Control, p.4
Control, page 4
Galton was the archetype of a gentleman scientist. Born in 1822 into wealth (his peace-loving Quaker ancestors were also gunsmiths), Galton was no longer required to work for a living after his father died in 1844. A truncated stint at medical schools in Birmingham and London was followed by four years at Trinity College, Cambridge, studying the mathematics that would dominate his pursuits throughout the rest of his life. He traveled extensively, including to what is now Namibia, as well as Sudan, the Nile, Damascus and Jordan, and wrote a bestselling handbook called The Art of Travel based on his adventures. Galton had a phenomenal mind and left a formidable intellectual legacy. He did pioneering and lasting work in forensic fingerprinting, in synesthesia and in meteorology (he effectively conceived the weather map),§ and he invented the dog whistle. He did less enduring and more peculiar work on female beauty, attempting to catalogue and quantify it, and secretly scoring women in public on a three-point scale (“attractive, indifferent or repellent”) using a special glove armed with pricks concealed in his pocket. His intention was typical: to apply metrics to something previously intangible. His aim was to show where the most attractive women in the United Kingdom were on a beauty map (it turned out to be London, and Aberdeen at the other end of his scale). In all these pursuits, Galton deployed, and in many cases invented, statistical techniques to crunch numbers for whatever project had taken his fancy.¶
Francis Galton’s legacy is great, but he will and should be remembered primarily for his role in ushering eugenics into the twentieth century. His work spread the ideas of eugenics to countries around the world. He directly influenced figureheads of the American eugenics movement and was talismanic to men such as Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, to whom we will come in the next few pages. It is in the work of these Americans that the Nazis found scientific, legal and intellectual justification for their own genocidal eugenic ambitions.
More than thirty countries had formal eugenics policies in the twentieth century, but here I will focus on two that did—the United States and Germany—and one that did not. Despite Great Britain’s role as the intellectual birthplace of the field, it never enacted a eugenics policy. However, the cultural and political appetite for eugenics in the United Kingdom was robust, and this rests largely on the shoulders of Francis Galton.
GALTON’S GENIUS
Enamored with the work of his cousin, Galton was fundamentally interested in heredity in people, and the potential for their betterment. Darwin’s Origin of Species concerns evolution, which has no valence toward improvement in any abstract sense, only adaptation. Nevertheless, the first chapter concerns not natural selection, but what he calls artificial selection (much of which is about preposterous fancy pigeons bred for competition), as a means of showing that creatures are mutable over the generations. Galton figured that this principle could be applied to humans.
According to Darwin’s model, there has to be variation among individuals in a population for evolution to occur. Some members must be naturally better adapted for success in the struggle for existence in any particular environment. Galton took that idea and applied it very specifically to the huge disparities in intellectual capabilities of man (he expressed little interest in the abilities of women). He believed that these traits were innate to the extent that neither social nor educational environments could overwhelm them. His first scientific book concerned the observation that eminence runs in families. Hereditary Genius was published in the United Kingdom in 1869 and lays out an empirical theory of the greatness of British men.
The seeds of Galton’s eugenic thinking first came to light in a pair of magazine articles in 1865, but they bloomed in Hereditary Genius. It specifically analyzes the inheritance of intellectual ability, framed according to the fairly arbitrary judgments of who Galton decrees are great men. Their eminence is judged via reputation and status, garnered from obituaries and biographies; by Galton’s reasoning, the truly eminent men number only 250 in a million (or 1 in 4000). The concept of genes did not yet exist in 1869, or indeed any mechanism for biological heredity, but the success of genius men in Galton’s eyes showcases an innate and heritable condition, passed from father to son, and maintained within important families: “a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world.”
This, of course, is empirically true: we are biological creatures, an ape evolved from extinct apes, and cousin to living apes. We are a symphony of what is innate and how that plays out in our lived lives—nature and nurture. It was Francis Galton who later coined the phrase “nature versus nurture,” and in his appraisal of eminence, he very clearly favors the former.#
Hereditary Genius is a strange, awkward book. In the late twentieth century, academic historians and teachers began moving away from “great men theory,” where history could be told via the intrepid deeds of unique men of pivotal influence. The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle developed this view, asserting in essays, books and lectures in the 1840s that it was in the innate abilities, heroic acts or divine inspiration of individuals—always men—that history could be explained. In Galton’s work, this idea reaches its apex. He insists upon the superiority and rarity of men of true eminence, from the “Judges of England from 1660 to 1868, the Statesmen of the time of George III., and the Premiers [Prime Ministers] during the last 100 years” as well as “Commanders, men of Literature and of Science, Poets, Painters, and Musicians.”
Galton would later emerge as a founding father of statistics, and a de facto father of genetics: it is from his biometric analysis of people that much of the modern study of heredity, families and sex derives, and the mathematical fusion of heredity with Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection would occur under his auspices. Hereditary Genius differs from other works of “great men” history because of its methodological approach. Galton strives to use statistics to make his case for the rarity of eminence, and its hereditary qualities. As with his beauty map, his aim is to quantify something ill defined and vague.
Over the next fifty years or so, as eugenics developed into what was then regarded as a science, the ability to measure the qualities—or indeed the quality—of a person was essential for the design of eugenic programs. This would involve different metrics over the years, but none more than the intelligence quotient in its various forms—IQ. In time, and primarily in America, IQ would be used to categorize people and their intellectual ability such that they might be sterilized, or so that immigrants might be sent back to where they came from. In Scientific American in 1915, a public health official named Howard Knox wrote, in language familiar to that of the contemporary eugenicist, “The purpose of our mental measuring scale at Ellis Island is the sorting out of those immigrants who may, because of their mental makeup, become a burden to the State or who may produce offspring that will require care in prisons, asylums, or other institutions.”
Galton’s metrics were far less rigorous than even the early forms of standardized IQ tests that were the tools of U.S. immigration policy in the first few decades of the twentieth century. He introduces a ranking for classes of people, A–G, and observes the rarity of As as well as Gs according to a statistical technique invented by the Belgian astronomer and demographer Adolphe Quételet—the law of deviation from an average. From that Galton calculates that if there are sixteen grades of men, eight above average, that only the sixth, seventh and eighth top grades will rank as eminent:
We have seen in p. 25, that there are 400 idiots and imbeciles, to every million of persons living in this country; but that 30 per cent of their number, appear to be light cases, to whom the name of idiot is inappropriate. There will remain 280 true idiots and imbeciles, to every million of our population.
The precision of these numbers is suspect: 250 first-class men per million, 280 true idiots and imbeciles, everyone else somewhere in the middle, in a way that anticipates the statistical distribution known as the normal distribution, sometimes called a bell curve.
Galton was a hoarder of information, a data junkie, whose mantra was “whenever you can, count.” He saw the power of science, statistics and empirical arguments in fomenting political change. Nevertheless, there is a notable tension in Hereditary Genius and his later works.
The metrics he applies, in an era before IQ tests for cognitive abilities, are deeply questionable and reveal the inherent prejudice of men of power: they include the results achieved in university exams, and rest upon the preeminence of Oxford and Cambridge universities, as well as the major exclusive private schools where men of hereditary power typically went. He asserts that kinship transmits a higher degree of eminence, and that men do so more readily than women, though he admits that the sample size is low—a factor that continues to hamper the quality of published science to this day: “The numbers are too small to warrant any very decided conclusion; but they go far to prove that the female influence is inferior to that of the male in conveying ability.”
This is a revealing point and worth noting: Galton was working in the days before the molecular means of inheritance had been revealed. The scientist-friar Gregor Mendel was pottering away breeding his pea plants in Moravia at exactly the same time, but his results—which gave us the concept of the gene as a unit of inheritance—would not be brought to light until the Victorian era was over. We now know the exact mechanisms by which women and men pass on their genetic material, via sperm and egg, and the ways in which their genomes are halved and shuffled as those cells are born, before coming together to form a whole and unique genome at conception. The contribution is not exactly equal though. Due to the minuscule size of the male Y chromosome (passed from fathers to sons), and the addition of the separate mitochondrial genome, which sits not in the nucleus but in the egg’s plasm and is therefore passed only from mothers to children, women contribute fractionally more genetic material to their children than fathers. Galton was not to know that, but it shows that his model was wrong. He assumed a sexed biological role of inheritance that was not there. Ultimately, nurture would explain the discrepancy far more than nature.
In the end, his thesis is hamstrung by its lack of objectively rigorous data. Galton blithely acknowledges this—it is the nebulous concept of reputation on which his whole house of cards sits. The qualities of his geniuses are determined by the “opinion of contemporaries, revised by posterity—the favourable result of a critical analysis of each man’s character, by many biographers.” His data is literally opinion. Hereditary Genius is a superlative showcasing of confirmation bias. Galton asserts the greatness of his geniuses, and at great length explains that they are geniuses because they are great.
Hereditary Genius is also a fundamentally racist thesis, in a way that was typical, though not universal, for Galton’s time and place. Galton’s racism was deep, consistent and robust, even for his era. It was explicitly White supremacist:
[T]he negro race is by no means wholly deficient in men capable of becoming good factors, thriving merchants, and otherwise considerably raised above the average of whites—that is to say, it can not unfrequently supply men corresponding to our class C, or even D. It will be recollected that C implies a selection of 1 in 16, or somewhat more than the natural abilities possessed by average foremen of common juries, and that D is as 1 in 64—a degree of ability that is sure to make a man successful in life. In short, classes E and F of the negro may roughly be considered as the equivalent of our C and D—a result which again points to the conclusion, that the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own.
His grading of people goes on:
The Australian type is at least one grade below the African negro. . . .
[T]he number among the negroes of those whom we should call half-witted men is very large. Every book alluding to negro servants in America is full of instances. . . .
The average standard of the Lowland Scotch and the English North-country men is decidedly a fraction of a grade superior to that of the ordinary English.
The ablest race of whom history bears record is unquestionably the ancient Greek, partly because their masterpieces in the principal departments of intellectual activity are still unsurpassed, and in many respects unequalled, and partly because the population that gave birth to the creators of those master-pieces was very small.
Note the casualness of his rankings. Also note the adoration of classical civilizations—a recurring theme for obsessive rankers of people. Though Galton and his intellectual descendants wanted this to be a science, informed by statistical analysis and rigor, it is not and cannot be value free. The idea that lives should be as free from pain and suffering as possible is uncontroversial, but these analyses of a vague sense of quality of people instead invoke the idea that some people are demonstrably better than others over and over again. There are a handful of geniuses and imbeciles at the two poles of society but in the morass in between, there is also a hierarchy, and the aim of society should be to fill future generations with better people than are there currently. Galton lambasts the Church for imposing celibacy on the great men of the Middle Ages which caused the “moral deterioration” of the United Kingdom, and he castigates academia for continuing to discourage marriage among Fellows at British universities, a practice he dramatically likens to religious persecution.
Galton’s systematic grading of humans is the backbone of his agricultural view of humans in society. We are animals, and animals can be bred. This is central to the eugenics project. Back in the 1870s, with this clear vision of breeding, the emergence of improvement in populations becomes Galton’s political dogma for change:
I argue that, as a new race can be obtained in animals and plants, and can be raised to so great a degree of purity that it will maintain itself, with moderate care in preventing the more faulty members of the flock from breeding, so a race of gifted men might be obtained, under exactly similar conditions.
This expression of a Darwinian view of humans sets out the principle of positive eugenics—that is, the improvement of future generations’ quality (however arbitrary that definition is) by selective breeding. People can be better, and nations can comprise a better stock if efforts are made to encourage good breeding of right-minded people, as Plato had suggested two thousand years earlier. Without that nudging of society in the right direction, we drift toward degeneration with the many babies of the unfit swamping those who achieve eminence.
Galton’s ideas—and the eugenics movement that they spawned—are simultaneously radical and traditional. With the new science of evolution applied to humans, society must escape the doldrums in which it has languished, but that change is engineered to maintain Great Britain’s dominance over the world and harks back to the classical notion of a lost golden age. We must change in order to stay the same. No matter how scientific Galton tried to be, his ideas emerge from a fear of the decline of civilization.
Weird, fascinating, flawed, racist, sexist and blindly biased though it is, Hereditary Genius fires the starting pistol for a methodological and (pseudo-)scientific endeavor never seen before in the long history of population control. Before the word existed, eugenics is born, and Galton its midwife, possessed by a religious conviction that only statistics will save his brethren: “When the desired fulness of information shall have been acquired then, and not till then, will be the fit moment to proclaim a ‘Jehad,’ or Holy War against customs and prejudices that impair the physical and moral qualities of our race.”
GALTON’S INFLUENCE
Reviews of Hereditary Genius were mixed. Some were clearly unpersuaded by Galton’s reduction of the social influences of achievement over the genetic. Religious reviewers were angered by his attacks on the Church, and its diminution of Christian charity as a means of improvement. The magazine Catholic World began its anonymous review: “Mr. Galton is what in these days is called a scientist, whose pretension is to assert nothing but positive facts . . . ascertained by careful observation and experiment and induction therefrom . . .”—which may well be intended as a haughty sleight, but to most scientists’ ears today will sound both accurate and desirable. Some reviews, notably scientific ones, commended its data-driven approach. The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace—who came up with a correct but slight version of natural selection at the same time as Darwin a decade earlier—reviewed the book for the scientific journal Nature and concluded that it was “an important and valuable addition to the science of human nature.” Other reviewers were alert to the arbitrariness of Galton’s definitions of eminence, and his failure to acknowledge professional trades—notably the law—that promoted average men via nepotistic family connections. A review in the London literary magazine The Athenaeum declared that it was a sturdy example of the maxim that “anything can be proved with statistics.”
None of these arguments has ever really gone away—which is dominant, our inherent nature or how we are nurtured? Untangling the relative influence of DNA and the environment remains one of the great challenges of human genetics in the twenty-first century. We continue to rely on twin studies—invented by Galton—as a means of canceling out the genetic influence on individuals and revealing the environmental, as identical twins have near identical DNA, and so any difference between them should be attributable to nurture, not nature. Statistical analyses of genomic data—the accumulated mass of which is now galactically vast—are often misinterpreted, misunderstood and misrepresented. So-called hereditarians are a vocal but mostly fringe collective of online commentators, activists and the occasional scientist who seek to amplify the role of genetics over that of the social environment for many personality traits, particularly in relation to race and intelligence, sometimes with misunderstood, weak or even fraudulent data.** Galton was the first hereditarian.
