In a 1926 article in American Anthropologist, E.A. Hooten reviews the brand new journal Annals of Eugenics, a publication devoted to "racial problems" that "every anthropologist will welcome". As scientists, it's important to recognize our history and air some of our skeletons, if only to prevent anybody making these kinds of mistakes again.

Eugenics is a neglected part of the history of science. It is often associated with genocidal dictatorships such as the Nazi regime, but it's easy to forget that this was a well-established field in America and Britain too, only three generations ago.

The following is Hooten's review of the first issue of the "Annals of Eugenics. A Journal for the Scientific Study of Racial Problems". It was issued by the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, University of London. This was no fringe publication - the Institute for Scientific Information listed it as one of the "262 journals published between 1900-1944 ... identified as providing the most relevant significant and useful information of that era to today's researcher". In the 1950s, it switched its name to the Annals of Human Genetics, which exists to this day [2].

The Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics at UCL was named for (and funded from the will of) a famous Victorian Gentleman scientist. A product of the age of polymaths he made contributions in many fields, but eugenics became his main passion. The laboratory remained so named until 1963, when it became The Galton Laboratory of the Department of Human Genetics & Biometry. In the 1990s, it was consumed by the Department of Biology [3].

So what did Hooten make of this new journal?

"The attitude of the editors upon the subject of race differences may be gathered from the following excerpt: 'No more than there is equality between man and man of the same nation is there equality between race and race. Many races have hardly yet found their true place and function in the community of nations. Science will not flinch from the conclusion, if such be inevitable, that some of these races scarce serve in the modern world any other purpose than to provide material for the history of man.'

Don't mistake this for criticism - Hooten is expressing admiration for their uncompromising stance, noting: "that existing journals and text-books which deal with eugenics are dismissed with contempt. The future of the science of eugenics is stated rather than predicted".

The first article in the journal (comprising half of its length) is apparently a lengthy monograph by the editor himself, Karl Pearson, which is interesting to compare with the 2008 first edition of Answers in Genesis. It is titled "The Problem of Alien Immigration into Great Britain, illustrated by an Examination of Russian and Polish Jewish Children". Hooten describes its content for us.

About 600 Jewish boys and nearly as many girls constitute the sample upon which the work is based. The data include anthropometric measurements, medical information, sociological facts,and intelligence rating. Non-Jewish school children in similar districts are used for comparative data. Coefficients of correlation and of mean square contingency are employed in measuring the relationships of the different variables. In physique the Jewish children are not found to be superior to the non-Jewish children, but inferior to them in the great bulk of categories dealt with. In cleanliness of clothing the Jewish children fall far short of the native Gentile population.

Taken on the average,and regarding both sexes, this alien Jewish population is somewhat inferior physically and mentally to the native population. The contention of the authors is that in a crowded country only immigrants surpassing the average of the native population in physical and mental qualities should be admitted.

There is a certain relentless logic that stems from an inability by both author and reviewer to provide any kind of meaningful analysis of the results. I have no reason to believe that Pearson didn't find the results he published, but he fails to tackle the cause. If the immigrant population tends to be poorer, or have less access to quality education, then that could easily explain any differences.

This doesn't seem to occur to Pearson and Hooten who - in line with many of their contemporaries - were more inclined to fit this result in to their racist views. Again, you can't help but compare this to Answers in Genesis - the manipulation of evidence to fit preexisting assumptions.

And at the time, this field was growing steadily. Hooten ambitiously comments:

The science of Eugenics is in fact only highly developed and applied anthropology, and the day will inevitably come when every university of standing will have its professor and laboratory of Eugenics.

The field of Eugenics was well on its way to achieving this when World War II began. And then came the Holocaust. This massacre so shocked the world that the field of eugenics was dead and buried by the 1950s. Or at least, publicly it was - much evidence exists to suggest the field continued as an underground movement well into the late 20th century, but that's a blog entry for another time. At any rate, one has to wonder what science would be like now without the Holocaust.

Confronting issues like this is important for modern scientists. These are the kinds of episodes that creationists and other anti-science movements will seize upon as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of science, but in fact they serve as an important reminder of what happens when scientist go astray, and bring personal prejudices into their research.

[1] Hooten, E.A. (1926). Review: Annals of Eugenics. A Journal for the Scientific Study of Racial Problems by Karl Pearson. . American Anthropologist, 28(3), 551-553.

[2] Annals of Human Genetics homepage.

[3] Galton Laboratory of the Department of Human Genetics & Biometry homepage.