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 Francis Galton (1822-1911) is considered the founder of the eugenics movement. Galton came from a prominent English family and studied medicine at Cambridge University. He gave up medicine but remained intensely interested in the nature of human differences. He was inspired by the work of his famous cousin, Charles Darwin, to begin his own investigations into the role heredity played in intelligence, poverty, and criminality. In his first book on the topic, Hereditary Genius (1869), he claimed that notable figures in English and European history owed their accomplishments to their superior hereditary stock.
Galton had been attracted to the ideology of Social Darwinism, which justified social inequalities as a natural result of the “survival of the fittest “ between superior and inferior members of humanity. By the 1880s Galton claimed this theory was not working because too many of the inferior classes and races were kept alive through “false philanthropy.” In 1883 he invented the term eugenics (derived from the Greek root, meaning well born or good birth) to restore what he saw as nature’s proper course. Galton promoted eugenics as a modern science with a civic purpose where the most fit should have more children and the less fit should be discouraged from reproducing. While his ideas never attracted a wide audience in England, his ideas generated great interest and influenced public policies in the United States and later on in Nazi Germany.
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