Behind the Bastards - Part Four: Francis Galton: Inventor of Eugenics

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

We conclude the story of Francis Galton and explore all the hideous ways his ideas helped inspire eugenic laws around the world, and ultimately the Holocaust. Sources:  https://www.historyofdatascience.com/francis-galton-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-19th-century-science/ https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/special-collections/kantsaywhere https://unseenhistories.substack.com/p/the-disturbing-visions-of-francis-galton-gavin-evans https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/server/api/core/bitstreams/dfd786fa-2090-4749-bcbe-3cc7159e55b5/content https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/anti-racism/lies-damned-lies-and-racist-statistics/ https://www.scienceaq.com/Article/other/22011.html https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-anthropometric-detective-and-his-racial-clues/ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42042093-superior https://books.google.com/books/about/Francis_Galton.html?id=vL0hq80XXqMC https://galton.org/books/memories/index.html https://victorianweb.org/victorian/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////science/health/insanity1.html https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691825003853 https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PTCw5CJT7cE6Kx9ZR/most-people-endorse-some-form-of-eugenics https://www.balkanweb.com/en/They-are-brother-and-sister-but-have-4-children-together.-German-couple-in-trouble-with-authorities--fighting-to-legalize-incest./#gsc.tab=0 https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/blue-plaque-stories/eugenics/ https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/78669/pg78669-images.html https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/a-dangerous-calculation/ https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/301897  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

CoolZone Media. Welcome back once again to Behind the Bastards, Part 4 of our series on Francis Galton, the inventor of racism, by which I mean eugenics. Here with me to talk about racism is David Bell, who is not racist, as far as I can prove. I tell everybody that all the time. A lot. Suspiciously often, actually. Yeah.

Shouted out of cars a lot. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I wanted to, sorry, we've covered my shirt with my cats. I do want to describe my pants because I'm wearing pajama pants with fish on them. And it says, asleep at the reel. It's a fishing joke.

Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah, asleep at the reel. That's good. That's a good. Yeah. I wanted people to know about that. And that, and I'm not racist. Thank you.

That for that. And you know a fishing joke? Well, you know who didn't know fishing jokes? Francis Galton. I don't think he got his hands dirty outside of a, doing surgery as a young man all that often. So, this is behind the bastards, and I'm not really interested in giving a complete history of all of, like, the non-shitty things Galton did, but he didn't have a lot of major achievements.

We've talked about some of them, the concept of, like, regression to the mean, statistical concept of correlation, a bunch of different, like, math stuff that Galton did and, like, either invented or was, like, the first guy to figure out or, like, helped to figure out. He has a lot of influence, and just, like, the way we do science and conduct scientific studies, particularly those that involve like statistics, the way we survey populations, twin studies. Galton had a lot to do with all of that. You should also note that while he was becoming the first racism nerd in the history of either racism or nerds, he was also becoming the first weatherman or one of the first weatherman.

In April of 1875, he published what is probably the first weather map ever published in the Times of London. It did show the previous day's weather. I'm not really sure what the purpose was. Like, I don't know. Hey, you guys start somewhere, man. He's showing that like, now imagine that for like tomorrow.

But tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah, I get it. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. The long loading times. The glitchy video calls. That's your house asking for better internet.

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Why did they do it? And what did it do to the people they left behind? Listen to Death of an Artist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. By the late 1880s, Francis was spending most of his free time, either in meetings with various eugenics groups that had sprouted up all around Britain. And he's again... Meetings. Yeah, yeah, yeah, meetings.

You got to have your racism meetings, right? Yeah. The problem with our modern racists is that they don't have enough bureaucracy around the bigotry. You know, Galton and his boys were taken minutes, you know, from multiple different groups as they wrote about why the poor should be sterilized. They're not quite doing that yet. But he wants them to be doing that. He's pushing them to do that, right?

The other thing he's doing during this period of time is helping to invent what we now call forensic science. He's not the inventor of forensic science, but he's like any list of the founding fathers of forensic science has got to have Galton on there somewhere, because he is very influential. His interest in forensics seems to have been spurred not just by his related eugenics work, obviously that has a lot to do with it, but by the fact that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes book, a study in Scarlet in 1887. Galton stated in his autobiography that his interest in forensics was spurred by, quote, a sort of Sherlock Holmes fact. fascination. Now, the way that's written in the text, he may have just been saying that, like,

I'm like Sherlock Holmes and not I was influenced to want to get into this by Sherlock Holmes. I'm not 100% sure there, but he was a massive fan of Doyle's novels. And regardless of kind of how it timed out, Holmes influenced him because he really wanted to see himself as that kind of a figure, right? Like, he clearly kind of idolized Sherlock Holmes and took Doyle seriously as like when he would write about like forensics and like science like the science of investigations right like he even though doyle again it's just kind of like writing books right he he took him seriously as like a scientific thinker on the subject sherlock holmes was like the first joker and what i mean is that like the character in a vacuum is fine it just created some of the worst fans you know what i mean

like i like sherlock i've read all the sherlock holmes it's very entertaining stuff it's just it's once you start becoming like, I want to be like Sherlock Holmes that things get troublesome, right? Yeah. Well, and it's also like, I don't know, when you make the TV show a house and then later realize that, oh, wow, I guess Brian Singer really put a lot of gross stuff into this series that I didn't catch the first time I watched it 20-something years ago. Man, but it is weird. I couldn't agree more.

Yeah, Galton wants to be the Gregory House of Racism, and in a way he is, right? but he's also getting into forensics at this point. So in 1888, he had a forensic laboratory that would have made Sherlock Holmes himself drool. And I found a description of this laboratory in an article by Ava Kaufman in the Public Domain Review. Quote, in 1888, a reporter from the Paul Mall Gazette paid a visit to Galton's anthropometric laboratory in London, where instruments developed by Galton measured the physical and mental characteristics, from keenness of hearing to breathing power of over 10,000 people. The resulting article, titled A Morning with Anthropometric Detectives,

described Galton's laboratory as a world of order and precision and tests of the nicest accuracy. Dumb though they are, Galton told the reporter, what splendid detectives are instruments might prove. Splendid detectives, the reporter exclaimed, I am not, I hope, in a department of the criminal investigation department, unconsciously yielding convincing proofs of personal identity with some scoundrel hitherto unhung. And, you know, it's obviously an early example of like media, hype of like, wow, look at all these

instruments. This must be like a real detectives agency. You sure could catch anything with like, has he caught anybody? He never does. He gets actually consulted on with the police a few times. His stuff doesn't like catch criminals because he's, he's marking up the wrong tree. Junior detective shit.

Constantly. Yeah. He's like inventing his own detecting tools and stuff. They're like, by measuring hearing and, you know, I don't know. It's, it's, there's some value in it, just in that. Yeah, it's useful that we started thinking about how to like measure how well people could hear and try to take some data on people for like health.

And there's all sorts of purposes where you want this kind of data. But he is really interested on using it to like predict and solve crime. It's sort of, we said at the very start of this, we talked about it's some of this stuff is neat. Like the cap is like neat for some of this stuff. Yeah. And then he takes it to the next level, right? It's like it becomes this dogma that he wants people to like breed certain ways. Yeah.

Stuff that's at best neat. Yeah, right. And one of the neat things that he has in this anthropometric lab is fingerprinting equipment. He started to get really interested in that by the 1880s. And we actually do have an advertisement for Galton's anthropometric lab because he's gathering. He has like thousands and thousands of people volunteer to let him like measure them and various ways for all of his different like studies and theories. And this advertisement, the reason I find it interesting is I think it has like the first privacy guarantee for biometric

data. Take a look, Dave. It notes. And Netflix viewers. You can see it on here, but it notes in one portion of the, the advertisement for keeping a methodological register of the principal measurements of each person, of which he may at any future time obtain a copy under reasonable restrictions. His initials and date of birth will be entered in the register, but not his name. The names are indexed in a separate book, right? I think that might be the first, like, that's amazing. Like, the first, like, promise that, like, will protect your biometric data in history. I don't know who else could have been earlier, right? They didn't even know why they were protecting it. But they knew people were going to want to steal it. Yeah. And let me tell you, like, giving it to a eugenicist.

not a great call. It's like, well, it's, how bad can it get? Like, it's just, yeah. Yeah, you don't have to worry about other, the wrong hands, you know, like, it's already there. They're all the wrong hands. Yeah. This is why I enjoy, like, the forensic files show today, right? Is because of this asshole?

Like, he helped. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he's a big part of that. Right. Now, the use of fingerprinting to identify, fingerprints to identify people had been advocated as early as, like, 1858, which is when Sir William Herschel of the Bengal Civil Service used fingerprinting to identify individual Indians as part of a fraud investigation. In 1880, a scientist named Henry Fowlds

published a groundbreaking study on fingerprints that ignited a vigorous debate among the scientists of the day. Francis Galton has always been interested in trends, right? He's always been either a trendsetter or a trend follower, and as soon as fingerprinting becomes hip, he gets really interested with it, right? And he becomes obsessed with proving that they're a good way to identify individual people, right? There was theories that these might be a good way to individual, like to identify individual people, but we didn't have much, like, today we know that fingerprints are probably unique to each person, right? It's impossible to say 100%, like that's, that's a theory, right? You can't guarantee that, but probably.

are the stupidest thing that is correct. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's really dumb that they work. Yeah, I think it's really silly that they work. Yeah. What is everybody has unique fingerprints and then we match up? How do we match him? Oh, just everybody gives their finger prints.

Everybody give them up. Yeah. Oh, I guess that's half on files. Yeah. I don't like all of the implications of this, but it's frustrating that it actually does work that way, right? Right. It sounds like all the other shit he's been talking about, you know?

And, and Galton is the. first guy to show that fingerprints work that way. Because we didn't have like a big, no one had ever like taken a bunch of fingerprints from a wide subset of the population to see if any of them were the same. And Galton gathers 8,000

fingerprint samples and for the first time is able to say none of these 8,000 are copies, which suggests heavily that every fingerprint is unique. Right. And that's still the conclusion to this day, right? But he is the guy to establish that. To go from, this might be a good way of identifying

people to confirming, no, these are unique individual, like, identifying characteristics. Right, like the moment someone finds a pair that's identical, it all kind of falls. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That'll fuck some shit up if that ever does happen. Yeah. Right. It's like minority before pre-crime is like the moment you find one pre-crime that wasn't true, the whole system everybody gets free.

Like, that would really, that hasn't happened yet. I'm surprised like there isn't like a Dan Brown novel, Da Vinci Code style of someone learning. about fingerprints that match. To be honest, as I've talked about in the, we did a series of episodes on how like forensic science is largely nonsense. Because a lot of stuff like gun, like bullet matching to guns is like

nearly complete bullshit. Fucking gate analysis is heavily flawed. And fingerprints are real like and definitely the most real of all the different like forensic science things. But also very flawed in like the way in which fingerprinting is used by law enforcement.

And a lot of like, so it's, not perfect, right? And it's not as reliable a method for actually, because of flaws and, like, gathering, or not, as law enforcement often wants to portray it, that is true. But Golden's correct here in general, and that it is a good way to identify

individual people, and he does more than that. He lays out the eight characteristics of fingerprints, and a lot of his original science is still the standard today. He's the guy who comes up the classification of, like, arches and loops and warls in fingerprints. Like, he's the dude who lays all that out for the first time.

So this is like legitimately groundbreaking, right? In 1899, and so far, pretty good science. In 1899, he was approached by police in a country that he never named to help with the kidnapping of the error to a rich family. They wanted to know if fingerprints from a healthy baby would change over time. Galton had already shown previously. He documented fingerprints from people from his youngest 30 months and as they like grew up in age up to like 80. not the same person obviously, but he had measured people

over a course of years and shown that like, yeah, their fingerprints don't change over time, right? But he had never, like, gotten data on infants

to prove that, like, a baby's fingerprints don't change over time. And so he does that now. There's an American mother who volunteers to document her daughter. And so he's able to show that,

like, no, baby's fingerprints, it's like the same thing. And by the way, that whole, like, missing kid, that was probably a lie because he never explained

if he helped them find her. or not or mentioned it for the most part. And his biographer, Bulwer, suspects he just, like, made that story up when he was giving a speech about his fingerprint research to kind of judge things up a little bit and maybe make himself seem a little bit more like Sherlock Holmes. I don't know. That said, while this initial research into fingerprinting is pretty good science, especially for the day, being Francis Galton, the instant he starts looking into a new field of scientific

endeavor, he has to find a racial angle, right? This has to be a way to... There have to be, basically his immediate belief is, well, there's no way black people and white people and like Indian people all of the same fingerprints, right? White fingerprints have to be better in some way and non-white people's fingerprints have to be in some way inferior. And there have to, not just inferior, they have to be identifiable as not white based on their fingerprints. More worlds or something or less worlds. Whatever's the bad amount of worlds versus the good amount. Something different that he can declare as like a flaw because if they all, if everyone's fingerprints are completely identical, then maybe where,

We're all just human beings. Right. Like maybe like all of my whole life is a lie. We can't have that, right? So Gulton starts looking into like ways in which he can both predict criminal behavior by like, are there criminal fingerprints? Are there signs of fingerprints that someone's going to be a criminal? And also can we tell people of different races based on their fingerprints?

Now he's not the only guy who thinks that this sort of thing should be possible. He specifically not the only guy who thinks that like the characteristics. of someone, like, of someone's personality and, like, the things they've done in their life might be reflected in their fingerprints and other immutable biological characteristics. As Ava Kaufman notes in their article, the late 19th century was a time in which increasing numbers of scientific-minded people started looking for, quote, clues unnoticed by others. That's a common, like, way to describe it, right? They're starting to, once we realize fingerprints are a thing that, like, forever, people have

been leaving fingerprints behind, not just on the scene of a crime, but ever. everywhere and we didn't know what they were or that we could look for them, that starts a bunch of people have said, well, there's got to be other stuff we're missing, right? And obviously there is. There's a ton of stuff we're missing, right? That is very important for helping to, like, explain human beings and how we work. This fascination is what's called, this is called the semiotic model, right, in human sciences. And this fascination with the semiotic model is noted by historian Carlo Ginsburg is having risen to prominence alongside, quote, an increasingly clear tendency for state power to impose a closed mesh net of control on society,

which involved attributing identity through characteristics which were trivial and beyond conscious control. So again, you have this good motivation, which is, we've been missing fingerprints for ever many fucking thousand years, and those are pretty important. What else might be missing to how can we categorize people and, like, control them by having an understanding of the things, like these, like, Like how can we categorize and like judge them based on these things they cannot control, right? It's really funny.

It's really funny. It's really funny to go like, we have determined that every human is different and unique in this one specific way. I wonder if there's ways we can put them into categories. Yeah. Yeah. Another one. I feel like you're learning the opposite lesson here. It's also like it feels like it always gets mixed up when they're like we want to be able to

predict what a person will be. Yeah. And it's like, it's so clear that that's just not how people work. That's just not, not, and what they've done and, like, can we determine, like, the dangerous people by, and lock them away from society by figuring out these characteristics that are, they can't argue, there's no way to hide it, you know, the fingerprint gave you up or whatever, right? In fingerprints, Galton's 1892 book that is, I mean, this is kind of gives birth to fingerprints as like a forensic science. This book is very important. Galton is forced to conclude against his hopes that, quote, no peculiar pattern seems to characterize the fingers of any one race above the other.

In other words, he has to admit in this book, I have not found any racial differences between fingerprint types. Now, he refuses to see this as evidence that he had been wrong about everything. And as Kaufman writes, quote, despite his admission that hard fact had made hope no longer justifiable, a closer look at Galton's writings reveals that racial typologies were never far from his thoughts. the conflicted speculation, conjecture, and hesitation in Galton's racial rhetoric and fingerprints can be understood as a deliberate strategy, one which allowed him to perpetuate a strong,

racial, and imperial research program even when his scientific data undermined it. So he is still, even though he has not found evidence for this, he finds a bunch of ways to point out, like, well, but there might be this difference. Or there's this, like, one thing he notes is that when he's analyzing fingerprints of Indian people, because the ink and the paper is of lower quality in India because the British don't like send the good stuff over there, I guess. The fingerprints are of lower quality. And he's like, well, this is evidence of a difference.

And he describes it as like, because the fingerprints are just kind of like blurrier. But like, oh, Indian people are less formed. Their hands are like less finished, basically. Like that's kind of what he's saying. Like a microcosm for everything he does. They're not as evolved, basically. Yeah.

That's his entire scientific method, right? there is taking a systemic, like, taking like a problem with the data that reflects society at the time, right, concluding something like that must be like in the nature of that person. It's perfect. Exactly. It really is, it really is beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Throughout fingerprints, Galton continued to alternate, sometimes in the space of a single sentence between claiming that fingerprints were and were not marked by racial difference. For example, in a later chapter about race and class, he concluded with disappointment that everyone seemed to have an identical character

of fingerprint. He included a table that showed this lack of difference, that there's no real, like, pattern between the differences. There's nothing that you can really tell, you know, based on, like, race about fingerprints. But after saying all this and putting up this, like, this table, he wrote, quote, their patterns are not, so far as I can tell, different from those of others. They are not simpler. Still, whether it be from pure fancy on my part, or from the way in which they were printed,

or from some real peculiarity, the general aspect of the Negro print strikes me as characteristic. The width of the ridges seems more uniform, their intervals more regular, and their courses more parallel than with us. In short, they give an idea of greater simplicity due to causes that I have not yet succeeded

in submitting to the test of measurement. So, like, I can't measure this, and there's no evidence for it, but I feel like their fingerprints are simpler in a way that's literally impossible to prove or measure. He's like, maybe it's me, but I don't know. I just don't like him. I just don't like him as much.

And he did that with his study of, like, Jewish people in London, too, where he's like, maybe it's me, but I thought they were all just looking to see if I had money, you know? Like, he does this. Again, this is always the underpinning of his science, no matter how much data and statistics he throws in. And that's the reason why despite his, is undeniable achievements in, like, mathematics and statistics and his contributions to the scientific method in that way, I can't respect him much as a scientist because when push came to shove and he,

he had good data. He always, he didn't discard it. He would print it and then argue that it was wrong basically because of something he felt and had no evidence of. And that's just bad science. That's really bad being a scientist. In the end of the book, he also concludes it like, well, the fingerprints don't let us identify like white people from black people, from Indian people. But I feel like the shapes of hands of non-white people are different from white people. And that might help us identify. He's specifically part of what he wants to do here is identify people who have non-white ancestry but look white and live in a European society because he wants those people to stop to not be able to breed with full white people.

Right? Yeah. So he's looking for if there's something different. The fingerprints that would have been really helpful, but there's not. So maybe the handshape will do it, right? Yeah. In 1903, Arthur Conan Doyle published The Adventure of Norwood Builder. And we'll talk a little bit about this and more about Francis Galton, but you know who

didn't write any Sherlock Holmes novels. Who? Sponsors of our podcast, I assume. It'd be weird if they had. The long loading times. The glitchy video calls. That's your house asking for better internet.

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My name is Josie Duffy Rice. I'm a journalist who covers the criminal legal system. And over my career, I've heard account after account of prosecutorial misconduct, story after story of injustice. But I've never heard a story quite like this. The more I kept reading that stuff, I thought, man, there's more red flags

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What's in the tunnels? Gold bars, silver ingots. It could be worth half a billion. And they would have made more if it hadn't been for one courageous, cop. No, Dad, don't. You're going to need all of us. I'll call you when I can. Frank, be careful.

Underground Zero, starring Steve Sheripa, Ray Abruzzo, and me, Michael Imperioly. Would you be willing to see your family go to pieces? Some ways it already has. Listen to Underground Zero on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So, in 1903, Arthur Conan Doyle published the Adventure of the Norwood Builder, which is a Holmes mystery that hinged around like the big point, like the, the big like twist in this is that like they,

they find evidence that a guy did a murder based on like a fingerprint and then Holmes is able to prove that the fingerprint was forged in order to like frame an innocent man, right? That his fingers, that his fingerprints were artificially added to the scene of a murder in order to like frame him, right? which is like a really at 1903 that was like the year before or after scotland yard had started like actually widely using fingerprint that so like law enforcement had had started massively using it it was like it was a big hype at the time there was a lot of like news articles about it right this is sci-fi basically this is sci-fi almost yeah this is like doing a killer robot movie now where it's like you know AI and chunk like that it's weird because like is there any sources on like what we thought fingerprints were before because it's not like fingerprints didn't exist before

we realized that. And the very first like English guy certainly doing that I've read about doing fingerprint research. Like what brought him into it is he was he was in Japan. He was like working, I think, in Tokyo as a doctor. And he was looking at he noticed fingerprints on like pottery, old pottery. You can see people's fingerprint. That's got him interested in the subject.

I don't know what they, I guess they just didn't think about them much. Like we've always known because it's obvious that people. people have them. In fairness, I don't think about them much either. You just look at them and go like, hey, neat. All mine look like little anus. That's cool. Weird.

I wonder why we got these. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, so Conan Doyle has come up with this plot that hinges on like a fingerprint being faked and like a real fingerprint being like put in at the sign of a crime using like a wax mold. And the way in which he envisions this fake fingerprint being transferred, it probably wouldn't have been possible, right?

Because it's not based on reality. It's a novel. And Conan Doyle, like every author is like, that seems realistic enough. People will buy that, right? And stuck it in there and never check to make sure that it would work because that's just not really a thing you do usually when you're writing. Like if it's good enough, that's fine.

You're a liar, right? All fiction authors are and it's okay. So after, but Galton doesn't think about it that way. Remember, he like idolizes Sherlock Holmes and kind of feels like he's like the real Sherlock Holmes. I get the feeling. And so after reading the story, he writes a letter to Arthur Conan Doyle and starts asking serious technical questions about, well, how would a wax mold of a seal be used to leave like a legible bloody fingerprint?

You know, because based on my experience, I don't see how this would be possible. But obviously, I know you've done your own research. Could you, like, give me the details of your own experiments with fingerprints? Because I think this is really useful scientific data. And Arthur Conan Doyle never responds because obviously he wasn't, he wasn't doing experiments. He just wrote a book. Like, this is like the first nerd writing to. Yeah, exactly.

How does the warp drive really work? I don't know, man. It's a TV show, right? And I find this very funny, but also very telling of his character, because Francis Galton cannot imagine in a world in which multiple black men who were like either born or raised as slaves have written bestselling novels, right, that were obviously written by a man of deep intelligence, right? He lives in that world, and he cannot imagine an educated black man, but he trusts,

implicitly that a fiction novelist did research before putting something in his book. Right? That's really interesting. I guess it speaks to like, you know, there's writers today. There's people like, you know, you sit there with a Michael Crichton book and you're like, this feels like it's real. Some of this has to be real. Yeah.

It feels like I could clone dinosaurs if I just follow the instructions in this book. Like, there are writers who are very good at making dumb ideas sound plausible and smart. By the early 1900s, Francis Galton's ideas on eugenics had moved well beyond him and beyond a topic of intellectual discussion. They'd started to become law, partly because so many men accepted everything Galton wrote as the truth, and increasingly took it further even than he'd been willing to dare. But a quote now from an article in Science A.Q. Quote, when Galton gave a lecture on eugenics in 1904, prominent thinkers were invited to respond. The author H.G. Well sounded skeptical at first, arguing that the relative genetic superiority of individuals was too

to quantify, but then he concluded with this shocker. The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born, it is in the sterilization of failures and not in the selection of successes for breeding that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies. So he's actually not just taking, he's taking the Galton's starting point, but arguing, no, you don't need to encourage smart people to breed. That won't get you anywhere.

You have to sterilize the poor of the stupid, right? That's H2Ls. They finally got to it. Yeah. We figured it out. We figured it out. It's unclear to me because Galton in his autobiography says that I wasn't initially in favor of sterilizing or like criminally like using the law legal system to make it illegal for undesirable people to breed. I didn't think that was necessary at first, but I came to realize it was the only way to do things over time, right?

I think he's probably lying because he admitted also that because he admitted like in his autobiography that, In 1865, when he first started writing about eugenics but hadn't named it eugenics, he didn't want to talk fully. He didn't want to, like, reveal everything he believed yet because he didn't think people were ready. And so I think that that... I came to realize. Yeah. Like, we've forced my hand.

I have to conclude this horrible thing I always believe. Exactly. I suspect H.G. Wells kind of going like, no, we actually have to sterilize and otherwise stop the poor for breeding. I think Galton was like, oh, finally. Okay, good. They've caught on the thing I've been pushing subtly for a while, and now I can start to be more open about it, right? Because he had been pushing people in this direction. I just don't think he wanted to go out on a limb alone because he's fundamentally a little bit of a coward.

In 1907, he wrote to his successor and his mentee, Carl Pearson, quote, except by sterilization, I cannot yet see any way of checking the produce of the unfit who are allowed their liberty and are below the reach of moral control. That same year, an agent Galton stepped down from the eugenics record office, which he'd helped found at University College London. Carl Pearson took over at his request and named it the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics. It still exists under a different name, and it's in the Darwin Center. But yeah, like they just took Galton off of it because eugenics got a bad rap. By 1908, Galton was openly on team sterilized the poor and announced this in his autobiography, writing, I think that stern compulsion ought to be exerted to prevent the free propagation of the stock of those who are seriously afflicted by lunacy,

feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality, and pauperism. How to restrain ill-omened marriages is a question by itself, whether it should be affected by seclusion or in other ways, yet to be advised, that are consistent with a humane and well-informed public opinion. Obviously, we've got to humanely sterilize people, right? Sure. We don't want to do it the mean way. at the end of his autobiography, he states his opinion that time

had only proven the claims he made an hereditary genius 45 years earlier, even more correct. He reprinted a segment of that book, a lot of his autobiography. Is him like quoting segments of his earlier books and being like,

yeah, see how right I was? I'm pretty smart, huh? So he reprinted a segment of that book in which he complained that no one had ever tried to breed dogs for high general intellect and then suggest someone try and see how well it. worked. Immediately after this, he went on to identify himself as a true philanthropist and stated

charity refers to the individual, statesmanship to the nation. Eugenics cares for both. He then went on to argue that all married couples can be divided between desirables, passables, and undesirables. And given the limitations of available funds, future charity should only go to the desirables, whereas the undesirable should be stopped from breeding. The passables, I guess we let breed, but we shouldn't be happy about it, right? You don't want to encourage it. Right, we probably can't stop the middle class from having, right, right. Yeah, we need someone to work in the restaurants, right?

Right. He wrote, quote, individual, and this is him, this is kind of his fucking took six tabs of acid period too, because he starts writing a little bit more philosophically here. It's because he's ancient. He's aged, 1908, yeah. Yeah. He's becoming an edge lord. individuals appear to me as partial detachments from the infinite ocean of being and this world is a stage on which evolution takes place principally hitherto by means of natural selection which achieves the good of the whole with scant regard to that of the individual man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings he has also the power of preventing many kinds of suffering i conceive it to fall well within his province to replace natural selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective this is precisely the aim of eugenics

its first object is to check the birth rate of the unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely. The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the fit, by early marriages and healthful rearing of their children. Natural selection rests upon excessive production and wholesale destruction, eugenics,

on bringing no more individuals into the world than can be properly cared for, and those only of the best stock. So that's his kind of like conclusion about like why eugenics is good and necessary. We're all part of this infinite ocean of being, but also pity is sort of a mistake. Like it's nice that we feel it. But if we don't check the birth rate of the unfit, they're doomed. They'll die.

There's no way to take care of them, right? Alfred Wallace continued to oppose Galt on his entire life. At 18, that's the guy who co-invented the theory of evolution or co-discovered or whatever, the theory of natural selection. Like Wallace goes after him repeatedly. He continues attacking eugenics and eugenesis. In 1890, he writes, Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent. And in a later article, he added,

Leave heredity alone until we have made the environment of every child from conception to death the best possible for its full and free development. And then we can begin to think about the influences of heredity, which may be small, right? It's important that you know, as this is not a everyone felt this way. There were no counterbeating. This guy is the co-fout discoverer of natural selection. And he's like, no, we should give kids better schools and like food.

Right. Let's not go freaking out here. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Francis Galton died in 1911 of being an old piece of shit. Yeah. Finally fucking dead. My God. My God. Sir. I was waiting for you to be like, He now lives in Southern California.

He's still alive. Yeah, no, he works in the White House right now, yeah. He just seemed immortal, unfortunately. His ideological enemy, Alfred Russell, Wallace, lived two more years, which is at least a nice little moral victory, that Wallace lasted a couple years longer. Before he died in 1913, he published one last article insisting that over the course of his career, he had found, quote, no marked superiority in any race or country. Furthermore, he argued that even if Galton's ideas had something to them, society was far too corrupt and fucked up to allow anyone to decide who was fit or unfit to breed. Like, even if you had a point, nobody who might be in a position to do that should be able to do that. Right.

This guy is so right. He's super right. There are hereditary things. There are people more prone to certain diseases than others, and it is linked to race. That's why, again, it always goes back to neat, where it. it's like, yeah, there are things to know that's worth knowing, but it shouldn't dictate who you breed with. How you treat people, what the laws necessarily.

It's also like, again, what some of these EA people would say, like, well, everyone's a little into eugenics, which I agree, and it's not, eugenics is about improve, like, trying to direct the growth of a race. That's different. Right. Just like not, like, not, like, anyway, we've gotten off topic. But yeah, that is, that is, there's, it's messy, but I just fundamentally don't that that's all eugenics, right?

So the year after he died, 1912, the first eugenics Congress was held in London and dedicated to Francis Galton, who had passed away the year before. Leonard Darwin, the son of his cousin Charles, was the chair. The welcome address was given by Arthur Balfour of the Balfour Declaration. One prominent delegate was Sir Winston Churchill, who would come to agree with Galton that feeble-minded people were breeding too much and causing cultural degeneration. as Gavin Evans wrote in a piece for unseen histories about Churchill. As Home Secretary, Churchill promoted a plan to forcibly sterilize 100,000 mental degenerates.

With this was blocked, he backed the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, which established that those defined as idiots or imbeciles could be placed in an institution against their will at the prompting of parents or guardians. This became law for 46 years and led to the enforced confinement of tens of thousands of people. Churchill's views on race were no less rabid than Galton's. In 1902, he called for further colonial conquests because the Aryan stock is bound to cot to triumph. After the First World War, he wrote in favor of using poison gas

on uncivilized tribes to spread a lively terror. Kenyans were brutish children, Palestinians, barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung, and Indians a beastly people with a beastly religion. He added, I hate Indians. On red Indians and black people in the United States and Australia, he said in 1927, I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, has come in and taken their place. In 1954, he said, I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails. I don't like the look of them or the smell of them. I don't like the look of them or the smell of them.

Galton has a lot to do with Winston Churchill's beliefs about the world. He certainly has an influence on the man. Now, I'm not going to be able to give a comprehensive list here of every 50. figure in every law that was influenced by eugenic thought. Not all of these guys agreed with Galton's conclusions, though. And not all of the people who started, who became eugenicist, agreed with his fundamental conclusions. There are like left-wing eugenicists who are still pretty problematic, but in a very different way. One of these guys was a British politician, the labor politician named Ramsey MacDonald, who in 1909 complained that natural selection by death has been set aside, but the state can set sexual selection in operation again by an

education in good taste. And he argued that the way to do this, because that's pretty problematic sounding, right? But his argument was that if we push environmental reform and we can eliminate poverty, that will create a, quote, healthy and comely race of people without the need to segregate or punish the unfit, right? He is making, with a different set of beliefs, because Wallace doesn't believe in eugenics at all, but he is making a similar argument that we're like, well, all we need to do, we do need to improve the quality of the race,

but we'll do that as like feeding people and giving them better schools and cleaner neighborhoods, right? So again, he still leaves some race stuff that's bad, but like, okay, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like, hey, kids, Superman eats his vegetables, you know, like, you're just trying to like make it sound more appealing to the racist.

You know, honestly, it's like those, it's like there are a bunch of abolitionists who were still racist against black people, they just knew slavery was evil. And it's like, yeah, you know, it's 18. 1960, whatever it gets you there, right? Right, exactly. If you're shooting at Confederates, I guess we can forgive the fact that, like, you didn't quite get all the way to the right answer.

Right. Like, I still don't like them, but I don't want them to be slaves. And it's like, okay. For right now, that's probably, that's probably okay. In 1912, the mental deficiency bill was introduced to Parliament to prevent feeble-minded people from having kids, despite opposition from the Catholic Church, among others. And one thing you got to say is that, like, the Catholics, and, like, particularly are really always against this stuff. For the same reason, they don't think condoms are good or abortions, unfortunately. But they do oppose this stuff, you know?

The bill becomes law in 1913. Per the website, English Heritage, the law, quote, established the means to segregate mental defectives and asylums, but rejected sterilization. As a result of the backlash and the protests against this bill, they had to take out sterilization. In fact, English eugenicists seemed to be heading away from sterilization until 1931 when a new sterilization bill was introduced to Parliament to legalize voluntary sterilization of mental defectives. This failed as well, and the introduction of sterilization policies by the Nazis, policies Galton would have supported, curtailed progress in his homeland. Right. So Great Britain never sterilizes people for eugenic purposes in mass. I'm sure some happened, but they don't succeed.

The eugenics is pushing for laws to formalize that. Do not succeed in Great Britain, right? They do succeed in the United States. Eugenics first came to this country, courtesy of a guy named Charles Davenport. Davenport was a trained mathematician who read Carl Pearson, that's Galton's mentee, read his papers on evolution in the 1890s, and was selected by Pearson and by Galton himself to be the American editor of the Eugenics Journal Biometristian. Davenport, once he gets selected for this job, he goes to England and he meets with Galton and

Pearson in person in 1902, and he reports returning home, quote, full of renewed courage for the fight for qualitative study of evolution. He received a Carnegie grant at 1904, and in 1910, a huge donation allowed him to establish the Eugenics Record Office, patterned after the British version that had been founded by Galton. There's a Eugenics Record Office in the UK that Galton founds in heads for a while. Davenport wrote back to Francis Galton during this period of time, we have established very cordial relations with institutions for imbeciles, epileptics, insane, and criminals. So he's starting to do the same stuff, Galdness. He's making connections with these insane asylums and prisons and starting to document people as a way to, like,

further this eugenic research. The Eugenics Records Office becomes the most influential organization of the American Eugenics movement for decades until like the end of the 1930s. And the work of Davenport and his followers, and like the first time it really bore fruit is when Indiana, passed the U.S.'s first compulsory sterilization law in 1907. So Indiana is the first state to have a law that allows the government to forcibly sterilize people who are unfit. The preamble to this law claimed heredity plays a most important role of the transmission of crime.

A decade later, 15 states had similar laws allowing compulsory sterilization. Now, that's, yeah, very quick. We let the Nazis spoil it for us, huh? No, no. The Nazis come. copy us to an extent. They're like, oh, yeah. Like some, right, some of the Nazis' racial laws are based on the U.S. laws, which are

directly based, like, the U.S. laws were partly written and heavily lobbied for by Charles Davenport, who was a direct disciple of Francis Galton, right? And the Nazis copy a lot of those eugenic laws to make their own eugenic laws. You know, Galton has a very direct influence on the Third Reich and the Holocaust. The Holocaust would not, could not have happened the way that it happened without Galton. I'm not saying Nazis, because they're anti-Semitism as much older and whatnot. Yeah, they would have gotten there. But so much of the Holocaust was not just the death camps.

It was, you know, the T for euthanasia program, have disabled people. It was sterilization programs and stuff like that. All of that stuff, at least, like would not have happened the same way without eugenics. And Galton created eugenics, right? Yeah. U.S. until after 1924. When Virginia passed the first eugenics law that was actually like well written enough to pass legal muster, most of these early laws, they kind of use them sparingly and only on people who don't like have anybody or any resources, because they know that if it's challenged

and it goes to the Supreme Court, the laws are not very well written for that. This Virginia law is the first one that, I'm not a law guy, but this is the first one that they feel could like pass constitutional muster. And it does. There's a Supreme Court. case in 1927 over this Virginia eugenics law because they're sterilizing someone who doesn't want to be sterilized. Right. It really feels like a girl. Sterilizing people in this country trying to pretend like where the land of the free means

that like something like this feels like it could be easily countered by someone going, no, you can't. Like you know. That's what should have happened. Fucking no. But if they do like to people who don't have anybody stand up for them. Yep. Then, you know.

Well, in this case, you know, there is a challenge, but the Supreme Court overwhelmingly decides that eugenics is perfectly constitutional. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion, and I'm going to read a selection from that majority opinion here. We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for the world if instead of waiting to execute a degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough. You know what else is a crazy argument? Anyone who argues you shouldn't buy these products advertised on our podcast. They're crazy. The long loading times. the glitchy video calls. That's your house asking for better internet. Switch to Bell Pure Fiber, Canada's most reliable internet awarded by Open Signal from $75 a month.

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The more I kept reading that stuff, I thought, man, there's more red flags that just kept coming up over and over. We'll hypnotize him to strengthen that memory. So he went into a good trance. I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. Listen to Examine the Backfire Effect on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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They would go on to make millions of dollars. What's in the tunnels? Gold bars of ingots. It could be worth half a billion. And they would have made more. If it hadn't been for one courageous cop. No, Dad, don't. You're going to need all of us.

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So, by 1927, you know, when this hits the Supreme Court, about 3,000 Americans had been sterilized under various eugenic laws. After this 1927 case, Buck v. Bell, rules in favor of eugenics. people like the speed at which people are being sterilized increases massively. And this mostly occurs over a period of a couple of decades. But in the years to come, more than 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized in multiple U.S. states. You want to guess when the last of these procedures was carried out the last forcible sterilization as a result of the eugenics law in the U.S.? I mean, because it's America, I'm going to say 2024. Not that bad.

It was 1981. And one guess as to the city. Just think racism It's Portland, Oregon It's Portland, Oregon It's Portland I mean We have microplastics

We're still all getting sterilized Yeah, we sure are We sure are It just shows up all over Portland The history of Eugenics Very fun stuff I've never been there All I know is it's what they say

It's associated with Hippie stuff and then like Nazi stuff Yeah, hippies, anarchists, Nazis, Nazis eugenics Free preschool I don't know Yeah We're a real grab bag

Of stuff here in Portland Great trees though So Before we We finish I should say something About the Nazis Right

Because obviously That's the greatest death toll That you can associate With Francis Paul The The phrase of that sentence Was just incredible Robert

Before we go though A little bit We got to talk Nazis. I would say of all of the people who did not live to see the rise of fascism and the Third Reich and who were not German, he might be the one most responsible for Nazism. Right? Maybe. There's some other guys in that, but he's a lot of a meaningful percentage of the Holocaust is due to his ideas or heavily influenced by his ideas, right? A meaningful chunk of it.

So the German eugenics movement was, like all other eugenics movements, inspired by Francis Galton. The concept first came to Germany in the form of a guy named Alfred Plotz, who early in life was a, he like is a German guy, Alfred Plotes, who like moves to the U.S. as a utopian socialist. And he moves to the U.S. because there's all these communes that have started up in like the late 1800s, early 1900s where people are doing like free love and like practicing like communism, like actual like literal communism in a commune. And so he moves to one of these communes in Iowa, and he spends six months there, and he concludes, like most people who live in communes, that communes are a bad idea, right? Specifically because people, he doesn't include communes are a bad idea. He concludes that people suck too much for communes to work, right? You know, very common conclusion. As a commune guy myself, happens every time pretty much.

Unlike most people who have this realization and decide, like, I don't know, maybe we all need private bathrooms and kitchens. You know, maybe we can't. Maybe we need to dial back the communal level a little bit, right? Instead of doing that, he decides that eugenics is the answer, that that will make commune living, like, realistic. Quote, he concluded that the plans we wish to execute would be destroyed as a result of the low quality of human beings. For this reason, I must direct my efforts not merely toward preserving the race, but also toward improving it. My views immediately led me to the field of medicine, which appeared to be relevant to the biological transformation of human beings. So he gets into eugenics so that, because people are too mean in his

commune. And yeah. Must have been a shitty common. That's it. Come out of it going like, we need eugenics. So he concludes that because people are too selfish and like dicks in the commune he visited, that like, yeah, we need eugenics to get rid of inferior human beings. He coins the term rassen hygiene or race hygiene. And this is, he creates this as a synonym for eugenics, right? And race hygiene is the term the Nazis are going to use as well. He argues that, like Francis, that protecting the weak and the poor would degenerate the German race unless they also use selective breeding. Now, one thing that plotes does get correct, where he diverges from Galton, is he realizes

Galton is an elitist, right? And he doesn't believe that, like, only rich people deserve to breed. He thinks that only, like, Aryan people deserve to breed, right? So he does advise more egalitarian methods to allow the best to breed. So he's not based on, like, who your dad was in that, like, he is based on who your dad was, but not because your dad had a good job. It's because of your dad's race and your mom's race, right? As opposed to he doesn't care so much about, like, well, what is your family line done, right?

All he cares about is your blood. And that is a real difference between kind of the Nazi eugenic attitudes and what Galton had proposed. When you say you got it correct, you mean, like, he really honed in where he's like, if we're going to be fucking racist, let's be racist, folks. He was correct that Galton was an elitist, right? Obviously, the eugenics stuff is very wrong. But he correctly was like, well, Galton just thinks that rich people deserve to breathe. And that's silly.

I think that only Aryan should be able to breathe, right? Yeah. Alfred founded the first German eugenics journal in 1904 and the Racial Hygiene Society in 1905. Michael Bulwer describes the racial hygiene society as, quote, the world's first professional eugenics organization. And he restricted its membership to the most eugenically fit people from the middle class, right? So he's restricting it to the most eugenically fit, but not basing it on like wealth or anything

like that. And as soon as he founds the society, he makes Francis Galton, the honorary vice president of the world's first professional eugenics organization. For years, there was a conflict in the German eugenics movement between what we might call race and class-based eugenicists. You've got these left-wing eugenicists who are kind of more like the British guy we talked about earlier. And obviously, the less racist side loses.

and while the German eugenics movement fails at pushing through any laws to allow them to sterilize people during the Vimar years, they become suddenly much more influential after 1933, and you all broadly know the rest, right? Yeah. The T4 euthanasia program, all of these different fucking restrictions on like who can marry and like what constitutes is a Jew and obviously the eventual Holocaust. All that's downstream from old Francis Galton.

But now you understand where he came from and what his life was. like. So how do you feel, Dave, at the end of this? I know, like, there's worse things to be bugged about. But the monkeys, man. The monkeys that he killed? It's just that it's how poetic it is that he also just sounds like a real asshole. Yeah.

Like, he sounds like one of those guys that, like, you wouldn't let him borrow your car these days, you know? Like, he doesn't, he just seems like a rich dirt bag who used, like his weird little rich dirtbag pass to to conclude like so much bad science. Oh, yeah. Tons of it. And he got lucky and fell into some good science along the way, I guess. Yeah.

Yeah. Luck. It's more that his particular fascinations occasionally led him to discover useful things generally while doing something non-useful, right? Like his his fingerprinting is, he makes a lot of massive, you know, gains to the science of fingerprinting while he's trying to prove there are like racial differences. Yeah, exactly. You know, he comes up with a lot of the rules for what we now understand are like good scientific studies and like statistical analysis to try to prove stuff that his own data shows is untrue. And he just kind of has to lie about to himself and everyone else.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I don't like the guy. I don't like him. Yeah. It's weird. Like every episode I've been a guest on, I never liked the guy at the end. A big old thumbs down.

Maybe one of these days. I'll like him. Yeah. Yeah, I'll introduce to that. The guy as maybe a bastard? Is that why you would like, I don't know. I don't like that guy. Well, you sure got behind him.

Wow. Like that scene in the movie when they say the title of the movie. Yeah. Usually doesn't work well. This probably did neither. Anyway, Dave, bluggables? Blugables. Sure.

Gamefully Unemployed. That's my podcast network with Tom Ryman, where we talk about movies and TV. And that is it. Those are the two things we talk about. I think sometimes comics, I don't know, man. You have to go listen to find out. Yeah. But it's, yeah.

You want some light podcasting. We got it, baby. We got it. And we're good. It's good. You know, it's a good. It's a good network. It's not just a good network.

It's like the most... No, I'm not going to make a racial purity joke. That's probably a bad taste. Anyway, Dave, thankfully unemployed. Good. Good stuff. Good stuff. Listen to do it. Dave, good. Yeah. Dave, good.

You like... Yeah. Good night and good luck. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Coolzone Media.com. or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, appa podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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