The problematic of this essay may strike some readers as odd. After all, phenylketonuria, or PKU as it is more commonly known, was understood to be inherited nearly from the time it was first identified as a disease entity by Norwegian physician and biochemist Asbjørn Følling in 1934. Indeed, by the mid-1940s its autosomal recessive pattern of inheritance had been well confirmed. But the genetic aetiology of PKU was not always a defining characteristic of the disease. Whether an inherited condition is characterized as ‘genetic’, and, if so, the meaning and importance attached to that designation, is context dependent, varying with place, time, the specific features of the disease that are of greatest salience to patients, researchers and clinicians, and the general visibility of genetics in the culture. Thus Jean-Paul Gaudillière has shown that for Lionel Penrose and his British peers, the characterization of Down syndrome as a genetic (chromosomal) abnormality had very different implications than it did for Jérôme Lejeune and many of his compatriots in France. And writing of cystic fibrosis, Keith Wailoo and Stephen Pemberton explain that in the 1960s and 1970s, ‘neither families nor experts emphasized the “genetic” features of the disease. To be sure, they understood it to be a “hereditary” disorder, but this way of thinking did not capture what they saw as its fundamental biological underpinnings’.

How does Darwin's Darwinism relate to social Darwinism and eugenics? Like many foes of Darwinism, past and present, the American populist and creationist William Jennings Bryan thought a straight line ran from Darwin's theory ('a dogma of darkness and death') to beliefs that it is right for the strong to crowd out the weak, and that the only hope for human improvement lay in selective breeding. Darwin's defenders, on the other hand, have typically viewed social Darwinism and eugenics as perversions of his theory. Daniel Dennett speaks for many biologists and philosophers of science when he characterises social Darwinism as 'an odious misapplication of Darwinian thinking'. That perspective is also reflected in the 2005-6 blockbuster Darwin show curated by the American Museum of Natural History, where the section on 'Social Darwinism', subtitled 'Misusing Darwin's Theory', claims that all uses of Darwin's theory to justify particular social, political, or economic principles 'have one fundamental flaw: they use a purely scientific theory for a completely unscientific purpose. In doing so they misrepresent and misappropriate Darwin's original ideas'. Few professional historians believe either that Darwin's theory leads directly to these doctrines or that they are entirely unrelated. But both the nature and significance of the link are passionately disputed.

AMBIVALENCES AND INFLUENCES

How does Darwin's Darwinism relate to social Darwinism and eugenics? Like many foes of Darwinism, past and present, the American populist and creationist William Jennings Bryan thought a straight line ran from Darwin's theory ('a dogma of darkness and death') to beliefs that it is right for the strong to crowd out the weak, and that the only hope for human improvement lay in selective breeding. Darwin's defenders, on the other hand, have typically viewed social Darwinism and eugenics as perversions of his theory. Daniel Dennett speaks for many biologists and philosophers of science when he characterises social Darwinism as 'an odious misapplication of Darwinian thinking'. Few professional historians believe either that Darwin's theory leads directly to these doctrines or that they are entirely unrelated. But both the nature and significance of the link are disputed.

This chapter examines the views held by Darwin himself and by later Darwinians on the implications of his theory for social life, and it assesses the social impact made by these views. More specifically: section II discusses the debates about human evolution in the wake of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859).3 Sections III and IV analyse Darwin’s ambiguous contribution to these debates. Sometimes celebrating competitive struggle, he also wished to moderate its effects, but thought restrictions on breeding impractical and immoral. Sections V and VI see how others interpreted both the science and social meaning of Darwinism. Darwin’s followers found in his ambiguities legitimation for whatever they favoured: laissez-faire capitalism, certainly, but also liberal reform, anarchism and socialism; colonial conquest, war and patriarchy, but also anti-imperialism, peace and feminism.

INTRODUCTION

Study of biology flourished under the swastika. Although we tend to dismiss Nazi science as pseudoscience and equate research in biology with racial hygiene, the history of biology during the Third Reich was in fact quite complex. Work supported by Heinrich Himmler's Das Ahnenerbe (“ancestral heritage”), the research and teaching arm of the Schute-Staffel (SS), was indeed racist nonsense (Deichmann 1996, pp. 251–76). But most of the science supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the major government funding agency, would have been considered mainstream science in the 1930s and 1940s. Its content and standards differed little from those of the science being pursued elsewhere in the western world.

Of course, research under the Third Reich was funded in the expectation that it would ultimately advance the aims of the regime. That fact prompts us to ask how we should think about the activities of scientists who did not engage in overtly criminal acts, but rather practiced “normal research.” We do not hesitate to condemn researchers who actively promoted and implemented the racial policies of the National Socialist state. We know what to think about those who produced anti-Semitic propaganda or reports on racial ancestry in connection with enforcement of the Nuremberg laws, helped formulate euthanasia policy, informed on colleagues who employed half-Jewish or politically suspect assistants, or conducted obscene experiments on human subjects. But more difficult, and more interesting, questions are raised by the behavior of scientists whose work was no more racist in either its intention or its assumptions than that of their non-German peers, but who in some way sought to profit from the National Socialist regime.