But Galton’s eugenics ideas would never have flourished if they hadn’t fallen on such fertile public ground. How sure can any of us be that had we lived at the time we wouldn’t have supported eugenics?īy all means condemn Galton for his moral blindness. But this judgment is incomplete, ignoring the widespread popularity of eugenics for so long and how easily people accepted the implication that eugenics forced so many innocent people to make huge involuntary sacrifices. It is easy now to condemn eugenics as a moral abyss, knowing the awful consequences in the 20th century. The eugenicists were also wrong in thinking you could successfully breed humans to select for moral characteristics like courage, honesty etc. For example, the genetic differences between Africans and non-Africans are smaller than the differences between Africans themselves. We now know that genetic differences between races are very small. Galton and many other eugenicists were racists, but at that time many scientists believed that humans were divided into races, some distinctly genetically inferior to others. But negative measures were also introduced, preventing marriage and even forcing sterilisation on people deemed unfit for procreation, such as people with mental/physical disabilities, low IQs, criminals and “deviants”.Įugenics was always entirely unacceptable morally because it offends so deeply against human dignity. Eugenic measures were introduced in some countries encouraging people to reproduce who were deemed particularly fit. He was the first to study twins to assess the influence of environment on development.Įugenics spread to most European countries and also to the United States, Canada and Australia. But Galton is remembered most for his studies of human inheritance of physical and mental attributes with the aim of improving the human species through selective breeding – eugenics. Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), was a Victorian polymath who made significant contributions in several areas, eg meteorology (made the first serious attempt to chart weather over large areas), statistics (devised the correlation calculus) and forensics (devised a method of classifying fingerprints). In 2020 UCL renamed two lecture theatres and a building that honoured Francis Galton and Karl Pearson – Pearson was the first professor of eugenics at UCL. Galton established a laboratory that bore his name at University College London (UCL) and left a bequest to UCL to fund the first professorial chair of eugenics. The science journal Nature has published an editorial on How Nature Contributed to Science’s Discriminatory Legacy, detailing a number of “sins” perpetrated by the journal over the years and in particular apologising for publishing the work of Francis Galton (1822-1911), the founder of eugenics.
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