The First Eugenicist

Was Francis Galton wrong to want to improve the human race?

Kenneth Silber from the July 2005 issue

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Unlike Adam Smith and Fr�d�ric Bastiat, Galton showed no recognition of how specialization in a free market could grapple with the demands of a complex civilization. Indeed, as Brookes notes, Galton's view of intellectual achievement was distinctly old-fashioned. Having grown up in a time when intellectuals operated across multiple fields, and having done so as well, he was now trying to preserve a particular type of intellectual--polymaths like himself.

And if human capabilities were under dangerous strain, charity to the poor could make matters worse by allowing the unfit to continue procreating. Britain's 1905 election of a Liberal government committed to a welfare state seemed a setback for Galton's vision. The industrial revolution's failure to eliminate poverty, he reasoned, was more explicable if those in the lower orders were inherently inferior.

Galton lived to see his ideas gain considerable acceptance, as eugenics societies and journals sprang up in the new century. The movement continued to grow after his death, spreading to multiple countries and across the political spectrum. Having long found acolytes on the right, eugenics now gained enthusiasts among liberals and socialists who embraced hereditary improvement as a progressive cause. Thus, in the 1927 U.S. Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell, liberal Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writing for the 8-to-1 majority, justified a woman's forced sterilization on the grounds that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." In socialist Sweden, such sterilizations would last into the 1970s.

Extreme Measures does not present Galton in an entirely unfavorable light, despite the objectionable nature of some of his ideas. He had a powerful mind and a laudable intellectual curiosity. He was physically courageous and could be charming. He was proud that all the men on his Africa expedition, white and black, came back alive, and seems to have been a devoted, if emotionally guarded, husband. But he remains, overall, an unsympathetic character, an "immense snob" in Brookes' words, and one who dressed his snobbery in elaborate scientific garb.

The book sheds light on a question whose answer is too often assumed rather than examined: What was wrong with eugenics? Beyond its unsavory political ramifications, it was also based on shoddy science. Galton made sweeping assertions with little or no evidence. He categorized the intellects of large groups based on personal impressions and relied heavily on vague concepts such as the "eminence" of people under study. He systematically downplayed environmental influences, and his assiduous search for data often was aimed at bolstering preconceived notions, not finding the truth.

And of course his ideas did have a strongly authoritarian cast. Coercive techniques would be employed if people did not perform their assigned tasks willingly. Although he contemplated a voluntary approach, it is hard to imagine his policies taking hold without force. What if people outside the approved ranks continued to interbreed? What if some members of a eugenic culture chose not to participate? Galton did not foresee eugenics applied with Nazi brutality, but he was vague as to what techniques were acceptable. In retrospect, it is not surprising that, even in democratic countries, his ideas took such form as forced sterilizations of people seen as having little use to society.

Was Galton wrong to try to improve humanity biologically? Emerging or prospective genetic technologies are sometimes tarred with the brush of Nazism and accused of being harbingers of a second era of eugenics. Unlike Galton's vision, however, the new genetic technologies are based on an understanding of how heredity actually works, including recognition of environmental influences and individual variations. Such technologies are not inherently authoritarian and do not involve control of human mating.

Moreover, in the near term, genetic technologies will focus on such objectives as preventing cystic fibrosis or providing better eyesight, not pursuing some singular teleological vision of a perfected human. The prospects of genetically improving human intelligence or personality remain distant even now; insofar as they become real, they must be approached with caution regarding tradeoffs and unanticipated consequences. But these technologies do promise a welcome expansion of human possibilities and control over our fates, so long as they are used voluntarily by individuals and parents, not imposed by the state or restricted through the pressure of moralistic busybodies. It would be an additional tragic consequence of Galton's eugenics if its dark memory stained the very different and far more benign biological techniques available today, and tomorrow.�