Francis Galton was a man of dark visions...also a scientist with some of the brightest ideas...

Long article from the current New Yorker on Francis Galton, Victorian scientist, cousin of Charles Darwin. His motto was "whenever you can, count". Since The New Yorker doesn't allow FR to post any of its material, it can be accessed via www.aldaily.com; scroll down under New Books, and click on the link. Or go directly to the article at The New Yorker

Born: February 16, 1822 in Sparkbrook, England
Died: January, 17 1911 in Grayshott House, England

An explorer and anthropologist, Francis Galton is known for his pioneering studies of human intelligence. He devoted the latter part of his life to eugenics, i.e. improving the physical and mental makeup of the human species by selected parenthood.

Although weak in mathematics his ideas strongly influenced the development of statistics particularly his proof that a normal mixture of normal distributions is itself normal. Another of his major findings was reversion. This was his formulation of regression and its link to the bivariate normal distribution.

He also made important contributions to the fields of meteorology, anthropometry, and physical anthropology. Galton was an indefatigable explorer and an investigator of human intelligence.

Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin, was convinced that pre-eminence in various fields was due almost entirely to hereditary factors. He opposed those who claimed intelligence or character were determined by environmental factors. He inquired into racial differences, something almost unacceptable today, and was one of the first to employ questionnaire and survey methods, which he used to investigate mental imagery in different groups of people.

His work led him to advocate breeding restrictions.

Galton was knighted in 1909.

English social scientist, an outspoken hereditarian and selectionist and (alone with his disciple Karl Pearson) a founder of biometrics. Galton conducted extensive statistical studies of heredity in humans, including the first major twin study (1883).

A virulent racist, he popularized the phrase "nature and nurture" from 1874 onward specifically so he could downplay the latter. He also coined the term "eugenics" (1883) and essentially founded the eugenics movement with arguments going back to 1865, although his ideas did not gain wide acceptance until the turn of the century, spurred on by the rediscovery of Mendel's laws of inheritance.

A first cousin of Darwin and a witness of the famous Huxley-Wilberforce debate of 1860, he was a staunch supporter of natural selection even at its lowest, late 19th-century ebb. Ironically, he argued that selection on minor variations was too weak to produce long-term evolutionary changes, which instead were due to occasional saltations.

Despite having read Galton's 1869 book, Darwin himself still took a dim view of the influence of heredity on human behavior in his The Descent of Man (1871). As a member of Murchison's Royal Geographical Society, Galton led a major expedition to south-central Africa in the 1850's. He became general secretary of the RGS in 1857, and also was a Fellow of the Royal Society.

He also conducted research in meteorology. In his will, Galton endowed a chair called the Foundation Professor of Eugenics at the University of London specifically so Pearson could fill it.

Charles Darwin, Francis Galton and Ernst Haekel each, in their own way, connived to supplant God's supremacy with a vision of man as master of his destiny. Together, they were the progenitors of the eugenics movement and the galaxy of evils unleashed in the 20th century. Darwin's book, The Descent of Man was the inspiration for Galton's founding of the Eugenics Education Society which advocated, among other things, the creation of a database of the elite of England which would be encouraged to breed early and often, and the supression of society's "inferiors" through sterilization and internment. Not content, he began promoting the vainglorious theory that nature herself destined the superior (i.e. Anglosaxon) race to dispatch the dark continent's inhabitants into evolutionary oblivion.
From this, Ernst Haekel, at Germany's University of Jena, took the torch of the Eugenics agenda with the zeal of a preacher. He wrote two popular books in which Monism, a kind of religious natural philosophy, emerged. His book, Wonders of Life, ridiculed and undermined every aspect of Christianity's body and spririt dualism, and with reptilian coldness, he stated that society was no place for the biologically unfit. The charity of the Church and care of medical science were intrinsically destructive to society. These men, more than any other figures, provided the "science" that allowed the Nazis to justify Aktion T-4, their eugenics program, and later, the camps and final solution. The reverberations of Monism follow us today with our own farrago of death dealers (Jack Kevorkian, Margaret Sanger and Derek Humphrey... ad infinitum).

Galton was one of the founders of the secular humanist horde presently darkening our horizon. Without the grace of God, the mind and imagination darken and the will becomes pernicious and destructive. In their negation of the one thing that could given them wisdom, how could Galton, Darwin or Haekel hope to profess what was good and noble for mankind?

Interesting read, MS, thanks for posting it.

(CO, I thought this would be a biography that might intrigue you.)

I found Francis Galton's life history to be disturbingly depressing. While reading it I was continually reminded of the saying that "a mind is a terrible thing to waste". Here was a man whose mind showed early on that it held the greatest potential, yet through a lack of personal discipline and formal education, his intellectual growth became stunted and sidetracked into frivolous pursuits. I was left wondering whether the author was trying to lay the grounds for a diagnosis of a manic-depressive individual.

The irony is that in his pursuit of eugenics, it would appear that Galton failed to recognize that his own intellectual short comings that would place him decidedly on history's reproductive "B" list, not for any lack of intelligence, but rather for his lack of ability to apply it.

Although the biography only touched on it lightly, it seems that his rejection of religion was an early and fatal flaw in his developing a strong moral base from which he could have dealt with an overcome those personal flaws. All in all, his life seems to me to be a prime example of the failure of the "Age of Reason".

--Boot Hill

Chapter Two: Francis Galton and the Eugenics Society

Francis Galton (1822-1911) was an English scientist who studied heredity and intelligence. He was the person who coined the word eugenics, using Greek words to express what was originally a Greek concept.

He was a cousin of Charles Darwin. Erasmus Darwin was Francis Galton's maternal grandfather and also Charles Darwin's paternal grandfather. Erasmus Darwin developed a theory of evolution that Charles Darwin later expanded and refined.

Galton defined his new word this way: "Eugenics is the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, whether physically or mentally." But he wanted more than a little study. In 1905, he wrote about the three stages of eugenics ã first an academic matter, then a practical policy, and finally "it must be introduced into the national consciousness as a new religion."

In Memories of My Life, Galton said that the publication of Darwin's book on evolution stirred a rebellion against religious dogma: "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."

He became an openly anti-Christian bigot. For example, he wrote about prayer, dismissing the idea that God would ever listen to anyone's prayers for good weather, basing his argument on mockery, not data: "I do not propose any special inquiry whether the general laws of physical nature are ever changed in response to prayer: whether, for instance, success has attended the occasional prayers in the Liturgy when they have been used for rain, for fair weather, for the stilling of the sea in a storm, or for the abatement of a pestilence. The modern feeling of this country is so opposed to a belief in the occasional suspension of the general laws of nature, that most English readers would smile at such an investigation." Is English scorn a reliable measure of truth?

The Death of the Eugnics Movement

In 1933 the Nazi party seized control of Germany and forever altered public opinion of eugenics. Initially, the Nazis enacted only sterilization laws. However, these laws went far beyond the actions of the United States. In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that "anyone who wants to cure this era, which is inwardly sick and rotten, must first of all summon up the courage to make clear the causes of the disease." (David, 89) The Nazi party took several steps to rid the Third Reich of the "causes of the disease." On July 14, 1933 the Cabinet passed the Law for the Prevention of Heridtary Diseases in Future Generations. This law, which was to be implemented on January 1, 1934 called for the sterilization of "lives unworthy of life". These "unworthy lives" included those persons suffering from congenital mental retardation, schizophrenia, manic-dpressive insanity, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, grave bodily malformation, and severe alcoholism. To enforce the sterilization laws, Nazi leadership created special "Hereditary Health Courts." All physicians were legally required to report to the courts anyone they encountered who fell into any of the categories for sterilization. As a result, by 1937 some 225,000 individuals had been sterilized by German authorities, a figure that was roughly ten times the number in the United States. (David, 91) Surprisingly, many eugenic supporters saw the rash tactics of Germany as a threat to the United States eugenic movement. Many began to argue that the United States was in fact sterilizing too few people. In 1934, Joseph S. DeJarnette, a key figure in Virginia eugenics said, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.” (Kevles, 116)

Eventually, the megalomaniac ideas of Hitler and his closest advisors would completely end public support for eugenics. With the mass extermination of the Jews and those deemed unfit in the eyes of Hitler, a very powerful anti-eugenic movement arose. Public support wavered and eugenic programs slowly faded away. The science that was once thought to contain the key to human betterment became nothing more than a black mark on history.

The eugenics movement in Germany was very strong. In 1904 Dr. Alfred Ploetz founded a journal called the Archiv fur Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie, or the Archive for Racial and Social Biology. In 1905, Ploetz and Dr. Ernst R¸din founded a German eugenics society, called the "Society for Racial Hygiene." Later they changed the name a little, adding the word suggested by Francis Galton: the "Society for Racial Hygiene (Eugenics)."

In his book Fundamental Outline of Racial Hygiene, Ploetz called for the elimination of "counter-selective processes." He was concerned about social processes that reversed the work of natural selection by eliminating the strong and favoring the weak. He did not like war, because it eliminates the strong. And he opposed charitable programs to protect the weak and the ill. He suggested that doctors who were present at the birth of a weak or malformed child could provide an easy death with a small dose of morphine.

In 1922, a German lawyer named Karl Binding and a German psychiatrist named Alfred Hoche published a slim book with a clumsy title: Permission to Destroy Life Not Worth Living (Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens). They argued in favor of euthanasia, or mercy killing. The cost of maintaining useless people was too high, and the government could spend the money on better things. Religious barriers should be pushed aside, so that the government could get on with the job of killing the physically and mentally defective (painlessly). Destroying useless lives was necessary for the survival of society as a whole, they wrote.

In 1935, a French-American Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Alexis Carrel, wrote Man the Unknown, in which he advocated building euthanasia institutions to deal with criminals and the mentally ill, using some suitable gas.

Step by step, positive eugenics gave way to negative eugenics. In 1910, Francis Galton and the President of the new Eugenics Society, Montague Crackanthorpe, gave a reception for Ploetz in London. Later, Ploetz and his colleague R¸din built the German racial hygiene program, and both were ardent supporters of Hitler.

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