Part One: Francis Galton: Inventor of Eugenics

Behind the Bastards

This episode of 'Behind the Bastards' explores the controversial legacy of Francis Galton, a pioneering scientist and statistician who inven

Key takeaways

• Francis Galton coined the term 'eugenics' and promoted the idea of improving humanity through selective breeding based on race and class.

Main topics

• Origins of modern racism

Notable quotes

"It's the Enlightenment that gives us racism. Right. In its modern sense."

Conclusion

The episode concludes that Francis Galton's legacy is a cautionary tale of how

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:02) Welcome Speaker 1 (0:03) back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast where I started the introduction before recording. But then I started recording because I remembered and Dave gave me some shit on it. Our guest for this week, the great David Christopher Bell. How are you doing, Dave? Speaker 2 (0:17) I'm doing great. I'm living the dream. Living the dream. What is the dream? Living the dream. Having shirts with the faces of our pets on it. Speaker 1 (0:27) Oh, that is the dream, actually. Yeah. Is that kitten? Oh, kitten in the new one. Yeah. Yeah, Rue. Speaker 3 (0:32) And I got this Anderson shirt from my friend Bethann. Oh, wow. It's beautiful. I don't Speaker 1 (0:38) have my cat on a shirt, but I do have some old Gulf War themed Simpson shirts that have Saddam Hussein on them. And my cat's named Saddam Hussein. That's close enough. Speaker 3 (0:47) It counts. It counts. We also have those shirts with each other's faces on them that we order that one live show and never Speaker 2 (0:55) address Speaker 3 (0:55) it. Speaker 2 (0:55) We should talk about that Speaker 1 (0:56) in reference to pets and stuff. That would be weird. Speaker 2 (0:58) Wear it every episode, right? Wear Speaker 6 (1:00) it Speaker 1 (1:00) every episode. Yeah, Speaker 2 (1:01) that's right. Speaker 1 (1:02) I just wear it to the grocery store, you know? Oh, Speaker 3 (1:06) good. Out to the fight club. Speaker 1 (1:07) When I go to my local fight club, I always wear it. Oh, Speaker 3 (1:10) I'm glad it's getting good use. I'm glad it's not just the grocery store. Speaker 1 (1:14) I do have a concern, because you and I are both men of more or less a certain age, right? So we grew up the right way, obviously. We're hurtling Speaker 2 (1:22) towards the grave. Speaker 1 (1:23) We are hurtling towards the grave. But we were you watched Mulan as a kid, right? Speaker 2 (1:28) Not as much as a lot of people my age. I watched it a lot. Speaker 1 (1:33) I watched it. And I think the lesson, whether you saw it once or a dozen times, that Mulan did a really good job of imparting is that you always need to be ready for the Huns to attack. Right. And there's Speaker 2 (1:44) some Speaker 1 (1:44) good lessons in there about how to kill a large number of Huns with the minimal amount of ammunition use. Right. And my concern, because I was watching this with a kid's friend recently, and I realized, because I've watched a lot of media with this kid, kids today aren't learning about how to defeat the Huns. No one's telling them about the danger of the Huns. What's Speaker 6 (2:02) going to happen? Well, it's up to Speaker 1 (2:03) us. I know. It's up to us, and we're not doing the job right now. We were warned about the Huns, but they're not being warned. It worries me, Dave. Speaker 2 (2:12) Yeah, we have to go school to school. Like a program. You know when you have an assembly and someone would come in with puppets and tell you about Speaker 6 (2:21) stuff? Here's Attila. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 2 (2:23) Not really Speaker 6 (2:24) accurate. Speaker 3 (2:25) Such a good movie, though, guys. Such a good movie. Yeah. Speaker 6 (2:28) A Speaker 3 (2:28) bop. Oh, yeah. Speaker 6 (2:29) It is because I think. Speaker 1 (2:31) based on historically when it would have been set, this was roughly contemporaneous to like the height of the Roman Empire when Mulan is set. And Speaker 6 (2:37) the Huns really wouldn't have been, certainly not in China. Like, I don't know where. Speaker 3 (2:40) No, no, no. But I think they didn't want him to be Speaker 6 (2:42) Mongolian. Speaker 3 (2:43) Never count on Disney being historically accurate and not. Yeah, Speaker 6 (2:46) they picked a different kind of racist to be. Yeah, Speaker 3 (2:48) yeah, yeah. They're like always, always at minimum, a little racist all the way up to a Speaker 1 (2:53) lot of racists. Speaker 3 (2:53) Yeah, it's gotta be some kind. And historically inaccurate 95 % of the time. Speaker 1 (2:58) As an Italian, I'm okay with bigotry against the Huns because as far as I'm aware from history, we were doing great until the Huns came. No problems in the Roman Empire until the Tilles showed up. Speaker 6 (3:08) That Speaker 1 (3:08) was when things went wrong. Speaker 7 (3:10) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast? Speaker 5 (3:18) Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. Speaker 7 (3:38) And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Speaker 5 (3:42) Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If Speaker 8 (3:47) you're seeking to try to understand the forensic science behind these cases that we hear about in the news, Body Bags is where you need to turn. There's no fluff. We do a deep dive into the forensics. Listen to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan and start listening. Speaker 3 (4:16) It's the US Open, which means the tennis world is about to lose its mind. And I'm here for every second of it. Join me, Renee Stubbs, on the Renee Stubbs Tennis Podcast as I break it all down. The matches that matter, the drama that doesn't, and the stories everyone's talking about. No cliches, no sugarcoating, just host analysts from someone who's actually been there. Coco looking real good. Her serve looks so much smoother than it has in the past. I was really happy to see. eager back to what she looked like a couple years ago when she was winning dominantly. Listen to the Renee Stubbs Tennis Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 7 (4:52) 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. Speaker 2 (5:05) If 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 7 (5:13) Listen to Fault Line Haditha on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 6 (5:24) Speaking of racism, Dave, have you ever wondered who invented racism? Speaker 2 (5:29) Oh, God. Was his name, was it like, like James T. Racism? Speaker 6 (5:35) Jonathan H. Racism? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Of the Portland Speaker 1 (5:40) Racists. Of the Speaker 2 (5:41) Racist Empire? Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 6 (5:43) Yeah. I Speaker 1 (5:44) mean, human beings have never needed like a scientific justification to be shitty to people who live far away and practice strange customs. Speaker 6 (5:52) Like if you're like the word barbarian literally exists because the ancient Greeks heard some people who lived like today, we'd say like 40 minutes away from Greece. And they were like, those people just sounds like they're going bar, bar, bar, bar, bar all the time. That's what that's literally where the term came from. Yeah. Speaker 2 (6:08) I imagine like the first caveman, right? Where it's like a caveman family. This other guy from. And Speaker 6 (6:13) this Speaker 2 (6:13) is other cave over them. They're like, I don't know why I don't know. I don't know. I don't like Speaker 6 (6:18) their customs. I Speaker 2 (6:19) think Speaker 6 (6:19) we Speaker 1 (6:20) should kill them all. It is funny how long some of these like if you heard of the Berbers and like a lot of North Africa, like Morocco, right? They're kind of the indigenous people of Morocco. Like their name comes from Barbar from the barbarian term, right? Like it's still and that's not what the Berbers prefer to be called because that's actually kind of a racial slur for them. They prefer to be called. I think it's the music. And so I bring this up to say that no one like had to invent prejudice and human beings had been doing slavery and colonialism for a long time prior to the Enlightenment. But it's the Enlightenment that gives us racism. Right. In its modern sense, you know, like that's the racism where you're not just because it used to be back in the day. All you needed to say is like, well, we're from Rome and those guys aren't. So like, fuck up. Like people. Yeah. Speaker 2 (7:06) You're saying that like when we really leveled up our race. Speaker 1 (7:09) Yeah. Yeah. Because the upside of the ancient Roman era prejudice is that like if you're saying, OK, they're not Roman, fuck them. When you conquer them, they kind Speaker 6 (7:17) of become Roman. And then you stop being a dick to them for the most part. Right. Right. That's not I'm smoothing over some stuff. But it was a Speaker 1 (7:24) lot less shitty than it was like with racism today, where we're still dealing with the after effects of like slavery. Right. And the bigotry. And that's because of. scientific racism. And scientific racism is a product of the Enlightenment and that kind of like early modern period where people are starting to put together science, and they're doing it kind of the wrong way. And the guy who's most responsible for creating modern racism by sort of marrying these early ideas of science to the prejudice that had always existed is a man named Francis Galton. Francis Galton is the subject of our episodes this week. and one of the most influential people in all of human history. I cannot overstate this. In terms of the impact Galton has had, he's absolutely on the level of a guy like Hitler. But unlike Hitler, he didn't, like, kill anybody. He was a scientist. He wrote books, you know? And he also... Speaker 6 (8:14) Right, he Speaker 2 (8:15) didn't... There was no point in his life, probably, when he was like, man, I'm a real Hitler right now. Speaker 6 (8:21) Yeah, I really gotta do some Hitler stuff. No. Yeah, he died Speaker 2 (8:24) probably thinking he led a good life. He Speaker 1 (8:26) absolutely did. But Hitler also was like Francis Galton. That guy had some shit locked down. Like, we're definitely going to copy some Francis Galton stuff. Speaker 6 (8:36) And the Speaker 1 (8:36) weird thing about Galton, because he was a really brilliant scientist in a lot of ways. He also did a lot of good stuff. Like he's he is the person who gets credit for being the first like mathematician, I guess, to observe and demonstrate the concept of regression to the mean. And he gets credit for discovering correlation as a statistical concept. So like most of a lot of maybe most is too much, but a lot of modern statistics is based on shit. Galton was the first guy to figure out. Right. And there's he did a lot more stuff. Right. And that's part of why he was such an influential racist, because the guy who invented you, he's Speaker 2 (9:11) the Speaker 1 (9:11) guy who invented eugenics, like literally came up with the name eugenics. That's where we're Speaker 2 (9:16) at on the eugenics of it all. Yeah. Yeah. Because we're talking about that idea of like racist trying to kind of couch racism in like science. Yeah. And that idea that it's gotten so found, you know, it's stuff like what BMI. Being a thing that's like a guy measured like a bunch of soldiers in Ireland or something. It was like, everybody needs to be like this. This is the ideal body shape. Right. Speaker 6 (9:44) It's Speaker 2 (9:45) the weird idea that starving Speaker 6 (9:46) Irishman. Speaker 2 (9:47) Yeah. Like I'm not saying throw out all science, obviously, but it's weird that like we have such dogma from times like this where it's filled with racist and weird. you know, weird tactics and yeah. Speaker 1 (10:02) So let's talk about Francis and how he became the king, the guy who invented racism, I guess. Not the king. That's still probably Hitler. So Francis Galton was born on February 16th, 1822 at the Larches near Sparkbrook, Birmingham. That's obviously in England, right? Like, I don't need to specify that. The Larches, Speaker 6 (10:24) Sparkbrook, obviously Birmingham. It Speaker 1 (10:27) could Speaker 6 (10:27) be Speaker 1 (10:27) Alabama too, I guess. Oh, Speaker 2 (10:30) yeah. Speaker 1 (10:30) So Galton's family had lived in that area around Birmingham for ages. And they had made their, obviously, the founder of modern racism. His family were like arms Speaker 6 (10:42) merchants. Of course, they were war profiteers. That's the most obvious way for them to have Speaker 1 (10:47) gotten rich. His grandfather, Samuel, took up work at his father's. So Galton's great grandfather had had a gun factory in Birmingham. And I think previously it had just been making muskets for like people to hunt or whatever with, right? Like it was not a military arms manufacturer. And then the Napoleonic Wars start going. And he's like, oh, you know how what's a great way Speaker 6 (11:12) to make a shitload of money right now is selling guns to the British army at the start of the Napoleonic Wars. I think we're going to need a lot of guns for about 20 fucking years. This Napoleon guy Speaker 1 (11:22) is going to be a problem. Speaker 1 (11:25) So this makes them quite rich, right? The family gets loaded off of selling guns to the British army. But it also causes strife with their extended family because the Galtons were Quakers and they had been Quakers longer than anyone could remember. And the Quakers, I think, are OK with hunting. But you know what the Quakers aren't OK with? Selling guns to an army. That's not really. No. Yeah. But once Samuel spun up production to start selling to the military, the Quakers are like, well, you can't keep. being a Quaker, because that's like one of our main things is that you don't, you're not a war profiteer. So he gets formerly, and his branch of the family is formally disowned from the Quakers in 1795 for fabricating and selling instruments of war. Although he keeps attending Quaker services. I think they're too polite to kick him out. But he's no longer like, they're like, well, but you're not one of us, Speaker 6 (12:14) right? We can't kick you out of the house of God, but it's really weird now. Speaker 1 (12:20) Yeah, you made it weird, Samuel. In his own autobiography, Francis Galton notes that his grandfather was also a scientific man and, quote, a statistical man of business. He was a fellow of the provincially famous Lunar Society, whose members met at one another's houses on the day and the night of the full moon, and which, though small in numbers, was so select as to include, and then he lists a number of famous scientists of the day, including a guy named Dr. Erasmus Darwin, who's the father of the famous Darwin. And the famous Darwin is like the half cousin of Francis Galton. They know each other most of their lives. Right. And they're very close, like friends. Speaker 2 (12:58) Sorry, I petitioned to bring back the blank society. Speaker 6 (13:05) Yeah, as like reclaim it as Speaker 2 (13:07) something that isn't always filled. Whenever I hear the blank society, I think that's a bunch of racists. A bunch of racists? Yeah, Speaker 6 (13:13) a Speaker 2 (13:13) bunch of bigots. Yeah, you got to bring it back. Or it's something that Sherlock Holmes will bust up or something. Right, Speaker 6 (13:18) right. Yeah, they're doing some sort of scheme. Speaker 2 (13:20) Right, but they were right about the naming idea there. Like we should have that. Yeah, the Speaker 1 (13:25) Lunar Society. I would love to be a part of a Lunar Society. That sounds cool. Yeah, exactly. Speaker 1 (13:31) So it's clear to me that Francis Galton came to regard his war profiteer grandfather as the ancestor he took most after. That's why he emphasizes how statistical and scientific he is in an era in which that's not really as much of a thing. Like if you're if in 1800, you're a man who believes in statistics, a lot of people will be like, well, that's nonsense. Math Speaker 6 (13:50) doesn't know things, you fool. Right. Like it's not it. Speaker 1 (13:54) There's controversy among basic elements of science in this period of time. Samuel marries into the famous Barclay family. You've heard of like Barclay Bank, right? Samuel marries into the Barclays and he starts a bank after the war, right? That's how he gets rich after he stops being a war profiteer. And he was described, one thing that's interesting, at the time he is described as a captain of industry. And like one of his biographies that someone writes in like 18 fucking 12 or something, he's called that. And that's not a term a lot of people are using in the early 1800s. That's more of like a later 1800s term. So he's among the very first people to be described as like a captain of industry. He's really an early founder of capitalism in a lot of ways. Capitalism is still getting formed as an ideology. And this guy who's a war profiteer and a banker, but also a man of statistics and science is a very early. A lot of people see him as an early embodiment of what a capitalist is supposed to be in almost the first generation in which they exist. Not quite. Samuel's oldest son, Samuel Tertius Galton, partnered with him, and that's Francis's father, partnered with him to run the bank and married a woman named Violetta Darwin, the daughter of his friend Erasmus. That's how the Darwins become a member or become entwined with the Galton family. Francis's dad. marries the daughter of Erasmus. So Francis is born into a family of four sisters and two brothers and was the youngest member of the family to survive to adulthood. Life was dangerous even then for the very wealthy. His cousin Charles Darwin, not the more famous Charles R. Darwin. This is the Charles Darwin nobody hears about because he dies at age 20 as a medical student from what is described as a dissection wound. That means he's dissecting a cadaver or performing surgery and he cuts himself and then he dies of infection. That happened to a lot of surgeons and doctors in this period of time. Speaker 2 (15:52) Yeah, this is the era where gravestones could just say stub toe. Stub Speaker 6 (15:56) toe. Got a little Speaker 2 (15:57) cut if Speaker 6 (15:58) things went wrong. Speaker 1 (15:59) Yeah. And it's especially the case if you're like cutting up a corpse and you get corpse juice in your open wound. Bad to get corpse juice in an open wound. Generally want to avoid that. Don't like that Speaker 3 (16:08) phrase. Corpse juice. Not into it. Thank you so much. Speaker 1 (16:11) Avoid it. Avoid it as much as possible. So because the Galtons were a large family and Francis's parents were rich, most of the raising when he's a little boy is done by not his parents, but by his third sister, Adele. She's 12 years older than him and severely disabled, with a spinal curvature that left her bedridden much of the time and unable to socialize or go out in public much at all. So instead, she focused all of her attention on her younger brother, as he would later recall. She hailed my arrival into the world as a fairy gift and begged hard to be allowed to consider me as her sole ward, and in her simple way educated herself as best as she could in order to be able to teach me. Her idea of education at that time was to teach the Bible as a verbally inspired book to cultivate memory, to make me learn the merest rudiments of Latin, and above all, a great deal of English verse. This she did effectually, and the result was that she believed, and succeeded in making others believe, that I was a sort of infant prodigy. So what Galton is saying there is that She teaches him to memorize the Bible as a little kid, and that convinces the people around them that he's a genius, right? He's always of the belief that I was not really a childhood genius. My sister convinced other people of that by helping me to learn how to memorize the Bible, because that's what she thought was what made an educated man. And other people believe this as well. A visitor to their home in 1828, when Francis was six, described him as a prodigy, recording that he read Shakespeare for fun and, quote, by reading a page over twice, he repeats it by heart. So he's got this very, like, eidetic memory, you know, where he could just look at something. Yeah. Speaker 2 (17:43) Yeah, nothing against anybody with a good memory, but this is real, like, dumb guy, smart guy. Yeah, yeah. Like, Speaker 6 (17:49) I Speaker 2 (17:49) think about Speaker 6 (17:50) - Speaker 2 (17:50) Memorize this Speaker 6 (17:50) shit, huh? Speaker 2 (17:51) Right, I had a social studies teacher that- made us all memorize the preamble to the Constitution. Oh, Speaker 1 (17:57) I Speaker 2 (17:57) still have it memorized. Yeah, I can still recite it. I don't know what any of it means, really. He never taught us why it was important. Or maybe it did, and I don't remember anymore. It Speaker 1 (18:09) just Speaker 2 (18:09) lost to me. Yeah, the stupid preamble. Speaker 1 (18:13) It's a very... old-timey 1800s way of like, this boy has memorized all the works of Shakespeare. And Speaker 6 (18:19) it's like, well, that is impressive, but does that mean he's like smart? Or does it mean he has a lot of Shakespeare memorized? Speaker 2 (18:26) I would classify it under neat. Neat. It's neat. Yeah, it's potentially impressive. Speaker 6 (18:31) Yeah. Speaker 2 (18:31) Yeah. Speaker 1 (18:33) And this is he