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

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

Robert explains how Francis Galton helped invent modern forensic science while looking for ways to be more racist, as well as continuing his weird fetish of 'measuring' attractive women.   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/301897See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Coalzo Media Oh my goodness, I didn't see you walk into the internet where I don't ever see you and you don't really see me unless you're watching the Netflix so I guess actually quite a few of you do see. Anyway, this is behind the bastards, this is a podcast, but the very worst people in all of history. You know that.

This is the second week that we're going to be covering Francis Galton, the man who invented racism. It's probably the flippant title I'm going to use for the episode. He's really the guy who invented eugenics. And a bunch of fun math. stuff and shit. We'll talk about some of that too, but it's less interesting than the horrible things he did, which are certainly the most notable part of his life. Speaking of people who did horrible, nope, David Bell, you don't do horrible things, do you? No, no, you're a good person.

Since, oh man, since we last record, I got a second chair. You see my second chair? Oh, I do. It looks exactly like the chair of sitting in. Yeah. And I went to the six flags that kills people. Oh, great. The one, you know, the one that. It's been like giving people comas and stuff. I went to it. Oh, yeah. It was like a specific brain stuff, right? Yeah, it was not crowded.

It was great. That's good. That's the smart way. Once there's a scandal, that's the right time to go to an amusement part. Yeah. Like after Schlitterbond decapitated that kid, RIP, but that's when you go. That's when you go to Schlitterbond, yeah.

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30 years ago, an island off Manhattan almost brought down New York City. Who will you trust your friends and neighbors? Or will you trust the people five miles overseas? This is a story about neighbors turning on each other and what happens when a forgotten place decides it's had enough. But we're not stopping, are we? Listen to revisionist history, the Staten Island problem

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, it's probably time we get back to Francis Galton. Unfortunately, yeah. Let's get back. So, we had left off in the 1870s. Francis has invented the term eugenics and has started spreading it around English society. And he's going from this point on, he's going to keep writing books about eugenics and publish scientific papers.

But he's also constantly throughout this period. He's writing like news articles and opinion columns. He's suggesting laws. He's going to be throughout this as his understanding. understanding and beliefs about eugenics evolve constantly trying to push society to adopt legal like schema around based on his ideas right like that is that is from the beginning like a major uh focus for galton in 1874 he published a new book english men of science their nature and nurture in this book he sir he did the same thing he always does where he looks at like the guys he

considers imminent and then tries to figure out like how many kids did they find and like what families did they come from? A lot of lawyers. Right. This time he was scientists. And he asked like 190 fellows from the Royal Society of Science to send back like self-reported data about their families and their education. And like a hundred of them did, roughly.

And his goal was to try to figure out the relative impact of nature versus nurture, right? Look at what these scientists say about like what inspired them and made them become great scientists and try to figure out how much is, you know, heredity play into scientific genius and how much is like just how you raise people, right? And this is why Galton becomes, if you've all, everyone's heard the term like nature versus nurture, we're all familiar with that concept. Galton is the first guy to name it, right? Not that people hadn't wondered about this before, but nature versus nurture using those specific words to discuss that comes from Francis Galton. his biographer Michael Bulwer suspects that Galton took the phrase itself from a passage in Shakespeare's The Tempest, where Prospero calls his adopted son Caliban, quote, a devil, a born devil on whose nature, nurture can never stick.

Now, one thing Galton found as he goes through the self-reported backstories of these scientists is that first sons are twice as likely to have become scientists as youngest sons, right? they're like way likelier and Galton accurately credits this to the advantage of nurture obviously there's not like a genetic reason that the first son is going to be better at science these are because of like social things right there are there um and he concludes basically well first sons obviously they get more resources it's a period of time in which like legally if you're the fourth first son you pretty much have to inherit most of what your if not everything that your dad has right like yeah that's a big part of like what colonialism is second and third son's need something to do to go make their fortune so they go to the colonies or something, right? First, first born is like you're putting all your resources into it. Yeah. You're taking a big swing. If you screw it up, you can make another. Yeah.

You know, it's, it's, it's, it's got good and bad there. Yeah, exactly, right? And so, you know, to Galton's credit, he sees like, well, obviously this is a nurture sort of thing and in a major way, right? Like that, like that specific aspect of the fact that first sons are more likely to be famous scientist comes down to nurture. But rather than generalizing that and being like, wow, well, if that major thing, like, if nurture, like, had such an impact there to where, like, first sons are twice as likely to become scientists, maybe nurture has, like, a lot to do with whether

or not people get into science, right? Maybe that's, like, as important as heredity and more important in some ways, right? But he ignores the implication. He completely breezes past this, right? He acknowledges, like, oh, well, that one's down to nurture. And then continues to basically generalize it like, but nurture really means nothing at all, pretty much, right? Part of why he concludes this is that based on the self-proported reported data, 56 of the 91 men who responded to him, said that they believe they had an innate skill and interest in science. And only 11 of these great scientists did not report having an innate skill, right? So that based on that, right, super scientific data.

Right. Super scientific. These guys are like, I feel like I'm a great scientist born. Yeah. Right. So as he's like looking into these different great scientists, he concludes, obviously, well, if most of them say that they had an innate skill, that means that, like, that's further evidence for what I believe that heredity has everything to do with intelligence and success.

And, you know, you can see how sloppy his work is, just looking into the case of one of the scientists that responded to him, his cousin, Charles Darwin, because don't. Darwin classified his scientific interest as innate, but when he was asked to like, well, where does the origin of your interest in your specific, in your specific branch of science come from? He's like, well, it was the voyage I took on the Beagle, right? Like, I would not have gotten interested into, like, heredity and natural selection stuff. Like, that was all because of this thing that falls under nurture, right?

Like, I happened to be in a position to go on this voyage. And that's what spurred my particular interest in this branch of science, which, again, I think someone more open-minded would be like, well, this is perfect evidence of how others, both nature and nurture, you know, playing together here. Like Darwin had an innate interest in science that had probably always was going to be with him, but also specific elements of his life and the opportunities he had heavily influenced the kind of scientist he became and made sure he was in a position to make his great discovery, right? Like nurture, you know, what we would call just like blind luck, I guess in a lot of ways,

had a lot to do with that, right? Yeah, it's like if you have like a sort of analytical mind or a specific personality that was brought on by genetic traits, you might gravitate towards this thing that then, like, if your parents are also doing that thing already, like, you could have just as easily gotten into something similar, but not the same exact thing. Yeah. Again, it's a combination of the two factors. Right. Like, it would be very silly of me to be like, well, either to be like, well, I just worked hard. And so that's how, like, I wound up as a successful writer. And it would also be silly for me to be like, well, my dad was pretty good at writing and

had a nice voice. And so, like, that's why I wound up as a pot. Yeah, both of those things had something to do with it, right? Like, it's a, it's always a mix of, like, nature and nurture that contributes to this. But Galton has this habit of, like, really, even when he has to acknowledge, like, the massive impact that, like, nurture, so to speak, has on someone like his cousin Charles, he just kind of blazes past it. He never draws broader conclusions, just like he never draws broader conclusions from the fact that, like, his big sister who was disabled also was a really smart person who massively contributed to his intellectual development. And maybe that means people who are disabled have value in society, right? Right.

Like he can't, he just doesn't, he refuses to generalize. It's not even a can't thing. And, yeah, Bullwer, sorry, Buller, Galton's biographer adds about his sort of analyses of these different scientific self-report. Furthermore, if one of the parents had scientific tastes, Galton took this as evidence of heredity, but he had no way of distinguishing heredity from encouragement at home, whose importance was acknowledged by one-third of the respondents. So even where his respondents are like, well, yeah, my parents, like, really pushed me to be a scientist and made sure I had a good education, and that probably led me to my field.

Like, he just kind of like breezes past it, right? He considers that heredity. But like, well, if your parents like science and encourage you to be a scientist, that's heredity, as opposed to like, well, anyone could do that, right? They don't have to be like... And this is based off of, again, him just... It's like he's doing science like a YouTuber does science. Right.

He's just asking people what they think they are a scientist. Like, why do you think you're a scientist? Which is a very, a very shitty starting place. And then he's just sort of hand-waving even when they say things that are against the thing he wants. Yeah. He does that a lot. When there's a data point that... contradicts him, he'll acknowledge it in the paper and then ignore it in his conclusions because

it's inconvenient, right? One of the main things that separates Galton from Darwin, sorry, one of the main things that separates Galton and Darwin from their critics at this period of time, the people who are like attacking eugenics and don't agree with him, is not that they have a differing understanding of genetics and heredity, because nobody really has a good understanding of genetics and heredity at this point quite yet. But what really separates Galton and Darwin from their critics is this they have a differing belief in whether or not nature and nurture matters like Darwin gets convinced by Galton that nurture means basically nothing and Galton is a vocal advocate of the idea that like helping out poor kids giving

them more money and more food better schools that'll do nothing like they're fucked from the start because they have bad genes right how can be basically Galton's attitude um what but there are critics of this one of the most vocal critics of early eugenics was Alfred Russell Wallace. Alfred was a biologist who independently, he's the co-creator of the theory of evolution by natural selection. He and Darwin independently came to it at the same time and published like at the same time. He just is a lot less well-known. Darwin was way better at the PR into things, right, and got famous. But Russell's, Alfred Russell Wallace is just as brilliant a scientist. Again, like he's recognized today as the, and at the time was recognized as someone who

would come up with this independently. And he was in some ways a superior scientist to Darwin because he became an immediate enemy of eugenics, right? Galton comes up with eugenics and tells his cousin, and Darwin's like, oh, yeah, that sounds completely right. I'm a bigot now. I mean, not that he hadn't been before, but Alfred Russell Wallace reads Galton's theories, and he's like, well, that's fucking crazy.

And he writes an article warning them, quote, the world does not want the eugenicist to set it straight. Give the people good conditions, improve their environment. environment, and all will tend towards the highest type. Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant, scientific priestcraft. And I really like that phrasing, that, like, you are pretending to be like a man of science and an atheist, but all you have done is create, like, a secular religion and appoint yourself basically the Pope.

That's what Galton has turned himself into. He is now, like, the high priest of this increasingly popular secular faith in heredity, and the ability, and they're kind of both their sort of, uh, apocalyptic and also their like, you know, utopian sort of heaven vision is that you can breed a perfect society, a people who will live longer and not ever have any problems with violence and make beautiful, brilliant art and be like, perfect, right? We can make perfect special boys forever. That's the dream like future that Eugenics is promising and that Galton is, you know, turning himself into a hype man for effectively. And I think that calling him a scientist,

priest does get, because there's an element of this guy when you read him, he sometimes sounds like a cult leader or like a madman. Like there's, there's some really crazy quotes from some of his writing. Like here's a segment from hereditary talent and character published in 1865. The power of man over animal life and producing whatever varieties of form he pleases is enormously great. It would seem as though the physical structure of future generations was almost as plastic as clay under the control of the breeder's will. It is my desire to show more pointedly than, as I'm aware, has been attempted before, that mental qualities are equally under control, right?

The future generations are just like clay, they're putty in our hands. We can mold them perfectly to whatever we want, right? That's crazy person talk. That's like, that's 90s movie villain shit. Yeah, mad scientist shit, right. Yeah. Unfortunately, a lot of people are into it. By the 1870s or so, Galton had become well convinced and argued to much popular a claim

that the native peoples of colonized lands must either be breadlike livestock to enhance their positive traits, or in the case of certain peoples who are at the lowest level of his racial hierarchy, should be bred out of existence. Extinction was the goal. Why are people into this? Because it's like someone being like, we're all slopping in the future we can breed like perfect people. It's so weird for any of you.

Yeah, that's right. Down with us. You know? They're not saying down with us. He's speaking because his audience, I think this is important to get, Dave, because you brought up that that's. He's not writing for an audience that what we think of it. Like, you publish an article, and it's there for, like, all of the people who read, right,

who are interested in it or whatever and want to. He is writing specifically for the very tiny number of people who are both, like, can read and are educated scientists. He's writing for gentlemen in his own country. Rich honkeys. Yeah, rich honkeys. And what he's saying is that, like, us and people like us are the pinnacle of human beings so far, and we're the only ones who really should be briefed.

And we can be better. Like our descendants will be even better than us if we get good at this. But we're the special ones. And so like we need to restrict everyone else from breeding because we've got it right. We've got culture right and society and like everything like philosophy right. And there's no other value in anyone who does anything differently in any societies or cultures that are different. They need to be extinguished because this is the only actual way to live, right?

always been, I mean, conservatism always has an element of this in it of like, well, there's one right way to do things. And kind of eugenics is taking that to the absolute most absurd extent, which is like there's only one right way to be a human being genetically. Right. Right. That's what's going on here. That's how Galton's pitching it, you know? And while, you know, obviously at the time, they have very, medical science is much more primitive. They, like, there's not any real ability to like do a mass sterilization campaign and he's not advocating that yet but he is advocating for the extinction of inferior peoples and his plan for this initially is to move superior people into the area and incentivize them financially and legally to outbreed the others right like

this is why he wants to send chinese people to africa to replace black people because he thinks that they're higher up on the racial list you know it's like the it's like this is like adjacent to people who cry about white genocide right right right oh yeah this is where i'm from. Yeah, when I heard the term white genocide, I was like, wait, what do they think is happening? And I, and so I, like, looked into it and looked into what these people think is the problem. And they're just describing this gradual thing where cultures will just mix and mingle in a very positive way. And it was like, oh, so like just basic progress? And this sounds like people kind of proposing the opposite, right? Where they're like, yeah, we're not saying.

that we need to like put people in camps we just need to encourage the opposite of this like you know of race mixing and stuff like yeah everybody goes back to where they came from or something like that we certainly because there's not a and he will get more concerned about immigration as it comes on but initially his his belief is that like we need to improve the world as a colonial power part of what justifies british colonialism is that we're improving the gene pool, right, by ideally getting rid of these inferior peoples and breeding the peoples, the colonized peoples who are like best, breeding them for better traits. That's what we should be doing. We should be gardeners of the human race, right? That's kind of his initial argument. That's going to

change over time somewhat, but that is his initial argument. And white genocide, I will tell you where that comes from, because that also comes out of Galton, right? But he's not immediately panicking about that. Initially, he's looking further afield. He believed, that colonialism should do, quote, the necessary job of replacing inferior people's with their betters because they would stupidly fail to submit to the needs of a superior civilization. He was applauded for writing stuff like this because it was what rich British people wanted to hear that they were doing the right thing. And in fact, they should be even more racist and even worse to the people that they already basically owned. And this is, what he's giving his peers here

is something that colonialism started to need by the end of the 19th century. moral legitimacy. It was never hard to find Christian justifications for colonialism, just as many Christians had used scripture to justify slavery. But the problem with this, and obviously there's a big justification of like evangelical stuff, right? Of like, well, we need to colonize these places to spread the one true gospel, right? Like that that's a justification for colonialism. But the problem is, if you're, if you're just, you can, and people do justify colonialism that way. But if you're doing that, you can't ever really cut out the full text of the Bible. And there are always passages in the Bible that you can interpret as justifying, you know,

colonialism and slavery. But there's lots of passages that don't, right? And so there's always going to be a constant stream of Christians who are reformers and critics of colonialism too, because you're working from the Bible. And a lot of people are always going to read the Bible and be like, oh, it says you shouldn't actually be shitty to people, right? Right. There's all that like be good stuff. Yeah.

Obviously, other people interpret it differently, but you're always going to have some of those folks if it's based on the Bible. And likewise, the fairly new ideas of secular humanism had also fueled critiques of the system, right? The people who are not like religiously motivated, but are early humanists are like, I don't know, like, seems bad to do slavery. It seems bad to do colonialism, to oppress these people in like their own homes, right? And what eugenics provided was a way for men of science and men of faith who trusted science to argue that racial, hierarchy is not cruel, but literally written into the laws of heredity. And thus, any kindness or equality that would allow lower races to reproduce an interbreed is actually cruel, because it leads to worse catastrophe in the long term, right? And so, from what we might

call an effective altruism standpoint, eugenics makes sense, you know? This is a, it's a moral justification that doesn't require Christianity, and that sort of allows us to, because we're not seeing them as people. We don't have to treat them as people, right? Now you've got a scientific justification for that. And I know some people might think I'm being unfair by talking about, by comparing this to effective altruism, right? Taking a modern day ideology that on the surface is about maximizing the effectiveness of charitable giving and comparing it to eugenics. And the reason I am making this comparison is because a ton of modern day effective altruists love arguing that actually everyone really believes in eugenics if you actually think about it,

right? And that's the premise of a post I found on the effective altruism forum from February of 2003 by someone with the account named sentientist. The title was, most people endorse some form of eugenics. The article started with the case of a German couple, Susan Karoluski and Patrick Stubing, originally from Leipzig, Germany. Here's how the article introduces them. Susan and Patrick were a young German couple in love, but the German state never allowed Susan and Patrick to get married. Shockingly, Patrick was imprisoned for years because of his sexual relationship with Susan. You want to guess what was going on there? They look different?

No, they're brother and sister. Oh, oh. Oh. It's all back to cousin fucking. God. Right, right, right. I did not see that coming. No, it's a crazy way to introduce an article that is about, I mean, yeah, so like, what's

happened here is that Patrick and Susan were raised separately. They were like their brother and sister. but like they were in foster care or something like that and they had multiple children four children in total three of whom had severe birth defects and those children are yeah are eventually taken away in place with a foster family because like the state said that you guys are really irresponsible and this is fucked up and bad right but that's not in this fucking article where he's trying and this this guy is trying to argue that like enforcing laws against incest is a form of eugenics, right?

That's the, that's the argument of this. And the author starts by saying that, like, yeah, okay, so their, you know, their children were taken away because they had birth defects and, you know, a place with a foster family. And then the article asks, why did Germany do all these terrible things to Susan and Patrick? Eugenics. And first off, this author doesn't think eugenics is terrible. And he, like, what he is saying is that, like, this is eugenics.

And so everyone's okay with some degree of eugenics. And that's a lead point. Everybody's on the eugenics spectrum. And you are supposed to take from that that like, well, maybe I should consider other aspects of eugenics more reasonable than I do, right? Now, the reality is Germany didn't do this because of eugenics. They did this because Patrick and Susan are brother and sister. And their relationship is incestuous and that can lead to horrible birth defects. And they continued to have kids even after this was known and like they had been warned.

And that's why Patrick, after his second kid, gets sentenced to 10 months in prison. Now, I'm not saying that's good or bad. I don't know enough about German law or enough about all of the specifics of this prosecution. But the reason why this author frames the story the way he does is that he's trying to convince everyone that we all support a little eugenics. Right. It's like a rhetorical game. It's like being like, oh, like the left are the real racist because they're always talking about race. And it's like, well, what's the context in which people are bringing up and talking about race?

That's important. It's not just a word, saying a word. Like, sure, I guess if you want to call this being pro-ugenics, if you want to redefine those things, I guess, yeah, I guess we're all literally the eugenics. Nobody wants to be cousin fuckers. Yeah. His argument is that, well, we criminalize incest because of birth defects, right?

Because it leads to higher birth defects. And that's eugenics. And that's idiotic, right? For one thing, like, people hate the idea of a pregnant mother abusing drugs and alcohol. because it can cause birth defects and other harm to an eventual child. It's not eugenics to want to avoid a totally preventable case of fetal alcohol syndrome. That's not eugenics. That's just like not wanting a kid to suffer for no fucking reason, right?

Now, in this case, really, it's not about eugenics, right? But still, the author of the article insists, if you agree that people who are genetically related should not have children or should see a genetic counselor, congratulations, you're a eugenicist. And that's nonsense for a very simple reason. Eugenics is not about trying to prevent specific kids from having birth defects. It's the less popular just Foxworthy bit that he had to be tried for a while. You might be a eugenicist.

Eugenics, as Francis Galton would have been quick to point out, is the attempt to direct the improvement of an entire race, right? the fact that the goal is racial improvement is critical. The German state is not trying to improve the German race by stopping these people from having kids that are going to be at a massively higher risk of birth defects. My suspicion is it's really expensive to the German state health care system and they don't want to deal with that, right?

I mean, every society, right, it's freedom versus safety, right? Where it's like, let's give people as much freedom as they can while not like ruining safety. And so countries have determined like, listen, you just can't fuck your siblings. Sorry. Yeah. Like, we've done the math, and it's more trouble than it's worth.

As hot as your sibling is, it's just not worth it. And it's just not, it has nothing to do with trying to improve the race, right? That's not the goal here. You're just trying to stop children from suffering or save money for the healthcare system. Either way, it has nothing to do with eugenics. We'll talk a little bit more about the EA. I'm going to get back to Galton. But first, ads.

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here's the thing I'm speaking with more artists, policymakers, and performers like actor Stephen Root. I think for me to be any good or for any character to be any good, you've got to put enough of yourself

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and taking all of that knowledge to build a platform that hopefully is going to make New York City better in the long run. And actress and singer Melissa Eriko. Partnership took on a whole other meaning when I started making my own work. It's like you with a great actress or actor. It was best to come out of your trailer, full of life, and just face another person who's full of life and don't talk. Listen to Here's the Thing on the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So I don't want to derail this episode too much by talking about effective altruism,

but you should know that this article that I'm picking on is just one example of what we might call eugenics, intriism in effective altruist spaces. And obviously, I think regular listeners have heard it. I talked about EA a lot in the Sam Bankman-Fried episodes. This is like a Silicon Valley heavy. ideology that basically went from arguing we should make sure charities are efficient before donating money to them to arguing that like, well, hypothetically, the people who have not been born yet, outnumber the people who have. So that means that like it's actually justifiable to like destroy

anyone who tries to slow down AI development because it'll obviously be better for the people who haven't been born. Right. That's a thing some EA people will say, right? Obviously it's a big group, but like that's the folks I'm talking about. And a lot of them are into fucking eugenics, right? EA people are often fascinated by transhumanism, and the guy who first popularized the concept of transhumanism in the 1950s was Aldous Huxley's brother Julian. Julian Huxley was also president of the British Eugenics Society, who owed their existence to Francis Galton. And there are a eugenicist today among the most prominent effective altruists. Per an article in New Humanist magazine by Peter Ward, quote, There is an obsession with IQ and intelligence among the community that suggests some are at least flirting with

eugenicist ideas. In 23, a former EA member reported that the Center for Effective Altruism had tested a new way of measuring the value of people using a metric called potential expected long-term instrumental value, or peltive. People with IQs of less than 120 would have peltive points deducted, while those working for EA organizations or on AI would rank higher. You know you're the good guy when you're trying to figure out the value of a human mathematically. Yeah, person number. Nice little value for a person. And it's the same thing, too, as Galton of like, and obviously people who are interested in the same things that I am are the most valuable, right? Like, clearly. Anyone in the E.A. Because they're thinking about the future, it's more valuable. Which is like these objective, like intellectual minds being like, I have determined that everything that we already believed was good. What I do is right. And it's good to be. And the only way to be. Yeah. This is actually the only kind of human that you should be. Nick Bostrom, founder of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, is a prominent. modern leader in the effect of altruist community who was often considered the father of long-termism,

which is that idea that future hypothetical unborn people ought to have more moral weight than the smaller number of real living people in crisis who exist right now, right? Well, we can help people starving today. Elon Musk being like, we must go to Mars, no matter how many slaves we throw at this idea, where it's that idea that in the long run, this thing would be good, actually. Yeah, it's actually evil to feed people who are starving. in like the Sudan right now because that money could go to getting us to Mars and that'll save humanity in the future. So it's able to help poor people if that money could go to Mars.

So yeah, I've talked about Nick Bostrom, the found, like some people call him the founder of long term. He's a major EA figure. Philosopher Emil P. Torres, a former EA guy himself, recently published a 1996 email Nick Bostrom had sent where he insisted, quote, Blacks are more stupid than whites. Per that article, Bostrom apologized, but the statement caused a scandal. Oxford shut down his Future of Humanity Institute in April this year, which said it was based on our review of the best structures

for conducting our academic research. So Francis Galton used different data to make basically the same argument that Bostrom and a lot of EAs do, which is that IQ is what matters. It's the best judge of someone's worth, right? Or one of the most important judges of someone's worth as a person, right? Because IQ definitely measures,

intelligence and isn't just like a measure of certain kinds of intelligence. And it's also, so basically it's the only thing that matters, right? Right. Yeah. And but it's not just that. It's, again, the most valuable people don't just have the highest IQs. They're also working in AI or NIA, right? They're members of my community, my subculture.

The guys I hang out with are more valuable people, right? Like that's, it all comes down to the same thing. That's a really important bit to grasp, regardless of the science. It's like how it's incredible how. my cat out of all the cats happens to be the cutest. Like in the world, I've done studies about this. I looked into it and she's the cutest and the smartest cat. And she's sexy to other cats, too.

She's the highest cat. And that's what I figured out through extensive studies. Yeah. It's just a wild coincidence that's my cat. Yeah. So Galton substituted judges and scientists for EA's and AI coders, because those didn't exist yet, right? But his beliefs were otherwise identical.

And while we focused so much, and while we focused most so far on the racism of his ideology, it's here I should note something about what Galton meant when he was talking about race, right? Because race is a very different concept in the 1870s and 80s than it is even like 20 or 30 years later at the start of the 20th century. Susan Schumacher identified three different kinds of race

that Galton would refer to, in his writings. Quote, the first is in a literary sense when he makes statements such as poets are a sensuous, erotic race, exceedingly irregular in their way of life, and judges are by no means an unfurtile race.

Banton, another scholar of Galton, also argues that he uses race in a taxonomic sense as a synonym for genus when he writes of the human race, as a synonym for species, when he writes that the American Indian race is divided into many varieties, or as a synonym for variety itself when he writes about the race of the Irish Celts,

or of the English race. However, he believes that Galton's conception of race is better understood in line with his later thinking about heredity. Thus, in 1892, when Galton wrote a new preface to hereditary genius, he wrote in terms of the question of race, where Banton believes he is using race as a synonym for heredity. Fancher also maintains that Galton's understanding of race should be considered in line with his beliefs about heredity

when Galton writes as a definition that race is the constitutional peculiarities transmitted by inheritance. And that's deeply confusing. So you're saying, he's not at all consistent. He was real loose with the term race. A poet can be a race sometimes. But he's doing race science. That's,

yeah. And again, they don't have a modern understanding of genetics and heredity, right? And neither do as critics. No one really does at this. Well, one guy kind of does at this time. But nobody else really does for a while yet.

And as a result, all of his underlying assumptions. and all of the underlying assumptions behind eugenics science are fundamentally flawed from the get-go, because it's based initially on an understanding of race that has nothing at all to do with genetics or inheritance, right? Gregor Mendel, who was also active through the mid to late 1800s, is credited with discovering inherited and dominant recessive traits using pea plants, right? He's how we learned about, like, dominant recessive genes. Galton doesn't know about that when he's talking about eugenics at first. most of his writing on eugenics is pre-any understanding of like dominant and recessive traits

when he talks about like breeding and the like. And part of why is that Mendel, you know, his foundings, I think it's around like the 1880s or such that he's like coming up with a lot of this stuff. But his findings are initially ignored by the great scientists of the day, including Galton and don't reemerge until around 1900. As a result, when Galton plotted out how states should encourage exceptional people to breed, He doesn't know that recessive traits are a thing. This is why, for example, while he would have insisted his disabled sister not procreate,

it would never have occurred to him to limit his father from doing so or himself, even though it's very likely that either or both of them carry genes that might have passed this disability down to future children. Right. He doesn't understand that at all. He thinks like she's got something wrong with her, but that couldn't have anything to do with my father because he made me too and I'm perfect, right? He's bad at racism. Like he's doing a bad job at his race. He's better being a science.

He's better. His knowledge of science is incomplete, right? Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, when we, I mean, we already covered it, but I don't remember him going to, like, a lot of school. I do remember killing monkeys, you know. He's killing a lot of monkeys.

This is the era of the gentleman scientist, though, right? Like, Gregor Mendel, who does discover a lot of this stuff, is like a monk who's just kind of fucking around with pea plants and stuff. Right. They're inventing science walls. Right. So there's not, like, a lot of. There are colleges, but there's a lot of science you get to be self-taught, right?

Like, Galton, it would have been hard for him to have known, but it is important that, like, he's completely wrong from the get-go. The fact that he would be like, well, someone like my father should be encouraged to breed, and also, like, someone like my sister shouldn't be allowed to is a basic fundamental misunderstanding of, like, heredity, right? Galton, the atheist, had by the 1870s and 80s appointed himself a scientific priest overseeing the collective brilliance if not the soul of the British people. And he becomes in this period much more, less concerned with overseas stuff, with like

overseas stuff, with like colonies and like these foreign people. Like he still cares about replacing or halting the breeding of inferior races. But he becomes mostly focused on what's happening in England because he becomes, he decides that racial degeneration is an emergency, that actually a white genocide might be. He doesn't quite think of it as a white genocide because it's really not. about white to him as much as it is about class. But he thinks an idiocracy is going to happen. All of the stupid people are going to breed out the eminent men, the intelligent people, and the quality of the English race is going to decline because we've let fools breed too

rapidly, right? And poor people, primarily poor people, right? Galton's chief obsession from this period of his life on is urban decay. There is, in early industrial London, a teeming mass of homeless and indigent people, folks in mad houses and poor houses on the streets of London, and he decides that's going to have to change. He cannot stand seeing homeless people because that is evidence that there's like, that is evidence that the genetic quality of his race is being degraded. If his people are alive and have the potential to breed, right? He's horrified by that.

Like a homeless person could make kids, someone in a poor house could just be having kids. That's the biggest threat in the world to him because he believes you can't, you shouldn't ethically give those kids any resources. You need to let them die. So that's a tragedy. Obviously, it's completely unavoidable. And also that will mean less resources for like rich people who are smart, right? How does he imagine the race? Like I guess that idea of looking around and going like, look at all these poor people and, you know, it's going to be, all the smart people are going to disappear. And it's like, but you've got, the human race has been doing pretty good so far. So what do you think it's been in the past? He does have an explanation for that, right? Because he's looking at,

Darwin's origin of species, right? And Darwin had argued in that that, like, obviously natural selection favors those who are most fit because they tend to out, because they tend to outbreed the less fit. Galton comes in and says, like, well, that's true, but because of modern civilization and modern medicine, we've kind of broken that cycle. Right. And now people who are less fit are breeding more because, like, intelligent people often decide to wait or, you know, they had a big issue with, like, the church.

during like the medieval period, putting a bunch of smart people making the monks and priests because then they couldn't breed. And that was a disaster for the collective intelligence of Europe, right? That's a big thing. One of Gaulman's major issues with religion. And his big, like he argues that now natural selection often favors people who are less fit and that these quote, weekly and incapable men will cause the degeneration of society if allowed to breed. It's not quite white genocide. It's more of a smart genocide. Yeah. No, it's funny how every generation, like, you can go and find articles of people complaining about, like, kids are reading too many books these days that's going to rot their brains.

Where it's like there's always this idea of modern technology. And it's very funny, especially now, that a lot of these guys who are like, what is it, good times create weak men, those guys are the same guys being like, also I invented this machine that can think for us and parent for us. So Galton is primarily, the thing he comes to primarily, lame for like breaking the natural cycle of things, right, for making natural selection not favor the strongest and actually favor the weak social programs, right? That is the unnatural thing that has caused, that has like shattered the system that ensures that only the best procreate.

Because we have welfare programs that like help poor people survive and like feed starving kids, that's going to ruin the species, right? That's his main argument. It's very funny. that these people never calculate. You know, you talked about how, like, the Bible has these baked in morality, where it's like, you know, be good to people. I would argue that that's baked into our existence and the fact that it's clearly part of our survival that if we see another person starving, we want to help that person. Like, that is a, it's natural part of how we progressed.

There's a, there's a white, no. And there's a lot of documentation of like, all truism. in the animal kingdom, right? It's not just human beings, multiple species of it, that there's no other real explanation for them. Like, oh, I guess they decided to do a nice thing for this other animal, right? And like, yeah, there's, that's a broader topic of discussion than we can get into, but there's a, and, you know, part of the proof of it of like the, and I would never want to reduce someone's like, I don't think it's moral to be like, oh, someone's good because they have evolutionary value. But like, if you want to look at further evidence of like the evolutionary

value of like within Galton's own sort of life story, right? You have an example of this person who is not like physically fit because of an inborn like illness that they had no control over, but who is still massively contributes to her family and to her society. And Galton even recognizes that. He's capable of seeing in like a specific instant, oh, well, this is a person who contributed to society as much as anybody despite being disabled. But he still concludes that on the whole disabled people are worth very little. And that's the thing is like everybody has evolutionary value except for Joe Rogan. Like it's like everybody is worth helping because everybody has something to offer the world.

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And we're back. So we should talk a little about the science of, like, genetic inheritance and the impact it has on intelligence, right? Because obviously, like, heredity has a lot to do with intelligence, right? You know, like, that's not a controversial thing to say. But also, it's not the only or the primary thing. And it's certainly inaccurate to say that, like, nurture can't do any, which is what Galton believes, right? Because he doesn't get genetics. and he's based all these conclusions at just like looking graphing all of the rich and prominent people that he thinks are imminent men and kind of estimating how many of them had successful kids right like that's that's all of his science and that's like a that's a really bad i that we know that's nonsense now a 2018 study i found noted that quote across studies parents education correlates point three oh with children's intelligence implying that it accounts for nine percent of the variance in children's intelligence right and that i

Obviously, that doesn't say anything about heredity. We're talking about, like, parents' education. But that does suggest that the Galton's obsessive focus on the education level achieved by someone's parents as a predictor of their kid's success is extremely short-sighted, right? Because that does not, like, we know that that does not, like, guarantee or doom a kid. If their parents are, like, having educated parents doesn't mean you'll be educated, having dumb parents, or having uneducated parents doesn't mean you won't get an education. There's some impact there.

But it occurs for, like, 9% of the very. and children's intelligence, right? In theory, there was a time it's almost everything, damn. Where being more educated got you a better job and not just student debt. And that might help your kid down the line. I feel like that's less of a case now. Yeah, I mean, and we probably, it's probably too recently that change has happened for there to be much to show from it, right? Modern science has also shown that the heredability of intelligence is vastly more complicated

than Galton believed. For one thing, the heritable elements of intelligence are, per one, research paper I found, extremely polygenic, which means there's no single, like, smart gene. And it's part of why you often have cases that people are like super geniuses whose parents and whose family lines are like, you know, normal people. There wasn't much of a sign of that in the family before, and then suddenly you get this mega genius.

And it's because, I don't know, both parents had like some interlocking sets of genes that wound up, you know, influencing the intelligence of this kid in a way that's not predictable and certainly not something that we could have predicted based on the face. family history of the people who had that genius kid, right? Yeah, the one smart sperm. The one smart sperm wiggled in there. Yeah, that's just not how it works. Identical twins with similar educations will differ by as much as six IQ points in either

direction. And identical twins raise separately attribute more than twice that variability, like a variability, like a 15 point IQ difference up or down, which shows, again, like a there's a, that's a very significant degree in which, like, nurture or like, your actual environment impacts things because these are people who are genetically identical. And there's a 15 point gap in intelligence based on them being like raised in different areas with access to different kinds of education systems and different kinds of parents who have different tactics, right?

That's a pretty massive gap. Yeah, there's like documentaries about like identical twins being raised by different people and stuff like that and how vastly different your life is depending on. Yeah. Yeah, intelligence is complicated and it's not nearly as simple as Galton thought. Now, I should note, because I brought up twins, Galton is the guy who starts doing that pretty much. He is, like, the founder of twin studies as a major thing in science.

One thing that's happening in the background here, a lot of these studies that I'm quoting in books that I'm citing, Galton is kind of inventing a lot of the, and helping to invent. Other people are doing it. He's in dialogue with him. But he is part of, like, how we come up with the way of how to do, like, a scientific study and how to, like, analyze statistics and, like,

gather data from a population. Galton does have a large role in inventing a lot of that. He's inventing it to do bad science and racism, but he is influential in that process, right, in part by creating the idea of twin studies. Now, he doesn't know what's going on genetically with the twins that he's studying. Like, they, they, because they don't know, like, DNA back then, right? Right. So there's a lot of, I would say all of the twin studies, I have read that he has conducted

had very questionable conclusions, right? I got it. I have to imagine twins have had a hard time historically. A hard time. A lot of science has fucked with a lot of twins. Well, in the preface of the 1892 edition of his book on hereditary genius, Galton described race mixing as one of the chief causes of social degeneration. He was particularly concerned by this point that breeding peoples who were far from each other geographically

would create weak and short-lived children. By far he means that, like, well, an African and a Britain, right, are far from each other. and so their genetics must not be compatible, and by necessity, they'll create unhealthy children. Now, trying to answer the question of, like, how, is there health, are there health differences between, like, mixed race kids and kids who are not mixed race? That's an incredibly complicated question. But one thing we can do, there are some very basic ways to prove gaunt and wrong here, right, just in terms of, like, the basic level of, like, health and wellness that mixed race people have, right? For example, people of European descent who carry genes for

cystic fibrosis are less likely to pass them on when they have a child with somewhat of non-European descent because of the way like recessive traits work, if you, if someone who's like a carrier for cystic fibrosis and European has a kid with, you know, somebody who's like Chinese or whatever, right? That kid is less likely to get the genes for cystic fibrosis, right? People of Ashkenazi descent are likelyer to carry genes for Tay Sachs disease, but less likely to pass them on when they mix with other populations, right? So these are, and there's a number of genetic illnesses like this that are more common in people of like one ethnic group or another that when they like breed with people of other ethnic groups, it's less likely that they pass on that genetic disease, right? Right.

There's also some. Like if you wanted to build a stronger future generation, it's just everybody, bone, everybody, right? Like that's the secret. I mean, it's a good. There's certain benefits to it, right? Including like there's some benefits to your immune system. I want to quote from an article I found on the doctor guide online, the immune system benefits greatly from genetic diversity.

One key component is the human leukocyte antigen HLA system, a group of genes responsible for helping the body recognize foreign invaders like viruses and bacteria. People with more varied HLA genes tend to have stronger immune responses because their bodies can detect a wider range of pathogens. Mixed individuals usually inherit a richer set of HLA alleles compared to those from genetically homogenous populations, right? And that doesn't mean mixed race people are healthier. always or live longer lives.

There's so many other factors there, right? It just means Galton is wrong. There's zero reason to believe that mixed race kids are like sicklier or have shorter lifespans, right? We just know that there's no evidence of that. And there's quite a bit of evidence that in some cases it can reduce the odds of certain illnesses, right? Anyway, it's just important to point out that he's wrong there. By 1892, Galton had started focusing his eugenic obsessions on two groups within English society who worried him, the carriers of congenital defects and people of color who might or actively were interbreeding

with the white European population. This is like very white genocide adjacent. Again, he's more concerned with like smart people being genocide, but obviously he doesn't think that non-white people can really be smart usually. So it does, it is the same thing. He's just not framing it quite the same, right? For obvious reasons, the latter people, non-white people who are breeding with white people, were of the greatest concern to Galton. His conclusion by the 1890s is that nurture has almost nothing to do with outcome. Savages, he wrote,

even when raised by European families, were, quote, incapable of progress after the first few years of their lives. While white people could learn and grow, non-white people lost that ability after a while and could only be educated for a limited period of time. That's a really convenient thing to believe when you want these people to start working

when they're like 14 or so or younger for you. Right? That's the thing. You're saying, like, it's not, it's not being identified of racism. It's just that racism is an ingredient in the larger equation. Like, it's not racist, not because it isn't racist, but because just it's the sum of its parts includes racism in it. It's already baked into it. A lot of his biographers will argue that class was a bigger thing for Galton than race.

And his, in his obsession with class also. like was seen in his obsession with race and fueled his obsession with race but it all started because he's like a rich guy who thinks poor people are gross and scary right like that is the root of all of this right and I do think that that's broadly accurate not to minimize his racism I just think this does start with class right and like the people he's seeing in the Middle East and in Africa right they're mostly poor people right like the locals that he's talking about so terribly and he says very similar things about poor people he sees in London and he often will as we'll talk about he'll compare them to the

the poor to the Herrero's that he saw in South Africa, right? Now, I don't think it's fruitful to like bust every single myth Galton has here because you know they're untrue. But it is important that like important to note that like there was a lot of evidence that everything he's saying about like, well, you can't educate, you know, black people right past a certain point. They can't learn more. You know, that that window closes quickly.

There's a ton of educated black men who are writing books and articles. that are being read internationally by this point in time. Frederick Douglass exists during his lifetime and is very famous, right? And Frederick Douglass is not the only black man who had been enslaved and became a prominent writer and political organizer. James William Pennington, also born a slave, went to fucking Yale, the first black man to go to Yale. He was allowed to attend classes, but forbidden from formally graduating, although he was

recognized in 2023 as having completed the coursework necessary to have gotten a degree. Solomon Northrop published his account 12 years a slave in 1853. And in Galton's own England, Olata Equiano published a harrowing account of his own youth as a slave, and life as an explorer in 1791, a century before Galton wrote this shit, right? And I've read Equiano's book and several works by Galton. I'll tell you who struck me as a more intelligent, impressive person. And it's not the fucker who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It's the guy who was stolen into slavery as a child, became free, wrote a best-selling book,

became a major abolitionist organizer, and was one of the first people to, explore the Arctic. Right? Like, I just find that more impressive than a rich guy you stay rich. The guy you want to talk to at the party, yeah. Yeah. Galton never read Olaude's book. Doing so would have proved his very theory a lie. Instead, he began drawing conclusions from the physical characteristics he's observed in foreign peoples, like the hottentots, the Herrero, and similar characteristics in the urban poor in London. He concluded that Africans and British criminals had a lot of traits in common. Quote, the greater part of the hot and tots about me had that peculiar set of features, which is so characteristic

to bad characters in England, and so general among prisoners that it is usually, I believe, known by the name of the felon face. I mean, they have prominent cheekbones, bullet-shaped head, cowering but restless eyes, and heavy sensual lips, and adding to this a shacking, and added to this

a shackling dress and manner. And the felon face is a concept, looks like cops kind of come up with this, and like, well, you can tell who's a criminal. In part because that way they don't have to tell he's a criminal. Inferial. Cops faces. is definitely a thing. That's a facial expression.

There's many cop faces out there. Yeah. There is cop face. Some people are prototypically cops. Yeah. I'll show you felon face in a second. Do they actually like, use felon face as like a piece of evidence? Oh, Sophie.

You're not, you're not, yeah. Oh, they're trying. He's going to try to. Right. He's going to try to. Yeah. Because it just reminds me of like early on when we were doing that episode when they, the gene pattern.

like way doing evidence, it's like on that level where it's like absolutely not. Yeah. So, I mean, part of what's going on here with FelonFace is that the 1870s to 1900 are a period of massive growth. This is like a period of massive growth in the science of photography, right? Camera technology leaps forward at a rate that is probably similar to how we feel about how cell phones have advanced during our lifetimes, right? You're going from like, we've got this box that you have to like sit still by for like a long

period of time and it kind of looks like shit to like people can just like travel with like cameras and take pictures of shit all over the world right um it's it's a massive change and galton it becomes obsessed with cameras right he loves photography and he starts working with sir edmund de kane the inspector of prisons for england who provides him or for london who provided him with photographs of convicts from several institutions and before we go any further i i need to expose a flaw in Galton's research, which is that he is basing because he's going to try to decide, find the physical features that show someone's a criminal, so that you can predict crime by being like, well, if someone has this sort of face structure, that means they're going to be a criminal,

and we should do something about them before they have a chance to hurt people, right? It's very funny because I think we've started, people have tried this recently with like AI shit. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We're going right back to it. Yeah. This is, this is absolutely something that AI is going to accelerate again. Is he like that person has high cheekbones, fell in face. Stuff like that. Stuff like that. Yeah. We'll get into it.

So, yes, it is stuff like that. But before we get in it, I need to point out a massive flaw in his like underlying assumptions, which is that police and judges in Victorian England are even worse at their jobs than their modern equivalents. Innocent people are convicted of crimes regularly in this period of time, as they are today, but even more regularly back then. And they're also, because he's also taking pictures of like people in mental institutions to try to determine what sort of facial features, features mean that, like, show insanity

so that we can know who's going to go crazy. before they do, right? You can tell it, right? You can diagnose them just by looking at them. He believes that should be possible, right? Because he believes that there's, the face reflects these mental characteristics that are inherent to people. And one of the problems with this is that people often wind up in mental institutions in this period of time for reasons that have nothing to do with mental health. In a 2012 book on mental illness in late Victorian Britain, Philip Cohen related this story. The daughter of an architect, a socialist and a feminist, announced her intention to live openly, outside of wedlock with James Sullivan, a member of the

working class, and secretary of a local London branch of the SDF, a local socialist party. Cohabiding with Sullivan would express her commitment to socialism and her related rejection of the institution of marriage. But such behavior crossed rigid lines of class and religion, not to mention conventional morality. Therefore, her father and two of her brothers exploited the English lunacy act of 1890 to launch a preemptive strike by having her involuntarily committed to an asylum, aptly called the priory on an emergency basis, i.e. not to exceed seven days, based on the statement of a single physician. This temporary commitment was the intended prelude to a long-term involuntary institutionalization. Now, the good news is this woman is freed. Eventually, there's like a public outcry and she does get out. But that shows you what, and first, and that 1890 law is something that Galton had lobbied for. He was very much in favor of getting crazy people off the street and locking them up, partly so that he could study them. But, like, that's a lot. lot of people who wind up in asylums. Yeah.

Any study. You can bribe to have someone put there, you know? Yeah. Any study based on people who've been in prison or institutionalized in general, if the study is to determine what type of person has that, like, even if you boil it down to like shoplifting, like, if you're like, we took all the mug shots of shoplifters, therefore we have determined what a shoplifter looks like. The problem is the data always starts with humans.

It's the same with AI, right? Training AI. It always starts with human error. what you're actually getting is we looked at what cops most likely like see for a shop, like what type of person cops approach first. Yeah. Or like that people suspect of shoplifting. It doesn't give you, here's what all the shoplifters look like.

It's just here's all the shoplifters that got caught for shoplifting for various reasons, including the biases of the people around them. It just doesn't work. Like, especially the older. the data, obviously, from this time, like, it's a nightmare starting point. Yeah. So Galton ignored the possibility that the justice system and the mental health system might be flawed and instead considered these photos of criminals to be the best kind of evidence. He grouped them by crime and expected their physical features would provide clues to the

crimes that they'd committed. For Schumacher, quote, in the first instance, by sight he established to his own satisfaction that men who committed larceny possessed large foreheads and small skulls, and burglars were inclined to be squinty-faced. However, once he subjected the photographs to his composite process, the results did not give him the outcome he had anticipated. Instead of identifying the criminal, he determined that he had instead revealed the face of a man who was likely to fall into criminal behavior.

So he starts by being like, I should be able to determine who is a criminal by like compositing all of the faces of criminals together and then like looking at which guy in this lineup best matches that. And that doesn't actually work at all. So instead what he realized is, is that like, well, this guy who I identified as likely a criminal because his face looked like this composite of other burglars, he hadn't committed a crime yet, but he's gonna.

Right. He figured out free crime. He must be a future criminal then. Therefore, the test is correct. It is good. And I got to show you some of these. So he's going to put up on the Netflix now, some of these composite portraits that he's doing. And there's that if you can't see it, this is like a bunch of different, like a dozen or so pictures of guys.

that are all like composited from like bunches of people at the bottom. You've got like portraits at the top of men convicted of crimes of violence. And then there, several of the portraits are combined in the bottom to, and it just kind of makes blurry looking people, right? Like the all seven guy just has like a, but he looks like a weird AI composite because he's just got like eight fingers and stuff. Like I'm not sure what you're supposed to get out of this, but Golden is obsessed with it. like he is convinced this is the new pre-crime.

If we just figure out crime face, then we can stop crime before it happens, you know? Um, and it's, it's just silly nonsense from the jump. He has never able to, none of his own research ever, like,

backs any of this up as much as he thinks. He's constantly frustrated to be like, okay, but it's, this is what their faces are supposed to be. And yet when I try to actually like catch a criminal using these techniques, it never works.

Right. What is the science here? I don't know what could be wrong. Like, Does their larger foreheads make them more aerodynamic for the crimes? Like, what's the evolutionary purpose of having crime phase? I'm sure some of this is descended from phrenology, you know, like that that certainly influences this, right?

And some of it's just, he has always been, if you remember back to his explorations in Africa, he's like measuring ladies, he thinks they're hot on the slide with a sextant from a distance. He's always been obsessed with measuring people. And he, this is what he really starts. to professionalize measuring people in the late 1800s. He calls it anthropometric techniques. And these are ways he wants to categorize and help predict criminal behavior by taking on a lot of data about the physical characteristics of criminals and people with like mental illnesses. And once he starts making these composites, it has a horror.

It doesn't actually help find any criminals. It never like works out scientifically. But he becomes obsessed with seeing criminals in every crowd in London. And once he knows, like, this is the face of a robber, this is the face of a rapist, this is the face of a murderer. Anytime he's around a crowd, he's like, my God, the sheer number of maniacs and criminals, London is overwhelmed with a flood of crime and violence. Because, like, these people have faces that look kind of like his weird composites. He should have.

He thinks that means they're destined to crime. I wish he had AI. It's weird to say, I wish this guy had AI. He would have taken to it like a ducked water. It just seems like the kind of person. If you gave him Claude, it would actually help us out in the long. run because he'd like invent his own type of math and then light himself on fire and then we have to deal with this guy yeah claude might have talked to him into fucking ending the problem

before yeah yeah claude might have taken him out of the gene pool so to speak um so gaulton starts getting increasingly paranoid and obsessive after this period of time in another one of his books inquiries into human faculty in its development in 1883 published in 1883 he wrote the proportion of weekly and misshapen individuals is not to be estimated by those we meet in the streets. The worst cases are out of sight. We should parade before our minds' eye, the inmates of the lunatic, idiot, and pauper asylums, the prisoners, the patients and hospitals, the sufferers at home, the crippled, and the congenitally blind. Our human-civilized stock is far more weak through congenital imperfection than that of any other species of animal,

whether wild or domestic. That's not based on science. He's not doing studies of like animals and how many of them have congenital birth defects or any of that. He's not even attempting to. He's just declaring this. He's not even, there's no statistic basis for all that he's the stats guy. This is just like what feels right to him based on kind of looking, looking at people. Right. And he's very smart. He's very smart. He's really smart guy. And that this also points out something. The fact that he is including the poor houses, people who are literally being locked up just because they're in debt to like an insane asylum, does reemphasize the point that like this is about class, right? Eugenics is hugely about class.

Galton's inferior people aren't just the mentally and the physically ill, they're the poor and people convicted of crimes. In other words, they're people of a lower class than Francis Galton. As biographer Michael Bulwer noted, Galton also used this book to expand his advocacy for a eugenic society. Quote, he suggested that a scheme of marks for family merit should be devised so that ancestral qualities as well as personal qualities could be taken into account. Individuals with a high composite score should then be encouraged to marry early by the provision

of endowments as well as by a sense of pride. The attitude of mine that I should expect to predominate among those who had undeniable claims to rank as members of an exceptionally gifted race would be akin to that of the modern possessors of ancestral property or hereditary rank. A man of good race would shrink from spoiling it by a lower marriage. And the fact that he's looking at high race as the same as inheriting a high property, right? It's all class, you know? Yeah, which is the dumbest thing to judge people based off? I mean, it's bad to be racist. Whether or not their dad was rich.

Yeah. But, like, class seems like the most arbitrary. It is. That's why I think, partly why he has to dress it up as a race thing is because class is arbitrary and it makes it clear that he's just like a snooty rich asshole. He's got to foof it up. He's got to razz it with some racism to make it more exciting for people. The racism is a little bit of a beard to make it seem scientific.

Yeah. Right. Now, he still doesn't in the 1880s. He's still not advocating for the repression. of less fit people, quote, believing that it would ensue indirectly as a matter of course. In other words, you don't have to sterilize, because how would we at this point in time, people? You don't have to, like, kill them. You just have to, if we just change the incentives and stop supporting them with social programs

and spend that money on supporting rich people who are already rich and giving them more money to have kids. That's how we get rid of these people, right? Right. Now, as a result of his obsession with anthropogenic documentation, Galton decided to turn his scientific mind to devising systems that would allow the police to identify people who were inclined to criminal behavior or who had committed crimes. Speaking of criminal behavior, even as an old man, Galton continued to exhibit what we would

call today a criminal and deeply troubling inclination towards measuring and describing the hotness of girls he liked without telling them what he was doing. This continues throughout his life, per Bulwer's biography. In 1880, he exhibited a pocket registrator for recording the number of of individuals of different kinds in a crowd without attracting attention. And he also drew attention to the ease with which registers may be kept by pricking holes

and paper of different compartments with a fine needle. He used the latter technique to construct a beauty map of the British Isles, classifying the girls he passed in the street or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent. He found London to rank the highest for beauty, in Aberdeen the lowest. So he creates his like pocket notebook

that he can without looking rate the hotness of people like to like and he uses this to create a map of where the girls are hottest in the British Isles. Again, he would have done great with AI and like credit. He would have loved these things. This is like the John Doe notebook in seven is what you're describing. Yeah, yeah. Serial killer notebook.

You know, what it made me think about is the very first version of Facebook that Mark Zuckerberg had was a way it was hot or not. It was a way for Pete guys to like rape the girls in their school, right? Like he and Galton are the same. man. Yeah. It really does feel like any era there's certain like characteristics of people like this. Dirtbacks. I would call them dirt back. Dirtbacks. Scumbags. Gross guys. Yeah. And one is like trying to boil people down to these equations, able to rate them and give them quality to make yourself feel better. I assume that's the point. Right. The other is doing a secret hot or not.

Right. You don't be able to see you do it. it. Again, like looking at pictures of him, I, you know, I'm not him. I don't want to rate people's looks, but it's very clear that he's the kind of guy who perhaps if someone had a notebook with him in it, he wouldn't be at the top of that notebook. He wouldn't turn out so well, yeah. Right. So there's this idea of almost like reclaiming it or like this guy who probably knows that he's nothing to look at, you know? I think it's, it's more I think that that's what he sees is like the actual value of like women, right? is their hotness, whereas like men clearly have other things going on. He's got that big sexy brain of his that uses a fucking prison mugshots to create the

prison mugshots. Yeah. I mean, don't forget this is the guy who called that, that woman an uncommonly good-looking female lunatics. Uncommonly good. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yes.

What a guy. My favorite classification of person. In 1886, Galton turned his keen scientific mind to the study of British, you know, Jews, and you know this isn't going to go anywhere. Oh, no. He's working with an anthropologist. Yeah, yeah, oh, boy. Uh-oh.

Oh, boy. Yeah. Now, his partner in this is an anthropologist and, like, historian of Jewish communities named Joseph Jacobs. I actually don't know if Jacobs is Jewish, but he's not, like, racist. Like, he's actually, like, interested in just, like, studying Jewish people, I guess, for whatever reason. But I don't think he's a bigot.

Or at least not compared to Galton. Galton, though, considers Jews to be inferior to Europeans because Jews have Asian origins. And he sees his evidence of the fact that, like, as they're doing this, like, survey of the, like, Jews in London, a lot of London Jews live in large, like, live in, like, in the inner city and, like, crowded neighborhoods and have large impoverished families, right? And part, I'm guessing a lot of the, especially by the era, a lot of these folks would have come from, like, Eastern Europe as, like, refugees because, like, shit's really bad and, like, Russia and the like, you know.

So you've got all, so he takes them out to like, ah, this is proof that like they're an inferior kind of people. They have these large families. They live in these, you know, these bad neighborhoods, right? Galton conducted a study of these people and reported to the Royal Anthropological Institute. Quote, the feature that struck me the most as I drove to the school through the adjacent Jewish quarter was the cold scanning gaze of man, woman and child, and this was no less conspicuous among the schoolboys.

I felt, rightly or wrongly, that every one of them was coolly appropriate. praising me at market value without the slightest interest of any other kind. I found that as I was hiding in these bushes that these Jews were acting very suspicious about me. Maybe it was nonsense, but I think they boiled me down to just thinking of my financial value. I have no evidence for this. No one said anything, but all of them did this. Yeah. Like, yeah, in his safari. This is a lot of that stuff, right?

Yeah. I'm going to screw up this fact, but like the idea of like Jews controlling the wealth. came from the fact that Jews were allowed banking jobs at one point and not other jobs. Yeah, yeah. That's like the basics of that are accurate, right? That like Christians and Muslims were forbidden from like collecting interest and stuff. And so that's part of one, like one reason why Jewish people came to dominate the banking industry for a period. Yeah.

And there's a lot of that. I remember there's like the whole thing with Scrooge McDuck. It's like such racism that it's, I didn't even know, I didn't even know that like Scottish people are cheap. And it came from like the famine of them like having to save money and everybody being like, ah, you're cheap. They were starving at one point. No, they were dying. Yeah, they didn't have any money.

The stereotype of like the lazy, and this is another thing that like fucking throws a wrench in Galton's bullshit, there was an understanding at this period of time that like American southerners, like the poor southerners were like a worse quality of white because they were like lazy and slow and stupid. It turns out what happened is like a large chunk of the south. People had horrible hookworms that like fucked up. every aspect of their life, including, like, their brains because they have fucking worms. White people love kicking someone in the shin and then going, like, ah, you Irishman, always holding your shins. Always honing your shins. Yeah.

Classic Irish. Yeah. But this is, and one of the things that's interesting here is that he is conducting this study with a guy who's not racist and comes to wildly different conclusions, in part because that other guys actually trying to, like, do a. like study and like the survey, the population and like kind of what physical traits do people have in common,

what illness is or more common, whereas Galton's looking, hiding in the bushes and being like, they're clearly appraising me with their Jew eyes. You know, like literally that's the difference between them. One guy's doing science and Galton's just like, well,

I'm pretty sure they all were thinking about this. So that's what I've concluded in my report to the Royal Society. I'm imagining now like all of his studies being like Frank from It's Always Sunny. Like I'm just picturing Frank from it's always sunny. Like I'm just picturing Frank from it. that. It's a lot. Yeah. He does take a lot of notes and document stuff because there's all sorts

of numbers, but when you get down to his basic conclusions, it's often he decided all Jewish people felt this way because he looked at a crowd once. In her dissertation, Susan Schumacher, Suzanne Schumacher summarizes the differing reactions to his work here. Quote, he and many of his scientific colleagues believed that he had successfully captured the Jewish type, Jacobs and another Jewish scholar, Dr. Adolf Neubauer, however, had quite different opinions from Galton, as reported in their presentations to the anthropological society. They both argued that the Jews of Europe were so racially mixed that they could not be distinguished from other Europeans, and that if there was something in their expressions, it was environmental and related to them

being oppressed individuals, rather than from heredity. What Galton regarded as biologically determined a visual embodiment of an inferior race, Jacob saw as a social phenomenon. And again, Jacobs is obviously correct here. Now, despite the fact that his use of composite photography had consistently failed when he tried to validate it as a predictive, as predictive of anything, and that the constant disagreements of his colleagues kind of proved his objective findings were heavily subjective. Galton only grew more obsessed with using composite photography and making, like, objective judgments about large groups of people based on no real evidence. He toured asylums across the country, trying to average patients with tuberculosis to prove some sort of link

in their facial features, because there was a belief that, like, tuberculosis isn't caused about, it wasn't like a disease, like, we know it is. It was like a thing that some people with, like, bad genes have because, like, they inherited tuberculosis, right? And so there's like this narrow ovoid face. And doctors, this isn't just golden. Doctors believe, like, the narrow ovoid face is a sign of tuberculosis, right? That somebody might be, you know, at risk of coming down with it later in life. They have this face style. And Galton like averages a bunch of tuberculosis patients using this like facial composite and he doesn't find that, right? That narrow ovoid face just like isn't the thing. There's actually like no facial features that seem to predict tuberculosis.

And rather than seeing this is proof that because he could have been like, oh, I guess everyone else is wrong. And I being smart Galton got to prove them wrong using science. He does not. He reports that he didn't find a link, but he concludes by being like, future tests will definitely confirm a link, right? I just didn't get it right this time, but I'm sure this is still accurate. Because again, he's really not that good a scientist. He really wants faces to matter. He also started assembling composites of desirable features in the belief that this would inspire ordinary citizens to see what could be achieved through eugenics. He never labels these or explains them.

He just like put out as propaganda of like, look at how good-looking people could be in the future if we stop some of you from breeding. His work here never supported his actual beliefs about eugenics, but Galton would remain obsessed with facial composites for decades. However, his next area of scientific endeavor would be partly inspired by the failure of his composites to help identify criminals. We'll talk about how Francis Galton helped invent modern criminal science and fingerprinting in part four. But Dave, we're done for today. My question before we wrap is, do we have a list of those desirable features? And does he have any of them? Well, he's smart and rich, Sophie.

That's most of it. Oh, okay. Dave, you got any plugables? Oh, why not? I am a co-host of a podcast network called Gamefully Unemployed. We talk about movies, movies. It's moving pictures. We talk about them.

Did you know that you've had a podcast about that? Yeah. We also have a Patreon, patreon. Patreon.com slash Gamefully Unemployed, where you have exclusive podcasts on there, such as one that's called, there's Tom and Jeff Watch Batman, there's Fox Mulder as a maniac.

There's a bunch. And we watch movies with our patrons as well. We do a lot of movie stuff. We like movies. We regularly, I'll have people, especially after a rough episode, be like,

anyone got a podcast that's less depressing to help me, kind of clear, and I always recommend Gamefully Unemployed. Oh, thank you. Check out Tom and Dave. And check out the next and last part of our series on Francis Galton slightly later this week, or immediately

if you're listening to this in the future when all the episodes are out, which statistically most of you will be. So congratulations, you know many great things that we don't, and in fact are a superior kind of person because you live in the future. Anyway, we're probably dead. Goodbye. Yeah, baby. Who knows?

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency. It does not have body cameras. It's real.

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