Most famous scientists picked a thing. But a few polymaths, like Aristotle and even Sina, picked everything. Francis Galton, one of the most important thinkers of 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. 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 for So, it was very 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 were learning.
For Galton, as for most Victorians, nature held all 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 environment or experience. And, like Darwin, he sought evidence for his theory.
The first step was to pick some traits 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 very first use of the phrase nature versus nurture. The book also, by the way, 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 he was barely scratching the surface on 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 than twins, should behave differently when raised apart.
Galton didn't conduct his own twin studies, but he did outline 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, Thought Bubble, 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 P 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, Thought Bubble. 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 on 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 person 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 or 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 Kalakaks. 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 Kalakak family that was descended from its founding father's legitimate marriage, and the branch that descended from that father's affair with a, quote, nameless feebleminded girl. Goddard concluded that feeblemindedness was strongly heritable and a danger to democracy.
Although he later He later admitted that 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 is a big-time fan of Galtonian eugenics, translated the work of three major French psychologists in 1910. This translation was picked up by Louis 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. His 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 so 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... 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 U.S. birth control clinic in 1916, Margaret Sanger. Sanger founded the American Birth Control League to aid the American birth control. 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.
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 a much more important for states. They wanted to understand their populations and now shape them.
Compulsory sterilization was challenged in the U.S. 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 in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney Studio in Missoula, of Montana, and it's made with the help of all these nice people, and our animation team is Thought Cafe. Crash Course is a Complexly production.
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