Sir Francis Galton and the Roots of Eugenics

Abstract

The Law of Half-Intended Effects deserves to be more widely known. It usefully describes what happens to men who act intentionally, and who know more-or-less what they intend, but are shocked when things suddenly get out of control. If only he had lived long enough Sir Francis Galton’s enthusiastic promotion of eugenics might have been a good example of this—in some ways it began benignly enough. But its author never saw the grim conclusion: the shock of the ‘final solution’ was kept for its victims and for us. Galton was born in 1822 and died in 1911. Between those dates he explored and mapped part of Africa, wrote bestselling books about travel, was a member of the Athenaeum and actively participated in the affairs of England’s Royal Society, Royal Geographical Society, and British Association, invented psychometrics, discovered correlation and regression, and in the words of Nicholas Wright Gillham’s 2001 biography “helped to found and nurture the statistical methods that today have extremely broad applications in many fields including human genetics.” He was largely responsible “for the development of fingerprinting as a forensic method and made important contributions to psychology, especially in the case of mental imagery.” A matter not discussed in two recent biographies, perhaps because Freud has fallen into disrepute, is the remarkable fact that he at least suggested—simultaneously with Freud and perhaps even before Freud—the importance of unconscious processes in our mental life. This list may be incomplete but it must do. Galton had that rarest of all things human, an original mind, and it is quite possible that no scientist before or since has made so many lasting contributions to so many fields. When half way through his life The Origin of Species appeared, in 1859, this became a turning point. There was already a family bond and a background of shared interests—Charles Darwin was a cousin. Coming at a critical stage of both his scientific career and his domestic life, the effect of Darwin’s book was nothing less than momentous, shattering his religious beliefs and turning him away from geographical concerns towards psychological and biological research. In his autobiographical Memories of My Life Galton wrote that: “The publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science.” Galton wrote of Darwin’s book that he “devoured its contents and assimilated them as fast as they were devoured, a fact which may be ascribed to an hereditary bent of mind that both its illustrious author and myself have inherited from our common grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin.” The phrase “a hereditary bent of mind” is noteworthy. In his 2001 book Gillham says that right from the start Galton seems “to have been convinced that nature, and not nurture, determined human ability”: in 1859 Darwin provided this conviction with theoretical justification and focus. From that time on he proceeded to investigate, he said later, matters “clustered round the central topics of Heredity and the possible improvement of the Human Race.” The two topics—heredity and racial improvement—are however not inseparable. Why was it that the human race Soc (2008) 45:170–176 DOI 10.1007/s12115-008-9058-8