Truth, Justice, and Genetics

In 1927, a remarkable book appeared in France [1]. Its title was La trahison des clercs, and it was written by the then 60-year-old Parisian journalist Julien Benda (1867-1956). The title is difficult to translate: Trahison is "betrayal," but who are les clercs? One could translate them by "the writers," "the intellectuals," "the scholars." What is the content of the book? The author documents how contemporary French philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists betrayed truth, reason, or justice (righteousness, civil rights)--or all three--by becoming partisans of a race (in general, the white race) or a class (often the working class). Benda survived the Shoa. He wrote an introduction of about 100 pages for the new edition of his book in 1946 on the new acts of treason of some of the persons already mentioned in his book and of some other persons; the geneticist André Lwoff, an old friend of Benda's, wrote an introduction for the 1975 edition. This article will attempt to provide an analysis of genetics according to the criteria of Benda and Lwoff.

Genetics is a young science, having emerged only in 1900, when Mendel's papers were discovered and finally understood. The research of Thomas Hunt Morgan, and of his students Sturtevant, Bridges, and Muller, between 1910 and 1920 revealed the exact order of more than one hundred genes on the four chromosomes of Drosophila melanogaster [2]. Truth and reason present themselves here in the most beautiful manner; justice is absent. It was not used in the context of this work.

In 1921, the year when the German translation of Morgan's book The Physical Basis of Heredity appeared, the first textbook of human genetics (as we would call the field today) appeared in Germany [3]. Its authors were Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz. Where the authors describe general principles of genetics and the genetics of human physical traits, the text is excellent, and H. J. Muller called the English translation of the third edition in 1927 "the best work on the subject" [4]. Where the authors discuss races and the inheritance of intellectual and emotional capabilities, the text is interesting but speculative. Few hard facts were known then. This is acceptable as long as the speculative character of the discussion is pointed out, and not yet a treason of truth and reason. But quite often the authors wrote as if their speculations were facts. And there begins the treason of truth and reason.

Baur, Fischer, and Lenz believed that successful social politics fundamentally depends on the knowledge of human behavioral genetics. They claimed that it is a fact that the mass of petty criminals of low intelligence bred faster than the few people of high intelligence. They believed that antisocial behavior, violent crime, and intelligence were genetically determined to a large extent. Similar views were held at the time by experts and politicians in the United States [5]. Baur, Fischer, and Lenz predicted the ruin of Europe and the United States, if the breeding of these "inferior" people was not stopped immediately, and they proposed involuntary sterilization. None of the political parties of the Weimar Republic, except the Nazis, concurred. This made Baur, Fischer, and Lenz accept the violent anti-Semitism of the Nazis as a minor evil. And soon they began to collaborate with the Nazis. In 1931 Lenz reviewed Hitler's Mein Kampf [6]. He revealed that Hitler had read the second edition of the Baur-Fischer-Lenz while he was writing his book. The last sentence of Lenz's review sums up as follows: "Hitler is the first politician of real, large influence who has recognized race hygiene as a central theme of politics and who is willing to fight for it."

The sterilization law which the Nazis introduced in 1933 in Germany and which led to the sterilization of 350,000 "inferior" mental defectives, schizophrenics, manic-depressives and others was treason of justice [7]. That the...