Sunday, October 19, 2003; Page BW10
Misreading Genes In War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, investigative journalist Edwin Black compellingly argues that the ethnic-cleansing movement that culminated in Nazi Germany's death camps during World War II was the realization of a particularly ugly American dream. Black, whose mother lived under Nazi rule in Poland, writes here with the zeal of an avenger, albeit one with the assistance of a team of 50 researchers who unearthed some 50,000 documents to support his case. He traces the eugenics movement to English economist Thomas Malthus's argument that charitable assistance to the poor "made no sense in the natural scheme of human progress" and to its later distillation in the theories of Francis J. Galton, cousin and contemporary of Charles Darwin.
Galton was no nut; he created the world's first weather maps and later was credited with discovering the uniqueness of human fingerprints. It could be argued that he wasn't even a nut when it came to eugenics; his "positive eugenics" merely speculated that society could profit from careful marriage and procreation among the elite.
Galton's theories never achieved stature as serious science, but they were quickly adopted and perverted on both sides of the Atlantic by racists and elitists looking to place blame and find solutions for society's ills. "By the dawn of the twentieth century," Black writes, "Galton's notions of voluntary family planning and positive governmental structures would be transmogrified into an entirely different constellation of negative and coercive thought." The new faithful called it "negative eugenics."
America's eugenics movement found its leader in zoologist Charles Benedict Davenport, who "led the wandering faithful out of the wilderness of pure prejudice and into the stately corridors of respectability." More precisely, in Black's telling, Davenport led them into the pocketbooks of the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation, which subsidized eugenics research in the United States and around the world -- including Germany -- right up through the rise of the Third Reich.
The U.S. eugenics movement's signal achievement -- federally sanctioned sterilizations of thousands of criminals, mentally ill persons and others -- was supposed to be a first step in a global campaign to rid the world of non-Nordics, and the euthanizing of defectives was regarded as a possible tool. "Murder was always an option," begins a chapter citing a report prepared for the American Breeders Association, an organization through which Black says the U.S. Department of Agriculture maintained ties to the eugenics movement. Hitler, he seems to suggest, merely changed Nordic to Aryan and dispensed with the niceties. "During the Reich's first ten years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort," Black writes. "Indeed, they were envious as Hitler rapidly began sterilizing hundreds of thousands and systematically eliminating non-Aryans from German society."
-- Gregory Mott
Getting Warmer Scientific thinking about climate change has evolved tremendously in the few decades since this discipline started to emerge. In The Discovery of Global Warming (Harvard Univ., $24.95), Spencer R. Weart, director of the Center for the History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics, notes that the technology used to explore the field has changed as well.
Before there were highly complex models for how wind, tides, clouds, heat, haze and radiation affect the weather, there was the University of Chicago's groundbreaking . . . dishpan. The simple aluminum vessel was filled with water to simulate the Earth's air, and it was heated at the edge to represent the energy delivered by the sun. To make this world go round, the dishpan was mounted on a turntable and sent spinning. The researchers then added dyes and watched the patterns created by the rotation and the heat.
It's no small feat to have gone in barely half a century from such simple tools to today's sophisticated diagnostic and predictive instruments. This progress has allowed the scientific consensus to form around an amateur meteorologist's thinly substantiated claim in 1938 that the Earth was warming up as a result of the greenhouse effect and that the source of this warming was civilization's rampant burning of fossil fuels. Weart also notes that early efforts to study the atmosphere led to theories that our planet was cooling down, not warming up, and to assertions that any such warming would mean a global day at the beach -- longer growing seasons, more land available to grow food, etc. -- rather than an endless calamity of melting ice caps and rising sea levels.
Researchers have made great progress in understanding the forces that affect climate. But the numbers that Weart presents leave one wondering if it's all too little, too late. In the 19th century, the atmosphere contained about 290 parts per million of carbon dioxide, the most familiar but hardly the only greenhouse gas. In 1960, that number had risen to 315. In 1988, the reading was 350. Today -- with scientists, business leaders and public officials knowing so much more than those researchers did at the University of Chicago -- the number is above 375.
Humankind is smarter than the frog caught unawares in a pot of water that slowly reaches its boiling point. Weart -- whose style is dry to the point of brittle -- shows that we, unlike the frog, at least will know we're getting cooked.
-- Tom Graham
The reviewers are all science and health writers for The Washington Post.
