Francis Galton: Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry

3. Eugenics

79 3 Eugenics If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create! Galton, “Hereditary talent and character” Francis Galton is best known to the general public as the founding father of eugenics, the science of the hereditary improvement of the human race by selective breeding. He was enthusiastic about the subject from 1865 to the end of his life, and he coined the word eugenics to describe it in Inquiries into Human Faculty in 1883. It was an obvious extension of the improvement of domestic animals by man which was discussed in the first chapter of The Origin of Species. It played a central role in motivating Galton’s work, but it was argued in chapter 2 that it was secondary to his ideas on heredity and evolution, which are our main theme in this book; in other words, his eugenic ideas were derived from his ideas on heredity and evolution rather than the other way around. It is logically unnecessary to discuss eugenics in considering the latter, but some discussion of the subject is justified by the strong popular interest in it today. Galtonian Eugenics Most of Galton’s eugenic ideas were formulated in 1865 in “Hereditary talent and character.” In this paper, he first discussed the consequences of dysgenic practices: “Many forms of civilization have been peculiarly unfavourable to the hereditary transmission of rare talent. None of them 80 Francis Galton were more prejudicial to it than that of the Middle Ages, where almost every youth of genius was attracted into the Church, and enrolled in the ranks of the celibate clergy” (1865a, 164). Another hindrance was a costly tone of society, which discouraged an ambitious and talented man from encumbering himself with domestic expenses until he could afford them: “Here also genius is celibate, at least during the best part of manhood” (164). He then advocated the opposite idea, of improving the human race by encouraging early marriage between talented men and women. In a fanciful passage, he suggested that this objective could be brought about by a system of endowment based on examination results: “Let us, then, give reins to our fancy, and imagine a Utopia—or a Laputa, if you will—in which a system of competitive examination for girls, as well as for youths, had been so developed as to embrace every important quality of mind and body, and where a considerable sum was yearly allotted to the endowment of such marriages as promised to yield children who would grow into eminent servants of the State” (165). Ten young men and ten girls would be chosen each year, and the Sovereign herself would give away the brides in Westminster Abbey at any marriages between them that might be agreed; each of the couples would be given £5000 as a wedding present, and the state would defray the expenses of maintaining and educating their children. He argued that hereditary improvement was necessary because civilization was advancing more rapidly than our ability to cope with it: “The natural qualifications of our race are no greater than they used to be in semi-barbarous times, though the conditions amid which we are born are vastly more complex than of old. The foremost minds of the present day seem to stagger and halt under an intellectual load too heavy for their powers” (166). Finally, he met the objection that merely encouraging marriages between gifted individuals would not in itself lead to racial improvement : “If we divided the rising generation into two castes, A and B, of which A was selected for natural gifts, and B was the refuse, then, supposing marriage was confined within the pale of the caste in which each individual belonged, it might be objected that we should simply differentiate our race—that we should make a good and a bad caste, but we should not improve the race as a whole” (319). His reply was that it was also necessary to increase the fertility of the A’s (positive eugenics) and to decrease that of the B’s (negative eugenics): “Any agency, however indirect , that would somewhat hasten the marriages in caste A, and retard Eugenics 81 those in caste B, would result in a larger proportion of children...