Part Four: Francis Galton: Inventor of Eugenics

Behind the Bastards

The final episode of 'Behind the Bastards' examines Francis Galton's legacy as the founder of eugenics, tracing how his pseudoscientific ide

Key takeaways

• Galton pioneered statistical methods like correlation and regression to the mean, but applied them to justify racial hierarchies.
• His fascination with Sherlock Holmes inspired him to promote forensic science as a tool for racial classification.

Main topics

• Francis Galton's role in founding eugenics
• The intersection of statistics and racism

Notable quotes

"He was not just a racist, he was the inventor of racism—by which I mean eugenics."

Conclusion

Francis Galton's scientific innovations were deeply entangled with his

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) Welcome back Speaker 2 (0:04) once again to Behind the Bastards, part four of our series on Francis Galton, the inventor of racism, by which I mean eugenics. Here with me to talk about racism is David Bell, who is not racist, as far as I Speaker 4 (0:19) can Speaker 2 (0:19) prove. Speaker 4 (0:19) I tell everybody that all the time. A lot. Suspiciously often, actually. Speaker 2 (0:25) Yeah. Shouted out of cars a lot. Speaker 4 (0:27) Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I wanted to, sorry, we've covered my shirt with my cats. I do want to describe my pants. I'm wearing pajama pants with fish on them. And it says, asleep at the reel. It's a fishing joke. Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah. Asleep at the reel. Speaker 2 (0:45) That's good. That's a good. Yeah. I Speaker 4 (0:47) wanted people to know about that. And I'm not racist. Speaker 2 (0:51) Thank you. That and you know a fishing joke. Well, you know who didn't know fishing jokes? Francis Galton. I don't think he got his hands dirty. outside of doing surgery as a young man all that often. So this is Behind the Bastards, and I'm not really interested in giving a complete history of all of the non-shitty things Galton did, but he did have a lot of major achievements. We've talked about some of them, the concept of regression to the mean, statistical concept of correlation, a bunch of different math stuff that Galton... did and like either invented or was like the first guy to figure out or like helped to figure ideas a lot of influence and just like the way we do science and conduct scientific studies, particularly those that involve like statistics, the way we survey populations. twin studies. Galton had a lot to do with all of that. You should also note that while he was becoming the first racism nerd in the history of either racism or nerds, he was also becoming the first weatherman or one of the first weathermen. In April of 1875, he published what is probably the first weather map ever published in the Times of London. It did show the previous day's weather. I'm not really sure what the purpose was. Like, I don't know. Hey, you guys start somewhere, Speaker 4 (1:59) man. Yeah, historical documentation. Now imagine that for like tomorrow. But Speaker 2 (2:04) tomorrow. Speaker 4 (2:05) Yeah. Yeah, I get it. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Speaker 6 (2:12) Hi, this is Kylie Brakeman. Angela Geratana. Speaker 3 (2:14) Jeremy Colhane. Patrick McDonald. And Speaker 6 (2:16) we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists podcast. The Speaker 3 (2:20) improvised character comedy podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of Eurovision participants. And Speaker 7 (2:29) we do a little Halloween sometimes. Does the Pope dress up? He winks on Halloween. Speaker 3 (2:34) He gets right up next to the microphone. Speaker 6 (2:36) I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other. Speaker 3 (2:39) You've never seen Italy so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Speaker 6 (2:44) Listen to Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Speaker 1 (2:49) Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In Speaker 8 (3:25) 1986, a man named Scott Macklem was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect. Prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm reexamining this case. I really Speaker 3 (3:40) didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. Speaker 8 (3:46) Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time? Speaker 8 (3:51) Listen to Examined, The Backfire Effect, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (4:03) In February of 2024, celebrated illustrator and children's book author Petra Mathers and her husband Michael mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Dear honeys, this is goodbye. By the time you get this letter, both Petra and I will be dead. Next stop, Wonderland. Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 7 (4:33) Is there an epidemic against literature? More specifically, Black literature. I'm Jacquees Peace Thomas, and on this season of the Black Lit Podcast, we're outside asking why. They don't want a whole bunch of little Ella Bakers, Malcolm Xs, and Martin Luther Kings running around. And when you look at a lot of different cultures, they're like, we need to know where you came from. And considering this is Black Reading Month, the only real question is, what are you reading next? Listen to Black Lit from the Black Effect Podcast Network on our iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you think you were the only one? Like no matter what you did, it was never good enough for your mother. I'm Jennifer Arnice, and this is the Black Mother Wound Podcast, where we unpack and heal from the very first relationship that shaped us. We rush to accommodate other people when we have been hurt and our hurt has not been healed. Listen to the Black Mother Wound podcast from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (5:35) I believe that whoever was in that room and did that was a murderer. A new podcast series, Fault Line Haditha, tells the story of a shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. If Speaker 4 (5:49) you've got five players and you offer immunity to four, you better be right about the fifth. Because if you're not, then you've just given immunity to your killer. Speaker 3 (5:56) Listen to Fault Line Haditha on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (6:07) By the late 1880s, Francis was spending most of his free time either in meetings with various eugenics groups that had sprouted up all around Britain, and he's again- Speaker 4 (6:16) Meetings. Speaker 2 (6:17) Yeah, yeah, yeah, meetings. You gotta have your racism meetings, right? Sounds fun, yeah. The problem with our modern racists is that they don't have enough bureaucracy around the bigotry. You know, Galton and his boys were taking minutes, you know, from multiple different groups as they wrote about why the poor should be sterilized. They're not quite doing that yet, but he wants them to be doing that. He's pushing them. to do that, right? The other thing he's doing during this period of time is helping to invent what we now call forensic science. He's not the inventor of forensic science, but he's like any list of the founding fathers of forensic science has got to have Galton on there somewhere because he is very influential. His interest in forensics seems to have been spurred not just by his related eugenics work, obviously that has a lot to do with it, but by the fact that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes book, A Study in Scarlet, in 1887. Galton stated in his autobiography that his interest in forensics was spurred by, quote, a sort of Sherlock Holmes fascination. Now, the way that's written in the text, he may have just been saying that, like, I'm like Sherlock Holmes and not I was influenced to want to get into this by Sherlock Holmes. I'm not 100 percent sure there, but he was a massive fan of Doyle's novels. And regardless of kind of how it timed out, Holmes influenced him. because he really wanted to see himself as that kind of a figure, right? Like, he clearly kind of idolized Sherlock Holmes and took Doyle seriously as, like, when he would write about, like, forensics and, like, the science of investigations, right? Like, even though Doyle, again, is just kind of, like, writing books, right? He took him seriously as, like, a scientific thinker on the subject. Speaker 4 (7:53) Sherlock Holmes was, like, the first Joker, and what I mean is that, like, the character in a vacuum is fine. it just created some of the worst fans. You know what I mean? Like, I like Sherlock. I've read all the Sherlock Holmes. It's very entertaining stuff. It's just, it's once you start becoming like, I want to be like Sherlock Holmes that things get troublesome, right? Speaker 2 (8:15) Yeah. Well, it's also like, I don't know, when you make the TV show House and then later realize that, oh, wow, I guess Bryan Singer really... put a lot of gross stuff into this series that I didn't catch the first time I watched it 20-something years ago. Yeah, man. Speaker 1 (8:29) But it is weird. I couldn't agree more. Speaker 2 (8:33) Yeah, Galton wants to be the Gregory House of racism. And in a way he is, right? But he's also getting into forensics at this point. So in 1888, he had a forensic laboratory that would have made Sherlock Holmes himself drool. And I found a description of this laboratory in an article by Ava Kaufman in the Public Domain Review. Quote, in 1888, a reporter from the Paul Mall Gazette paid a visit to Galton's anthropometric laboratory in London, where instruments developed by Galton measured the physical. and mental characteristics, from keenness of hearing to breathing power of over 10,000 people. The resulting article. titled A Morning with Anthropometric Detectives, described Galton's laboratory as a world of order and precision and tests of the nicest accuracy. Dumb though they are, Galton told the reporter, what splendid detectives our instruments might prove. Splendid detectives, the reporter exclaimed. I am not, I hope, in a department of the Criminal Investigation Department, unconsciously yielding convincing proofs of personal identity with some scoundrel hitherto unhung. And... You know, it's obviously an early example of like media hype of like, wow, look at all these instruments. This must be like a real detective's agency. You sure could catch, you know, anything with like, has he caught anybody? He never does. He gets actually consulted on with the police a few times. His stuff doesn't like catch criminals because he's parking up the wrong tree. Junior detective shit. Constantly. He's like inventing his own. detecting tools and stuff. They're like, by measuring hearing and, you know, I don't know. It's, it's, there's some value in it. It just in that. Yeah. It's useful that we started thinking about how to like measure how well people could hear and try to take some data on, on people for like health. And there's all sorts of purposes where you want this kind of data, but he is really interested on using it to like predict and solve crime. It's sort of, we Speaker 4 (10:25) said at the very start of this, we talked about it's some of this stuff is neat. Like the cap is like neat for some of this stuff. Yeah. And then he takes it to the next level. Right. Where it's like, it becomes this dogma that he wants people to like breed certain ways. Yeah. Stuff that's at best neat. Speaker 2 (10:46) Yeah. Right. And one of the neat things that he has in this anthropometric lab is fingerprinting equipment. He started to get really interested in that by the 1880s. And we actually do have an advertisement for Galton's anthropometric lab because he's gathering. He has, like, thousands and thousands of people volunteer to let him, like, measure them in various ways for all of his different, like, studies and theories. And this advertisement, the reason I find it interesting is I think it has, like, the first. privacy guarantee for biometric data. Take a look, Dave. It notes. And Netflix Speaker 1 (11:18) viewers. Speaker 2 (11:19) You can see it on here, but it notes in one portion of the advertisement, for keeping a methodological register of the principal measurements of each person, of which he may at any future time obtain a copy under reasonable restrictions, his initials and date of birth will be entered in the register, but not his name. The names are indexed in a separate book. Right? I think that might be the first, like, That's amazing. Like, the first, like, promise that like we'll protect your biometric data in history i don't Speaker 4 (11:44) know Speaker 2 (11:44) who else could have been earlier right they Speaker 4 (11:46) didn't even know why they were protecting it but they Speaker 2 (11:49) knew people were gonna want to steal it yeah Speaker 4 (11:51) and let me tell you like giving it to a eugenicist not Speaker 2 (11:54) a great start it's like well it's Speaker 4 (11:56) how bad can it get like it's just yeah yeah you don't have to worry about other the wrong hands you know like it's already there they're all the wrong hands Speaker 2 (12:06) yeah Speaker 4 (12:07) This is why I enjoy like the forensic files show today, right? Is because of this asshole. Like he helped. Speaker 2 (12:14) Yeah, yeah, he's Speaker 4 (12:15) a Speaker 2 (12:15) big part of that, right. Now, the use of fingerprints to identify people had been advocated as early as like 1858, which is when Sir William Herschel of the Bengal Civil Service used fingerprinting to identify individual Indians as part of a fraud investigation. In 1880, a scientist named Henry Fowles published a groundbreaking study on fingerprints that ignited a vigorous debate among the scientists of the day. Francis Galton has always been interested in trends, right? He's always been either a trendsetter or a trend follower. And as soon as fingerprinting becomes hip, he gets really interested with it, right? And he becomes obsessed with proving that they're a good way to identify individual people, right? There was theories that these might be a good way to identify individual people, but we didn't have much. Today, we know that fingerprints are probably unique to each person. right? It's impossible to say 100%. That's a theory, right? You can't guarantee that. Speaker 4 (13:12) Fingerprints are the stupidest thing that is correct. You know what I mean? It's really dumb that they work. I think it's really silly that they work. Everybody has unique fingerprints and then we match them. How do we match them? Everybody gives their fingerprints. Everybody give them up. Speaker 2 (13:32) I don't like all of the implications of this, but it's frustrating that it actually does work that way. Right. Right. Speaker 4 (13:37) It sounds like all the other shit he's been talking about. Speaker 2 (13:40) Right. You know. And Galton is the first guy to show that fingerprints work that way because we didn't have like a big – no one had ever like taken a bunch of fingerprints from a wide like subset of the population to see if any of them were the same. And Galton gathers 8,000 fingerprint samples and for the first time is able to say none of these 8,000 are copies, which suggests heavily that every fingerprint is unique, right? And that's still the conclusion to this day. Right. Like, but, but he is the guy to establish that, to go from, this might be a good way of identifying people to confirming, no, these are, these are unique individual, like identifying characteristics. Right. Like Speaker 4 (14:17) the moment someone finds a pair that's identical, it all kind of falls. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Speaker 2 (14:24) That'll fuck some shit up if that ever does happen. Yeah. Speaker 4 (14:26) Right. Speaker 2 (14:27) It's like minority Speaker 4 (14:28) report pre-crime is like the moment you find one pre-crime that wasn't true, the whole system of rebate is free. Like that would really. But Speaker 2 (14:36) it Speaker 4 (14:36) hasn't happened Speaker 2 (14:36) yet. I'm surprised there Speaker 4 (14:38) isn't like a Dan Brown novel Da Vinci Code style someone learning about fingerprints that match. To be honest. Speaker 2 (14:45) As I've talked about in the we did a series of episodes on how like forensic science is largely nonsense because a lot of stuff like gun like bullet matching to guns is like nearly complete bullshit. Fucking gate analysis is heavily flawed and fingerprints are real, like and definitely the most real of all the different like forensic science things, but also very flawed in like the way in which fingerprinting is used by law enforcement. And a lot of like so it's not perfect. Right. And it's not as it's. not as reliable a method for actually because of flaws and like gathering and whatnot as law enforcement often wants to portray it. That is true. But Golden's correct here in general and that it is a good way to identify individual people. And he does more than that. He lays out the eight characteristics of fingerprints. And a lot of his original science is still the standard today. He's the guy who comes up with the classification of like arches and loops and whorls and fingerprints. Like he's the dude who lays all that out for the first time. So this is like legitimately groundbreaking, right? In 1899, and so far, pretty good science. In 1899, he was approached by police in a country that he never named to help with the kidnapping of the heir to a rich family. They wanted to know if fingerprints from a healthy baby would change over time. Galton had already shown previously he documented. Fingerprints from people from as young as 30 months and as they like went up, like grew up in age up to like 80. Not the same person, obviously, but he had like he had measured people over a course of years and shown that like, yeah, their fingerprints don't change over time. Right. But he had never like gotten data on infants to prove that like a baby's fingerprints don't change over time. And so he does that now. There's an American mother who volunteers to document her daughter. And so he's able to show that, like, no, baby's fingerprints, it's like the same thing there. And by the way, that whole like missing kid, that was probably a lie because he never explained if he helped them find her or not or mentioned it for the most part. And his biographer, Bulwer, suspects he just like made that story up when he was giving a speech about his fingerprint research to kind of judge things up a little bit and maybe make himself seem a little bit more like Sherlock Holmes. I don't know. That said. While this initial research into fingerprinting is pretty good science, especially for the day, being Francis Galton, the instant he starts looking into a new field of scientific endeavor, he has to find a racial angle, right? This has to be a way to, there have to be, basically his immediate belief is. Well, there's no way black people and white people and like Indian people all have the same fingerprints, right? White fingerprints have to be better in some way and non-white people's fingerprints have to be in some way inferior. And they have to, not just inferior, they have to be identifiable as not white based on their fingerprints. Yeah, more Speaker 4 (17:27) whorls or something. Or less whorls. Whatever's the bad amount of whorls versus the good Speaker 2 (17:32) amount. Right, right. Something different that he can declare as like a flaw. Because if they all have, if everyone's fingerprints are completely identical, then maybe we're all just human beings. Right. Like maybe like all of my whole life is a lie. We can't have that. Right. So Galton starts looking into like ways in which he can both predict criminal behavior by like, are there criminal fingerprints? Are there signs of fingerprints that someone's going to be a criminal? And also, can we tell people of different races based on their fingerprints? Now, he's not the only guy who thinks that this sort of thing should be possible. He's specifically not the only guy who thinks that like. The