"Breed out the unfit and breed in the fit": Irving Fisher, economics, and the science of heredity

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, July, 2005 by Annie L. Cot

All these functions were evidently much more than honorific: as Mark Hailer wrote in 1963, Fisher played the role of a "guiding genius" within a great number of institutions designed to promote American eugenic propaganda. (25)

II

A "Scientific Humaniculture"

FISHER'S DEFINITION OF EUGENICS was of strict Galtonian obedience. "First of all, what is eugenics?" he asked in his article "Impending Problems of Eugenics." "Eugenics, as the Greek derivation of the word shows, means the science of right breeding. The word was invented by Sir Francis Galton, of England, to express his ideal of founding a world movement to improve the human race.... Eugenics is simply an application of modern science to improve the human race" ([1916] 1997: 161-162). (26)

"A scientific humaniculture," is what Fisher wrote about a few years later ([1921] 1997: 195). Quite common at the beginning of the 20th century, (27) this metaphor presupposes some rather heroic assumptions. First is the appropriateness of the analogy between stockbreeding and human reproduction. "There is every reason to believe that human beings are as amenable to cultivation as other animals or plants," wrote Fisher in his report on National Vitality ([1909] 1976: 677). (28) Second is the supposition that the characters of "inferiority" and "superiority" of some individuals could be objectively ascertained. Third is the assumption that the factors responsible for this distinction are hereditary rather than environmental. And fourth, breaking with any sort of laissez faire, is "the proposition that the beneficial action of natural selection had been replaced by social mechanisms facilitating the propagation of inferior specimens." (29)

Whereas in his first texts on mathematical economics Fisher advocated in favor of tooling economic theory with concepts and measures strictly borrowed from classical physics, from 1906 on, this new corpus brings about a threefold methodological shift in his theoretical writings:

1. A shift in epistemological criteria from the strictly analytical and deductive rules used in mathematics and mechanics to the Galtonian and Pearsonian definition of an instrumental science, "harnessed" with applied reforms. The point is of some importance. For Fisher, eugenics was a science, not a classification or a taxonomy (30)--and as a science, it can be compared with economics. "I will here only observe that classification has never been an efficient instrument of scientific analysis," he wrote in the Economic Journal. "It comes forward in what Bacon called systems or pseudo-sciences. Physical science among the Greeks was classificatory; modern physics is analytic. The former was barren, the latter is progressive.... 'Natural history' gained little from drawing the distinction between plants and animals. It began, to be a science when Darwin introduced the abstract ideas of variation, heredity and selection" (1897: 213). It was hence on this basis that this "science" of eugenics could be developed as an "instrument" both of social expertise and of social reform. "Formerly I used to dislike the very word 'propaganda', and the idea still more," Fisher later acknowledged to Charles Davenport. "Now I have come to believe as Karl Pearson ... has said in his Grammar of Science that 'science can justify itself to the world only by being harnessed up with the world' or words to that effect, and it seems to me that every practical man, whether his tastes are naturally academic or scientific, or otherwise, must recognize the need of some machinery for so harnessing up scientific work." (31) A few years later, in his presidential address to the Eugenics Research Association, Fisher went even further: