Are we too stupid for democracy?
In 1906, Sir Francis Galton observed a crowd at a country fair in Plymouth attempting to guess the weight of an ox. Nearly 800 people participated – from butchers and farmers to busy fishwives. Galton, ever the measurer of men and beasts, gathered the guesses and calculated their average. The result was startling: the crowd's collective estimate came within one pound of the actual weight.
This elegantly simple experiment is the founding parable of what we term the 'wisdom of crowds' – the idea that while individuals may be flawed, the collective judgment of a sufficiently diverse group is compellingly accurate. Galton's experiment also became one of the great justifications for democracy. Within 20 years of Galton's ox being weighed and barbecued, much of the West had universal suffrage.
But that Devonian rural fair was over a hundred years ago.
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The Guardian
04-05-2025
- The Guardian
Maga's era of ‘soft eugenics': let the weak get sick, help the clever breed
English polymath Francis Galton formulated the concept of eugenics in 1883. Inspired by animal breeding, Galton encouraged people with 'desirable' traits to procreate while discouraging or preventing those with 'undesirable' traits from doing the same. As social and intellectual qualities were hereditarily 'fixed', he thought some groups were naturally superior. Galton constructed a racial hierarchy, with white Europeans at the top. Eugenics has since played out in varying, always tragic ways. Attempted genocides and forced sterilization are first to mind, though the 20th century brought about the concept of soft eugenics: non-coercive methods of reducing certain conditions through individual choice and medical advice. Popularized in Nancy Stepan's 1991 book, The Hour of Eugenics, 'soft' eugenics is accomplished by indirect, environmental, and educational interventions while 'hard' eugenics is marked by direct biological interventions (such as sterilization). The term has since been expanded in discussions of genetic technologies, prenatal screenings, and physical fitness. Enter Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US secretary of health, who regularly laments over the 'back then' of his youth when he says that diabetes and autism was almost unheard of and obesity rates were far lower. (In his campaign videos he would often do this over vintage footage of white bodies splayed on a beach.) Kennedy champions living harmoniously with nature, free from the burdens of 'poisonous' food additives, fertilizers, cooking oils and the most toxic chemistry of all: vaccines. Kennedy's myopic emphasis on personal responsibility as the main driver of health means he's at best indifferent, and at worst welcoming, of the idea that those that don't heed his counsel might die. Yet health is never simple. By avoiding discussion of education, employment, social support networks, economic status and geographic location – the social determinants that public health experts agree influence health outcomes – Kennedy, in lockstep with top wellness influencers, is practicing soft eugenics. He's not the only member of the Trump administration to do so. The increasing frenzy around immigration seems fueled by the desire to shape the population's genetic makeup. Musk's cuts to foreign aid are already leading to increased child mortality and HIV and malaria cases in Africa (the Trump administration's other main policy engagement with Africa has been offering white South Africans refugee status). At the heart of all these policies is soft eugenics thinking – the idea that if you take away life-saving healthcare and services from the vulnerable, then you can let nature take its course and only the strong will survive. Kennedy's 'Maha' ('make America healthy again') movement does not advocate for forced sterilizations or mass deaths. Their stance is more of a shrug and sigh than a battle cry. When Kennedy claims that autism is worse than Covid-19 because the latter only kills 'old people' and 'metabolically healthy' people don't die from it, or when a Maha associate claims that measles is 'an essential rite of passage, immunologically', you're hearing the language of soft eugenics. Don't let vaccines protect everyone, instead let the infirm and weak be culled so that the strong will survive and perpetuate. How can we get healthier without healthcare? Kennedy repeatedly puts the onus of disease on diet and lifestyle while minimizing the role of social services and doctors. He claimed that by removing chemicals from food, 'our nation would get healthy immediately,' and floated the idea of using money spent on Ozempic to provide 'a gym membership for every obese American.' In his mind, the unwell are the reason we're in such dire shape–not the system that keeps the unwell from receiving access to healthy food and medical care. While true that a nutritionally sound diet and regular exercise are important factors, Kennedy is not just adding emphasis on personal rather than public responses to health issues, he's decimating public options. The $2.6tn agency Kennedy oversees recently fired a quarter of its workforce and shuttered entire departments tasked to address the multivariate environmental and social factors that contribute to well-being. His handling of the worst measles outbreak in generations offers an example of his soft eugenics thinking. He falsely stated the measles vaccine 'wanes very quickly', leads to 'death every year' and has not undergone thorough safety evaluations. He also says it's 'very difficult' for a healthy person to die from measles while praising doctors treating children infected with measles with vitamin A. He's continued to do so even as a small number of child patients have begun to show up at Texas hospitals suffering from vitamin A toxicity, the result of overuse of the vitamin, probably due to receiving misinformation about its effectiveness. Thanks to declining vaccination rates, measles (along with rubella and polio) could soon be endemic. Things now seem so dire that Kennedy performed an apparent U-turn, writing that 'the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine', but he's since undermined that stance. This week he falsely claimed the vaccine contains 'aborted fetus debris'. Then there's autism, a neurodevelopmental condition that's been studied for over a century. Experts believe increased prevalence is due to expanded diagnostic criteria, improved awareness, and better case identification. More than 250 genes have been strongly linked to autism spectrum disorder. Yet during a recent press conference, Kennedy wrongly called autism a 'preventable disease', labeled it an epidemic like measles, and accused experts of being in 'epidemic denial'. He then said: 'Genes do not cause epidemics; it can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin.' This language squares with the longstanding belief that thimerasol, an organic compound used as a preservative in some vaccines, causes autism, even though the preservative was largely removed from vaccines in 1999 – and even then the link was unproven. Yet Kennedy appears hellbent on linking the two: he's placed known anti-vaxxer David Geier in charge of 'researching' a connection that will apparently be 'discovered' by September. In 2011, Geier was disciplined for practicing medicine without a license after injecting autistic children with puberty-blocking drugs. During his speech, Kennedy cited non-verbal children – roughly a quarter of the autism demographic – as evidence of an epidemic. By repeatedly calling autism a disease and promising to 'eliminate those exposures' that supposedly cause it, he's suggesting a variation in brain function is an impurity to be eradicated from the gene pool. His belief that autism wasn't around when he was young is also misguided. At the time it was a subtype of schizophrenia–autism didn't become its own diagnosis until 1980. Fabricated rhetoric that favored Kennedy in contrarian wellness spaces is falling flat as he heads the nation's public health apparatus. Tragically, he's not the only person in the administration pushing soft eugenics. Blaming the weak for their own sickness is one half of the coin of soft eugenics. The other is encouraging the perceived strong to procreate more, which brings us to Elon Musk. Musk frequently invokes IQ, a flawed and long-debated measure of intelligence. His fever dream of a crumbling civilization can only be salvaged when 'smart' people pump out more babies. What constitutes a smart person, he doesn't make explicit, though in tech-natalist circles they usually mirror the entrepreneurs declaring the mandate. To that end, Musk has personalized his advocacy for pronatalism by challenging himself to help 'seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence'. A proper pronatalism program might echo Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán's recent declaration that women with two more children will never have to pay income tax again. Yet the Trump administration is focused on taking away social services even while declaring the need for more 'seeding'. Trump's proposed $5,000 'baby bonus' isn't much of an incentive when the average cost of giving birth is $18,865. Musk's strange focus on babymaking ignores the complex socioeconomic, cultural and gender equity factors that contribute to declining fertility. If he truly cared about increasing childbirths, he wouldn't take a chainsaw to USAID, indiscriminately cutting off essential services in troubled regions. Those cuts have already caused childhood deaths in war-torn Khartoum, where over 300 soup kitchens were closed due to the shuttering of Emergency Response Rooms. Musk's pet project, the 'department of government efficency' (Doge), cut 86% of USAID funding linked to Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Programs, causing 16.8 million pregnant women to lose access to services and 11.3 million newborns to post-natal care. Funding for childhood vaccines is also gone, increasing the risk of death from measles, polio, and diphtheria. Musk's unofficial organization slashed budgets for the treatment of pneumonia and diarrhea for 14.8 million children, two leading causes of death in those under age five. There's been major disruptions in HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria programs – significant causes of child mortality in low-income countries. An estimated 25 million people could die in the next 15 years thanks to Doge. Such carnage only makes sense if you don't consider those lives worth living. Kennedy and Musk are aligned on this issue. Beyond all those chronic diseases food dyes are supposedly responsible for, Kennedy also blames color additives for declining sperm counts. Such bro-podcast pseudoscience fails from a policy perspective. Instead of aiding already-born children, the administration is cutting funding for Head Start, a program that provides early education services for more than 800,000 families. HHS grants that fund day care, counseling, and disability services for children are also on the chopping block. This fits the longstanding anti-abortion stance: ensure babies are born, then immediately stop caring about them by cutting off all social services. Despite relative geographic isolation, America isn't immune to global outbreaks. Experts predict the consequences of cuts to international aid will inevitably find us. When they do, they're going to impact the most vulnerable Americans, including senior citizens, people with disabilities, low-income residents, people living with chronic diseases and HIV, and those relying on public health programs. This again makes us wonder whose lives Musk and Kennedy value. Kennedy often compares America's health outcomes with other countries. Yet he never mentions that those countries all offer socialized medicine. When pressed on the topic during his confirmation hearings, Kennedy told Bernie Sanders universal healthcare isn't fair. Kennedy cites the example of smokers. Should longtime smokers deserve the same benefits as someone who exercises and eats organic? No, Kennedy says. Rules matter. Right now, the CDC sends billions of dollars to states every year for tobacco prevention efforts in an attempt to get to the root cause of smoking, which is strongly linked to social determinants. Kennedy isn't enthused by these kinds of approaches. He prefers the bootstraps mentality, a core component of Reaganomics propaganda: individual health is a personal responsibility. If you can't manage it, you shouldn't receive the same benefits as those who can. Kennedy advisor and former Heritage Foundation intern, Calley Means, claims that giving people more access to health care is only fueling a broken system. Yet public health officials recommend universal healthcare to improve health outcomes, especially in marginalized communities. Herein lies the wellness sleight of hand: Maha activists weaponize data about poor health outcomes, which predominantly affect lower income and minority communities, in order to preach personal responsibility (and often to sell unproven solutions like supplements that only affluent populations can afford). In this sense, Maha perfectly mimics Maga's deregulatory ethos: cut social services for vulnerable populations while parroting populist language that further helps consolidate power for the most well-off. The 19th-century fantasy of a privileged race is alive and well in Kennedy's yearning for the America of his youth, enabled by the circle of wellness influencers and contrarian doctors similarly hypnotized by a romanticized past that never existed. In his book Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics, geneticist Adam Rutehrford writes: 'The adoration of the classical world, and the constant lamentation for its demise, runs through the eugenics movement like a seam.' Kennedy's vision for a healthy America is akin to the mythical Camelot that has consumed his family's imagination for generations. Only his version is a wellness farm where everyone has access to kettlebells and free-range meat. If you find yourself outside of the walled garden, good luck crossing the moat.
Spectator
22-04-2025
- Spectator
Are we too stupid for democracy?
In 1906, Sir Francis Galton observed a crowd at a country fair in Plymouth attempting to guess the weight of an ox. Nearly 800 people participated – from butchers and farmers to busy fishwives. Galton, ever the measurer of men and beasts, gathered the guesses and calculated their average. The result was startling: the crowd's collective estimate came within one pound of the actual weight. This elegantly simple experiment is the founding parable of what we term the 'wisdom of crowds' – the idea that while individuals may be flawed, the collective judgment of a sufficiently diverse group is compellingly accurate. Galton's experiment also became one of the great justifications for democracy. Within 20 years of Galton's ox being weighed and barbecued, much of the West had universal suffrage. But that Devonian rural fair was over a hundred years ago.
The Guardian
17-10-2024
- The Guardian
Propelled by tech money, the menace of race science is back – and it's just as nonsensical as ever
'Civilisation is going to pieces … if we don't look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved.' Sentiments like this will be familiar to those who lurk in the less wholesome corners of the internet, where racism and other bigotries flourish. As a geneticist who specialises in racism and eugenics, I lurk so that you don't have to. However, this particular phantom threat comes from Tom Buchanan, Daisy's brutish husband, barking these unsolicited words at supper in the opening pages of The Great Gatsby. F Scott Fitzgerald paints a picture of upper-class ghouls that is fundamentally accurate: eugenics, race and the menace of immigrants were defining campaigning issues in Jazz-era America, as they were in Edwardian Britain. One would have hoped the fall of empire and the defeat of nazism marked their demise. But as a new Guardian investigation shows, these views are creeping back into the mainstream, fuelled by the concerted efforts of international networks of activists – and American tech money. What we are witnessing is a coordinated renaissance in eugenics and race science. One of these new race scientists, Emil Kirkegaard, leads a group that claims to have access to the sensitive health information of half a million British volunteers. Kirkegaard wrote on his blog in July that 'Africans are prone to violence everywhere'. Eugenics was formalised as a scientific discipline in the 19th century by the Victorian polymath Francis Galton, who dedicated his life to promoting the idea that certain populations could and should be improved via selective breeding of humans. So entrenched were his convictions that he believed it should be pursued as a 'jehad', a holy war against customs and prejudices that 'impair the physical and moral qualities of our race'. With Galton as inspiration, and with the support of scientists, philosophers and politicians – as well as funding from philanthropic tycoons – eugenics came to be an idea supported on the political left and right. Beatrice and Sydney Webb were advocates, as was Winston Churchill, who drafted compulsory sterilisation legislation that thankfully never made it through parliament. New progressive movements such as the Suffragists and advocates for birth control such as Marie Stopes were also keen eugenicists. Their views on the innate superiority of white people, though abhorrent to us now, were typical of the time. Britain never had formal eugenics policies, but Galton's American disciples later exported the idea to the US, where compulsory sterilisation became commonplace in the majority of states for most of the 20th century. It also became a regular talking point for America's upper classes, as Fitzgerald's Buchanan character shows. The hive of scientists in America responsible for the spread of eugenics even provided inspiration for the Third Reich, which drew direct intellectual, legal and financial support for their policies of mass sterilisation, persecution and murder. There was even direct collaboration. Nazi and US eugenicists combined to found the Pioneer Fund in 1937 – a pot of cash that was formed to support eugenics, and 'the problems of race betterment'. Despite the thorough debunking of race science by contemporary genetics, and the growing acceptance of our multiracial and multicultural reality, the Guardian reporting shows that such thinking has not been extinguished. In fact, the line between the early and contemporary race scientists can quite easily be traced. Mankind Quarterly, which today publishes Kirkegaard, was founded in 1960 as a mouthpiece for a grim cast of eugenicists, including Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, the Nazi PhD supervisor of the Auschwitz 'Angel of Death' Josef Mengele. But while it was the Rockefellers and Carnegies who funded the US and Nazi eugenics movements as part of their philanthropic outreach, the current eugenicists and race scientists seem to have courted tech multimillionaires. The plan appears to be to infiltrate the mainstream and normalise views that historians and scientists have long debunked. It can feel strange to discuss something as anachronistic and outdated as race science. Most right-minded people occupy a world in which the idea of genetic superiority between races is disproven and disturbing. They are right on both counts. Group differences, of course, are real and people are different – and genetics plays a huge role in influencing those differences, in physical appearance and in our behaviours. Does that mean race is a biologically meaningful definition? It does not. Race as we currently use it is a socially constructed idea, but one with biologically meaningful consequences, such as in healthcare where many disease outcomes are significantly worse for racial minorities. The impact of disease correlates significantly with socioeconomic factors, primarily poverty, and in our society racial minorities are mostly in lower social strata. Black and brown people endure worse medical outcomes not because they are black or brown, but because of this fact. The science very clearly evidences this, and no amount of cosplay race science – or human biodiversity, as they euphemistically brand their propaganda – can debunk it. In The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan ends his racist rant with a call to arms, one that echoes in our present: 'It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things.' Just as it was then, the current renaissance of eugenics and race science is nothing more than bigotry dressed up as biology. Dr Adam Rutherford is a lecturer in genetics at UCL and the author of How to Argue With a Racist Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
