Quote of the Day (Francis Galton, on Evolution and Eugenics)

“I was encouraged by the new views to pursue many inquiries which had long interested me, and which clustered round the central topics of Heredity and the possible improvement of the Human Race.”—Sir Francis Galton, Memories of My Life (1908)

It’s funny how some of the major advocates of science-based racism fell short of their own warped standards of perfection. In the last century, you need only look at Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and the object of their psychopathic veneration, Adolf Hitler. In the Victorian Era, the unprepossessing physical specimen would have been Sir Francis Galton (pictured), born on this date 190 years ago today.

The “new views” to which Galton (1822-1911) alluded in the quote above derived from cousin Charles Darwin’s epochal 1859 study, The Origin of Species. It’s been said that genius is not far removed from madness, and Galton treaded that line consistently—including, to preposterous effect, an equation linking male-pattern baldness to brain activity. (It may have been the first time in history that mathematics was employed to demonstrate that physical disfavor was a sign of genius. Talk about self-interested work!)

Now, this eccentric polymath (exploration was among his many endeavors) strove to prove that a) intelligence could be inherited and b) that laws should be propagated to help winnow out the more feeble-minded. He even coined the term for his pseudo-science: eugenics. Darwinians who dismiss how interrelated the work of Darwin and Galton is are best advised to read the fifth chapter of The Descent of Man (1871), “On the Development of the Intellectual and Moral Faculties,“ where Galton is cited approvingly several times.

Over the years, it’s become increasingly common to tie Christopher Columbus to the demographic decimation that virtually wiped indigenous tribes from North America. But there’s a far more direct line between Galton and the Holocaust.

This was the man who, after all, indicated that North American Indians were ''melancholic''; Negroes possessed ''neither patience reticence nor dignity''; and the Irish, after the potato famine, became ''low and coarse.'' Undesirables who procreated, he believed, should be declared “enemies of the state.” There really wasn’t that much distance between that statement and Hitler’s euthanasia program, which sought to eliminate “life not fit for life”--a kind of trial run for the gas chambers.