Program Overview: Galton and the Definition of Eugenics

Francis Galton

"I have no patience with the hypotheses...that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy...are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality."¹
-- Francis Galton

Hereditary Factors

The term eugenics was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton. Galton was a wealthy English mathematician of some renown who also happened to be Charles Darwin's cousin. In 1869, Galton published a study showing that the offspring of prominent Englishmen were more likely to reach positions of power than others in Britain. Galton could have attributed his findings to a variety of factors, including the greater opportunities available to upper-class children, but he believed that heredity was the sole factor. He wrote: "I have no patience with the hypotheses...that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy...are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the university, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary."²

Eugenics Defined

As he studied his cousin's theories, Galton came to believe that natural selection does not work in human societies the way it does in nature because people interfere with the process. As a result, the fittest do not always survive. So he set out to consciously "improve the race." He coined the word eugenics to describe efforts at "race betterment." It comes from a Greek word meaning "good in birth" or "noble in heredity." In 1883, Galton defined eugenics as "The study of the agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally."³


	"Racial Qualities" Galton Identifies

Galton was particularly alarmed to discover that the poor had a higher birth rate than the upper classes. In 1904, Galton explained how eugenics might address that problem. Click here to read his explanation


	Sacrificing the Truth Although Francis Galton spent years studying heredity, by the time he died in 1911 he still had no idea how traits are passed from parent to child. In his research, however, Galton stumbled upon two discoveries that might have led another scientist to abandon eugenics. Neither fazed him. One was the result of a test he devised to measure intelligence. To his dismay, the poor did as well on the test as "the better elements in society." He concluded that the problem lay in the test rather than his theory. His second discovery resulted from his efforts to track successive generations of pea plants. He found that, no matter how high the quality of the parent strains, some offspring were as good as the parent plant and some worse, but most were a little worse. This idea is known in statistics as "regression toward the mean" or middle. Galton suspected it was true for humans as well. If so, it would be impossible to improve the "race" through eugenics. Yet neither finding altered Galton's beliefs. He continued to insist that intelligence is linked to social class and that "the fittest" parents produce superior offspring.


	Facing History Resources • Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement (Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc., Brookline, Massachusetts) 2002, Chapter 3, "Evolution, 'Progress,' and Eugenics."
	Print and Video Resources • The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism by Allan Chase (Alfred A. Knopf, New York) 1976. • Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences by Francis Galton (Macmillan, London) 1869. • In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (revised edition) by Daniel J. Kevles (Harvard University Press, Cambridge) 1995.
	Web Resources • Cold Spring Harbor: American Eugenics Image Archive (http://vector.cshl.org/eugenics/)

¹ English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture by Francis Galton (Macmillan, London) 1874.
² Ibid.
³ Francis Galton: The Life and Work of a Victorian Genius by D. W. Forrest (New York: Taplinger, New York) 1974, p. 260.