A Monkey's Half-Cousin

Did you know that the father of eugenics was none other than the half-cousin of Charles Darwin?

Sir Francis Galton was born in 1822, and was a crazy, many-talented scientist. Wikipedia describes him as: an English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician.

The dude was the first to classify fingerprints, invented the weather map, and the concept of statistical correlation. He also invented the dog whistle (!)

After reading The Origins of Species (and corresponding with his 'cos), he apparently became obsessed with the question of whether human abilities were hereditary - investigations into which shortly led him to coin the phrase 'nature versus nurture'. Along the n v. n lines, he did the first twin studies, looking at identical twins separated at birth to see if they diverged.

In 1883, after years of research into human heredity, he coined the term 'eugenics' and started suggesting that superior brits should be offered monetary incentives to marry young and have a bunch of children! He then wrote a novel called Kantsaywhere which, according to wikipedia, 'described a utopia organized by a eugenic religion, designed to breed fitter and smarter humans.'

So...dude went off track, but he was still a serious baller. I miss the times of renaissance men. Nowadays you can't just zip about discovering new things in all manner of fields. It was even better back then you could learn everything there was to learn and, DaVinci style, be the best artist and best scientist and best engineer around. Can you imagine such a thing today?

Two last bits, first, an excerpt from a letter that Darwin wrote to Galton:

'Your proposed Society [to monitor the fitness of various families and promote eugenics] would have awfully laborious work, and I doubt whether you could ever get efficient workers. As it is, there is much concealment of insanity and wickedness in families; and there would be more if there was a register. But the greatest difficulty, I think, would be in deciding who deserved to be on the register. How few are above mediocrity in health, strength, morals and intellect; and how difficult to judge on these latter heads. As far as I see, within the same large superior family, only a few of the children would deserve to be on the register; and these would naturally stick to their own families, so that the superior children of distinct families would have no good chance of associating much and forming a caste. Though I see so much difficulty, the object seems a grand one; and you have pointed out the sole feasible, yet I fear utopian, plan of procedure in improving the human race. (italics mine)

And lastly, the Galtonia, native to South Africa, named after Sir Francis Galton.