slides supporting my discussion at the JSM 2020 session: Eugenics and Its Intersection with Statistics and Society Over Time: A Conversation

1. eugenics & statistics [in quotes]
Christian P. Robert
U. Paris Dauphine PSL & Warwick U. & CREST
ENSAE
[Mostly based on Kevles’ In the Name of Eugenics
(1984) and with further cut&paste from Wikipedia]

2. Dedicated to the memory of Gertrude Mac´e (? – 1988),
sterilized by the Nazis for having a baby with a French
prisonner of war, with whom they were eventually re-
united after the war.

3. Origins
prevention of hereditary diseases
natural (?) consequence of Darwin’s theory of
evolution
high of European imperialism and
nationalisms
evolution or scientism as new religion
fin de si`ecle pessimism on society’s decline
State socialism ideals / fear of proletarian
socialism

4. Darwin on races
“The various races, when carefully compared and mea-
sured, differ much from each other — as in the texture
of hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body,
the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the
skull, and even the convolutions of the brain (...) The
races differ also in constitution, in acclimatization and
in liability to certain diseases. Their mental charac-
teristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would
appear in their emotion, but partly in their intellectual
faculties.” (C. Darwin, The Descent of Man, Chapter
VII).

5. Darwin on races
“It is surprising how soon a want of
care, or care wrongly directed, leads
to the degeneration of a domestic
race; but excepting in the case of
man himself, hardly any one is so
ignorant as to allow his worst an-
imals to breed.” (C. Darwin, ibid.,
Volume 1, page 168).

6. Fashionable eugenism
“British eugenics was marked by an hostility decidedly
more of class than race.” D. Kevles, ibid.
Support of most members of UK and US intellectual elite and
establishment like
F.D. Roosevelt and W. Churchill (vice-president of the first
International Eugenics Conference)
B. Shaw: “some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal
chamber as the solution”
J.M. Keynes (director of the British Eugenics Society from
1937 to 1944)
W. Beveridge, W.E.B. Du Bois, F. Nightingale, A. Huxley,
V. Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence

7. Fashionable eugenism
and much fewer opponents
H.G. Wells moved from eugenism (1901) to anti-eugenism:
“Mankind from the point of view of a biologist is an animal
species in a state of arrested differentiation and possible
admixture.” (1921)
G.K. Chesterton: “the essence of Nazi Nationalism is to
preserve the purity of a race in a continent where all races
are impure”
Catholic authorities quickly rejected eugenism for many
reasons (from South Mediterranean and mostly catholic
immigrants being considered as “inferior” in the US, to
doctrinal opposition to birth control, incl. sterilisation, to
scientific against divine intervention, and to the theory of
evolution)

8. Positive consequences of eugenics
birth control development and legalisation
sexual education and child welfare
reproductive rights, incl. abortion
pre-natal and pre-nuptial health examinations
prevention of heritable diseases
artificial procreation
human genetics

9. Human genetic variations [D. Church, Nature 28
May 2020]
“What do the differences between each per-
son’s genetic code mean for their individ-
ual development and health? Several fac-
tors have hampered researchers’ ability to
answer this question.”
“First, understanding genetic variation requires
analysing huge numbers of sequences, because we carry
many rare variants. Most of these have no effect, with
just a few causing genetic diseases.”

10. Human genetic variations [D. Church, Nature 28
May 2020]
“Second, most of our understanding of ge-
netic variation has come from studying
single nucleotide variants, but structural
variants can have a larger impact on phys-
iological traits, and are major contributors
to disease.”
“Third, we lack an understanding of variation outside
protein-coding sequences.”

11. Annals of Eugenics
created by K. Pearson in 1925 for the
study of “agencies under social control
that may improve or impair the racial
qualities of future generations,
physically or mentally.”
edited jointly with Ethel M. Elderton
R. Fisher taking editorship over in 1934
supported by the Francis Galton Laboratory for National
Eugenics, UCL
published quantitative genetics and statistics papers by
Fisher, Yates, Jeffreys, Haldane (and national eugenic
papers by Pearson and Elderton)

12. Annals of Eugenics (till 1951)
“The papers in the Annals’ early years were concerned
with ordinary aspects of inheritance in humans. What
they were reporting was science of high quality. But the
science was used by scientists, physicians, and policy
makers, to impose a particular Darwinian view of so-
cial responsibility that led them to incarcerate, sterilize,
experiment on people, or even to exterminate them.” K.
Weiss and B. Lambert, A Human Genetics, 2011

13. J.B.S Haldane (1892–1964)
served on the battlefield during WW I
communist party member (till 1949),
freedom fighter during the Spanish Civil
War
took Indian citizenship (for India being
“a better model for a possible world
organisation”),

14. J.B.S Haldane (1892–1964)
served on the battlefield during WW I
communist party member (till 1949),
freedom fighter during the Spanish Civil
War
took Indian citizenship (for India being
“a better model for a possible world
organisation”),
Galton Eugenic Professor at UCL in 1933
head of the biometrics unit at the Indian Statistical
Institute (ISI) in Kolkata from 1956

15. Haldane as founder of human genetics
almost single-handedly developed
mathematical theory of population
genetics between WWI and WWII,
along with Fisher, Penrose and Wright
first demonstrated (with his sister)
genetic linkage in mammals, certain
genetic traits being likely to be
inherited together
mathematical linked natural selection as the central
mechanism of evolution with Mendelian inheritance
established human gene maps for haemophilia and colour
blindness on the X chromosome,
codified rule on sterility in the heterogametic sex of hybrids
in species

16. ...and contributions to statistics
“I have also made some minor discoveries in mathemat-
ics.” JBS, ca. 1940
earliest method using maximum
likelihood for estimating human
linkage maps
pioneering methods for
estimating human mutation rates
first estimates of mutation rate in humans and first notion
that there is a “cost of natural selection”
Bayesian Haldane’s (improper) prior
early representation of the Bayes factor as associated with
a mixture of priors (Etz and Wagenmaker, 2017)

17. Haldane and eugenics
proponent then opponent to (mainstream) eugenism,
supported human cloning (whom he christened) and
artificial breeding of individuals,
devised the name and concept of ectogenesis as a tool for
creating “better” individuals,
“[mental defect is] often not certified among the rich,
although a glance at the press will convince anyone that
they include a number of persons who satisfy the legal
criterion of imbecility (...) any [sterilization] legislation
which does not purport to apply, and is not actually ap-
plied to all social classes alike, will probably be unjustly
applied to the poor.” (J.B.S. Haldane, Nature, 1937)

18. References
Desrosi`eres, A. (1998) The Politics of Large Numbers. Harvard U
Press.
Etz, A. and Wagenmakers, E.-J. (2017) J.B.S. Haldane’s contribution
to the Bayes factor hypothesis test. Statistical Science, 32, 313-329.
Kevles, D. (1984) In the Name of Eugenics. Harvard U Press
[reprinted in 1995]
Kevles, D. (1999) Eugenics and human rights. British Medical J,
319(7207): 435–438
Keynes, J.M. (1925) A short view on Russia.
Lou¸c˜a, F. (2009) Emancipation Through Interaction – How Eugenics
and Statistics Converged and Diverged. J History Biology 42, 649-684.
Weiss, K.M. and Lambert, B.W.(2011) When the time seems ripe:
eugenics, the Annals, and the subtle persistence of typological
thinking. A Human Genetics, 75(3):334-43.