Mendel's Dwarf (36 page)

At exactly the same time as Mendel was working so brilliantly, so doggedly, with such piercing insight into the matter of inheritance, August Weismann of the University of Freiburg im Breisgau performed an experiment of mind-boggling stupidity to disprove the theory of the inheritance of acquired characters. This experiment involved chopping off the tails of mice. Weismann bred mice through five generations, more than nine hundred of the wretched animals, laboriously chopping off all their tails.

And by the fifth generation? Mice with tails.

I wonder whether his colleagues tried to hush the whole thing up. Or maybe he himself tried to keep it quiet, working late into the evening when no one else was around and keeping the cages and cages of tailless mice behind locked doors. Chop, chop, chop. Disposal would have been a problem. What did the cleaning lady imagine the good professor was up to? Or did he wrap the tails in newspaper and slip them into some rubbish bin on the way home? Chop, chop, chop. Did Weismann imagine he was contributing to the sacred body of man’s knowledge? Chop, chop, chop. Five generations. At least the iniquity of the fathers is only visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. There is something quintessentially Teutonic about Weismann’s insistence on going one further than God. He showed this talent in other directions, becoming the first honorary chairman of the Society for Racial Hygiene.

Mendel kept mice. I’ve told you that. I’ll bet he didn’t do anything so idiotic as cut their tails off.

I keep mice. We have thousands of them in the animal room at the laboratories, tiny, mewing creatures with pink noses and twitching whiskers. Some of them are monstrously deformed.

Let us listen to E. B. Ford, sometime Emeritus Professor of Ecological Genetics at Oxford University and friend of that enthusiastic eugenicist Leonard Darwin:

The total number of plant and animal species now described lies between 1,100,000 and 1,200,000. It would have been far less in Mendel’s day, but still very large. Yet he based his views upon a single species: the edible pea
, Pisum sativum.
It is true that he corroborated them to a slight extent by work on, unfortunately, a related plant: the bean
, Phaseolus.
He also published the results of his experimental crosses with the hawk-weeds
, Hieracium … 
Thus Mendel’s conclusions, though probably developed from a consideration of living organisms in general, were really only established from his monumental study on peas. Are the principles apparently derived from experiments upon a single species really applicable to over a million others, exhibiting all the diversity of animal as well as of plant life? It seems questionable indeed. Oddly enough, it would not have done so had Mendel merely used one other, chosen with discrimination …

Antirrhinum, Aquilegia, Calceolaria, Campanula, Carex, Cheiranthus, Cirsium, Dianthus, Ficaria, Fuchsia, Geum, Hieracium, Ipomoea, Linaria, Lychnis, Malus, Matthiola, Mirabilis, Phaseolus, Pirus, Potentilla, Prunus, Tropaeolum, Verbascum, Veronica, Viola, Zea
.

Oddly enough, Mendel tried as best he could. It was just that everyone else was too stupid to understand what he had done. One wonders
how
E.B. himself would have measured up …

Cyril Burt cheated, of course. We all know that now (or almost all of us, but there are already some revisionists around). The curious thing is,
we
should have known it all along. We should have looked into his figures, poked around in them, looked up his references (tricky, that one, because a good number of them simply didn’t exist), generally picked at the fabric of his work to see whether it would come apart at the seams. By
we
I mean
they
, of course—the people who took it all at face value and actually encouraged its use in education: in the eleven-plus examination. Pigeonholing at eleven years old. The children of the middle class go to the grammar schools; the children of the working class go to the secondary moderns.

What Cyril Burt set out to show was that intelligence is inherited, or such a large portion of it as makes no difference. He did it by testing people’s intelligence. He tested people at random, he tested members of families unto the third and fourth generation, he tested identical twins. And he came to the conclusion that intelligence is about as inherited as, say, shortsightedness.

Burt used an array of tests and then labored long and hard at the mathematical analysis of his results. He also used straightforward personal observation, a curious method that appears to go something like this: you chat with someone; you are an expert in such matters; off the top of your head you decide what his IQ score is; you are right. He did all this and, following in the footsteps of Spearman, who had come to the conclusion that intelligence is a unitary
thing
, which he called
g
, and whatever you’ve got you’ve got, and we can’t do much about it, Burt decided that
if you can identify a person’s intelligence at an appropriate age (eleven was the earliest age possible for reliable identification), then you can decide what education such a person needs and deserves. There’s nothing crueler than raising false hopes in a child, is there? No more attempt to train a dwarf as a basketball player than give an average man an academic education.

Now, I don’t want to kick a man when he’s down (actually I do—given my particular disadvantage, it’s the only way I get the opportunity), nor do I wish to speak ill of the dead, although if the libel laws don’t allow you to speak ill of them when they are alive, then I don’t see that you’re left with much alternative. But the blunt fact is, Cyril Burt was a fraud. He invented data to fit his prejudices and he even invented coworkers to fit his data. He was a lifelong scandal, and all in the name of genetics. But I did all right by him. I passed the eleven-plus. So, probably, did you, if your parents couldn’t afford a private school and you’re anything near my age and are reading this book.

Consider this little gem: shortly after the death of Alfred Binet in 1911, one of his admirers, Henry Goddard, administered the Binet test (adapted for English-language use) on behalf of the U.S. Public Health Service to immigrants at Ellis Island. He used two women to administer the tests, because women are gentler and more sympathetic. In 1913, working with Hungarians, Italians, Russians, and Jews, these two ladies discovered that 80 percent of these immigrants were feebleminded, the percentage differing little from group to group. Eighty percent.

Anton Mendel was exactly the kind of person who might have emigrated to the United States. I wonder how he would have fared in such a test? I wonder how his small, frightened, confused son Johann would have fared?

As a result of Goddard’s pioneering work, people of reduced intelligence were denied entry to the U.S.A. Furthermore, quotas were established that effectively excluded those nation groups that he had demonstrated to have such high levels of feeblemindedness
—the southern and eastern Europeans, the Slavs … and the Jews.

Richard Lynn, of the University of Ulster at Coleraine, is on record as using a survey of black African intelligence to calculate the average black African IQ. The figure he comes up with is 69. Murray and Herrenstein, in their book
The Bell Curve
, were more modest. They took the median of eleven different studies and came up with the figure 75. Therefore, on average, black Africans are at the moment about as feebleminded as southern Europeans and Slavs and Jews were at the start of this century. Isn’t it amazing what can happen in three generations?

You do understand, of course, that organic evolution, the changing of gene frequencies to any significant degree, is simply impossible in so short a time. So the sudden discovery of normal, “white” intelligence in the descendants of Slav and Jewish and Italian immigrants to the United States has nothing to do with race, nothing to do with genes and evolution, nothing to do, in fact, with any useful
thing
called intelligence. Genes code for protein. They don’t do anything else, and there simply isn’t any protein with a domain marked “intelligence.” I have no idea what there is, but I can assure you there isn’t that. Any change there may have been in the performance of Jews and Slavs in intelligence tests is—must be—entirely a result of environmental and social changes. The same thing is happening to American blacks and will happen, presumably, to Africans … unless people like Lynn and Burt and Goddard get to work on them.

A test of my own. First you must read each of the following quotations:

1. “The effect of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following:

a. Lowering of the level of the higher race.

b. Physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness.”

2. “If both parents are feebleminded, all the children will be feebleminded. It is obvious that such matings should not be allowed. It is perfectly clear that no feebleminded person should ever be allowed to marry or to become a parent. It is obvious that if this is to be carried out, the intelligent part of society must enforce it.”

3. “Taken on the average, and regarding both sexes, this alien Jewish population is somewhat inferior physically and mentally to the native population. We know and admit that some of the children of these alien Jews from the academic standpoint have done brilliantly; whether they have the staying power of the native race is another question. No breeder of cattle, however, would purchase an entire herd because he anticipated finding one or two fine specimens included in it.”

Now here’s the task, and it is a difficult one: you have to identify which quotation comes from the writings of Henry Goddard; which comes from the pen of Karl Pearson; and which is from Adolf Hitler. Don’t cheat.
¹

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was born in 1898. He cheated, of course. We all know that now, but the curious thing is,
we knew
it at the time (
we over
here on the other side, that is), whereas the ideas of Goddard and Pearson and Burt were all accepted,
more or less, and the ideas of Jensen and Murray and Lynn and Herrenstein are still at least considered. Because, unlike Pearson or Goddard or Burt or the others, Lysenko was on the wrong side. He was a Soviet communist.