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 Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 6:31 am |
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By Richard Hoste
Sir Francis Galton first brought his concerns about the future of
humanity to the public in an 1865 two-part article in MacMillan's
Magazine entitled "Hereditary Character and Talent." Part one begins
by simply making many of the points and presenting the data that would
be expanded and elaborated on a few years later in Hereditary Genius:
We can see talent is hereditary by the number of prominent men who
have talented relatives. Just as we have bred animals, it would be
possible to create a better race of humans.
Galton then goes on to have us imagine what a Utopia would look like.
The state would set up competitions between young men for the chance
to marry women selected for "grace, beauty, health, good temper,
accomplished housewifery, and disengaged affections, in addition to
noble qualities of heart and brain." If these unions are agreed upon,
the state would give the happy couples money to begin their lives and
raise the children they'd be expected to have. Near the end of the
first part, the author exclaims, "If a twentieth part of the cost and
pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race
that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle,
what a galaxy of genius might we not create!"
In part two, he points out how remarkable is the fact that so many
eminent men produce eminent sons considering that usually nothing is
known about the mother in the relationships. Now just think how much
smarter the geniuses could've been if the prominent fathers had all
married women close to them in intellect. They may very well have,
but there was no way to verify it.
Later, the author tries to argue for the existence of racial
peculiarities by going into a discussion about the consistencies in
the behavior of Native Americans under different political and
economic conditions. While having a great sense of honor, the Indian
is cold and indifferent, even to family members. The Spanish had to
create positive laws in order to force them to carry out basic human
duties. The polar opposite is the West African, who is affectionate
and gregarious but without a sense of dignity.
The races pass on their personality traits as surely as they do their
physical features. Just as we can undoubtedly breed animals that have
a certain feature and amplify it, we can select for any mental trait
we find desirable.
It wasn't until 18 years later in his book Inquiries into Human
Faculties and Development that Galton would introduce the word
eugenics into the English language. He defined the word in a long
footnote thus:
That is, with questions bearing on what is termed in Greek, eugenes,
namely, good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities.
This, and the allied words, eugeneia, etc., are equally applicable to
men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a brief word to express the
science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions
of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes
cognisance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to
give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of
prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would
have had. The word would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least
a neater word and a more generalised one than viriculture which I once
ventured to use.
In the opening to Inquiry, Galton opined that European man shouldn't
seek to make the whole world into one ideal. But writing in the July
1904 issue of The American Journal of Sociology, he tried to make
clear through a metaphorical tale what qualities all humans would
agree are valuable.
Let the scene be the zoological gardens in the quiet hours of the
night, and suppose that, as in old fables, the animals are able to
converse, and that some very wise creature who had easy access to all
the cages, say a philosophic sparrow or rat, was engaged in collecting
the opinions of all sorts of animals with a view of elaborating a
system of absolute morality. It is needless to enlarge on the
contrariety of ideals between the beasts that prey and those they prey
upon, between those of the animals that have to work hard for their
food and the sedentary parasites that cling to their bodies and suck
their blood, and so forth. A large number of suffrages in favor of
maternal affection would be obtained, but most species of fish would
repudiate it, while among the voices of birds would be heard the
musical protest of the cuckoo. Though no agreement could be reached as
to absolute morality, the essentials of eugenics may be easily
defined. All creatures would agree that it was better to be healthy
than sick, vigorous than weak, well-fitted than ill-fitted for their
part in life; in short, that it was better to be good rather than bad
specimens of their kind, whatever that kind might be. So with men.
There are a vast number of conflicting ideals, of alternative
characters, of incompatible civilizations; but they are wanted to give
fullness and interest to life. Society would be very dull if every man
resembled the highly estimable Marcus Aurelius or Adam Bede. The aim
of eugenics is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens;
that done, to leave them to work out their common civilization in
their own way.
Everybody but "cranks" would agree that "health, energy, ability,
manliness, and courteous disposition" are traits to be selected for.
He made five suggestions to push humanity towards a eugenic future.
1. Educate the public on the laws of heredity.
2. Scholars should undertake historical research into what classes of
society have traditionally contributed more or less of their fair
share to future generations. See if the rise and fall of nations and
civilizations can be traced to changes in the inherent quality of
populations and which races become more prolific and which less so
when acquiring a higher standard of living.
3. Researchers should look into under what conditions large families
of good stock have flourished.
4. Discourage marriages that would be likely to result in inferior
offspring. Social pressures should overpower love in these
situations.
5. Make eugenics a national priority. This should be done in three
steps:
I. Establish eugenics as an academic area of study, until its
necessity is accepted as fact.
II. Make sure that the importance of the practical development of the
field is recognized.
III. Introduce eugenics "into the national consciousness, like a new
religion."
Galton made clear that all steps were important. Eugenics must be
established in theory before it's put into practice. "Overzeal
leading to hasty action would do harm, by holding out expectations of
a near golden age, which will certainly be falsified and cause the
science to be discredited."
George Bernard Shaw replied in the same journal that he agreed with
Galton, and said that he would even take things a step further.
Humanity must be courageous enough to face the fact that nothing short
of a "eugenic religion" will save us. H. G. Wells concurred and
warned against the evils of race mixing.
In the autobiographical Memories of My Life (1909), Galton penned a
chapter entitled "Race Improvement." He acknowledges that at the time
he wrote his 1865 article in Macmillan's that the world wasn't ready
to hear the truth about heredity. There were too many misconceptions
about what a program of eugenics would entail. The public must be
made to know that compulsory unions would be unnecessary. Forceable
restrictions on breeding should only apply to those suffering from
"lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality, and pauperism." For
the general population, what is needed is a cultural change. The
quality of potential offspring should become one concern of many when
choosing a partner, alongside compatibility in religious doctrine and
social rank.
Galton also returns to the idea of eugenics as a religion:
I take Eugenics very seriously, feeling that its principles ought to
become one of the dominant motives in a civilised nation, much as if
they were one of its religious tenets.
In Genius, Galton was restricted to making his point from the history
books. By 1875 he was looking at twins. In an article entitled "The
History of Twins, as a Criterion of the Relative Powers of Nature and
Nurture," he explains that he had sent letters out to twins and
relatives of twins to see how close the siblings ended up being in
looks and personality. He had expected to find that twins tended to
differ by x amount and those pairs that varied from the mean did so in
some kind of normal distribution. Surprisingly, sometimes twins were
so alike in looks and personality that close relatives often couldn't
tell them apart, while at other times they seemed to be no more alike
than any pair of relatives!
To the modern day reader, it's obvious that Galton had discovered
identical and fraternal twins. His conclusion in the article was that
inheritance mattered more than environment, because when twins turned
out differently families weren't able to point to any difference in
nurture that caused it. Twins either were inherently the same or not,
and their life trajectories would reflect that. Of course, we now
know that twins are either born with 100% of the same DNA or an
average of 50% and that that explains Galton's findings.
Mutual Admiration
Though related, Galton and Darwin didn't begin corresponding regularly
until well into their respective scientific careers. Darwin read
Galton's 1853 Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa and
initiated contact. Galton would later read and be heavily influenced
by The Origin of Species. They wrote back and forth until Darwin's
death in 1882.
On Origin, Galton wrote to his cousin,
I have laid it down in the full enjoyment of a feeling that one rarely
experiences after boyish days, of having been initiated into an
entirely new province of knowledge, which, nevertheless, connects
itself with other things in a thousand ways.
Darwin was just as excited after reading Hereditary Genius:
I have only read about 50 pages of your book, but I must exhale
myself, else something will go wrong in my inside. I do not think I
ever in all my life read anything more interesting and original - and
how well and clearly you put every point! ... You have made a convert
of an opponent in one sense, for I have always maintained that,
excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal
and hard work. ... I look forward with intense interest to each
reading, but it sets me thinking so much that I find it very hard
work; but that is wholly the fault of my brain and not of your
beautifully clear style.
The relationship would be strained when Galton disproved Darwin's
theory of pangenesis, which stated that heredity is due to blood
containing little particles called gemmules that the body gathers in
the reproductive organs before fertilization. Galton tested the
theory by transfusing blood between different breeds of rabbit. If
rabbit A's blood was given to rabbit B, then according to the theory
of pangenesis rabbit B's offspring should show traits belonging to A's
breed. That didn't happen. Apparently, Darwin took it hard.
According to correspondence available at Galton.org, Galton tried to
assuage Darwin and may have been diverted by him from independently
discovering Mendel's law of heredity.
Darwin and Galton continued to write and the author of Origins came to
share his cousin's worldview. According to biologist Alfred Russell
Wallace, Darwin near the end of his life became very pessimistic about
the future of humanity on the grounds that the lower classes were
having the most children. One would have to believe that the heads of
Galton and Darwin would explode if they knew that a century and a half
after their time, not only would the worst of the British stock still
be breeding at will, but they would have been joined at the bottom in
their own country by those from Africa and the Middle East.
He took a moderate position for his time on Blacks. On one hand, they
were not as advanced as the egalitarians of the time suggested. Some
said that all of Africa's woes could be tied to the slave trade, but
Galton pointed out that those on the continent that were untouched by
it did just as poorly. The other extreme, which claimed that no
Blacks were suited for high culture, was just as wrong. Even at that
time there had been some Negroes who did well as merchants and in
other areas of life. Still, overall the race was less fitted for
civilization.
The history of the world tells a tale of the continual displacement of
populations, each by a worthier successor, and humanity gains thereby.
We ourselves are no descendants of the aborigines of Britain, and our
colonists were invaders of the regions they now occupy as their lawful
home.
Galton makes the point again and again that we shouldn't let sentiment
get in the way of building a better world. It seemed almost
self-evident to him at the time that the civilized races would
displace most of the rest of the world's people. The last few decades
have seen the opposite.
Unfortunately, in prizing IQ so highly, Galton seems to have not
thought about the consequences of Jews as a high-IQ group with
different interests from Europeans in areas such as the construction
of culture, as well as a deep sense of historical grievance against
them. Indeed, too many Jews would spend the next century obscuring
the truth about heredity and racial differences. In attempting to
thwart White ethnonationalism, they ended up denying their own
biohistory and much of what makes they themselves unique.
To Galton, the English and other Europeans needn't worry if other
intelligent races prosper in their own sphere. He was probably
correct. Westerners aren't worse off due to a strong South Korea or
Japan and we won't suffer due to the rise of the Chinese in and of
itself (Of course we could suffer if that growth is partly based on
interest from American debt, which it is, or if Richard Lynn's
predictions come true and they end up using biotechnology to give
themselves an average IQ of 200). It was the zero-sum mentality that
would make the British desperate to keep the Germans weak and lead to
the disastrous and dysgenic two World Wars.
In Genius, Galton wrote that part of the reason that the population of
classical Athens was so accomplished was because of the migrants that
the city's intellectual life attracted. European immigrants were fine
as long as they were of good quality. Since it wasn't an issue at the
time, it's hard to be sure what Galton would say about a White nation
admitting intelligent Indians or Chinese immigrants, although I'd
suppose he'd think that the nature of non-Whites would prevent them
from being assimilable and that that applies even to ones with high
IQs.
The World's Loss
When Galton died in 1911 he would have had every right to be
optimistic that his ideas would become implemented. He had already
made a case for the importance of nature and helped eugenics gain wide
acceptance among Western elites. Cross-adoption studies,
psychometrics, craniology and neurobiology would eventually prove that
he was spot on. Unfortunately, while all this science was being done
Western culture would take a horrible turn in the 20th century.
It remains to be seen whether the world will ever awaken and accept
the desirability of eugenics. If not, Galton's ideas falling out of
favor among Western intellectuals may have to be considered the
greatest disaster in the history of the world. But if we eventually
do realize what folly egalitarianism is, Sir Francis Galton will be
recognized as the man who laid out the path to a better future.
http://www.ihr.org/ www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/
http://www.natvan.com http://www.nsm88.org
http://heretical.com/ http://immigration-globalization.blogspot.com/ |
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