What has Darwin wrought?

• Author: West, John G.
• Position: Science & Technology - Charles Darwin's influence on scientific ethics and eugenics

THE BACKLASH against Nobel laureate James Watson for his controversial social views was a long time in coming. Famous for his discovery with Francis Crick of the structure of DNA, Watson resigned late in 2007 as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., after igniting a firestorm by suggesting in the British press that black Africans are biologically inferior to whites. Watson remarked that, while he hoped everyone was equal, "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true." The most pertinent question about the Watson brouhaha is not why this eminent scientist finally was taken to the woodshed, but why it took so long to do so, and why so many others in the scientific community have been given a free pass when it comes to their political and social pronouncements. After all, Watson is far from the only scholar to make outrageous statements in the name of science.

Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, traverses the world proclaiming that "faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate." Princeton University bioethicist Peter Singer has declared that "the life of a newborn baby is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee." University of Texas biologist Eric Pianka recommends eliminating up to 90% of the world's human population and calls on the government to confiscate all the earnings of any couple who has more than two children. Watson himself has had a long history of offensive comments, such as his 1973 proposal that infants not be declared alive until three days after birth in order to allow defective babies to be eliminated.

Unlike Watson's statements on race, most of these other invocations of science to justify ethically dubious positions have gone largely unchallenged by the vast majority of the scientific establishment. Why? This dilemma has deep roots. For more than a century, Western scientific elites have been infected by a virulent strain of triumphalism that idolizes the current scientific consensus and dismisses all viewpoints not based on science (such as religion) as tantamount to superstition. According to this view, any questioning of a current scientific consensus in the realm of public policy represents a "war on science" by those who would like to usher in a new Dark Ages.

One of the strongest reinforcers of this mindset today is an evangelistic form of Darwinian evolution. Dawkins, for instance. grounds his atheism on the belief that "[Charles] Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." Singer insists that his views simply represent "catching up with Darwin." Watson, meanwhile, cited human evolution as justification for his views on black inferiority. An unfortunate by-product of the off-repeated mantra that no rational person can doubt evolution is the tendency to give a free pass to any scientist who justifies his or her pronouncements--no matter how absurd--in the name of evolution.

Sometimes, of course, a scientist like Watson will go too far and be challenged, but those who think we simply can trust the current majority of scientists to police their own should remember the eugenics crusade, the horrific effort to apply the principles of evolutionary biology to human breeding in the early decades of the 20th century. Eugenics was promoted as the science of human breeding, and it resulted in the compulsory sterilization of more than 60,000 presumed "defectives" in the U.S., including many who probably would not be considered mentally deficient today. Racial minorities and the poor were special targets of the eugenics crusaders, and the program of forced sterilization ultimately was approved by the Supreme Court in the case of Buck v. Bell, where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously declared that "three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Francis Galton, the cousin of naturalist...