Francis Galton Quotes
Eugenics.
Francis Galton, 1822-1911, English Scientist, Word coined for the concept of regulating human mating and reproduction
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The Eugenics Movement, which grew quite popular for a while, tried to improve the race of man, not by improving individual people or even a generation of people, but of selective and restrictive breeding of humans. The coercion and bias associated with it caused one of the worst violations of human rights in American History, and then was picked up by Adolf Hitler who carried the ideas to one of the worst atrocities in human history—the murder of “inferior races” so that they could not breed, thereby in their warped theory developing a super race.
This book was the first popular attempt to spread the eugenics concept. Is was translated into German in 1925 and unfortunately read by Adolf Hitler who sent Grant a complimentary letter. See {603544}
At the time there were some Americans who supported Hitler and Fascism. Even senior military men like Osborne.
There was a substantial movement to prevent mentally defective and people of low intelligence from being able to reproduce. Over 20 states, with the approval of the then Supreme Court performed forced state sterilizations. Of course the then definition of “degenerates” changed from state to state. A century later, American values changed so much that there is no state that would even consider involuntary sterilization and if they did, the Courts would hold it un-Constitutional.
The logic is that communities and areas—even countries have finite resources. Since we have a welfare society in which we will not allow people to starve, society must provide for children whose parents cannot. Therefore, individuals ought not to be allowed to breed beyond their ability to care for the children for if many would do so, the capacity of the community could be overwhelmed. A middle ground is that while the final decision should be left to the individual family, the society ought to educate and persuade members to limit their breeding.
There was a small, but very vocal, part of the American population who argued that certain people should not be allowed to have children as they were inferior. Before Hitler started his problem of forced sterilization, many of our states—allowed forced sterilization of people they did not feel were desirable to bear children. Hitler was very complementary to the American pseudo scientists who advocated this.
Sir Francis Galton, FRS, was an English Victorian era polymath: a statistician, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician and a proponent of social Darwinism, eugenics and scientific racism. He was knighted in 1909.
