Jonathan Kellerman - Survival Of The Fittest

The two of them, so different, and yet they had a history of working together efficiently.

Friends, too, according to reports.

A homosexual and a heterosexual.

Interesting.

Daniel knew only one gay policeman, and not well. A sergeant major working out of Central Region. Nothing effeminate or overt about the man but he'd never married, never dated women, and people who knew him from the Army said he'd been spotted one night going onto the beach in Herzliyya with another man.

Not a brilliant policeman, that one, but competent. No one bothered him, but the other officers shunned him and Daniel was certain he'd never advance.

Sturgis was shunned, too.

For Daniel, the issue was a religious one, and that made it an abstraction.

For Daniel, religion was personal- his relationship to God. He cared nothing about what others did, if their habits didn't infringe upon his liberties or those of his family.

His family… in Jerusalem it was morning, but too early to call Laura. Like many artists, she was a nocturnal creature, stifling her internal clock for years to raise babies and coddle her husband. Now that the kids were older, she'd permitted herself to revert: staying up late sketching and painting and reading, sleeping in until eight or nine.

Feeling guilty about it, too; sometimes Daniel still had to reassure her he was fine making his own coffee.

He drew his knees up, closed his eyes, and thought about her soft blond hair and beautiful face, swaddled in topsheet, puffy with sleep, as he stopped to kiss her before leaving for headquarters.

Oh… I feel like such a bum, honey. I should be up cooking your breakfast.

I never eat breakfast.

Still… or I should give you other things.

Tugging him down for a kiss, then stopping herself.

My breath stinks.

No, it's sweet.

Pressing his lips upon hers, feeling her mouth parting, the wedding of tongue with tongue.

He opened his eyes, looked around the bare room.

In his Talbieh apartment, the walls were alive with color. Laura's paintings and batiks and the creations of her friends.

Her artsy friends, whom he seldom spoke to.

Painting with blood…

What would Laura say about that kind of art?

He never told her anything beyond the most general facts.

For twenty years of marriage, that had worked fine.

Twenty years. By today's standards, longevity.

Not mazal. Or the result of some amulet or chant or blessing from a Hakham.

God's grace and hard work.

Submerging your ego to be half of a pair.

Doing the right thing.

He wished he knew what that meant in this case.

The following morning as I drove to the U, I realized Helena still hadn't called.

Put Nolan's suicide to rest. I had plenty to do.

Snagging a Biomed computer terminal, I logged into Medline, Psych Abstracts, the periodicals index, every other database I could find, pulling up references on eugenics but finding none with any relationship to homicide.

Collecting handfuls of bound journals, I went looking for The Brain Drain. The book was filed under Intelligence, Measurement, three copies, two checked out. The one left was thick, re-bound in crimson, squeezed between manuals on IQ testing. A few books down the shelf I noticed a slim softcover entitled Twisted Science: The Truth Behind The Brain Drain, and I took that, too.

Finding a quiet corner desk on the tenth floor, I searched every source for a DVLL citation.

Absolutely nothing. But what I was learning kept me turning pages.

Because the idea that some lives were to be nurtured and others eliminated for the good of society hadn't begun with the Race Hygiene Program of the Third Reich.

Nor had it died there.

Selective breeding had appealed to the elite for centuries, but it had earned scientific respectability in the Europe and America of the late nineteenth century after being championed by a very respectable figure: British mathematician Francis Galton.

Unable to produce children himself, Galton had strong beliefs about survival of the ethnically fittest. Qualities such as intellect, zeal, and industriousness, he reasoned, were simple traits, much like height or hair color, and governed by basic rules of inheritance. In order to improve society, the state needed to collect detailed mental, physical, and racial information on every citizen, issue certificates to the superior and pay them for breeding, and encourage inferiors to remain celibate. In 1883, Galton coined the term eugenics, from the Greek meaning “well-born,” to describe this process.

Galton's simplistic theories of intelligence were undermined by a rebirth of the works of Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who bred thousands of plants and found that some traits were dominant, others recessive. Later research showed that most defective genes were carried by outwardly normal parents.

Even vegetables didn't follow Galton's simplistic model.

But Mendel's ability to measure patterns of inheritance spurred on Galton's disciples, and eugenics took hold of the academic mainstream, so that by the twenties and thirties nearly all geneticists assumed mentally retarded people and other “degenerates” should be actively prevented from breeding.

These views made their way into public policy on both sides of the Atlantic, and by 1917, a Harvard geneticist named East was actively promoting the reduction of “defective germ plasm” through segregation and sterilization.

One of East's main influences was someone I'd considered a sage of my chosen field.

I'd been taught that Henry H. Goddard, of the Vineland Training School in New Jersey, had been a pioneer of psychological testing. What I hadn't known was that Goddard claimed “feeblemindedness” was due to a single defective gene and enthusiastically volunteered to administer IQ tests to thousands of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in order to weed out undesirables.

Goddard's bizarre finding- that over 80 percent of Italians, Hungarians, Russians, and Jews were mentally retarded- was accepted without question by a wide range of intellectuals and legislators, and in 1924 the U.S. Congress approved an immigration act curtailing the entry of Southern and Eastern Europeans. The bill was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge, who declared, “America must be kept American. Biological laws show that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.”

And Goddard wasn't alone. Chasing down footnotes and citations, I came across the writings of another giant of psychology: Lewis Terman of Stanford, developer of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Though the French Binet test had been developed to help identify children with learning problems so they could be tutored, its American modifier declared his major goal to be “curtailing the reproduction of feeblemindedness” with a subsequent reduction in “industrial inefficiency.”

According to Terman, intellectual weakness was “very, very common among Spanish-Indians and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among Negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial… children of this group should be segregated in special classes… They cannot master abstractions, but they can often be made efficient workers… from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.”

But the prime mover of the U.S. eugenics movement was University of Chicago professor Charles Davenport, who believed that prostitutes chose their profession because of a dominant gene for “innate eroticism.”

Davenport's method of preserving the future of white America was castration of males of inferior ethnic groups.