive to brown eyes. So you draw a little
Punnett square table out and you put Big B, little
B, big B, little B, big B, big B, big B,
little B, you know, right? Who was the person who published and described this work first? it was Charles Davenport in 1907, "The Heredity of Eye Colour in Man." This pattern is described
for the first time in this paper by Davenport. Now, you know that it's not true, right? You know that if you're
doing your GCSEs now you write what's in the paper, but it's not true. There are dozens of genes involved in influencing, not
determining eye colour. And parents, it is probabilistic because genetics is probabilistic
and not deterministic, but you can't really accurately determine the eyes colour of your children based on the eye colour of your parents. And further than that, eye colour is not a binary thing. There aren't blue eyes and brown eyes. They have different eye
patterns in the same eye. Some people have heterochromia where they have different
eye colour in both eyes. So it's probabilistic and you can make predictions about what eye colour will
be based on the genotype, but they are predictions, they are not deterministic patterns. But the idea that it is deterministic comes specifically from Davenport himself. Now, in referencing the fact that there are not just
blue eyes and brown eyes, he acknowledges that in the
original paper and says, and this is a direct quote
from this original paper, that "hazel eyes exist, but
we assume that they're blue." (attendees laughing) I don't really know what to do with that. (attendees laughing) What is the second human characteristic that we use to describe human traits that are dominant or negative? - Tongue rolling.
- Not tongue... Tongue rollings is a good one. What?
(attendee speaking faintly) Oh, I see all the
geneticists are out here. So ear lobes is one. That comes later. Not tongue rolling, that's also not... No.
(attendees speaking faintly) Oh, come on, I was gonna do hair colour. Come on. Ginger hairedness. So MC1R is a gene, that recessive alleles
for which are responsible for red hairedness. Now this also comes from
Davenport published in 1909 where he describes the inheritance pattern of ginger hairedness. This is a caption from a joke report from, I don't know, if you can see it. "Red hair is created
by an endangered gene. "These babies are cowering "because genetics is coming to get them." (attendees laughing) Now Davenport didn't
have molecular genetics or large scale (indistinct)
to aid him in this. But in the most recent
assessment of hair colour from the UK Biobank, one of the great data sets for genetics, what was published about,
I think it was 2018, showed that more than 75% of
people who have two alleles that supposedly encode ginger hair, do not have ginger hair. We don't really know how hair
colour and eye colour work. And these are the most
obvious and easiest examples of Mendelian inheritance in humans. They are the basis of
how we teach genetics to school children. And yet both of them come directly from the father of American eugenics with the specific intention of demonstrating the
Mendelian inheritance in man, in humans, but he said in man, was something on which we could act and which we could breed people so that they had traits
that were more desirable and breed out people who had
traits which were undesirable. He also did work that demonstrated, as far as he was concerned, that sexual proclivity was also Mendelian and monogenic and deterministic. So based on working with
sex workers, prostitutes and also that seafaringness
ran in families in a Mendelian way. (attendees laughing) He was the first person to publish the Mendelian
pattern of inheritance for Huntington's disease. And he actually got the mechanism or the inheritance
pattern for this correct. It is autosomal dominance. Woody Guthrie there
died of of Huntington's. But in the abstract for this paper, he attributes the origin of Huntington's to three immigrant
brothers from 100 years. Which we don't know whether
they existed or not. But it's quite clearly associated with the politics of the time where eugenics is considered
a facet of immigration. I've still got 10 slides to go. - Keep going.
- All right. Thanks, mate. I don't know who you are, but I like you. (attendees laughing) Now, contemporary research
on this is really important. And I think this is the
most important reason why we need to know this and
why we need to study this. And it is based around the
idea that over the history, the short history of genetics, we have moved from this
Mendelian one-to-one relationship between monogenic deterministic thinking to a complex multifactorial idea that many genes interacting
with the environment and epigenetic factors
is the whole symphony of what becomes the phenotype and the behaviours of individuals. So this is the trajectory of genetics over the course of 100 years. But we continue to teach Mendel first, we continue to teach eye colour and hair colour and that genes are these discreet factors which are inherited in these very clear inheritance patterns, which is basically not true. Now research has begun to
emerge in the last five years where class cohorts in America and a small study based in
Leeds has actually tested what the outcome of teaching
this type of biology, this type of genetics
to school-aged children. And what they found, this is work by Brian Donovan, the paper is "Carver" et al., 2017. The work shows that if you take one cohort and you teach them a traditional way which starts with Mendel and goes on to complexity and diseases later and you take another cohort and you teach them complexity
and diseases first, but the total amount
of content is the same that you end up with cohorts, where the first one, where you teach Mendelian
inheritance first end up with a much more
racialized, centralised view of genetics than the second. Now these are preliminary studies, I don't have reason to doubt them, but we need to do more research into this. But if they hold up
over the next few years, then basically not only have
we been teaching genetics wrong for a century, but we've been offering a disservice to the genetics community by
teaching a version of genetics, which is not only wrong,
but it reinforces ideas of racial essentialism which
have been outmoded for decades. So we are offering not just disservice to biology students and to
genetics and also to Mendel who pointed out in his original paper that those flowers and those
plants they were not wild type, they were already bred so that those characteristics
were being expressed in a controlled background. And he also goes on to say, don't apply this to humans because humans are really complex. But we ignored all of that for 100 years and instead we've embraced
the eugenicists view that all characteristics are
determined by single genes. And that is what we
teach to school children. I could stop there. I mean there's a natural break
point for me to stop there, shall I? (attendees laughing) Or do you want me to do the Nazis? (attendees speaking faintly) All right, I'll do it quickly. All right, that monogenic
deterministic thinking is culturally baked into our society. I think it's older than Davenport. I think it dates from just the idea that things are inherited. The first example of monogenic
deterministic inheritance is really described in the Talmud where haemophilia is described, written in the third century BC, but in the press, and this is during the sort of
golden era of gene discovery as a result of genome-wide
association studies, you just see that this idea is so sticky that the press, left and right, just latch onto it. I tried to get this to be
called Rutherford's law for reasons of vanity,
but it didn't stick. If you wanna help me with
that, I'd appreciate it. But the idea that a headline says, the gene for X has discover... Scientists discover the gene for X works is a complex human trait. The gene doesn't exist and the scientists haven't discovered it. Can that be Rutherford's law? (attendees speaking faintly) Okay, let's go with that. So there's a few examples, so, you know, mad ones like, this one at the bottom from the Atlantic, A gene that predicts what
time of day you will die. (attendees laughing) I don't know how that works. If you get hit by a bus... The three from the middle here: Gene that will scare you out of your mind, the gene that makes you
politically left wing and a gene that makes you
unfaithful to your partner. They're all in the Daily Mail. And the cool thing about that
is it's all the same gene. (attendees laughing) DRND4. Imagine having that as a phenotype. (attendees laughing) permanently terrified, liberal love rat. (attendees laughing) (Adam laughing) But the negative... We joke, that's funny, right? In 1912, Herbert Godard, who was the first person
to translate the IQ test into English from French, was working on a case study of an 8-year-old girl called
Deborah Kallikak in his care, who he described as "a standard
issue, feebleminded girl, "the type that fill our reformatories." And he decided to try and understand why she was feebleminded, where this came from. And he did this by plotting
out her family tree. And he tracked back
eight or nine generations and discovered that she was the progeny of a returning Revolutionary War hero called Martin Kallikak, who on the way back from
the Revolutionary War, stopped off in a bar, a tavern, and impregnated what he described as an attractive but
feebleminded barmaid, unnamed. And then he went home to his Quakeress, upstanding fine wife and had a large family. But the attractive but
feebleminded barmaid also had a family. And Deborah Kallikak was the last, the terminal branch in that family, which was replete with
miscreants, criminals and people with developmental disorders. Whereas the family that he had with his legitimate Quakeress wife was filled with lawyers and doctors and scientists and bankers. And this became, I think, the founding myth of American eugenics. This becomes textbook
for many, many years. The book itself, which is
called "The Kallikak Family:" "A Study in Feeblemindedness,"
published in 1912, goes on to become a bestseller, but as late as 1955, it's in textbooks, undergraduate textbooks where you can see there's the cartoon, married, a worthy Quakeress, dallied with a feebleminded tavern girl on the left-hand side, she has 10 children, one of whom is known as Old Horror. But on the other side, seven
upright worthy children. Now hold that thought for a second because we're gonna
switch to England in 1912, which, again, a pivotal year in the history of these types of ideas because it is the incidence of the first Eugenics
International Conference held at a site down, which
is now Imperial College. And this is the brochure from it. It's a fantastic abstract. And for the scientists in the audience, it describes talks, some of
which are lantern-lit slideshow. There will be a bell rung
with three minutes to go and again, with 30 seconds to go, sorry, Jonathan. (attendees laughing) And it also describes places
where you can get sandwiches around the back as well. Now there's an official writeup for it, but it's not verbatim. I wanna show you some of the
cast list of the people there to show you quite how influential this type of thinking is at this time. Read them for your selves. But you've got Darwins there, you've got David Starr Jordan, the founder of Stanford University there, Bateson, founder of the
Genetics Society, us. Headmaster at Eton, Arthur Balfour, former prime minister, Balfour at the dinner, he gives the plenary keynote
speech at the dinner, goes on to award the first professorship in genetics on Earth. The Balfour Chair, which
still exists to this day and is held by Anne Ferguson-Smith, who I must stress is not a eugenicist, ()attendees laughing but the first is given to Reginald Punnett at Cambridge of the Punnett square. The thing that you draw
out your eye colour. And I have to confess that I was in my mid 30s when I discovered that Reginald Punnett designed that. I thought it was named
after strawberry boxes. (attendees laughing) I blame my educators at UCL. (laughs) But Reginald Punnett talks
at this conference and says, he says something, which
when you read the notes, you think, gah, thank
God he said that until... So he says, "I don't think we've got enough knowledge "about the inheritance patterns
of most human conditions "to warrant eugenic intervention." And I read that for the
first time a few years ago and went finally someone saying it, and he goes, comma, "apart
from feeblemindedness, "which is monogenic and deterministic "and should be acted on immediately." I don't know whether he
read the Goddard book on the Kallikaks, but it was published the same year. And we do know that Goddard had a stand. He wasn't present, but he had
a stand at that conference. Now again, they were men of their time, a fatuous argument. They were fatuous arguments and there were fatuous arguments there because here we have arch
Eugenicist Pearson pointing out that the American model of
monogenic deterministic thinking for this is not accurate
and it should be dismissed. It's not that he wants it to be dismissed 'cause he opposes eugenics. He wants it to be dismissed because he doesn't think
the data is up to it. So, you know, swings and roundabouts. He published three papers
over the course of 10 years saying that the American model was bad. Thomas Hunt Morgan, another
founding father of genetics, also points out that these are not just genetically inherited conditions, but they are communicated
rather than inherited, communicated here, meaning
non biologically inherited, but socially and culturally mediated. But you know what, none of this shit matters because the Kallikaks study was a fraud. The barmaid never existed. She had been made up. That Kallikak family was an
entirely different family, unrelated to Martin Kallikak himself. So this whole founding myth of American eugenics was actually based on a complete fraudulent story. Its impact is, well, we will see its impact because for the last two minutes
I will cover Nazi Germany. This is Alfred Ploetz. So he independently comes up with ideas that he coins the word rassenhygiene. So race hygiene, just
like personal hygiene and public hygiene are
there to protect individuals and the public in general, rassenhygiene is there
to protect the race. He travelled as a
socialist thinker to Iowa to work on a communal farm, but was so appalled at what he described as the low quality of the people there, that he came back and
committed the rest of his life to promoting ideas of eugenics in Germany. At first, Second Reich, then into Weimar years, and then into the Third Reich itself. Now many books and many studies, there's a whole body of
literature on the rise of eugenic and race hygiene thinking
as part of the cornerstone of the Third Reich and
the Holocaust itself. But broadly, these ideas
develop over the 1910s and into the 1920s. Nordic purity is a key idea here. 1920, "Lebensunwertes Leben"
is introduced in a textbook, "lives unworthy of life. And one of the first laws passed by Hitler after he takes the German
chancellorship in February, 1933, is the law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring. The thing that most people don't know and I develop in other
work, in other talks, is that almost all of the scientific, financial and legal foundations for Hitler's eugenics policies, his race hygiene policies
were derived specifically from the Eugenics Records
Office in Cold Spring Harbour, the Rockefeller Foundation funded them. The template laws were drawn from the ERO, the Eugenics Records Office. And they were inspired
by Charles Davenport, who was out in Berlin during the 1930s. Now the Germans were
very good propagandists, and part of the motivation
for Hitler going to war was to enact eugenics policies,
which is why they were backdated in November, 1939 to the 1st of September, when the invasion had happened. And cinema was a big part of the propaganda machine in Germany. 1935, 7 films, 7 short films, 15-minute
films were published to run as B-roll in front of
the major films and the cinemas in order to promote the
racial hygiene ideas that were being enacted
by the Nazi regime. And one of 'em was called "Das Erbe," which means the inheritance roughly. And in this, a young female
researcher is observing two stag Beatles rutting,
licking, you know, fighting and she doesn't know what they're doing. So she asks her supervisor, who sits her down in front of a film and shows her examples of the Darwinian struggle for existence. And it includes stags
fighting with each other. It includes cats hunting birds and dogs that have been bred specifically to be pedigrees for specific
hunting and purposes. And she gets it, halfway through it,
she bursts out laughing and says, "I get it. "Nature has its own
racist policies as well." Just after that, the film
cuts to the voiceover where they use the Kallikak
data, the Kallikak family tree, to demonstrate that
feeblemindedness runs in families. And therefore this is a justification for the slaughtering of,
initially from 1935 onwards, babies and children under the age of five who are deemed unworthy. So you've got this direct
lineage that starts, well, it starts earlier than 1912, but the fraudulent data
that comes from Goddard that is based on this monogenic
deterministic thinking, which is propagated by Davenport, which comes from Mendel, from all of these ideological ideas, starts there and it ends in the Holocaust. Two more slides. This is the Haldane Lecture. Haldane wrote this book in 1938, "Heredity and Politics." Now Haldane gets a good pass from us because he was a terrific writer and he was a funny writer as well. And in this book, he disassembles the eugenic policies of the Nazis and the Americans. And he says that on the first page, "I don't believe our present
knowledge of human heredity "justifies such such steps." He was a left-wing thinker, and I think we give him
a big pass for that. But he wasn't really a
left-wing thinker at all. He was a revolutionary communist. He was a Stalinist, in fact, a Soviet who supported Stalin's policies well into the 1950s. By which stage we knew
Stalin was a bad guy. And these are policies that
were both anti-scientific, anti-evolutionary, anti-genetics, and caused the deaths of
tens of millions of people. So thank you for the Haldane Award. (attendees laughing) And I'll leave you with someone who is much,
much easier to forgive. Thank you very much. (attendees applauding)
