Of Genes and Men: Overpopulation, Negative vs. Positive Eugenics in China and the USA, and the history of Xq28, the “Gay Gene.”
If there is one force that advocates for the greater good with any consistency, it’s crisis. The world has tripled in population since 1940, and statisticians say we’re set to give birth to a billion more babies by 2025. The subject of overpopulation has crept into the conversation, just as images of hunger and genocide root more deeply within the collective consciousness. Legislators will soon be tasked with regulating population growth and, while the extent of that regulation is anyone’s guess, there are those who think a decline in births could account for its own crisis [1]. No doubt, society should brace for impact.
Humanity controlling its own biological evolution is a fait accompli; at this point in biotechnological history, there is no turning back. Because “political systems enshrine certain kinds of rights over others, and thereby reflect the moral basis of their underlying societies” [2], our views around biotechnology will likely conform to our social structure and laws as they change. Current preoccupation with the creative and economic potential afforded by emerging technologies is enough to impair our sense of privacy and autonomy. And despite an underlying fear of biotechnology, the success of artificial insemination and personal genomics, however marginalized, suggests an eventual acceptance of applied genetics as it is “normalized” within the realms of agriculture and health care. Meanwhile, the deterioration of democracy and the normalization of classism and political abuse blazes a path of potential catastrophe that dwarfs Malthusianism by contrast [3].
Enter eugenics. The massive humanitarian failure of the Nazis during World War II prompted the United States to abandon its own eugenics program shortly thereafter. Eugenics then became a symbol of tyranny. Biotechnology has since inherited, albeit to a lesser degree, the stigma surrounding eugenics. Still, the dubious Western critique of China’s one-child policy and hybrid capitalism suggests an uncertain future for reproductive freedom and autonomy. This is disconcerting because we have already, to a degree, aligned the mechanisms and objectives of biotechnology with those of eugenics [4]. We can expect that policies similar to China’s have already been considered elsewhere.
Given the history of social conquest, a sustained interest around the genetic mechanism of sexual desire suggests a discursive longing to control it. This is best illustrated by Xq28, the long arm of the X chromosome now controversially dubbed “the gay gene” [5]. Ever since the American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses in 1973, sexual orientation research has employed a more biological approach to understanding what, on a chemical level, makes one person attracted to another. This paradigm shift in research resonates a gradual secularization in the West, while reinforcing the autonomous nature of biology in explaining behavior. The question of whether sexual desire is more a product of nature or nurture goes unanswered. And while genetic research may be closer to explaining the origin of same-sex attraction, genetics has so far offered little more than a series of inconclusive results and theoretical what ifs.
The first study came in the early 1990s when Simon LeVay linked the size of various brain structures to the sexual orientation of his subjects. Later, J. Michael Bailey noticed a connection between genetics and orientation in monozygotic and dizygotic twins, among others. Between 1993 and 2005, Dean Hamer’s linkage study at the National Institutes of Health resulted in the first-ever comprehensive genetic scan of a group of gay men. All studies were inconclusive.
Hamer’s Xq28 gay gene hypothesis was eventually rejected by the science community, due to insufficient sample size, but not before inspiring Psychiatric Biologist Alan Sanders to continue the work. The “Gay Brothers” study, led by Sanders, tested the assertion that environment, psychology and genetics each play a significant role in determining one’s sexual orientation. Seven hundred sets of brothers were genetically “frisked”, while birth order and gender nonconformity were taken into account [6].
The idea that biological justification can prompt greater social and moral acceptance at least partially inspired the science behind these and earlier studies. Legitimate research around homosexuality is thought to have started in the late 1800s, when Freudian theory was first breaking ground in the public sphere. Meanwhile, the biocentric perspective dates back more than a century, when Karl Heinrich Ulrichs sought to justify a “natural flow” of sexuality using biological determinism [7]. Havelock Ellis and Richard von Kraft-Ebing—pioneers of the shift away from psychology—also believed that biology could provide an answer.
Many years and laws later, human rights activists are skeptical when it comes to the gay gene, and for good reason. Technological innovation, while helping to improve the human condition, is subject to scrutiny with regard to its role in raising quality of life across the board. Thomas Robert Malthus, the 19th century political economist responsible for Malthusian theory, suggested that technological innovation throughout history has resulted in a population increase, but not necessarily in a higher standard of living [8]. The apparent indifference of science toward economic sustainability also applies to human rights, in that objective science can only go so far in correcting a long and bitter history of discrimination around sexual diversity. It is therefore likely that Xq28 is not about defining the genetics of sexual desire, nor is it about separating “us” from “them” by any sensational means. Rather, perhaps more realistically so, Xq28 is about drawing the line on genetic freedom. Should technological innovation precede a profound moral breakdown in society, the indiscriminate power of legislation and judicial law could easily dispose science to tyranny again. But even more unbearable is a future unable to cope with population. This is the essence of China’s one-child policy.
In Cultivating Global Citizens: Population In the Rise of China, Harvard Professor Susan Greenhalgh associates China’s economic ascent with its governance of population, suggesting a critical interplay between technology and tradition:
“When [former Chinese Communist Party Leader] Deng Xiaoping took charge of population control in the early 1980s, he was inspired not by Maoist ideology but rather by social Darwinist ideas advanced by some of China’s leading scientists. Their theories framed China’s large and growing population in Malthusian terms as a crisis of modernization: too many people of too backward a type. Championed by defense engineers Qian Xuesen and Song Jian, this theory rested on the outmoded science and eugenics and incorporated a “veritable religion of science and technology” aimed at reconciling traditional Chinese values with the demands of the modern world [9]”.
To a brave new world, modern eugenics might seem arcane. However, considering how China’s one-child policy has sought to reconcile traditional values with modernity, it’s not difficult to imagine a more virulent strain of eugenics creeping back into the American mainstream undetected, as yet another initiative championed by religious extremists crusading for a “better” society, or perhaps by nationalists whose xenophobic brand of “patriotism” serves only to further embody an American Ethos at war with itself.
Biotechnology, however enlightened, is not immune to the mob. It was the Poet Robert Burns who wrote that the best laid schemes of mice and men go often awry [10]. Burns’ poetry inspired the title for John Steinbeck’s 1937 novel Of Mice and Men, in which the ethics of euthanasia were indirectly addressed. While science has since made remarkable progress, and despite the cornerstone objectivity of the scientific method, it’s worth considering how biotechnology is neither impervious to prevailing ideology, nor can it ever hope to be. Because a resurgence of eugenics may follow a more “compassionate” tack—an alternative to negative eugenics models like China’s effective yet problematic policy—we should carefully consider the consequences of blindly wielding a force we know very little about, especially in a time when all the world seems torn in principle and purpose.
In this way, biotechnology represents a promethean form of enlightenment. The desire in the West to employ negative eugenics to eliminate undesirable elements from the gene pool is neither new nor its fate predictable. In the early 20th century, following the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of inheritance, the American eugenics movement emerged with the central claim that the species could be improved by controlling its breeding conventions [11]. The false legitimacy of pseudoscience during this time led to questionable practices, including forced sterilization of the disabled and those individuals deemed intellectually inferior [12]. By the 1930s, eugenics in the United States had quickly lost support, largely in response to the monumental failure of the Nazis during the war. Still, how the free world allowed science and technology to justify widespread social injustice on the basis of disability and intelligence—much the way it has done with race, gender and sexuality—cannot be ignored. Biotechnology affords us much in the way of longevity and genetic fitness, but how much power is too much power? It’s a question Prometheus would have been wise to consider.
As conduits for genetic expression, our offspring remain the key to our survival. In this way, reproductive choice provides an entry point for discussion around the viability, power and mechanism of resurgent eugenics. Still, matters of morality and economy continue to dictate the prevailing ideology around biological reproduction. To understand the implications of resurgent eugenics, we must first consider the role of faith in society, as it relates to production, consumption, and technological intervention—a discussion for a later time. Indeed, the image of fetal wreckage seems inadequate against a flurry of ten thousand blights [13]; surely we cannot hope to fight something that has yet to become the entirety of evil it was meant to be.
Notes
[1] Kotkin, Joel. “Overpopulation Isn’t the Problem: It’s Too Few Babies” Forbes http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2011/10/27/overpopulation-isnt-the-problem-its-too-few-babies/
[2] Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002) Picador: New York, 110
[3] My aim here is not to encourage biotechnophobia, but rather to emphasize the immense and largely misunderstood power signified by our proclivity to technological innovation.
[4] Crook, Paul. “The New Eugenics? The Ethics of Bio-Technology” Australian Journal of Politics and History 54.1 (2008): 135-43. http://www.slideshare.net/UnitB166ER/the-new-eugenics-the-ethics-of-bio-technology-by-paul-crook-university-of-queensland
[5] Hamer followup study abstract (1995) http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v11/n3/abs/ng1195-248.html
[6] Alan Sanders “Gay Brothers” study http://www.gaybros.com/updates.html
[7] Murphy, Timothy F. “When Science Looks at Homosexuality: Orientation research roils the moral and political waters” CREGS (2005) http://cregs.sfsu.edu/article/when_science_looks_homosexuality_orientation_research_roils_moral_and_political_waters
[8] Malthusian Trap, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_trap
[9] Greenhalgh, Susan. Cultivating Global Citizens: Population In the Rise of China (2010) Harvard University Press: Cambridge
[10] Burns, Robert. “To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough” (1785) http://www.robertburns.org/works/75.shtml
[11] O’Brien, Gerald V. “Eugenics, Genetics, and the Minority Group Model of Disabilities: Implications for Social Work Advocacy” Social Work 56.4: 2011
[12] Fukuyama, 159
[13] According to Promethean myth, Pandora is warned by Athena not to open the golden casket that the god Jupiter has given her on her journey to Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus. Pandora disobeys, releasing ten thousand deadly creatures upon the world, but manages to close the box on “foreboding”, saving humanity from a worse fate of knowing what calamity will befall it in advance.
Images
[4] X Chromosome 1 (Apex Visuals), 48 KB http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/x-chromosome-3d-max/518155
[5] Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (unknown artist), public domain, 88 KB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Karl_Heinrich_Ulrichs_%28from_Kennedy%29.jpg
[6] Synthetic Wombs (unknown artist), 124 KB http://www.mondolithic.com/?p=262
KEYWORDS: afterlife, childbirth, China one-child policy, choice, curse, eugenics, gay gene, immortality, knowledge, Kobayashi Maru, liberal eugenics, mortality, neo-eugenics, power, prometheus, punishment, reproduction, sanctity, scientific progress
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