Part Four: Francis Galton: Inventor of Eugenics

Cool Zone Media (0:01)

Coolzone Media.

Robert Evans (0:03)

Welcome back once again to Behind the Bastards, part four of our series on Francis Galton, the inventor of racism, by which I mean eugenics. Here with me to talk about racism is David Bell, who is not racist, as far as I can prove.

David Bell (0:20)

I tell everybody that all the time.

Cool Zone Media (0:22)

A lot, suspiciously often, actually.

David Bell (0:25)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (0:26)

Shout it out of cars a lot.

David Bell (0:28)

Yeah, oh yeah.

I wanted to, sorry, we've covered my shirt with my cats. I do want to describe my pants. Sure, please. Because I'm wearing pajama pants with fish on them. And it says, asleep at the real. It's a fishing joke. Yeah, yeah, asleep at the real.

Robert Evans (0:45)

That's good. That's good.

David Bell (0:47)

I wanted people to know about that. That and I'm not racist. Thank you.

Robert Evans (0:51)

Yeah, that and you know a fishing joke. Well, you know who didn't know fishing jokes? Francis Galton. I don't think he got his hands dirty outside of doing surgery as a young man all that often.

So this is Behind the Bastards. And I'm not really interested in giving a complete history of all of the non-shitty things Galton did, but he didn't have a lot of major achievements. We've talked about some of them, the concept of regression to the mean, statistical concept of correlation, a bunch of different math stuff that Galton did and either invented or was the first guy to figure out or helped to figure out. He had a lot of influence, just like the way we do science and conduct scientific studies, particularly those that involve statistics, the way we survey populations, twin studies. Galton had a lot to do with all of that. You should also note that while he was becoming the first racism nerd in the history of either racism or nerds, he was also becoming the first weatherman or one of the first weathermen. In April of 1875, he published what is probably the first weather map ever published in the Times of London.

It did show the previous day's weather. I'm not really sure what the purpose was.

David Bell (1:57)

Like, I don't know. Hey, you guys shared somewhere, man.

SPEAKER_4 (2:00)

He's showing that in the documentation.

David Bell (2:02)

Now imagine that for like tomorrow.

Robert Evans (2:04)

But tomorrow.

David Bell (2:05)

Yeah. Yeah, I get it.

Robert Evans (2:09)

By the late 1880s, Francis was spending most of his free time either in meetings with various eugenics groups that had sprouted up all around Britain. And he's again-

David Bell (2:18)

Meetings.

Robert Evans (2:19)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Meetings. You got to have your racism meetings.

David Bell (2:22)

Sounds fun. Yeah.

Robert Evans (2:23)

The problem with our modern racists is that they don't have enough bureaucracy around the bigotry. Galton and his boys were taking minutes from multiple different groups as they wrote about why the poor should be sterilized. They're not quite doing that yet, but he wants them to be doing that. He's pushing them to do that.

The other thing he's doing during this period of time is helping to invent what we now call forensic science. He's not the inventor of forensic science, he's like any list of the founding fathers of forensic science has got to have Galton on there somewhere because he is very influential. His interest in forensics seems to have been spurred not just by his related eugenics work, obviously that has a lot to do with it, but by the fact that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes book, A Study in Scarlet, in 1887 Galton stated in his autobiography that his interest in forensics was spurred by a sort of Sherlock Holmes fascination. Now, the way that's written in the text, he may have just been saying that like, I'm like Sherlock Holmes, and not I was influenced to want to get into this by Sherlock Holmes. I'm not 100% sure there, but he was a massive fan of Doyle's novels, and regardless of kind of how it timed out, Holmes influenced him, because he really wanted to see himself as that kind of a figure, right? Like he clearly kind of idolized Sherlock Holmes, and took Doyle seriously, as like when he would write about like forensics, and like science, like the science of investigations, right? Like he even though Doyle, again, he's just kind of like writing books, right? He took him seriously as like a scientific thinker on the subject.

David Bell (3:56)

Sherlock Holmes was like the first joker. And what I mean is that like the character in Evacuee is fine. It just created some of the worst fans. You know what I mean? Like I like Sherlock. I've read all the Sherlock Holmes. It's very entertaining stuff. It's just it's once you start becoming like, I want to be like Sherlock Holmes that things get troublesome, right?