Francis Galton was the archetypal polymath. A cousin of the pioneer of evolution, Charles Darwin, he was born in 1822 into a well-off family. He studied medicine in London and mathematics in Cambridge. Galton made important scientific contributions in several areas, but he is probably best remembered for starting the eugenics movement. This movement developed to produce tragic consequences in the 20th century. The young Galton rapidly assimilated all that was known in several disciplines. He went on to make significant diverse contributions. He studied colour blindness so thoroughly that for many years it was known as "Galtonism". He researched the physiology underlying visual memory and the senses of taste and smell. He studied meteorology, discovered anticyclones and published the first weather map.
He studied twins to determine the relative effects of nature and nurture. He introduced the idea of forensic fingerprinting and persuaded Scotland Yard to adopt the system. Galton was awarded the highest scientific distinction, Fellowship of the Royal Society, at the age of 34.
A marked strain of eccentricity runs through much of Galton's work. Some of his publications include: On Spectacles for Divers; Nuts and Men; Visions of Sane Persons; Arithmetic by Smell; Three Generations of Lunatic Cats and Cutting a Round Cake on Scientific Principles. He also invented the "silent" dog whistle.
Galton made a "beauty map" of Britain, based on grading women on a scale of 1 to 5. The low point on the map was Aberdeen. He published a paper called Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer, in which he compared the health and longevity of British monarchs with that of commoners. He reasoned that if prayer was effective, the monarch should be very well off because of the millions of prayers offered daily across the British empire on his/her behalf, e.g. God Save the King routinely intoned at all official functions. Galton found that monarchs were not significantly healthier than non-royals and concluded that prayer had no effect.
He is most remembered for his work on heredity. In his book Hereditary Genius he presented evidence for the hereditary nature of mental and physical characteristics that predispose people to take up various professions and activities.
Galton was convinced that science had a duty to see that the best parental characteristics were passed on to future generations, thereby improving the human stock. He proposed the term "eugenics", which means "well-born", as a title for this idea. Galton believed that moral qualities were inherited in addition to mental and physical characteristics.
The eugenics movement saw two "disturbing" factors operating in society. Firstly, modern civilisation frustrates Darwinian natural selection because it allows "inferior" biological specimens to survive. Secondly, it was noted that "better class" couples had few children while "poor class" couples had many.
The eugenicists claimed that these two factors would inevitably degrade the quality of humanity unless something were done about it. Galton lobbied government to provide incentives to encourage "better class" people to produce more children.
However, the ugly under-belly of eugenics was prominently displayed elsewhere. Some eugenicists enthusiastically advocated the sterilisation of "defective" people. Targeted classes included people with epilepsy, psychiatric problems, learning problems, criminals, sexual "deviants", etc. Twenty-seven American states and several European countries passed laws allowing for the sterilisation of these people. For example, by 1939 there were more than 30,000 people who had been sterilised in America on eugenic grounds.
The Nazis also promoted this darker side of eugenics and pushed it to its ultimate mad conclusion. Hitler eliminated "inferior" genetic stock by murdering six million people. Thank God, and thank the Allies, that the Nazis were defeated.
Eugenics was a bad scientific idea, strongly promoted in its later phase by cruel people, and it ended in disaster. One of the many bad ideas in eugenics was the notion that morality is heritable. Characteristics such as honesty, steadfastness, thriftiness, laziness, fecklesness, bravery, cowardice, etc., are not inherited like eye-colour and in any event they are somewhat arbitrary entities, at least partly determined by the social habits of the time. The business of science is to discover how the natural world works. It sometimes happens that new knowledge discovered by science is put to bad use by others. By and large, science is not to be blamed for this. However, eugenics was a case where many scientists worked towards bad ends. The racial hygiene movement, so popular in Europe, particularly in Scandinavia and in Germany, was a creature of medical-biological science and anthropology. The story of eugenics is a shameful chapter in the history of science.
(William Reville is a senior lecturer in biochemistry and Director of Microscopy at UCC.)