One of my earliest papers, in 1968, was this one:
Crow, J. F. and J. Felsenstein. 1968. The effect of assortative mating on the genetic composition of a population. Eugenics Quarterly 15: 85-97.
The paper gives derivations of the additive genetic variance of a character for which there is not random mating, but for which there is assortative mating: individuals who mate are more likely to be similar in that character. Examples would be people who tend to marry someone who is of a similar height.
R. A. Fisher gave a derivation in his major 1918 paper on the theory of quantitative genetics
of how big an increase of additive genetic variance there would be in a
character for which there was assortative mating. But his derivation was very hard to
follow. Sewall Wright, in one of his pioneering papers on inbreeding in 1921, had a
similar result, derived using his own method of “path coefficients”. But even that was hard to follow.
Jim Crow was working on materials for his 1970 book with Motoo Kimura. For the section
on assortative mating, he found a way to use kinship coefficients to derive Wright’s
result. I read the draft of this and figured out a way to generalize his result to
cases where the trait was caused by a mix of genes of large and small effects. So I
was made co-author on a paper. (I do still wonder whether one of the steps I used in my
derivation was actually justifiable).
No. It is not at all about effects of preferentially breeding from some people and not from others. In the model in the paper, every member of the population is equally able to have offspring.
James F. Crow, the senior author, wanted it there. He was one of the major people who revived work in human genetics after World War II, when much of it was discredited by the association of advocates of eugenics with the horrors that Nazi ideology led to. He was an associate of H.J. Muller, who pioneered work on mutations in human populations, and human genetic loads. Muller (and Crow) did not want eugenics to be completely ruled out, in cases such as trying to reduce the numbers of harmful mutations in the population. I think Jim was trying not to totally abandon having some future eugenics program. With our ability to detect new mutations and to engage in genetic engineering to directly change those loci, the idea of using a eugenics program to reduce the numbers of deleterious mutations is now obsolete.
By then, the journal had almost entirely changed to publishing articles about demography – the study of patterns of birth and death rates, and the growth rates of populations. Later, the journal changed its name to “Social Biology”, and more recently, to “Biodemography and Social Biology”.
Yes, I recall feeling a bit queasy when that journal was proposed. But I read other articles in the journal, and concluded that people would look at them and understand that this journal was by then not really about eugenics. Perhaps I was wrong about assuming that people would check that and be understanding!
No, I am not. If someone proposed to get a broad acceptance in society of having a program of breeding humans, similar to animal breeding, they’d have to answer three questions:
Can we all decide on an objective? For example, do we all want people to be six feet tall, and make sure all have enough muscles to guarantee them an Olympic gold medal?
Can we ensure that there won’t be unwanted side effects? For example, the breeding of German Shepherd Dogs (Alsatians) to have sturdy-looking hind quarters ended up leading to high rates of congenital hip dislocation. Oops.
Can we do this without massively violating human rights? By, for example telling people who can have children and who can’t? I don’t think we can.
I think the answer to, not just one or two, but all three of these is clearly “no”. And in fact there is basically no country in the world right now that has a eugenics program, or is even talking about one. There are alarming neo-fascist movements in many countries, whose ideologues have racist fantasies about breeding people to be blonde “Aryans” (or whatever). But instituting eugenics programs is not the main danger they pose – that would be very slow and cumbersome, while there are many more immediate dangers if they take power.
If you go back and actually read the papers written in the literature of eugenics, you may be confused to find that most of them are not focused on racial differences, but on class differences. They were alarmed that better educated people were having fewer children than less well-educated people. They imagined society being overwhelmed by working-class people’s children. Of course, eugenicists were hereditarians, in that they attributed most differences between groups of people to genetics. So of course that meant that they tended to carry this over to any discussion of race. But the literature is actually mostly about class.