Part Three: Francis Galton: Inventor of Eugenics

Robert Evans (0:03)

Oh my goodness, I didn't see you walk in to the internet where I don't ever see you. And you don't really see me unless you're watching the Netflix. So I guess actually quite a few of you do see. Anyway, this is Behind the Bastards, this is a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. You know that. This is the second week that we're going to be covering Francis Galton, the man who invented racism, probably the flippant title I'm going to use for the episode. He's really the guy who invented eugenics and a bunch of fun math stuff and shit. We'll talk about some of that too, but it's less interesting than the horrible things he did, which are certainly the most notable part of his life. Speaking of people who did horrible, nope, David Bell, you don't do horrible things, do you?

Dave Anthony (0:42)

That's true, that's true.

I've had a big, since, oh man, since we last recorded, I got a second chair. You see my second chair? Oh, I do, I do. It looks exactly like the chair I'm sitting in. And I went to the Six Flags that kills people. Oh, great. The one, you know the one that's been like giving people comas and stuff? I went to it this weekend.

Robert Evans (1:03)

Oh yeah, it was like a specific, like brain stuff, right?

Dave Anthony (1:06)

Yeah, it was not crowded. It was great.

Robert Evans (1:08)

That's good, that's the smart way. Once there's a scandal, that's the right time to go to an amusement park.

Like after Schlitterbond decapitated that kid, RIP, but that's when you go, that's when you go to Schlitterbond, yeah.

Dave Anthony (1:20)

Exactly.

Robert Evans (1:24)

Well, it's probably time we get back to Francis Galton.

Dave Anthony (1:27)

Unfortunately, yeah, yeah.

Robert Evans (1:30)

Let's get back. So, we had left off in the 1870s, Francis has invented the term eugenics and has started spreading it around English society. And he's going from this point on, he's gonna keep writing books about eugenics and publish scientific papers, but he's also constantly throughout this period, he's writing like news articles and opinion columns, he's suggesting laws, he's going to be throughout this as his understanding and beliefs about eugenics evolve, constantly trying to push society to adopt legal schema based on his ideas.

That is from the beginning, like a major focus for Galton. In 1874, he published a new book, English Men of Science, Their Nature and Nurture. In this book, he did the same thing he always does, where he looks at the guys he considers eminent and then tries to figure out like how many kids did they find, and like what families did they come from. A lot of lawyers. Right. This time, he was a scientist, and he asked like 190 fellows from the Royal Society of Science to send back like self-reported data about their families and their education, and like a hundred of them did, roughly. His goal was to try to figure out the relative impact of nature versus nurture, right? Look at what these scientists say about like what inspired them and made them become great scientists, and try to figure out how much is, you know, heredity play into scientific genius, and how much is like just how you raise people, right? And this is why Galton becomes, if you've all heard, everyone's heard the term like nature versus nurture, we're all familiar with that concept. Galton is the first guy to name it, right? Not that people hadn't wondered about this before, but nature versus nurture, using those specific words to discuss that comes from Francis Galton.

His biographer, Michael Bullwer, suspects that Galton took the phrase itself from a passage in Shakespeare's The Tempest, where Prospero calls his adopted son, Caliban, quote, a devil, a born devil, on whose nature, nurture can never stick. Now, one thing Galton found, as he goes through the self-reported backstories of these scientists, is that first sons are twice as likely to become scientists as youngest sons, right? They're like way likelier. Galton accurately credits this to the advantage of nurture. Obviously, there's not like a genetic reason that the first son is gonna be better at science. These are because of like social things, right? And he concludes basically, well, first sons, obviously they get more resources. It's a period of time in which like legally, if you're the first son, you pretty much have to inherit most of what you're, if not everything that your dad has, right? Like that's a big part of like what colonialism is second and third sons needs something to do to go make their fortune. So they go to the colonies or something, right?