Charles Darwin

by Andrew Norman

  Francis Galton

  In 1883, the year after Darwin’s death, Francis Galton’s Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development was published. In it, he developed more fully his ideas about ‘eugenics’ – a word which he himself invented and defined as

  the science of improving stock, which is not confined to questions of judicious mating, but which [gives] to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.7

  In his ‘Introduction’, Galton states that ‘We must free our minds of a great deal of prejudice before we can rightly judge of the direction in which different races need to be improved.’

  In every race of domesticated animals, and especially in the rapidly-changing race of man, there are elements, some ancestral and others the result of degeneration, that are of little or no value, or are positively harmful. We may, of course, be mistaken about some few of these … but, notwithstanding this possibility, we are justified in roundly asserting that the natural characteristics of every human race admit of large improvement in many directions easy to specify.8

  Here, the words ‘of every human race’ are reassuring, in that Galton regards his aims and objectives as being of global application and relevance.

  ‘Composite portraiture’

  Under this heading, Galton describes how he took photographs of people who were engaged in various selected occupations. He then superimposed one image upon another in order to determine what traits, if any, the members of each group had in common with one another.9

  An attempt to identify criminals, using the technique of composite portraiture

  Galton was now able to contrast his ‘composite portraits’ of, say, the Royal Engineers, with ‘the coarse and low types of face found among the criminal classes’.

  It is unhappily a fact that fairly distinct types of criminals breeding true to their kind have become established, and are one of the saddest disfigurements of modern civilization.

  However, of the type of face which he regarded as being of a typically criminal nature, Galton was able to produce only two examples.10 Despite the paucity of evidence he declared, ‘I am sure that the method of composite portraiture opens a fertile field of research to ethnologists11 – ethnology being the study of the characteristics of various peoples and the differences and relationships between them.12

  The notion of an ‘ideal race’

  It is the essential notion of a race that there should be some ideal, typical form from which the individuals may deviate in all directions, but about which they chiefly cluster, and towards which their descendants will continue to cluster.13

  Galton now proceeds to describe those qualities which, in his view, are desirable and how they may be measured. They include stature, strength, capacity for labour, acuteness of hearing, and sense of vision and touch. Of particular value in an individual, is the ability to recall to mind visual images, number forms, conversations, and the written word.

  Evolution by natural selection is a process which is neither intelligent nor compassionate

  The process of evolution on this earth, so far as we can judge, has been carried out neither with intelligence nor ruth [pity], but entirely through the routine of various sequences, commonly called ‘laws’, established or necessitated we know not how.14

  A breeding programme designed to eliminate inherited ‘barbarism’

  The hereditary taint due to the primeval barbarism of our [presumably the human] race … will have to be bred out of it before our descendants can rise to the position of free members of an intelligent society … .15

  The dangers of ‘overbreeding’

  When it came to ‘the stringent selection of the best specimens to rear and breed from …’ in order to promote ‘the unlimited improvement of highly-bred animals …’, Galton issues a caveat. ‘Overbred animals have little stamina … an increasing delicacy of constitution … [and] after a few generations … fragility.’16 He also points out that ‘diminished fertility’ is a feature of ‘highly-bred animals’.

  The limitations of ‘selectivity’

  Were a nation to ‘banish a number of the humbler castes – the bakers, the bricklayers, and the smiths’, said Galton, – then that nation ‘would soon come to grief’. Therefore

  it will be easily understood that these difficulties, which are so formidable in the case of plants and animals, which we can mate as we please and destroy when we please, would make the maintenance of a highly-selected breed of men an impossibility.17

  Nevertheless, this did not mean that the role of the eugenicist was redundant.

  The favouring of a ‘high race’ over a ‘low race’: the concept of ‘merciful eugenics’

  A ‘low race’, said Galton, ‘must be subjected to rigorous selection. The few best specimens of that race can alone be allowed to become parents, and not many of their descendants can be allowed to live’. Here he appears to be stating unequivocally that most of the offspring of ‘low race’ parents are to be eliminated. He continues:

  On the other hand, if a higher race be substituted for the low one, all this terrible misery disappears. The most merciful form of which I ventured to call ‘eugenics’ would consist in watching for the indications of superior strains or races, and in so favouring them that their progeny shall outnumber and gradually replace that of the old one.18

  If a ‘superior race’ prevails, the outcome is enrichment, whereas if an ‘inferior race’ prevails, the outcome is unhappiness

  ‘There exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race.’

  That the members of an inferior class should dislike being elbowed out of the way is another matter; but it may be somewhat brutally argued that whenever two individuals struggle for a single place, one must yield, and that there will be no more unhappiness on the whole, if the inferior yield to the superior than conversely, whereas the world will be permanently enriched by the success of the superior.19

  In the light of such remarks, Galton cannot complain if his remarks are construed as advocating the wholesale destruction of, what he terms, the ‘inferior races’.

  In Galton’s view, the colonist may legitimately grab the spoils

  It was likely, said Galton, that the Arabs would ‘become one of the most effective of the colonizing nations … who may, as I trust, extrude hereafter the coarse and lazy negro from at least the [metalliferous] regions [those containing or producing metal]20 of tropical Africa’.21

  The weakness of the Malthusian doctrine

  The check to over-population mainly advocated by Malthus is a prudential delay in the time of marriage … .

  In other words, by postponing marriage to a later age, the female spouse’s years for potential childbearing would be foreshortened. However

  such a doctrine … would only be followed by the prudent and self-denying; it would be neglected by the impulsive and self-seeking. Those whose race we especially want to have, would leave few descendants, while those whose race we especially want to be quit of, would crowd the vacant space with their progeny … .22

  Malthus’s proposals were therefore, in Galton’s view, impracticable.

  The way forward: celibacy for the ‘less fitted’

  few would deserve better of their country than those who determine to live celibate lives, through a reasonable conviction that their issue would probably be less fitted than the generality to play their part as citizens.23

  Galton and God

  As far as the notion of God was concerned, it appears that Galton and Darwin were not far apart. For example, Galton refers to

  Our ignorance of the goal and purport of human life, and the mistrust we are apt to feel of the guidance of the spiritual sense, on account of its proved readiness to accept illusions as realities … .24

  * * *

  One of the problems with Galton’s Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Develo
pment is that the author tends to vacillate in his opinions. For example, he appears, on the one hand, to propose extreme and drastic measures in order to achieve his eugenic goals, and on the other, to advocate a ‘merciful’ form of eugenics, based on voluntary participation.

  * * *

  At the International Health Exhibition held in London in 1884, Galton established an anthropometric laboratory (anthropometry being the scientific study of the measurements and proportions of the human body)25 for the purpose of collecting statistics as to the acuteness of the senses, and the strength, height, and dimensions of large numbers of people.26 In 1901 a quarterly journal entitled Biometrika was founded, to promote the study of biometrics (the statistical analysis of biological data) with Galton as its consulting editor. In 1904, The Galton Laboratory for Research into Human Genetics was established at University College London, where, in 1907, Galton initiated a scholarship in eugenic researches.

  On 16 May 1904 Galton read a paper entitled ‘Eugenics: its Definition, Scope, and Aims’ to the Sociological Society at the School of Economics (London University), with mathematician and statistician Professor Karl Pearson FRS in the chair. In a ‘highly selected society’, ordered in accordance with his ‘eugenic’ philosophy, said Galton:

  The general tone of domestic, social, and political life would be higher. The race as a whole would be less foolish, less frivolous, less excitable, and politically more provident than now. We should be better fitted to fulfil our vast imperial opportunities [an indication that on this occasion, he was evidently referring to the British race].

  As a way forward, Galton advocates the following courses of action:

  1. Dissemination of a knowledge of the laws of heredity, so far as they are surely known, and promotion of their further study.

  2. Historical inquiry into the rates with which the various classes of society (classified according to civic usefulness) have contributed to the [size of the overall] population at various times, in ancient and modern nations.

  3. Systematic collection of facts showing the circumstances under which large and thriving families have most frequently originated; in other words, the conditions of eugenics. The definition of a thriving family … is one in which the children have gained distinctly superior positions to those who were their classmates in early life.

  Galton advocates the compilation of a ‘golden book’ of such thriving families, to include details such as a person’s ‘race, profession, and residence; also of their own respective parentages, and of their brothers and sisters’.

  4. Influences affecting marriage. If unsuitable marriages from the eugenic point of view were banned socially, or even regarded with the unreasonable disfavour which some attach to cousin-marriages, very few would be made.

  Having advocated a system of eugenics which is based more on coercion than on voluntary participation, Galton insists that such a system

  must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion. What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction. The improvement of our stock seems to me one of the highest objects that we can reasonably attempt.27

  Galton died on 17 January 1911. In his will he left the sum of approximately £45,000 for the establishment of the Galton Chair of Eugenics at the University of London with the wish, which was granted, that Karl Pearson be appointed as its first professor.28

  The views of Alfred Russel Wallace on the subject of Eugenics

  In 1890 an alternative view to Galton’s was put forward by Wallace (who was to outlive Darwin by thirty-one years).

  I contributed to the Fortnightly Review an article on ‘Human Selection’, which is, I consider, though very short, the most important contribution I have made to the science of sociology and the cause of human progress. The article was written with two objects in view. The first and most important was to show that the various proposals of [writer and novelist] Grant Allen, Mr Francis Galton, and some American writers, to attempt the direct improvement of the human race by forms of artificial elimination and selection, are both unscientific and unnecessary; I also wished to show that the great bugbear of the opponents of social reform — too rapid increase of population — is entirely imaginary, and that the very same agencies which, under improved social conditions, will bring about a real and efective selection of the physically, mentally, and morally best, will also tend towards a diminution of the rate of increase of the population.

  A year later I contributed a paper to the Boston Arena … and I pointed out that a more real and effective progress will only be made when the social environment is so greatly improved as to give women a real choice in marriage, and thus lead both to the elimination of the lower, and more rapid increase of the higher types of humanity.29

  I showed that the only method of advance for us, as for the lower animals, is in some form of natural selection, and that the only mode of natural selection that can act alike on physical, mental, and moral qualities will come into play under a social system which gives equal opportunities of culture, training, leisure, and happiness to every individual.30

  In other words, according to Wallace, the goals of the eugenicists could just as easily be achieved by effecting an improvement in the social milieu.

  Charles B. Davenport

  In 1898, US biologist and eugenicist Charles P. Davenport became Director of the Biological Laboratory of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences at Cold Springs Harbor, New York. Here, in 1910, he established the Eugenics Record Office, where a database containing records of the ‘mentally deficient’, the deaf, the blind, and the insane, were collected and stored. The outcome was that, between 1905 and 1972, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 such people were sterilized, with or without their consent, as part of a federal government funded programme.31

  In 1921 the Second International Eugenics Congress was held in New York City (the first having been held in London in 1912) and, the following year, the American Eugenics Society was established.

  Karl Pearson

  Whereas Francis Galton showed a degree of hesitation when it came to the question of eugenics in practice, Pearson was constrained by no such moral scruples. For example, in a lecture delivered to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle, UK in November 1900, he stated:

  If you have once realized the force of heredity, you will see in natural selection the choice of the physically and mentally fitter to be the parents of the next generation a most munificent provision for the progress of all forms of life. Nurture and education may immensely aid the social machine, but they must be repeated generation by generation; they will not in themselves reduce the tendency to the production of bad stock. Conscious or unconscious selection can alone bring that about.

  What I have said about bad stock seems to me hold for the lower races of man. How many centuries, how many thousands of years, have the Kaffir or the negro held large districts in Africa undisturbed by the white man? Yet their intertribal struggles have not yet produced a civilization in the least comparable with the Aryan [a word which, four decades later, was to have the gravest connotations, as will be seen]. Educate and nurture them as you will, I do not believe that you will succeed in modifying the stock. History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race. If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve [into] a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves … .32

  As regards the ‘white man’ who ventures to

  lands of which the agricultural and mineral resources are not worked to the full … he could either settle down and live alongside the inferior race [or] the only healthy alternative is that he should go and completely drive out the inferior race.33

  The struggle means suffering, intense sufferi
ng, while it is in progress; but that struggle and that suffering have been the stages by which the white man has reached his present stage of development.34

  You will see that my view – and I think it may be called the scientific view of a nation – is that of an organized whole, kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races, and with equal races by the struggle for trade-routes and for the sources of raw material and of food supply. This is the natural history view of mankind … .35

  Mankind as a whole, like the individual man, advances through pain and suffering only. The path of progress is strewn with the wreck of nations; traces are everywhere to be seen of the hecatombs [sacrifices] of inferior races, and of victims who found not the narrow way to the greater perfection. Yet these dead peoples are, in very truth, the stepping-stones on which mankind has arisen to the higher intellectual and deeper emotional life of today.36

  Pearson was, therefore, a eugenicist, a racist, a warmonger and a ‘white supremacist’.

  NOTES

  1. Oxford Dictionaries Online.

  2. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, and A Summary view of the Principle of Population, pp. 127–9.

  3. Ibid, p. 171.

  4. Ibid, p.130

  5. Ibid, p.172.

  6. Darwin, Erasmus. ‘The Temple of Nature’, Notes, p.45, published posthumously in 1803, quoted in Charles Darwin’s The Life of Erasmus Darwin, p.39.

  7. Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, p.17, Footnote 2.

  8. Ibid, p.2.

  9. Ibid, pp. 6–7.

  10. Ibid, pp. 10–11.

  11. Ibid, p.13.