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The British Academy Summer Showcase
Professor Rebecca Sear FBA is a speaker at this year's Summer Showcase – the British Academy's free festival of ideas.
Transcript
Eugenics is the ideology that human populations should be “improved” through social policies, such as selective breeding – encouraging people with “desirable” traits to have children while discouraging those with “undesirable” traits. It’s a coercive ideology. It involves people in positions of power making value judgements about which traits are desirable or not, and so who is deserving of reproduction or not, and it inevitably leads to human rights abuses.
The first eugenics sterilisation law was put in place in the US state of Indiana in 1907, which made legal the sterilization of those who were deemed undesirable without their consent; many other US states and some countries later implemented similar eugenic policies. Clearly, such policies involve a violation of people’s reproductive rights which, according to the World Health Organisation, rest on the ability of each individual to be able to freely choose how many children they’re going to have.
You may think this is going to be a talk about history. Surely the eugenics movement died out after the Second World War, because of the extremes that the (first) Nazi regime took these ideas to. In the 1930s and 40s in Germany, Nazis didn’t simply prevent undesirables from having children but murdered them in horrifying numbers, attempting to exterminate in concentration camps those with traits the Nazis didn’t like, such as people with disabilities, or those who were Jewish, or Roma, or gay.
It’s true that the eugenics movement did lose some of its appeal after World War II, and not just because of the Nazi regime. In the early 20th century, it was a popular movement in countries such as the UK and the US, and was highly influential in academia. Interest in researching topics relevant to eugenics was important in the development of academic disciplines such as demography, psychology, statistics and genetics.
Although it wasn’t universally accepted. Alfred Russell Wallace, who proposed the theory of natural selection alongside Darwin, said that eugenics was “simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priestcraft”; he believed that if you wanted to improve human populations, you should improve the environment, the material conditions in which people live.
As science progressed during the 20th century, it became increasingly clear that Wallace was right. Eugenics really is ideology, not science.
The kinds of traits eugenicists were interested in – poverty, criminality, intelligence – are highly complex and heavily influenced by the environment. In the case of a trait like intelligence, there may be some inherited, genetic underpinnings, but even here genes and the environment interact to produce this trait in very complex ways that we still don’t fully understand. To believe that interfering with people’s reproductive decisions will lead to an improvement in the “quality” of human populations in the way that eugenicists assume, and without any unintended consequences, is simply not a scientifically realistic belief.
So eugenics did wane in popularity after the Second World War, but the ideas underlying eugenics – that some groups of people are just inherently better than others and that society should be organised to favour those people – are powerful ideas. Eugenics never really went away, and by the end of the 20th century, was on the rise again. In the 21st century, eugenics is experiencing a fully-fledged revival. This is a talk about eugenics in the present, not the past.
There are many reasons for the resurgence in eugenics but, as a university researcher, one aspect which interests, and embarrasses, me is that role that academic research has played.
In academia, a few individuals worked hard to keep eugenic ideology alive and well throughout the 20th century. By the 1960s, it was becoming increasingly difficult to publish papers on eugenic themes in scientific journals, and so a group of individuals set up a pseudo-journal – Mankind Quarterly –to provide a forum for this kind of research. Mankind Quarterly specialised in scientific racism – which is the use and misuse of science to promote the ideology that there is a natural and inevitable hierarchy of races. Scientific racism is used to argue that racial inequalities are inevitable and so policies aimed at reducing such inequalities will be doomed to fail.
One of the founders of Mankind Quarterly – Reginald Ruggles Gates – who was briefly married to birth control pioneer and eugenicist Marie Stopes – had such extreme views on race he believed that white and black human races were different enough to be considered different species. This runs counter to the scientific consensus that race is a social construct and has no basis in biology.
There is obviously genetic variation between humans but this variation is very complex, and it’s not possible to identify distinct races on the basis of this variation. We perceive race, because those genetic differences are often literally skin-deep, they’re particularly obvious in characteristics such as skin colour or hair texture. And so race has social consequences, because groups may be discriminated against because of perceived race. But it’s been the scientific consensus for many decades that race is not a biological reality.
Despite this consensus, a small number of academics have attempted to keep alive the appearance of a “debate” about the biological reality of race. They have continued to argue that there are inherent, genetically-determined differences between races in traits such as intelligence, criminality and sexuality. These kinds of ideas are fundamental to eugenic ideology, which is based on the assumption that some people are superior and others inferior, and so policies must be implemented to ensure the protection and reproduction of superior groups of people, while disadvantaging inferior people. Academic research which claims to provide evidence for the inferiority of particular groups of people can make it much easier for eugenicists to argue for their policies.
A clear case of this was by the psychologist Richard Lynn. He spent several decades of his career putting together a database of “national IQs”, which he claimed provided an average IQ – a measure of intelligence – for nation-states worldwide. In this database, there are substantial differences between the IQs of world regions, with African nations having much lower IQs than countries in Europe or Asia.
The problem is that Lynn’s IQ database has no scientific merit. Some international organisations compile national-level data on demographic outcomes like fertility and mortality, which is an incredibly difficult and expensive to do, but it’s at least a reasonable thing to do, given that births and deaths can be fairly easily defined in the same way across cultures.
Intelligence is not like a birth or a death, it’s a nebulous concept, a construct of the brain, which cannot be easily measured in the same way across very different populations. The kinds of cognitive tests which are used to calculate IQ are more familiar to people who’ve received formal education, meaning that any global database of intelligence is likely to reflect different access to formal education, rather than revealing anything about the intelligence of people in different countries.
The methods Lynn used to build the database also fell far short of typical standards of scientific rigour. There’s evidence he deliberately manipulated the data he included, to underestimate the IQs of African nations.
Despite these problems, Lynn used his database to make very strong claims about global variation in intelligence. He claimed that differences between Africa, Europe and Asia in intelligence are genetically determined, and used the database to argue explicitly for eugenic policies, for example, arguing that immigration from “low IQ” countries to “high IQ” countries should be restricted, to avoid having the gene pool of “high IQ” countries contaminated with less intelligent genes. Lynn was trying hard to, in his own words, “have a go at the rehabilitation of eugenics”.
Yet he was firmly embedded in the UK university community – he was employed as a university psychologist throughout this career, and published dozens of papers, many of them based on the national IQ database, and not just in pseudo-journals such as Mankind Quarterly but in mainstream academic journals too. In 2011, after his retirement, he held a dinner for some of his colleagues in the field of intelligence research. These colleagues – who were themselves academic psychologists – presented him with a sword “for his services to eugenics”.
In the 21st century then, it’s impossible to argue that eugenics is history. Lynn is no longer publishing but last year, the organisation Hope not Hate conducted an undercover investigation which revealed the existence of a network of scientific racists, funded by a tech millionaire and with links to political activists on the far-right. These people are working together to manipulate science by producing flawed research which promotes the idea of inherent differences between races, and they regularly succeed in publishing their work in mainstream academic journals.
The intended audience for scientific racism, though, is not science but society. Lynn and the network of scientific racists all work hard to promote their “research” to policy-makers, politicians and receptive public audiences, and these efforts have impact. In 2022, the terrorist who killed 10 black people in a racially-motivated attack in the US cited Lynn’s work in his manifesto.
Beyond individual acts of terror, the historian Quinn Slobodian links scientific racism to the rise of far-right political parties in recent decades. The ideologies promoted by these parties are typically underpinned by the belief that not everyone is capable of contributing equally to society: this is eugenic ideology. These beliefs appear to have been heavily influenced by the arguments of scientific racism, that the races are inherently different in important ways. Far-right groups often frame their rhetoric in terms of race, and use scientific racism to justify policy goals which disadvantage racial minority groups.
Anti-immigration sentiment, for example, is whipped up by “great replacement” ideologies, which claim white populations are being “replaced” by the immigration, and higher fertility, of black and brown populations; and by claims that such immigrant populations are prone to criminality.
Replacement fears also underlie a rapidly growing “pronatalist” movement, which claims higher income populations are at imminent risk of “population collapse” because of declining fertility rates. Elon Musk has promoted this particular panic, claiming that declining fertility is a bigger threat to humanity than climate change. The pronatalist solution to impending “population collapse” is to get involved in people’s reproductive decisions and encourage women – typically certain types of women – to have more children; we’re back to eugenics again.
Eugenic ideology and scientific racism are now beginning to appear explicitly in the language used by highly influential politicians: during his presidential campaign, Donald Trump referred to “bad genes” when discussing immigrants to the US, and after his election, issued an Executive Order which appears to claim that race has biological reality.
Eugenics is not history. Given that it’s an ideology which labels some groups of people as inferior to others, and which history has shown will inevitably lead to serious human rights abuses, it should concern us all that eugenics is back.
Rebecca Sear is a demographer, evolutionary behavioural scientist and Director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London
Further reading
Short form:
- Dan Samorodnitsky, Kevin Bird, Jedidiah Carlson, James Lingford, Jon Phillips, Rebecca Sear and Cathryn Townsend, 2024, Journals should retract Richard Lynn's racist 'research' articles | STAT
- Jenn Dowd, 2025, Is our population collapsing? Throwing some cold water on “population panic” https://jenndowd.substack.com/p/is-our-population-collapsing
- David Pegg, Tom Burgis, Hannah Devlin and Jason Wilson, 2024,Revealed: International ‘race science’ network secretly funded by US tech boss | Race | The Guardian
- Kevin Bird, John Jackson and Andrew Winston, 2024, Confronting scientific racism in psychology: lessons from evolutionary biology and genetics
- Aaron Panofsky, Kushan Dasgupta and Nicole Iturriaga, 2020, How White nationalists mobilize genetics: from genetic ancestry and human biodiversity to counterscience and metapolitics https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.24150
- Rebecca Sear (2021) Demography and the rise, apparent fall and resurgence in eugenics. Population Studies 75(Supl 1): 201-220 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00324728.2021.2009013
Long form
- Adam Rutherford, 2022, Control: the dark past and troubling present of eugenics Control — Adam Rutherford
- Adam Rutherford, 2020, How To Argue With A Racist How to Argue with a Racist — Adam Rutherford
- Angela Saini, 2019, Superior: the return of race science Angela Saini | Award-winning Science Journalist and Author
- Joseph Graves and Alan Goodman, 2023, Racism not Race Racism, Not Race | Columbia University Press
- Quinn Slobodian, 2025, Hayek’s Bastards: gold, IQ, and the capitalism of the far right Hayek's Bastards | Princeton University Press
- William Tucker, The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund UI Press | William H. Tucker | The Funding of Scientific Racism
- Hope not Hate, 2024, Inside the Eugenics Revival
