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With this article we begin an occasional series, "Eugenics Again," which will explore the present-day return of eugenics to respectability, the history of eugenics, and the ethical questions raised by new genetic technologies. In the early decades of the twentieth century, eugenics was widely practiced in the United States and Europe. The horrors of the Nazi era, once revealed, relegated eugenics to the shadowy fringes of science and public policy: anyone in the postwar liberal democracies who openly espoused the hereditary "improvement" of a nation, a race, or humanity at large immediately became a pariah. Indeed, merely to acknowledge the significance of heredity in human development was suspect.
In recent years, however, there are signs on many fronts that this taboo is losing its force, and we have begun to hear—even in the pages of the preeminent journals, Science and Nature—that, while the Nazis were of course quite awful, perhaps the general condemnation of eugenics should now be seen as an understandable overcorrection. Meanwhile, embryos are routinely being screened and selected out with no particular fuss: everyday eugenics.
Notorious today as the founding father of eugenics, Francis Galton (1822-1911) was honored as one of the leading scientists of his day. He held various offices in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, was elected a member of the prestigious Royal Society, received both the Darwin and Copley Medals of the Royal Society, was named an honorary fellow of Trinity College, and was knighted in 1909. He devoted much of his life to investigating human heredity and ways to "improve" it, coining the term "eugenics" to describe this enterprise. In the course of his studies (many, but not all, related in some way to heredity), he made significant contributions to fields as diverse as geography, statistics, meteorology, psychology, and forensic science.
It is tempting to see Galton as a "hereditary genius," to borrow the title of his first major book on heredity published in 1869. In any case, biographer Nicholas Wright Gillham, an emeritus professor of genetics at Duke University, succumbs to this temptation, entitling his first chapter "An Enviable Pedigree." Galton was a pioneer in using pedigrees to study heredity, and here Gillham applies the method to its originator. A grandson of Erasmus Darwin and a cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton hailed from a family of illustrious thinkers and successful businessmen. He learned to read before the age of three. Gillham portrays Galton's mental abilities, including his "scientific imagination," as biological family traits.
Galton, who framed the Victorian debate over human nature as a contest between "nature and nurture," would be pleased to see his life so interpreted. He insisted on the primacy of nature in determining not only physical but also mental and moral traits, while campaigning relentlessly against the environmentalist view of human nature so influential in his day. By so doing, he opposed the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, perhaps the leading intellectual of Victorian Britain, who also had eminent forebears and who also could read at age three. Mill, however, ascribed his own intellectual prowess not to his biological makeup but to the strict regimen of his zealous father, who hoped to demonstrate the truth of environmentalist psychology through the rigorous training of his son.
Though Gillham tilts decidedly more toward Galton than toward Mill, he does point out the role of training and education in the process of Galton's development. From infancy, his devoted older sister diligently instructed him in reading. During his studies at the University of Cambridge, he made strenuous efforts to attain university honors in mathematics, but in vain. Was it the result of these exertions rather than some inscrutable trait of "scientific imagination" that brought Galton to apply mathematics and statistics to his various scientific investigations? Was it his inherited wealth, and the free time it gave him to pursue his scientific interests, that made possible his achievements, or was it his inherited biological traits—or both?
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