Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (23 page)

It had begun life as The Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, held to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of President Jefferson’s purchase of the state from the French in 1803, which had opened up the Mississippi and helped turn the inland port of Saint Louis into America’s fourth most populous city after New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The fair had both highbrow and lowbrow aspects. There was, for instance, an International Congress of Arts and Sciences, which took place in late September. (It was depicted as ‘a Niagara of scientific talent,’ though literature also featured.) Among the participants were John B. Watson, the founder of behaviourism, Woodrow Wilson, the new president of Princeton, the anthropologist Franz Boas, the historian James Bryce, the economist and sociologist Max Weber, Ernest Rutherford and Henri Poincaré in physics, Hugo de Vries and T. H. Morgan in genetics. Although they were not there themselves, the brand-new work of Freud, Planck, and Frege was discussed. Perhaps more notable for some was the presence of Scott Joplin, the king of ragtime, and of the ice cream cone, invented for the fair.
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Also at the fair was an exhibition showing ‘the development of man.’ This had been planned to show the triumph of the ‘Western’ (i.e., European) races. It was a remarkable display, comprising the largest agglomeration of the world’s non-Western peoples ever assembled: Inuit from the Arctic, Patagonians from the near-Antarctic, Zulu from South Africa, a Philippine Negrito described as ‘the missing link,’ and no fewer than fifty-one different tribes of Indians, as native Americans were then called. These ‘exhibits’ were on show all day, every day, and the gathering was not considered demeaning or politically incorrect by the whites attending the fair. However, the bad taste (as we would see it) did not stop there. Saint Louis, because of the World’s Fair, had been chosen to host the 1904 Olympic Games. Using this context as inspiration, an alternative ‘Games’ labelled the ‘Anthropology Days’ was organised as part of the fair.
Here all the various members of the great ethnic exhibition were required to pit themselves against each other in a contest organised by whites who seemed to think that this would be a way of demonstrating the differing ‘fitness’ of the races of mankind. A Crow Indian won the mile, a Sioux the high jump, and a Moro from the Philippines the javelin.
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Social Darwinist ideas were particularly virulent in the United States. In 1907, Indiana introduced sterilisation laws for rapists and imbeciles in prison. But similar, if less drastic, ideas existed elsewhere. In 1912 the International Eugenics Conference in London adopted a resolution calling for greater government interference in the area of breeding. This wasn’t enough for the Frenchman Charles Richet, who in his book
Sélection humaine
(1912) openly argued for all newborn infants with hereditary defects to be killed. After infancy Richet thought castration was the best policy but, giving way to horrified public opinion, he advocated instead the prevention of marriage between people suffering from a whole range of ‘defects’ – tuberculosis, rickets, epilepsy, syphilis (he obviously hadn’t heard of Salvarsen), ‘individuals who were too short or too weak,’ criminals, and ‘people who were unable to read, write or count.’
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Major Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son and from 1911 to 1928 president of the British Eugenics Education Society, didn’t go quite this far, but he advocated that ‘superior’ people should be encouraged to breed more and ‘inferior’ people encouraged to reproduce less.
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In America, eugenics remained a strong social movement until the 1920s, the Indiana sterilisation laws not being repealed until 1931. In Britain the Eugenics Education Society remained in business until the 1920s. The story in Germany is a separate matter.

Paul Ehrlich had not allowed his studies of syphilis to be affected by the prevailing social views of the time, but the same cannot be said of many geneticists. In the early stages of the history of the subject, a number of reputable scientists, worried by what they perceived as the growth of alcoholism, disease, and criminality in the cities, which they interpreted as degeneration of the racial stock, lent their names to the eugenic societies and their work, if only for a while. The American geneticist Charles B. Davenport produced a classical paper, still quoted today, proving that Huntington’s chorea, a progressive nervous disorder, was inherited via a Mendelian dominant trait. He was right. At much the same time, however, he campaigned for eugenic sterilisation laws and, later, for immigration to the United States to be restricted on racial and other biological/genetic grounds. This led him so much astray that his later work was devoted to trying to show that a susceptibility to violent outbursts was the result of a single dominant gene. One can’t ‘force’ science like that.
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Another geneticist affiliated to the eugenics movement for a short time was T. H. Morgan. He and his co-workers made the next major advance in genetics after Hugo de Vries’s rediscovery of Mendel in 1900. In 1910, the same year that America’s eugenic society was founded, Morgan published the first results of his experiments on the fruit fly,
Drosophila melanogaster.
This may not sound much, but the simplicity of the fruit fly, and its rapid breeding time, meant that in years to come, and thanks to Morgan,
Drosophila
became the staple research tool of genetics. Morgan’s ‘fly room’ at Columbia University in New York
became famous.
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Since de Vries’s rediscovery of Mendel’s laws in 1900, the basic mechanism of heredity had been confirmed many times. However, Mendel’s approach, and de Vries’s, was statistical, centring on that 3 : 1 ratio in the variability of offspring. The more that ratio was confirmed, the more people realised there had to be a physical, biological, and cytological grounding for the mechanism identified by Mendel and de Vries. There was one structure that immediately suggested itself. For about fifty years, biologists had been observing under the microscope a certain characteristic behaviour of cells undergoing reproduction. They saw a number of minute threads forming part of the nuclei of cells, which separated out during reproduction. As early as 1882, Walther Flemming recorded that, if stained with dye, the threads turned a deeper colour than the rest of the cell.
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This reaction led to speculation that the threads were composed of a special substance, labelled chromatin, because it coloured the threads. These threads were soon called chromosomes, but it was nine years before H. Henking, in 1891, made the next crucial observation, that during meiosis (cell division) in the insect
Pyrrhocoris,
half the spermatozoa received eleven chromosomes while the other half received not only these eleven but an additional body that responded strongly to staining. Henking could not be sure that this extra body was a chromosome at all, so he simply called it ‘X.’ It never crossed his mind that, because half received it and half didn’t, the ‘X body’ might determine what sex an insect was, but others soon drew this conclusion.
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After Henking’s observation, it was confirmed that the same chromosomes appear in the same configuration in successive generations, and Walter Sutton showed in 1902 that during reproduction similar chromosomes come together, then separate. In other words, chromosomes behaved in exactly the way Mendel’s laws suggested.
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Nonetheless, this was only inferential – circumstantial – evidence, and so in 1908 T. H. Morgan embarked on an ambitious program of animal breeding designed to put the issue beyond doubt. At first he tried rats and mice, but their generations were too long, and the animals often became ill. So he began work on the common fruit fly,
Drosophila melanogaster.
This tiny creature is scarcely exotic, nor is it as closely related to man. But it does have the advantage of a simple and convenient lifestyle: ‘To begin with it can thrive in old milk bottles, it suffers few diseases and it conveniently produces a new generation every couple of weeks.’
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Unlike the twenty-odd pairs of chromosomes that most mammals have,
Drosophila
has four. That also made experimentation simpler.

The fruit fly may have been an unromantic specimen, but scientifically it turned out to be perfect, especially after Morgan noticed that a single white-eyed male suddenly occurred among thousands of normal red-eyed flies. This sudden mutation was something worth getting to the bottom of. Over the next few months, Morgan and his team mated thousands and thousands of flies in their laboratory at Columbia University in New York. (This is how the ‘fly room’ got its name.) The sheer bulk of Morgan’s results enabled him to conclude that mutations formed in fruit flies at a steady pace. By 1912, more than twenty recessive mutants had been discovered, including one they called ‘rudimentary wings’ and another that produced ‘yellow body colour.’ But that
wasn’t all. The mutations only ever occurred in one sex, males or females, never in both. This observation, that mutations are always sex-linked, was significant because it supported the idea of
particulate
inheritance. The only
physical
difference between the cells of the male fruit fly and the female lay in the ‘X body’. It followed, therefore, that the X body
was
a chromosome, that it determined the sex of the adult fly, and that the various mutations observed in the fly room were also carried on this body.
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Morgan published a paper on
Drosophila
as early as July 1910 in
Science,
but the full force of his argument was made in 1915 in
The Mechanism of Mendelian Inheritance,
the first book to air the concept of the ‘gene.’
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For Morgan and his colleagues the gene was to be understood ‘as a particular segment of the chromosome, which influenced growth in a definite way and therefore governed a specific character in the adult organism’. Morgan argued that the gene was self-replicating, transmitted unchanged from parent to offspring, mutation being the only way new genes could arise, producing new characteristics. Most importantly, mutation was a random, accidental process that could not be affected in any way by the needs of the organism. According to this argument, the inheritance of acquired characteristics was logically impossible. This was Morgan’s basic idea. It promoted a great deal of laboratory research elsewhere, especially across the United States. But in other long-established fields (like palaeontology), scientists were loath to give up non-Mendelian and even non-Darwinian ideas until the modern synthesis was formed in the 1940s (see below, chapter 20).
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There were of course complications. For example, Morgan conceded that a single adult characteristic can be controlled by more than one gene, while at the same time a single gene can affect several traits. Also important was the position of a gene on the chromosome, since its effects could occasionally be modified by neighbouring genes.

Genetics had come a long way in fifteen years, and not just empirically, but philosophically too. In some senses the gene was a more potent fundamental particle than either the electron or the atom, since it was far more directly linked to man’s humanity. The accidental and uncontrollable nature of mutation as the sole mechanism for evolutionary change, under the ‘indifferent control of natural selection,’ was considered by critics – philosophers and religious authorities – as a bleak imposition of banal forces without meaning, yet another low point in man’s descent from the high ground he had occupied when religious views had ruled the world. For the most part, Morgan did not get involved in these philosophical debates. Being an empiricist, he realised that genetics was more complicated than most eugenicists believed, and that no useful purpose could be achieved by the crude control techniques favoured by the social Darwinist zealots. Around 1914 he left the eugenics movement. He was also aware that recent results from anthropology did not support the easy certainties of the race biologists, in particular the work of a colleague whose office was only a few blocks from Columbia University on the Upper West Side of New York, at the American Museum of Natural History, located at Seventy-ninth Street and
Central Park West. This man’s observations and arguments were to prove just as influential as Morgan’s.

Franz
Boas
was born in Minden in northwestern Germany in 1858. Originally a physicist-geographer, he became an anthropologist as a result of his interest in Eskimos. He moved to America to write for
Science
magazine, then transferred to the American Museum of Natural History in New York as a curator. Small, dark-haired, with a very high forehead, Boas had a relaxed, agreeable manner. At the turn of the century he studied several groups of native Americans, examining the art of the Indians of the north Pacific Coast and the secret societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, near Vancouver. Following the fashion of the time for craniometry, he also became interested in the development of children and devised a range of physical measurements in what he called the ‘Cephalic Index.’
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The wide diversity of Boas’s work and his indefatigable research made him famous, and with Sir James Frazer, author of
The Golden Bough,
he helped establish anthropology as a respected field of study. As a consequence he was called upon to record the native American population for the U.S. Census in 1900 and asked to undertake research for the Dillingham Commission of the U.S. Senate. This report, published in 1910, was the result of various unformed eugenic worries among politicians – that America was attracting too many immigrants of the ‘wrong sort,’ that the ‘melting pot’ approach might not always work, and that the descendants of immigrants might, for reasons of race, culture, or intelligence, be unable or unwilling to assimilate.
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This is a not unfamiliar argument, even today, but in 1910 the fears of the restrictionists were rather odd, considered from this end of the century. Their anxieties centred upon the physical dimensions of immigrants, specifically that they were ‘degenerate’ stock. Boas was asked to make a biometric assessment of a sample of immigrant parents and children, an impertinence as controversial then as it would be scandalous now. With the new science of genetics making waves, many were convinced that physical type was determined solely by heredity. Boas showed that in fact immigrants assimilated rapidly, taking barely one or at most two generations to fall in line with the host population on almost any measure you care to name. As Boas, himself an immigrant, sharply pointed out, newcomers do not subject themselves to the traumas of emigration, an arduous and long journey, merely to stand out in their new country. Most want a quiet life and prosperity.
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