Most famous scientists picked a thing.
But a few polymaths, like Aristotle and Ibn
Sina, picked everything.
Francis Galton, one of the most important
thinkers in the generation after Darwin, fell
into column B.
Hardcore.
Galton was a co-founder of a range of scientific
disciplines, including meteorology, psychology,
forensics, and above all statistics.
He was an active member of the influential
British Association for the Advancement of
Science.
He made the first weather map.
Mostly, though, he is remembered for something
that we don’t even count as science today:
Galton was the father of eugenics, the idea
that the gene pool of the human species could
somehow be improved, if certain people with
different abilities didn’t have kids.
Where did Galton come up with such a terrible
idea?
Partly, from the work of his half-cousin.
Charles Darwin.
[INTRO MUSIC PLAYS]
When Darwin and Wallace proposed their theory
of evolution by natural selection, it was
based on observing differences produced by
thousands of years of gradual changes.
But we, as short-lived humans, can’t observe
thousands of years of evolutionary change
first-hand.
So it was hard to know what to do with natural
selection.
In the late 1800s, no one really understood
how heredity worked.
But many biologists, most notably Herbert
Spencer, argued that “survival of the fittest”
applied to humans, just like other species.
So they figured there must be a technical
way to use that knowledge…
Spencer, for example, argued against all laws
that limited class conflict, which he saw
as tests of fitness—including basic child
labor laws.
Spencer’s idea, called social Darwinism,
influenced a lot of people in the late 1800s.
And one of them was Darwin’s younger cousin,
Francis Galton.
Born in 1822 to a prominent Quaker family,
Galton was a child prodigy.
Like Darwin, Galton was largely self-taught—a
“gentleman of science.”
Also, like Darwin, he never did well in school,
suffered from nervous breakdowns, and traveled
widely.
Unlike Darwin, Galton was not a shy scholar.
He was obsessed with the idea of genius—whether
it was a product of good hereditary luck or learning.
For Galton, as for most Victorians, nature
held all of the cards.
He got this idea from his cousin’s hit book.
On the Origin of Species blew Galton’s mind.
After 1859, Galton focused on the social implications
of Darwin’s work.
He argued that an organism’s most important
characteristics must be biological, rather
than shaped by the environment or experience.
And, like Darwin, he sought evidence for his
theory.
The first step was to pick some trait to track
over time.
He selected “eminence,” which today you
might think of as basically awesomeness.
Galton thought that, if human traits can be
inherited, then tracking the descendants of
obviously eminent men—and of course they
were men—should show a decreasing level
of eminence over time, as intermarriage with
non-eminent people diluted this trait.
So he gathered all of the historical evidence
he could on eminent British men and their
descendants, and indeed found that eminence
seemed to decrease over time.
The resulting book, Hereditary Genius, published
in 1869, contains the first use of the phrase
“nature versus nurture.”
The book also, by the way, includes a chapter
on eminent “Wrestlers of the North Country.”
!!!
Hereditary Genius popularized the practice
of historiometry, or studying human traits
by tracking ancestry information.
But Galton knew that he was barely scratching
the surface of heredity.
He needed more evidence.
So he did what his cousin would have done:
he turned to a model from nature.
This time, twins and peas instead of pigeons
and barnacles.
In 1875, in the paper, “The history of twins,”
he proposed studying twins, which he saw as
a natural experiment.
By the mid 1900s, twin studies became the
foundation of behavioral genetics, or how
heredity affects behavior.
Galton realized that twins presented a “natural
experiment”: if nature is more powerful
than nurture, then twins should be more similar
than not, even if they’re raised apart.
But if nurture is more powerful, then twins
should behave differently when raised apart.
Galton didn’t conduct his own twin studies,
but he outlined what future research should look like.
Galton also developed statistical methods
to research inheritance, and in doing so,
he created the quantitative science of human
behavior.
ThoughtBubble, show us how:
Galton also started breeding sweet peas, comparing
the sizes of the offspring of different seeds.
Galton’s work with peas led him to conclude
that traits tend toward a statistical average.
Galton couldn’t figure out why, but he
could use statistics to model the general
pattern of how traits were distributed over
time—in this case, in a “normal” distribution,
a bell curve.
In 1884, Galton took his pea model to the
International Health Exhibition in London.
Visitors to his “Anthropometric Lab” paid
to have Galton measure their bodies, minds,
and senses in various ways.
He produced many new instruments in order
to measure, for example, eyesight.
Visitors received the results, and Galton
also kept a copy to add to his library of
research on variation in humans.
This practice, known as anthropometry—or
literally, measuring humans—became common
across many disciplines.
Galton also pioneered the use of fingerprinting
in forensics.
He classified the features that we still look
for: loops, whorls, and arches.
Thanks ThoughtBubble.
So Galton built on Darwin’s work to invent
a statistical science of life.
But now it gets weird.
And, frankly, difficult.
Because Galton decided that, based on his
investigations of inheritance, good traits
such as genius and morality were diluted down
to some norm over time.
In 1883, one year after Cousin Chuck passed
away, Galton published Inquiries into Human
Faculty and Its Development, in which he coined
the term “eugenics”—the discipline of
“good breeding,” or literally making “good
families,” in humans.
Galton was not the first to suggest that smart
people should have kids with each other, or
that cousins should avoid marrying.
What Galton did was argue—based on what
he saw as scientific evidence—for the public
to do something about these ideas.
He wanted “families of merit” to grow,
and he thought the government should incentivize
this growth.
This was called “positive eugenics.”
Galton pointed out that many well-born Victorians
married late and had few kids, compared to
the lower classes.
If this fear of the weakening of supposedly
“good stock” by new, poor, or different
people sounds familiar, that’s partly because
Galton’s so-called “science” of eugenics
quickly gained traction.
The First International Congress of Eugenics
was held in 1912, the year after Galton died.
And it was around this time that nations began
passing “eugenical” laws.
Particularly the United States.
Driven by a fear that births of supposedly
inferior people would lead to weak or criminally
“degenerate” adults, some states introduced
forcible sterilization laws starting in 1907.
These were mostly used to justify the sterilization
of already incarcerated groups and those with
different abilities.
This was “negative eugenics,” which was
not something Galton had explicitly argued for.
The metaphor used by eugenicists was drawn
from Darwin, but modified: a family or nation
was a tree, and its branches sometimes needed
“pruning.”
A famous example of this thinking in the United
States was psychologist Henry Goddard’s
1912 book about a family from New Jersey called
the “Kallikaks.”
This was a made-up name for a real family
whose genealogy Goddard studied to understand
what he called “feeblemindedness,” or
intellectual disability.
In the book, Goddard compared the branch of
the Kallikak family that was descended from
its founding father’s legitimate marriage,
and the branch descended from that founder’s
affair with a “nameless feeble-minded girl.”
Goddard concluded that feeblemindedness was
strongly heritable and a danger to democracy.
Although he later admitted this was a flawed
study, it was a hit, and his terms for different
levels of intelligence became common: “moron,”
“imbecile,” “idiot.”
Goddard’s attempts to quantify intelligence
weren’t at the fringes of science.
His ideas are creepily still with us in the
form of intelligence quotient or IQ tests.
Goddard, who was a big-time fan of Galtonian
eugenics, translated the work of three major
French psychologists in 1910.
This translation was picked up by Lewis Terman
at Stanford University, who adapted the work
of the French to create the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales in 1916.
Goddard and Terman then worked with Robert
Yerkes to develop an IQ test
for the US Army in 1917.
The US Army introduced aptitude tests to place
soldiers in different roles.
But the tests were highly discriminatory,
privileging white candidates from educated
backgrounds.
The trial of the test showed very low results
for non-Northern European whites and non-whites.
Goddard spent much of the rest of his life
publicizing these results—even though they
were contested in his own day as shoddy science.
There were sooo many other serious, Galton-inspired
scientists who did creepy research on human
difference and argued for terrible policies,
we could do a whole creepy spin-off show.
Instead, let’s just talk about some of the
worst.
A lawyer and zoologist named Madison Grant
wrote a book called The Passing of the Great
Race in 1916, citing Galton.
Grant subdivided Caucasians into three types,
claiming that the great “Nordics” were
being rapidly outbred in the United States
by inferior types of whites.
Meanwhile, Charles Davenport, a very influential
zoologist, founded the Eugenics Record Office
at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1910.
He collected data to help people check whether
a potential marriage was suitable.
And, maybe unsurprisingly,
Davenport was a fan of the Nazis.
But probably the eugenicist most well known
to us today was the nurse who coined the term
“birth control” and opened the first US
birth control clinic in 1916: Margaret Sanger.
Sanger founded the American Birth Control
League to educate people about safe abortion
procedures and contraceptives.
She gave lectures on birth control to many
groups, including the KKK in 1926.
In the 1920s and ‘30s, Sanger thought that
eugenics would give her movement legitimacy.
Eugenics became a dominant theme at her birth
control conferences, and she spoke publicly
of the need to put an end to breeding by the
unfit.
By the late 1920s, eugenics had been recognized
as bad science by most practicing biologists.
But as a source of policy for many lawmakers
in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere,
eugenics was still very much alive.
In the 1800s, science had become much more
important for states.
They wanted to understand their populations…
and, now, shape them.
Compulsory sterilization was challenged in
the US Supreme Court in 1927 in the famous
Buck v. Bell case.
But the decision, written by Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Jr., sided with the eugenicists
and has never technically been overturned.
In fact, forced sterilization was still happening
in California prisons until it was banned
in 2014.
Did Galton think that studying human difference
would lead to bad science and even worse laws?
Not necessarily.
But in some ways, his legacy -- a legacy of
comparing humans quantitatively -- is still
with us.
Next time—we’ll see what’s going on
in a less creepy area of the life sciences:
it’s time for Pasteur, Koch, and the birth
of microbiology!
Crash Course History of Science is filmed
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Montana and it’s made with the help of all
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