Cousins: Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton and the birth of eugenics

Nicholas W. Gillham

First published: 24 August 2009

 

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2009.00379.x

Citations: 2

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Abstract

Sir Francis Galton, scientist, African Explorer and statistician, was a key figure in statistical history. He was the man who devised the statistical concepts of regression and correlation. He was also Charles Darwin's cousin. And, inspired by his reading of Darwin, he was the founder of eugenics: the “science” of improving the human race through selective breeding. Nicholas Gillham tells of a darker side to statistics and heredity.

In December 1910, shortly before his death at the age of 89, Sir Francis Galton finished Kantsaywhere, a novel describing his notion of a eugenic utopia. Sir Algernon Methuen, the publisher, had earlier encouraged Galton to write his autobiography so it was logical for Galton to turn to Methuen requesting that he publish Kantsaywhere. Methuen was not taken with the manuscript and rejected it. Nevertheless, parts of Galton's novel appeared posthumously in the magisterial four-volume biography published by his acolyte, the great statistician Karl Pearson1.

In the pages of Galton's novel, the eugenic charms of Kantsaywhere were revealed through the journal of the late I. Donoghue, a professor of vital statistics. Apparently, a Mr Neverwas made Kantsaywhere possible by leaving his property to the colony provided that the income “be employed in improving the stock of the place, especially the human breed”1. A council governed Kantsaywhere, but the Eugenics College of Kantsaywhere determined the fate of its people based on a test establishing the heritable physical and mental gifts of each inhabitant. Those failing the test were segregated into labour colonies, where propagation—having children—was a crime, or else were encouraged to emigrate. Others taking the test might pass with the equivalent of an ordinary degree or with honours. Donoghue's friend Augusta Allfancy passed with flying colours and was made a Probationer.

Subsequently, she attended a round of parties to ensure that she met an appropriate male Probationer. The purpose, of course, was that between them they would enrich the human stock with many children of superior intellect and physique. Galton, always conscious of the importance of numbers, felt that the ideal age for somebody like Augusta Allfancy to form a reproductive alliance was 22. This would permit the production of four generations of superior people per century, assuming her progeny and their progeny married at the same age. Those who passed the first examination but not the honours examination could engage in limited propagation.

Although Kantsaywhere represented Galton's ideal eugenic community, the eugenics movement he did so much to unleash led to anything but utopias. Its main legacy would be a record of involuntary sterilisation of supposedly “feebleminded” individuals in the USA, the Canadian Province of Alberta, the Scandinavian countries and, of course, Nazi Germany. Eugenics also resulted in racial discrimination. An example is the Immigration Act of 1924 in the USA, which greatly restricted immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe from entering that country.

How was it that Sir Francis Galton came to initiate the eugenics movement? The defining moment came after Galton read his cousin Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species2.

Darwin and Galton

Darwin and Galton were grandsons of the Birmingham doctor Erasmus Darwin (Figure 1) by different wives. Darwin's father Robert was the son of Erasmus Darwin's first wife, Mary Howard, who died when she was only 30. His mother was Susannah Wedgwood, the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood—a good friend of Erasmus Darwin's. The remarkable connection between the Wedgwood and Darwin families continued into the next generation since Charles Darwin married Emma Wedgwood, the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood's son Josiah II.

Figure 1

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Cousins. Top: Erasmus Darwin from a print after a painting by Rawlinson of Derby (volume I)1; bottom left: Charles Darwin, aged 511; bottom right: Francis Galton, aged about 501

Several years after his first wife's death, Erasmus Darwin married Elizabeth Collier Sacheveral-Pole, the widow of an elderly colonel. Their daughter, Violetta, married Samuel Tertius Galton. Francis Galton, the youngest of their eight children, was born in 1822, 13 years after his cousin Charles Darwin. The Galtons were Quaker businessmen. The Society of Friends eventually disowned the family because they ran a lucrative gun foundry. The Darwins and Galtons were wealthy so neither Charles Darwin nor Francis Galton ever had to work for a living.

Like Charles Darwin before him it appeared that Francis Galton was headed for a medical career. After graduating from King Edward's School in Birmingham, Galton apprenticed to the General Hospital in that city, subsequently moving to King's College in London in 1839 to study medicine. Darwin and his wife Emma were living nearby in Gower Street, in rented accommodation whose gaudy colours led them to name it Macaw Cottage. Darwin, who had hated his medical studies at Edinburgh, had been sent by his despairing father to Cambridge to study for an ordinary degree in arts and sciences in preparation for a clerical career. Instead, John Stevens Henslow, the Professor of Botany, befriended Darwin and his future career became clear.

It would not be incorrect to describe Galton as a polymath. Besides his explorations and his statistical work, in meteorology he discovered the anti-cyclone and he originated the “arch, loop and whorl” system of classifying fingerprints—a system adopted by Scotland Yard in 1901 and still in use today.

His urge to quantify was perhaps extreme. He published in 1872, in the Fortnightly Review, a statistical enquiry into whether praying worked or not: “The efficacy of prayer seems to me a simple, as it is a perfectly appropriate and legitimate, subject of scientific inquiry. [The] decision will lie based upon data more or less justly handled …”. His method was to compare the lifespans of those whose health and long lives were most frequently prayed for, which he reckoned to be clergymen and monarchs. Clergymen, he found, lived no longer than anyone else and “sovereigns are literally the shortest lived of all who have the advantage of affluence. The prayer ‘Long Live the King’ has therefore no efficacy.”

He developed a “beauty-map” of the British Isles based on how many pretty women he encountered (London had the highest score, Aberdeen the lowest). He wished to record (for science) the steatopygia, or large buttocks, of women of tribes he encountered in southern Africa. A particularly pronounced example was displayed by the wife of a mission worker. Delicacy forbade that he should measure her directly but he did have his surveying instruments with him. He therefore stood at a distance and used his sextant. He mapped the dimensions of interest using trigonometry and logs.

Darwin had just returned from the Beagle voyage when, in 1837, he met his cousin in London. He advised Galton to interrupt his medical studies to attend Cambridge where rigorous mathematical training would enable him to be an even better physician.

Galton went up to Cambridge, studied hard for the Tripos honours degree in mathematics, had something akin to a nervous breakdown and subsequently graduated with an ordinary degree. He never returned to medicine. (His interests, however, remained broad: see Box.)

Hereditary talent and character

After Cambridge, Galton drifted for several years, but in 1850 he organised, planned and paid for his own African expedition. He originally meant to venture north from South Africa across the Kalahari Desert to Lake Ngami, discovered by David Livingstone, but Sir Harry Smith, Governor of the Cape Colony, dissuaded him because he would have to traverse territory north of the Orange River where the Boers were restive. So Galton's expedition sailed west around the Cape of Good Hope to what is now Namibia. He landed at Walvis Bay and proceeded inland via a string of Rhenish mission stations. There were adventures galore before Galton's expedition turned north into unexplored territory. He discovered a new and sophisticated tribe, the Ovampo, and also the great Etosha saltpan. Despite adventure, risk and hardship it was a scientific expedition rather than a gung-ho one. All along the way Galton made careful measurements of latitude, longitude and altitude—and much else beside.

Galton returned to England in 1852, was awarded the Founder's Medal by the Royal Geographical Society, completed his book Tropical South Africa3 and courted and married Louisa Butler, the daughter of a former headmaster of Harrow.

In 1855 he published the Art of Travel4, a kind of field guide to making one's way successfully in the bush. This enormously popular book went through eight editions between 1855 and 1893 and was reprinted in 2001. Galton was also very active in the Royal Geographical Society, focusing particularly on the discovery of the African Great Lakes by explorers like Burton, Speke, Grant, Livingstone and Baker.

But the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 changed the direction of his life. It so profoundly affected Galton that it “made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in human thought generally”5. To show how natural selection worked, Darwin often used examples of artificial selection such as the great number of pigeon varieties that breeders had selected. Such examples must have caught Galton's eye as he embarked on his quest to improve the human race. In 1865 he published “Hereditary Talent and Character”, a two-part paper in Macmillan's Magazine6. By choosing Macmillan's, Galton was courting a wide audience: this was one of the many highbrow Victorian magazines that serialised novels, published poetry and included learned articles by educators, scientists and the like. Galton's method in his paper was to establish pedigrees of men of accomplishment. The expectation was that if “talent and character” were inherited, a father of distinction was likely to have an accomplished son.

Encouraged by his results, Galton greatly expanded his analysis in Hereditary Genius7. There he grouped eminent men by profession—judges, military commanders, Lord Chancellors and the like. Much to his satisfaction, he found that if fathers were gifted, sons were more likely to be talented than were more distant relatives. In his view this established the primacy of heredity. He dismissed the obvious objection that an eminent father was more likely to find a suitable position for his son than one less fortunate. That is, environment might be important too.

Darwin effusively praised Hereditary Genius. He wrote to Galton: “I have only read 50 pages of your book (to Judges), but I must exhale myself, else something will go wrong with my inside. I do not think I ever in all of my life read anything more interesting and original—and how well and clearly you put every point!”5.

Theories of inheritance

Darwin needed heritable variations on which natural selection could act. To address this problem, he elaborated his theory of “Pangenesis” in the second volume of Variation in Animals and Plants under Domestication8. Darwin hypothesised that particles he called gemmules were gathered from all over the body into the sexual organs for distribution to the progeny. To create the variation for selection to work on, gemmules had to be modifiable in some way. Darwin imagined two mechanisms. First, gemmules were injuriously affected by changed conditions so that they did not aggregate properly. The second mechanism supposed that alterations in environmental conditions could cause changes in gemmules, a notion akin to acquired characteristics, something that bothered Galton a great deal.

It seemed logical that, in animals at least, the gemmules might be transported to the sex organs from the various parts of the body via the bloodstream. Anxious to test his cousin's hypothesis, Galton decided to use pure-breeding rabbits called silver-greys as recipients for blood from donors having different characteristics. One or both parents were transfused. They were bred to see whether they produced progeny with any of the unique characteristics of the blood donor. Galton kept Darwin informed of the progress of his ultimately unsuccessful experiments. But Galton seems not to have informed Darwin when he published his results in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 18719. Galton added insult to injury by proclaiming that he had invalidated Darwin's theory of pangenesis.

Darwin was uncharacteristically piqued. He made that clear in a letter to Galton, who apologised profusely. Darwin also wrote a letter to Nature pointing out that organisms lacking blood such as protozoa and plants must also transmit gemmules1. But Darwin admitted graciously that when Galton had suggested the experiments it seemed reasonable that gemmules might be transmitted through the blood. For his part, Galton apologised publicly in Nature1.

Darwin also postulated another class of gemmules to explain reversion, the reappearance of a characteristic seen in an earlier generation. These gemmules were usually dormant but when they multiplied reversion occurred. Galton liked this distinction and incorporated the notion into his own theory of inheritance. However, his papers on the subject were so difficult that, after torturing himself with one, Darwin wrote to his cousin that he had read his “essay with much curiosity and interest, but you probably have no idea how excessively difficult it is to understand”. To greatly oversimplify, Galton hypothesised the existence of hereditary elements that were initially unstructured but subsequently differentiated into what we would call the germline (latent elements) or soma (patent elements). Galton had elaborated a form of the germline theory normally credited to the German biologist August Weismann, a fact that Weismann acknowledged in a letter to Galton in 1889.

In constructing their theories of inheritance neither Darwin nor Galton seemed aware of Mendel's definitive 1865 paper “Studies on Plant Hybridization”10. It would not be “rediscovered” until 1900.

Dilemma: natural selection collides with regression to the mean

Much of Galton's research in the last few decades of the 19th century proceeded along two general lines of inquiry: personal and psychological identification and the elaboration of statistical methods for analysing heritable traits, particularly in humans. The latter of these two pursuits is most relevant to us here.

During the time of writing Hereditary Genius Galton became intrigued with the work of Adolphe Quetelet, the Belgian Astronomer Royal, who first fitted the normal distribution to human data using published chest measurements for 5738 Scottish soldiers. But Galton wanted to ask a different question. Was this distribution heritable? Would soldiers with small chest sizes produce progeny with small chest sizes and those with large chests have children endowed similarly?

Initially, Galton lacked appropriate human data to ask this question so he turned to sweet peas instead because they had little tendency to cross-fertilise. Galton found that seed sizes were distributed normally but, when he examined the seeds obtained from progeny plants, the progeny grown from small seeds produced plants with seeds closer to the mean of the distribution. The same was true of progeny obtained from large seeds. Galton now developed two important statistical concepts. He had discovered what he first called reversion to the mean, subsequently referred to as regression to the mean. He also plotted the diameter of parental against progeny seeds and thus constructed the first regression line and, from its slope, calculated the first regression coefficient (Figure 2).

Figure 2

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The first regression line1

Sweet peas are not human beings. Galton obtained the human data he so desperately wanted when he set up an anthropometric laboratory in connection with the International Health Exhibition held in South Kensington in the summer of 1884. Subjects paraded through the laboratory. They were measured and tested for various physical parameters (e.g. strength of pull) using devices invented by Galton. He again showed, by examining heights of parents and children, that regression to the mean was operative. By comparing such parameters as arm length with height, Galton discovered that they were correlated and calculated the first correlation coefficients.

Darwin's vision of evolution would be thwarted by regression to the mean

Regression to the mean posed a dilemma for Galton. How was natural selection going to work if traits under selection were always regressing to the mean? In what is arguably his most important book, Natural Inheritance11, Galton came up with a solution. Evolution had to occur by discontinuous changes that could not revert to the mean. Darwin's vision of evolution by tiny incremental steps would be thwarted by regression to the mean. The changes that drove evolution must be discontinuous ones.

The young British biologist William Bateson had collected lots of examples of discontinuous variation, which he gathered together in a large book, Materials for the Study of Evolution12. Bateson welcomed Galton's argument that evolution must occur in jumps. Similarly, Galton waxed enthusiastic about Bateson's book in an article entitled “Discontinuity in Evolution” published in 1894 in the journal Mind13.

Darwin, who had died in 1882, could not rebut this new model of evolution, but Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolutionary theory, was still very much alive. He took Bateson and Galton to task in a spirited two-part article in the Fortnightly Review14, another fine and high-minded Victorian periodical. He pointed out that when one parameter, say the size of an animal species, was represented by a normal distribution the power of natural selection was so strong that it could cause the replacement of this distribution by another distributing itself around a new mean.

Galton had actually anticipated this possibility in failed experiments with the Purple Thorn Moth where he planned to select for long-winged and short-winged moths. Medium-winged moths would serve as the control. At the sixth generation he would select for medium-winged moths in both the experimental lines until the long- and short-winged moths disappeared15. Furthermore, despite being the man who discovered it, Galton never seemed overly worried about regression to the mean when he was considering genetic improvement of human beings through selective breeding.

The First International Congress of Eugenics

The First International Congress of Eugenics was held in London in 1912, a year after Galton's death. By this time Mendelian genetics was firmly in the ascendancy. Major Leonard Darwin, the next to last of Darwin's five surviving sons, was president of the Congress. Paper after paper gave examples of the dire consequences of permitting the unfit to breed. These “unfit”, of course, were people who were, in general, much poorer and less able to care for themselves than the distinguished participants in the Congress. But not all were convinced. Arthur Balfour, the former Prime Minister, who had been asked to speak at the inaugural banquet, introduced a dissonant note. Balfour warned the Congress participants against steaming ahead too rapidly with their eugenic crusade since there was much still to be learned about heredity. Then he brilliantly exposed a paradox in eugenic thinking: “We say that the fit survive. But all that means is that those who survive are fit.”16. The perennial eugenic worry that “the biologically fit are diminishing in number through the diminution in birth rate” must be wrong by the “doctrine of natural selection” as he conceived it. If families of the professional class were “so small that it is impossible for them to keep up their numbers, they are biologically unfit for this very reason”. Later on J. A. Lindsay, reviewing the Congress, caught Balfour's meaning precisely: “Mr. Balfour, as the principal guest at the inaugural banquet of the Eugenics International Congress, inverted the part of the prophet Balaam. Invited to bless, he remained to curse.”17. Of course, the participants in the Congress paid no heed.

It is an interesting irony that Great Britain, the birthplace of eugenics, unlike some other countries, never passed any eugenic legislation related to involuntary sterilisation or immigration. The only legislation related to eugenics that ever passed in the UK was the Mental Deficiency and Lunacy Act (1913). It permitted segregation of those perceived to be mentally deficient—which eugenicists regarded as at least impeding if not eliminating propagation of the “unfit”. Josiah Clement Wedgwood, the liberal MP from Newcastle-under-Lyme, and a cousin of Leonard Darwin's, strenuously opposed passage of the Act. It is said that he delivered 150 speeches and offered 120 amendments to the Act over the course of 2 days, while subsisting on barley water and chocolate, before his voice finally deserted him.

Elsewhere Galton's legacy was much darker. Eugenic beliefs put into political practice turned many years of the 20th century to nightmare.