The impulse never dies - the belief that human worth can be measured, quantified, and ranked. From Alfred Binet's schoolroom test to Josef Mengele's clipboard to today's algorithmic sorting, the tools change but the dangerous faith in numbers remains. Ideas never die. They just change clothes.
⸻
I. The Birth of the Number
The original sin wasn't the number itself. Alfred Binet, a French psychologist in the early 1900s, devised a simple test meant to help struggling schoolchildren. It wasn't about ranking people or predicting their destiny. Binet specifically warned against using his test to label children permanently and believed that intelligence was flexible, not fixed.
Then came the Americans. Lewis Terman at Stanford saw something different: a tidy, quantifiable hierarchy of human worth. Psychologist William Stern had coined "intelligence quotient" in 1912; Terman popularized and mass-deployed IQ testing in the U.S. with the Stanford-Binet, selling it as destiny. Suddenly, a child's future could be boiled down to a score—immutable, permanent, divine. This wasn't science; it was numerology dressed in a lab coat. And Americans—God bless us—loved it.
The appeal was obvious. Numbers soothe us. They promise certainty. They tell us who belongs where and why. Never mind that the tests were crude, biased, and rooted in cultural assumptions (as I've detailed in "Debunking the Bunk of IQ Tests"). The question always is: who decides these numbers? Some technocrat with a clipboard. Claims of objectivity and no bias? Don't make me laugh. Once you have a number, you have authority. You have "truth."
⸻
II. Eugenics and the Worship of Purity
The early 20th century was a golden age for people who wanted to sort humanity like cattle. Charles Davenport, Madison Grant, and their friends in the eugenics movement pitched IQ as the ultimate sorting hat. Who should be allowed to immigrate? Who should have children? Who should not? The number had the answer.
California led the way in forced sterilizations. The state wasn't just a participant—it was the undisputed epicenter, responsible for a staggering one-third of all eugenic sterilizations in the United States. California alone sterilized some 20,000 people. Elite universities hosted conferences where men in white coats discussed how to "improve the stock." Immigration quotas were set to keep out those with "low mental capacity"—a euphemism for Italians, Jews, and anyone else who didn't look like a Harvard rowing crew. This wasn't fringe. It was mainstream. Theodore Roosevelt endorsed eugenics in letters to leading figures like Charles Davenport, urging that society encourage reproduction by the "best" and discourage it among the "unfit."
⸻
III. From Labs to Camps
Germany noticed. The Nazis read American journals. They studied our sterilization laws. They admired how efficiently we applied science to social problems. When they built their own system, they didn't invent the logic. They perfected it.
At Auschwitz, Josef Mengele carried a clipboard. He measured skulls. He weighed limbs. He recorded hair color, eye color, reflexes. Then he sent children to their deaths or to his experiments. To him, it was data—numbers, patterns, results. The logic of IQ had metastasized. If you can assign a number to human value, you can rationalize anything.
This is the part Americans prefer to forget: Nazi Germany didn't sprout from a void. It grew in soil we helped till.
⸻
IV. The California Laboratory
California was the laboratory for American eugenics. The Human Betterment Foundation, established in Pasadena in 1928, became the movement's intellectual headquarters.
Founded by Ezra Gosney and Paul Popenoe, the Foundation collected data on thousands of sterilized Californians and published reports promoting the practice worldwide. Its board read like a who's who of California's elite: Lewis Terman from Stanford, who helped popularize the Stanford-Binet IQ test that would sort millions of children; Robert Millikan from Caltech, its de facto founding leader and Nobel laureate; Harvard professors; bankers; philanthropists.
They weren't backwoods cranks. They were the establishment. The Foundation's 1929 report, "Sterilization for Human Betterment," was translated into German and used by German eugenicists in policy debates that led to Nazi sterilization laws. When Gosney died in 1942, the Foundation's archives went to Caltech, where they remained quietly filed away for decades.
⸻
V. The Postwar Amnesia
After the war, we got amnesia. Nuremberg turned eugenics into a German problem, a foreign evil. Back home, IQ testing quietly continued. We scrubbed the language, dropped the overt racism, but kept the core assumption: intelligence is fixed, measurable, and reveals your immutable potential.
California led this postwar continuation. Sterilizations continued into the 1970s. The same institutions that had housed eugenicists now housed their intellectual descendants. IQ testing persisted in schools, in hiring, in determining who got opportunities and who didn't. The tests remained, even as the overt eugenic ideology faded. Same sorting, cleaner justification.
⸻
VI. Digital Eugenics
Now we have AI. We feed it our data and pretend it's neutral. We let algorithms screen résumés, approve loans, predict crime. Amazon's hiring algorithm discriminated against women. COMPAS risk scores have been shown to flag Black defendants as "high risk" at higher false-positive rates than white defendants. We score embryos for "desirable traits." The marketing says "fair" and "inclusive," but the math is the same: a hierarchy of human worth based on flawed, biased inputs.
And because it's digital, it feels even more inevitable. If the computer says you're not a "fit," you're not a fit. If your score is low, your opportunities shrink. It's the tyranny of numbers, wrapped in the glow of innovation.
We are building a softer, cleaner version of the same old machine. Mengele wouldn't need to carry a clipboard now. He'd have a dashboard.
⸻
VII. The Dangerous Comfort of Numbers
Why do we keep coming back to this? Because numbers are comforting. They reduce the chaos of human complexity to a tidy scale. They let us believe the world is fair, that merit is measurable, that success is earned.
But the comfort is an illusion. Intelligence is messy, contextual, and dynamic. It can't be captured in a test, a score, a metric, or a genome. What these numbers really measure is our willingness to accept the easy lie that we can rank each other—and then live with the consequences.
The pattern repeats everywhere. Today we pathologize children who don't fit statistical norms, slapping "autism spectrum" labels on anyone from quiet introverts to obsessive perfectionists (as I've explored in "What Is Autism Anyway? You Might Think You Know"). The same impulse that once justified sterilization now justifies endless diagnosis and intervention. Different tools, same dangerous faith in the power of measurement to define human worth.
It took decades for institutions to even acknowledge their role. Caltech didn't remove Robert Millikan's name from buildings until 2021. Stanford renamed Jordan Hall in 2020, removing the name of David Starr Jordan, Stanford University's founding president who served from 1891-1913 and was a leader in the American eugenics movement who served on the board of the Human Betterment Foundation. Harvard Magazine published articles about the university's "eugenics era" in 2016. While these universities have renamed spaces and issued statements about their historical connections to eugenics, I have not found formal institutional apologies specifically for their roles in the movement. Responses seem to have been tepid at best and attempts to distance themselves from this.
The impulse to measure and rank human worth survives every catastrophe, every revelation, every moral awakening. It simply adapts, evolves, and finds new language. From Binet's schoolroom test to Mengele's clipboard to today's algorithms, the dangerous faith in numbers persists. We keep building systems to sort people into hierarchies, convinced each time that this version will be different, this time it will be fair.