WHY ARE DEATH EATER “PURE-BLOODS” WRONG ABOUT BREEDING AND THE GENE POOL?

Snobbery harbors seeds of both hypocrisy and despair. In the Harry Potter Universe, snobbery drove the desire of pure-blood wizard families, who regarded themselves as superior to those witches and wizards with muggles in their family trees.

The very name pure-blood refers to a wizard family with no muggle or non-magic blood. The origin of the idea was synonymous with Salazar Slytherin, one of the four founders of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Slytherin’s loathing to teach any muggle-born student led to a rift with his three fellow founders, and his eventual departure from his job and the school.

Pure-bloods were rarely, if ever, what they seemed. Claiming purely magical heritage, in reality, so-called pure-blood families argued their alleged purity by denying or lying about the muggle-borns within their family trees. Preferring to keep their bloodline pure, the families bred only with other pure-bloods, and not the muggle-born “mud-bloods,” a very derogatory term in the wizarding world.

In denial and despair at a changing world, pure-bloods then tried to heap their hypocrisy upon wizard kind by suggesting that any witch or wizard who mixed with “dirty blood,” was a “blood traitor.” In truth, there was not a witch or wizard whose blood had not at some time mingled with that of muggles. Indeed, if there were no muggles in wizarding family trees, the wizarding race would have died out long ago, as the number of pure-blood families was declining, and their blood type the least common in the magical world.

The house of Black was a case in point. They were a typical pure-blood family who claimed they could trace their pure-blood status through many generations of magical ancestors. They denied their tree contained any muggles, and their family motto was Toujours pur, or “Always (or Still) Pure.” But what does science have to say about the views of such pure-blood wizards and so many of the death eaters, whose leader denied the existence of his “filthy muggle father?”

Self-Help for Humans

The muggle world is full of self-help books, offering advice on how to improve oneself. Maybe they think you need more exercise. Or perhaps you need to read more books. Maybe it’s just a case of cutting down on visits to the local burger bar. But the topic of eugenics goes one better. Eugenics is about improving the human race as a whole, through bloodlines. Odd word, eugenics. The eu bit is Greek and means good; the gen bit refers to birth or race. Together, they make a word that suggests the quality of the human population can be improved.

It sounds fine, in principal. But the real trouble is that eugenics has a history of very dodgy ideas. One of the basic principles of eugenics is opposition to miscegenation or the mixing of races. Death eaters believe they are superior to all others, and argue against miscegenation, using the insult mud-bloods for those with mixed blood, which includes Hermione.

Eugenics has a horrible history. When people realized humans inherited traits from their ancestors, they began to come up with ideas to “improve” the human race. Take Greek philosopher Plato. In his book, The Republic, Plato argued that a good way to improve the human race was to kill inferior babies at birth. Hardly a vote winner. Plato was opposed by another Greek philosopher named Hippocrates (the founder of medicine), whose Hippocratic Oath is still taken by doctors today.

The first tale to explore a society based on eugenics was Gulliver’s Travels. This early fantasy story was written way back in 1726 by Irish writer Jonathan Swift. At one point in the story, Gulliver arrives in the land of the Houyhnhnms. These creatures, which are identical to horses, run a eugenics program involving the selective breeding of their human slaves, known as yahoos. At first, Gulliver is mistaken for one of the yahoos, but he manages to convince the horse masters that he is intelligent enough to be saved. If he hadn’t spoken up, Gulliver would have been sacrificed as part of their cruel eugenics program. When Gulliver’s Travels was written, improving human bloodlines wasn’t known as eugenics.

It was the cousin of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics. Some of Galton’s earliest research was based on obituary entries in The Times of London. By studying the entries, Galton claimed to trace what he saw as superior human qualities being passed down from generation to generation among Europe’s most eminent men. In contrast, he suggested that weak, inferior, and even dangerous traits were also being passed down—most clearly, in Galton’s eyes, in society’s lower classes, and within certain races.

Galton believed in the inequality of humans. For example, he thought Africans were inferior and suggested that the East coast of Africa be settled by the Chinese who were, according to Galton, superior. Galton’s theories were set out in his book Hereditary Genius, published in 1869. His plan was twofold. Galton’s positive eugenics proposed a human breeding program to produce superior people, and his negative eugenics urged the improvement of the quality of the human race by eliminating or excluding biologically inferior people from the breeding population.

It’s a small step indeed from the science of Galton to the chilling eugenics of the Nazis. During the 1930s and ’40s, the Nazis forced hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to be sterilized to prevent them from passing on their genes. Much of the horror of the Nazis regime was foreseen in a 1937 fantasy book called Swastika Night by British writer Katherine Burdekin. The novel bears striking similarities to George Orwell’s 1984, published more than a decade later. In both books, the past has been repackaged, and history rewritten. Language is distorted, few books exist apart from propaganda, and a secret book is sole witness to the past. In her future history, Burdekin feared the Nazis would come to dominate the world, and force their ideas of inequality on the human race. Swastika Night almost came true. But thankfully for us all, the world pulled together and the Nazis were defeated, along with their breeding programs and genocide.

Breed Outside your Local Pool

It makes total sense for wizards and muggles to have interbred. Making families within a select circle can be downright dangerous. Most people have a few hidden genes that can cause deadly diseases, but it’s not normally a problem because we carry two copies of each gene, one from each parent. So, as long as one of the two gene copies is fine, you don’t usually get the disease. Bad genes kick in only if both parents pass it down to their offspring. And that would have happened more often when wizards were more closely related.

Indeed, some wizards might be dicing with danger. The more closely related a wizard and witch are, the more probable it is they shared the same bad genes. In such cases, each child can have up to a 25 percent chance of contracting the disease. And it’s for this reason that inbreeding is outlawed in many muggle countries.

Consider two more examples, one wizard and one muggle. Pure-blood wizarding families, such as the Blacks and Gaunts, practiced marriage between cousins to keep their pure-blood status. They disowned any family members who married a mud-blood, and yet the Gaunts suffered from problems of inbreeding. As a result, family members showed signs of violent tendencies, mental instability, and even diminished magical capability. In the muggle world, old royal families of European inbreeding were also a problem. The Habsburgs ruled large parts of Europe for many centuries. But after many marriages between first cousins and even uncles and nieces, when King Charles II was born and inherited “bad genes,” meaning he had physical and mental disabilities and likely could not have children, the Habsburg rule was ended.

In 2015, one of the largest studies to date into genetic diversity went one step further. The study looked at the genetic background and health of more than 350,000 people, from about 100 communities across four continents of the muggle world. It found that the children of parents who are more distantly related tend to be taller and smarter than their peers. They also found that height and intelligence might be increasing, as a growing number of people are marrying people from more distant parts of the world, which may explain the increase in intelligence from one generation to the next, as documented in the 20th century. Pure-blood wizards had it all wrong. Mud-bloods will inherit the Earth!