Part Three: Francis Galton: Inventor of Eugenics

Behind the Bastards

This episode of 'Behind the Bastards' delves into the troubling legacy of Francis Galton, the inventor of eugenics and a pioneer in forensic

Key takeaways

• Galton coined the term 'nature versus nurture' but used it to reinforce hereditary determinism rather than acknowledge environmental influences.
• Despite observing that first-born sons had advantages due to social and economic factors (nurture), Galton dismissed these findings to support his belief in genetic superiority.

Main topics

• The invention of eugenics
• Galton's role in developing forensic science

Notable quotes

'He's really the guy who invented eugenics and a bunch of fun math stuff. And shit.'

Conclusion

Francis Galton's legacy is deeply contradictory: while he contributed to scientific

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:03) Oh Speaker 2 (0:03) my goodness, I didn't see you walk into the internet where I don't ever see you. And you don't really see me unless you're watching the Netflix. So I guess actually quite a few of you do. Anyway, this is Behind the Bastards. It's a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. You know that. This is the second week that we're going to be covering Francis Galton, the man who invented racism. It's probably the flippant title I'm going to use for the episode. He's really the guy who invented eugenics and a bunch of fun math stuff. and shit. We'll talk about some of that too. But it's less interesting than the horrible things he did, which are certainly the most notable part of his life. Speaking of people who did horrible, nope, David Bell. You don't do horrible things, do you? No. I've Speaker 3 (0:43) had Speaker 2 (0:43) a big... Speaker 3 (0:43) Since, oh man, since we last recorded, I got a second chair. You see my second chair? Oh, I do. Speaker 2 (0:51) It looks exactly like the Speaker 3 (0:53) chair I'm sitting in. And I went to the Six Flags that kills people. Oh, great. You know the one that's been giving people comas and stuff? I went to it this weekend. Oh, yeah. Speaker 2 (1:03) It was like a specific brain stuff, right? Yeah. Speaker 3 (1:06) It was not crowded. That's good. Speaker 2 (1:07) It Speaker 3 (1:08) was great. Speaker 2 (1:08) That's good. That's the smart way. Once there's a scandal, that's the right time to go to an amusement park. Speaker 3 (1:13) Yeah. Exactly. After Speaker 2 (1:14) Schlitterbahn decapitated that kid. That's when Speaker 3 (1:17) you Speaker 2 (1:17) go. That's when you go to Schlitterbahn. Yeah. Speaker 3 (1:20) Exactly. Speaker 7 (1:22) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. 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And Speaker 4 (3:11) I'm October Gonzalez. But you can call me Toby. We want you to join us on our new podcast, No Safe Words with October and Tony Gonzalez. We get real about marriage, parenthood, sex, divorce, and all the nitty gritty stuff we all think about, but just don't say out loud. You're probably just going to meet some rich guy and he's going to whisk you away. Speaker 1 (3:29) This is awkward. Listen to No Safe Words with October and Tony Gonzalez on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (3:40) Well, it's probably time we get back to Francis Galton. Unfortunately, Speaker 1 (3:45) yeah. Let's Speaker 2 (3:46) get back. So we had left off in the 1870s. Francis has invented the term. and has started spreading it around English society. And he's going from this point on, he's going to keep writing books about eugenics and publish scientific papers. But he's also constantly throughout this period, he's writing like news articles and opinion columns. He's suggesting laws. He's going to be throughout this as his understanding and beliefs about eugenics evolve, constantly trying to push society to adopt legal like schema around based on his ideas, right? Like that is from the beginning, like a major. uh focus for galton in 1874 he published a new book english men of science their nature and nurture in this book he sir he did the same thing he always does where he looks at like the guys he considers imminent and then tries to figure out like how many kids did they find and like what families did they come from so he asked Speaker 8 (4:41) right Speaker 2 (4:42) a lot this time he was scientists and he asked like 190 fellows from the royal society of science uh to send back like self-reported data about their families and their education. And like a hundred of them did, roughly. And his goal was to try to figure out the relative impact of nature versus nurture, right? Look at what these scientists say about like what inspired them and made them become great scientists and try to figure out how much is, you know, heredity play into scientific genius and how much is like... just how you raise people, right? And this is why Galton becomes, if you've all heard, everyone's heard the term like nature versus nurture. We're all familiar with that concept. Galton is the first guy to name it, right? Not that people hadn't wondered about this before, but nature versus nurture, using those specific words to discuss that comes from Francis Galton. His biographer, Michael Bulwer, suspects that Galton took the phrase itself from a passage in Shakespeare's The Tempest, where Prospero calls his adopted son Caliban, quote, a devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick. Now, one thing Galton found as he goes through the self-reported backstories of these scientists is that first sons are twice as likely to be, uh... to have become scientists as youngest sons, right? They're like way likelier. And Galton accurately credits this to the advantage of nurture. Obviously, there's not like a genetic reason that the first son is going to be better at science. These are because of like social things, right? And he concludes basically, well, first sons, obviously they get more resources. It's a period of time in which like legally, if you're the first son, you pretty much have to inherit most of what you're, if not everything. that your dad has, right? Like, that's a big part of like what colonialism is. Second and third sons need something to do to go make their fortune. So they go to the colonies or something, right? First born Speaker 3 (6:36) is like, you're putting all your resources into it. You're taking a big swing. If you screw it up, you can make another. Like, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's got good and bad Speaker 2 (6:47) there. Yeah, exactly. Right. And, So to Galton's credit, he sees like, well, obviously this is a nurture sort of thing in a major way, right? Like that specific aspect of it, the fact that first sons are more likely to be famous scientists comes down to nurture. But rather than generalizing that and being like, wow, well, if that major thing, if nurture had such an impact there to where first sons are twice as likely to become scientists, maybe nurture has a lot to do with whether or not people. get into science, right? Maybe that's like as important as heredity and more important in some ways, right? But he ignores the implications. He completely breezes past this, right? He acknowledges like, oh, well, that one's down to nurture and then continues to basically generalize it like, but nurture really means nothing at all, pretty much, right? Part of why he concludes this is that based on the self-reported data, 56 of the 91 men who responded to him said that they believed they had an innate skill and interest in science. And only 11 of these great scientists did not report having an innate skill. Right. So that very based on that data. Right. Super scientific. These guys feel like I'm a great scientist born. Yeah. Right. So as he's like looking into these different great scientists, he concludes, obviously, well, if most of them say that they had an innate skill, that means that like. That's further evidence for what I believe, that heredity has everything to do with intelligence and success. And, you know, you can see how sloppy his work is just looking into the case of one of the scientists that... responded to him, his cousin Charles Darwin, because Darwin classified his scientific interest as innate. But when he was asked to like, well, where does the origin of your interest in your specific branch of science come from? He's like, well, it was the voyage I took on the Beagle, right? Like I would not have gotten interested into like heredity and natural selection stuff like that was all because of. this thing that falls under nurture, right? Like I happen to be in a position to go on this voyage. And that's what spurred my particular interest in this branch of science, which again, I think someone more open-minded would be like, well, this is perfect evidence of how there's both nature and nurture, you know, playing together here. Like Darwin had an innate. interest in science that had probably always was going to be with him, but also specific elements of his life and the opportunities he had heavily influenced the kind of scientist he became and made sure he was in a position to make his great discovery, right? Like nurture, you know, what we would call just like blind luck, I guess in a lot of ways had a lot to do with that, right? Speaker 3 (9:20) Yeah, it's like if you have like a sort of analytical mind or a specific personality that was brought on by genetic traits. You might gravitate towards this thing that then, like, if your parents are also doing that thing already, like, you could have just as easily gotten into something similar, but not the same exact thing. Yeah. Again, it's a combination of the two factors. Speaker 2 (9:47) Right. Like, it would be very silly of me to be like, well, either to be like, well, I just worked hard. And so that's how, like, I wound up as a successful writer. And it would also be silly for me to be Speaker 3 (9:57) like, Speaker 2 (9:58) to be like, well, my dad was pretty good at writing and had a nice voice. And so like, that's why I wound up as a pod. Yeah, both of those things had something to do with it, right? Like it's a, it's always a mix of, of like nature and nurture that contributes to this. But Galton has this habit of like really, even when he has to acknowledge like the massive impact. that like nurture, so to speak, has on someone like his cousin, Charles, he just kind of blazes past it. He never draws broader conclusions, just like he never draws broader conclusions from the fact that like his big sister who was disabled also was a really smart person who massively contributed to his intellectual development. And maybe that means people who are disabled have value in society, right? Like he can't, he just doesn't, he refuses to generalize. It's not even a can't thing. Speaker 2 (10:46) And yeah, Bulwer, sorry, Bulwer, Galton's biographer, adds about his sort of analyses of these different scientific self-reports. Furthermore, if one of the parents had scientific tastes, Galton took this as evidence of heredity, but he had no way of distinguishing heredity from encouragement at home, whose importance was acknowledged by one third of the respondents. So even where his respondents are like, well, yeah, my parents like really pushed me to be a scientist and made sure I had good education. And that probably led me to my field. Like he just kind of like. breezes past it right he considers that heredity like well if your parents like science and encourage you to be a scientist that's heredity as opposed to like well anyone could do that right they don't have to be like based Speaker 3 (11:27) off of yeah again him just it's like he's doing science like a youtuber does science right he's just asking people what they think they are a scientist like why do you think you're a scientist which is A very, a very shitty starting place. And then he's just sort of hand waving even when they say things that are against the thing he wants. Yeah, Speaker 2 (11:49) he does that a lot. When there's a data point that contradicts him, he'll acknowledge it in the paper and then ignore it in his conclusions because it's inconvenient, right? One of the main things that separates Galton and Darwin from their critics at this period of time, the people who are like attacking eugenics and don't agree with them, is not that they have a differing understanding of genetics and heredity, because nobody really has a good understanding of genetics and heredity at this point quite yet. But what really separates Galton and Darwin from their critics is this. they have a differing belief in whether or not nature and nurture matters. Like Darwin gets convinced by Galton that nurture means basically nothing. And Galton is a vocal advocate of the idea that like helping out poor kids, giving them more money and more food, better schools, that'll do nothing. Like they're fucked from the start because they have bad genes, right? That's basically Galton's attitude. Speaker 2 (12:46) But there are critics of this. One of the most vocal critics of early eugenics was Alfred Russell Wallace. Alfred was a biologist who independently, he's the co-creator of the theory of evolution by natural selection. He and Darwin independently came to it at the same time and published like at the same time. He just is a lot less well-known. Darwin was way better at the PR end of things, right, and got famous. But Alfred Russell Wallace is just as brilliant a scientist. Again, like he's recognized today and at the time was recognized as someone who would come up with this independently. And he was in some ways a superior scientist to Darwin because he became an immediate enemy of eugenics, right? Galton comes up with eugenics and tells his cousin and Darwin's like, oh yeah, that sounds completely right. I'm a bigot now. I mean, not that he hadn't been before, but Alfred Russell Wallace reads Galton's theories and he's like, well, that's fucking crazy. And he writes an article warning them, quote, the world does not want the eugenicists to set it straight. Give the people good conditions, improve their environment, and all will tend towards the highest type. Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priest craft. And I really like that phrasing, that like, you are pretending to be like a man of science and an atheist, but all you have done is create like a secular religion and appoint yourself basically the pope. That's what Galton has turned himself into. He is now like the high priest of this increasingly popular secular faith in heredity and the ability, and they're kind of, both they're sort of apocalyptic and also they're like... you know, utopian sort of heaven vision is that you can breed a perfect society of people who will live longer and not ever have any problems with violence and make beautiful, brilliant art and be like perfect, right? We can make perfect special boys forever. That's the dream like future that eugenics is promising and that Galton is, you know, turning himself into a hype man for effectively. And I think that calling him a scientific priest does get... Because there's an element of this guy when you read him, he sometimes sounds like a cult leader or like a madman. There's some really crazy quotes from some of his writing. Here's Speaker 8 (15:00) a Speaker 2 (15:00) segment from Hereditary Talent and Character published in 1865. The power of man over animal life and producing whatever varieties of form he pleases is enormously great. It would seem as though the physical structure of future generations was almost as plastic as clay, under the control of the breeder's will. It is my desire to show more pointedly than, so far as I'm aware has been attempted before, that mental qualities are equally under control, right? The future generations are just like clay. They're putty in our hands. We can mold them perfectly to whatever we want, right? That's crazy person talk. That's like... Oh, yeah. That's 90s movie villain shit. Speaker 8 (15:34) Yeah, mad scientist shit. Right. Speaker 2 (15:36) Yeah. Unfortunately, a lot of people are into it. By the 1870s or so, Galton had become well-convinced and argued to much popular acclaim that the native peoples of colonized lands must either be bred like livestock to enhance their positive traits, or in the case of certain peoples who were at the lowest level of his racial hierarchy, should be bred out of existence. Extinction was the goal. Speaker 3 (15:57) Why are people into this? Because it's like someone being like, we're all slop and in the future we can breed like perfect people. It's so weird for any of you to be like, yeah, that's right. Down with us. You know? They're Speaker 2 (16:13) not saying down with us. He's speaking because his audience, I think this is important to get, Dave, because you brought up that he's not writing for an audience the way we think of it. Like you publish an article and it's there for like all of the people who read, right? Who are interested in it or whatever and want to. He is writing specifically for the very tiny number of people who are both like can read and are educated scientists. He's writing for gentlemen in his own country. Rich Speaker 3 (16:37) honkies. Speaker 2 (16:38) Yeah, rich honkies. And what he's saying is that like. us and people like us are the pinnacle of human beings so far. And we're the only ones who really should be breeding. And we can be better. Like our descendants will be even better than us if we get good at this. But we're the special ones. And so like we need to restrict everyone else from breeding because we've got it right. We've got culture right and society and like everything, like philosophy right. And there's no other value in anyone who does anything differently in any societies or cultures that are different. They need to be extinguished because this is the only actual way to live, right? There's always been, I mean, conservatism always has an element of this in it of like, well, there's one right way to do things. And kind of eugenics is taking that to the absolute most absurd extent, which is like, there's only one right way to be a human being genetically, right? That's what's... going on here. That's how Galton's pitching it, you know? And while, you know, obviously at the time... They have very medical science is much more primitive. They like there's not any real ability to like do a mass sterilization campaign. And he's not advocating that yet, but he is advocating for the extinction of inferior peoples. And his plan for this initially is to move superior people into the area and incentivize them financially and legally to outbreed the others. Right. Like this is why he wants to send Chinese people to Africa to replace black people because this is like they're higher up on the racial list. You know, it's Speaker 3 (18:09) like the it's like. This is like adjacent to people who cry about white genocide, right? Right. Oh yeah, this is where it comes from. Yeah, when I heard the term white genocide, I was like, wait, what do they think is happening? And so I like looked into it and looked into what these people think is the problem. And they're just describing this gradual thing where cultures will just mix and mingle in a very positive way. And it was like, oh, so like just. basic progress and this sounds like people kind of proposing the opposite right where they're like yeah we're not saying that we need to like put people in camps we just need to encourage the opposite of this like you know of race mixing and stuff like yeah everybody goes back to where they came from or something like that Speaker 2 (19:00) We certainly because there's not a and he will get more concerned about immigration as it comes on. But I'm sure his belief is that like we need to improve the world as a colonial power. Part of what justifies British colonialism is that we're improving the gene pool. Right. By ideally getting rid of these inferior peoples and breeding the peoples, the colonized peoples who are like best breeding them for better traits. That's what we should be doing. We should be gardeners of the human race. Right. That's kind of his initial. That's going to change over time somewhat. But that is his initial argument. And white genocide. I will tell you where that comes from, because that also comes out of Galton. Right. But he's not. OK. He's not immediately panicking about that. Initially, he's looking further afield. He believed that colonialism should do, quote, the necessary job of replacing inferior peoples with their betters because they would stupidly fail to submit to the needs of a superior civilization. He was applauded for writing stuff like this because it was what rich British people wanted to hear, that they were doing the right thing. And in fact, they should be even more racist and even worse to the people that they already basically owned. And this is what he's giving his peers here is something that colonialism started to need. by the end of the 19th century. Secular moral legitimacy. It was never hard to find Christian justifications for colonialism, just as many Christians had used scripture to justify slavery. But the problem with this, and obviously there's a big justification of like evangelical stuff, right? Of like, well, we need to colonize these places to spread the one true gospel, right? Like that that's a justification for colonialism. But the problem is... You can, and people do, justify colonialism that way. But if you're doing that, you can't ever really cut out the full text of the Bible. And there are always passages in the Bible that you can interpret as justifying colonialism and slavery. But there's lots of passages that don't, right? And so there's always going to be a constant stream of Christians who are reformers and critics of colonialism, too, because you're working from the Bible. And a lot of people are always going to read the Bible and be like, oh, it says you shouldn't actually be shitty to people, right? Speaker 3 (21:08) Right. There's all that, like, be good stuff. Speaker 2 (21:11) Yeah. Obviously, other people interpret it differently, but you're always going to have some of those folks if it's based on the Bible. And likewise, the fairly new ideas of secular humanism had also fueled critiques of the system, right? The people who are not, like, religiously motivated but are early humanists are like, I don't know, like, like. Seems bad to do slavery. Seems bad to do colonialism, to oppress these people in like their own homes, right? And what eugenics provided was a way for men of science and men of faith who trusted science to argue that racial hierarchy is not cruel, but literally written into the laws of heredity. And thus, any kindness or equality that would allow lower races to reproduce in an interbreed is actually cruel because it leads to worse catastrophe in the long Speaker 8 (21:55) term. And so from what we might call an effective altruism standpoint, eugenics makes sense. It's a moral justification that doesn't require Christianity and that sort of allows us to, because we're not seeing them as people, we don't have to treat them as Speaker 2 (22:12) people. Now you've got a scientific justification for that. I know some people might think I'm being unfair by comparing this to effective altruism, right? Taking a modern-day ideology that on the surface is about Speaker 8 (22:24) maximizing the effectiveness of charitable giving and comparing it to eugenics. And the reason I am making this comparison is because a ton Speaker 2 (22:32) of modern-day effective altruists love arguing that actually everyone really believes in eugenics if you actually think about it, right? And that's the premise of a post I found on the Effective Altruism Forum from February of 2023 by someone with the account named Synthientist. The title was, Most People Endorse Some Form of Eugenics. The article started with the case of a German Speaker 8 (22:54) couple, Susan Karaluski and Patrick Stubing, originally from Leipzig, Germany. Here's how the article introduces them. Susan and Patrick were a young German couple in love, but... the German state never allowed Susan and Patrick to get married. Speaker 2 (23:07) Shockingly, Patrick was imprisoned for years because of