You're Dead to Me - Francis Galton: Victorian scientist and pioneer of eugenics

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

Greg Jenner is joined in Victorian England by historian and curator Subhadra Das and comedian Desiree Burch to learn all about the life of scientist and eugenics pioneer Francis Galton. He was many things: a Victorian gentleman scientist, an inventor of whacky devices, a pioneer of fingerprinting technology, the less famous cousin of superstar naturalist Charles Darwin, and an important figure in the development of statistics. But more importantly – and more troublingly – Francis Galton originated the now discredited science of eugenics. His theories about how to apply principles of good breeding to humans, and his advocacy of ways to improve Britain’s so-called ‘racial health’, led directly and indirectly to many horrors in the decades after his death, from the forced sterilisation of certain groups to the Holocaust. This episode traces his life from child prodigy to prolific scientist, exploring his obsession with understanding the world through measurement and statistics, and how this mindset eventually led him to pioneer eugenic theories. Along the way it takes in his African travels, unwise self-experimentation during his medical degree, and his troubling views on women. If you’re a fan of debunked scientific theories, whacky historical inventions and the unsavoury origins of modern beliefs, you’ll love our episode on Francis Galton. If you want more biographies with Desiree Burch, listen to our episodes on Pythagoras, Paul Robeson or Lena Horne. And for more on the history of eugenics, check out our episodes on the Kellogg Brothers and Victorian Bodybuilding. You’re Dead To Me is the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Every episode, Greg Jenner brings together the best names in history and comedy to learn and laugh about the past. Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Naomi Weaver Written by: Dr Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Dr Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Dr Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Gill Huggett Senior Producer: Dr Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: Philip Sellars

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Hello, Greg Janna here. Great news. You can now watch this episode and all future episodes of You're Dead to Me in full video. Just search for Your Dead to Me on YouTube or watch episodes 28 days early by subscribing to the streaming service BBC Select in the US and Canada. Thank you. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me.

We are the BBC Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history, serious. My name's Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today, we are growing at our sideburns, gathering some problematic data as we head back to Victorian Britain to learn all about the scientist Francis Galton. And to help us in our study, I have two very special lab partners. In History Corner, she's a historian, writer and curator and a specialist in the history and philosophy of science, particularly the scientific racism and eugenics movement. Sorry about that. You might have read her excellent book. uncivilised, 10 lies that made the West. And luckily for us, she spent nine years as the curator of the science collection at University College London, where a lot of the Galton material is held. It's Sabadra Duss. Welcome to Madra. Hello, lovely to be here. Thank you for coming in. And in Comedy Corner, she needs no introduction, but I can actually have to do one. She's a comedian,

an actor, a writer. You've seen her on all the telly on Taskmaster, Frankie Ballas New World Order, QI, Too Hot to Handel. Maybe you've seen her live on tour, a brilliant stand-up comedian, but of course, most importantly, you'll know her from so many of our episodes. Timekeeping history of Broadway musicals, Lena Horn. We had to have it back for Series 12.

It's Desiree Birch. How did we not get sideburns for this? It's a visual medium now. Surely we should have all been doing this. Desiree, I mean, you've been on the show loads of times. I think we've skirted around the edge of eugenics sometimes, but what do you know about Francis Galton? So I actually, in a show that I did, one of my tour shows, Desire's coming early, we talked about Francis Galton because he sort of pioneered the eugenics that went into this sort of IQ test.

Because I talked a lot about that and having grown up and sort of like gifted and talented education in California and how that was sort of predicated on an IQ test that both like limited the opportunities for a lot of black people in California at certain periods, but also. also allowed me to get into the kind of education that would get me into higher and higher places. And also, apparently, was the only reason we figured out that lead was making people, like, dumber in America, because there was lead and all the gas and everything. And it was only the IQ test that was like, oh, lead go up. IQ go down. And, like, then they got rid of lead and everybody was like, oh, finally I can, like, remember anything or function. So that was like the one good thing, apparently the IQ tested.

Yeah, that might be the only good thing about IQ test. But yeah, it did like, you know, whatever Europe did with eugenics, America was like, oh, right, you know, and they just like blew it up to 10,000 and it was perfectly horrible. That's a pretty good summary. Except for the lead bit, except for the lead. I mean, there's actually a lot more to talk about. Gordon's life is sort of fascinating and deeply problematic, but there will be some funny bits, hopefully. You know, we are a comedy show.

They're always. But we are going to be crashing into eugenics at some point. So, you know, so clacks and warning there. But so let's crack on. So what do you know? This is the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's not-so-lovely subject. Francis Galton, Sir Francis Galton, is sometimes called the most influential British scientist you've never heard of.

If you've heard of him, like Desiree, you might know he was the originator of the science or pseudoscience of eugenics, the belief that society can be improved. So he's like the dark money of like... You know, it's like you've never heard of him, but his work is in everything. Exactly. So, you know, eugenics is the idea that you can improve the human race by selecting who can and cannot reproduce. You may know him as a major figure in early criminology. If you know your Charles Darwin's, you may know that he was Darwin's famous cousin.

But were Goulton's actual inventions and discoveries, you know, as Desiree said, are they, you know, important to the history of science? Why did he take Darwin's ideas to such a dark place? Because he was the cousin who wasn't as cool as Darwin, and Darwin cameos, he's like, well, I could do that and I could do like ten times more, made it way worse. It's like he's in the room. Final question, when do a pair of gloves deserve to be cancelled? When they do this over some dust and they start judging everything.

Oh, not even those gloves? Oh, wait, is it the Mickey Mouse ones? Hold on the gloves. You're going to find out, that's right? Those could also have been used. You're going to find out. Okay, we'll start at the beginning. So Sabadra, he's born in 1822, which makes sense.

kind of regency era he's going to crash into Victorian era later where is he born in the country and does the family have money? Is he posh? Oh yeah he's well they are new money he is pretty posh so he's born in Birmingham which may or may not sound posh depending

on like how you want to think about it the ones that they advertise over in Birmingham where they're like the home of Sir Francis Galton famous eugenicists guys am I right? High concentration of brown people in this country am I right? Yeah.

Yeah, he would be thrilled to see what's happened here. Perfect. The family estate was a place called Sparkbrook, which is now one of the suburbs of Birmingham. The Galton's made their money. Three generations earlier, so Samuel Galton, makes his money as an ironmongerer.

Okay. Which sounds fairly innocuous. Yeah, it does. Until you start to remember that ironmongery means making things like chains and shackles and muzzles. Cachin! He's one of the gazillions. cashing in on human trafficking.

Totally directly making money from the slave trade. But they're clever as well, so they pivot. So because they know that the trade in enslaved Africans is going to be made illegal, they swap to a different technology in terms to be able to benefit from this indirectly. Right. So what they did was they swapped to gun manufacturing.

Great. Because that way... Ethical choice. And they're Quakers as well. So this is kind of like an interesting thing. By the time we get to our Galton, they've converted to Anglicanism, but the family starts out as a Quaker family. So, yeah, you know, these things are problematic.

We keep in mind there's like, you know, porridge and guns. And actually, Galton and Farmer guns were the foremost guns that were used to trade for enslaved Africans. Right. They're not top-quality guns, but they are useful in the economy. So they're used as a currency almost? They used as a currency. Wow. Okay.

And then they moved to the much cleaner industry of banking. Which, I mean, it's like, let's put them all together. I mean, as a trio, it's a fairly evil selection, isn't it? It's not brilliant. It is the full trifector of Dushary, yeah, entirely. So now that when they're in banking, of course, they're making money indirectly from the trade that they made money from directly. Fine, okay, so that was the first Samuel Galton.

And the Samuel Galton, who is the father of our little Francis Galton. Yes. He is Samuel Tertius Gulton. Tertius Gulton. That's what I wondered, because I was like Tertius, like tertiary than third. is the third guy. They didn't want to call him Tripp. They didn't call him Tri.

That's it. Yeah. Trip Golden. All the lax pros is called. Jesus. Okay. So tell us about the family connection because, I mean,

little Francis Galton is connected to the Darwin's. He is. So how does that work on a family tree? So he was the son of Samuel Tertius Galton and also of Violetta Darwin, who was the daughter of a famous doctor called Erasmus Darwin. And this is how we get that Charles Darwin connection

is because they share that grandfather. I mean, he grows. up in a scientific family, but in Birmingham's the sort of also the kind of epicenter of a scientific movement as well. Absolutely. So both of his grandfathers, so Samuel Jr. and Erasmus Darwin, are founding members of a thing called the Lunar Society. These were wealthy, emphasis on wealthy, these very rich, but scientifically minded men. But what they're interested in doing is actually mobilizing the science to their greater interest. So there are other people like James Watt, Matthew Bolton,

Joseph Priestley, we think that Galton's grandfather supported Joseph Priestley with money. So Priestley's one of the great scientists. He is. He discovered oxygen. And invents fizzy drinks. Yeah, we're fond of him. But he might be the reason why Samuel Jr. was able to get into the Royal Society. Oh, interesting. It's who you know.

And Watt and Bolton obviously are kind of, we're talking steam power, steam engines. It's kind of, you know, industrial Britain. It fuels the industrial revolution. And he's a brilliant mind as a kid, right? So at one he's reading? Not quite. 18 months he knows the alphabet. Age two, he's, yeah, age two he can read, age three he can write,

and age five, he's onto epic poetry. I mean, sure. Yeah, why not? So, you know, age six, he's reciting the Iliad. They didn't have Facebook back in the day. My daughter's six, and she's smart, but she's not doing the Iliad or, you know, anything like that. He's just not working hard enough. Yeah, it's my fault.

It's clearly to make a effort. She's like, oh, but there's sunlight outside. Why would I be... So Adele is the sister who takes little Frank on as a project. Yes, so we know that she had some form of curvature of the spine, which meant that she wasn't as mobile as she would have been otherwise. And she's confined indoors. She's confined to her bed for extended periods.

But he is her project. And she is, you know, she is the baseline. She creates this notion of a genius and a born genius, because he's doing all these things that are. But yeah, we'd be interested to know. But also a one that's made, like, through somebody, like, you know, is he getting the ideas of being like, oh, well, you can really cultivate all of these great things. Yeah, the baby did not teach itself Greek.

Yes. Greek babies do, but that's a different way. I mean, even still, they've got to hear Greek otherwise. That's a good scientific question. Do we just learn Greek? I don't know. So it's nature versus nurture, and we'll come back to that later, Desiree. Because actually, that is a crucial phrase.

So so far, little Frank is giving off young Sheldon vibes. Oh, very much so. Genius. Nerdie. Nerdy, but also a bit of a jock. Really? Both of these, I don't understand how these two things are possible,

but it's the Victorian area. They're full of promise. He's outdoorsy. He likes some sports. And when they do eventually send him to school, he does quite well. He likes running around fields. Okay.

Multiple stories of him nearly drowning. One time was when he was, like, reaching across a river to try to get to a good fishing spot, and he gets caught in the reeds and nearly drowns. Okay. So we nearly lose him fairly early on. actually. Damn.

I mean, you say brilliant and accomplished. He doesn't love school, Francis Galton. He doesn't excel emotionally at school. No, possibly because there isn't someone just holding his hand and telling him how brilliant he is the whole time. He apparently hated school. He said it was hateful in many ways and lovable in none. Okay.

But that also might be part of his, like, looking back and mythologising, it's like, no, school wasn't responsible for making me clever. I was born clever. Fair enough. And parents wanted him to be not an ironmonger, not a banker, they want him to be a doctor. Yeah, this whole situation is so Asian sometimes. I guess because they're selling so many guns.

They're like, somebody's got to stitch him up. Yeah. So mom and dad are like, we think you should go to med school. Yeah. Well, mum particularly was very keen on him going to med school. And back in the day, medical school isn't like you go to university for eight years and then they put you on the ward. They put you on the ward straight away.

Okay. So he goes to med school and he's literally seeing patients like week one. This is it, yeah. Okay. And, you know, he's not thrilled by it. you know, the thing about hospitals is that they're full of sick and poor people. Right.

Which is, and in fairness, like, imagine yourself in that situation. Like, you've been kind of bunged in. It's not a fun place to be altogether. I mean, med school is tough. It's a hard life. And he hasn't had, like, several seasons of the pit to, like, really get into the vibes of how... He hasn't seen scrubs.

He hasn't understood the emotional, yeah. Yeah, I mean, he gets fairly adept. You know, he can set bones, and he does his level best. But he's way more into kind of understanding the nature of medicine. He's actually kind of keen on pharmacy. Apparently, he says in his autobiography, he decided that he wanted to test the efficacy of different drugs. So he started all the ones beginning with A and works his way through B. But when he got to C, he took this stuff which is called Croton Oil. And he said, I had underestimated its efficacy as an emetic and a

diuretic. So we're talking both ends violently. So yeah, unfortunately, Goulton got to C and made himself vomit and defecate and then went, oh, I might stop there. just before he got to D with Deadly Nightshade, which might have ended our episode very early. I mean, the thing that's interesting is Gulton never qualifies as a doctor. No, he got a little bit distracted by maths. So he was chatting with his cousin Charles, who was also a failed doctor.

Sure, yeah, that's the other thing, I suppose, we should think, isn't it? Charles Darwin is not a doctor, but should have been a doctor. This is it. So basically, you know, how everybody now is like, oh, I dropped out of university and started an app or whatever. Like, you know, millennials didn't invent this. They were dropping out of school and doing all kinds of cool things. He is your original disruptor.

And just as dangerous. Pretty much, yeah, if not more. So, yeah, he gets distracted by mathematics. And Darwin's like, yeah, go to Cambridge, study math, you'll enjoy it. Okay. So he's able to convince his dad that this is a good idea. But also, he struggles there as well. Formal education was not his milieu.

He was not enjoying himself there. because it's tough and you have to learn a lot of things. And listen to other people tell you what's right despite what you are anything. This is, yeah, I mean, it's a bit early on, but that doesn't seem like an unfair thing to Samaras. So he was going for the honours degree, and he misses that by a mile,

but he did get the poll degree. So he does have a math degree from Cambridge. The poll degree? It's like when you just do your basic degree. Okay. It's not an honor's. He's not on pole position. No, no.

The poll degree. Participation trophy. Yes, okay. You showed up. You showed up. Yeah. Okay. Great.

So after dropping out of medical school and not getting his math degree or his honors degree at least, Galton got a huge wind full of cash when his father died. So Desiree, what would you do with a massive windfall? You're young, you're 23, millionaire. I'd go back and do better at school. Ah. Do a do-over. But no, I mean, the Goulton does the opposite thing.

He does the sort of classic post-university holiday. But it's not lads, lad, lad, lads magaloof during. he's not even doing the kind of famous grand tour you do of Greece and Italy. He's like, I'm going to go to Antarctica. He goes to Sudan and Syria. Actually, he was originally off to Egypt. So this is what we can get a bit megalif kind of situation, which is like you could go under the Dahabia, which is a boat that will take you on a cruise,

on a Nile cruise. Sure. But the thing that is exceptional is that he does go then further. So normally people stop at the second cataract, but he goes on further to Khartoum. And then he works his way back, yeah, via via. modern-day Syria as well. He goes to Damascus. And he gets a lovely medal from the Royal Geographic Society. For going on

holiday? No, not quite. No, this is... Okay. Congratulations. Young white explorer, you have done the correct thing is your reward. What? No, no, no. This is where the ambition starts to come in. So, like, his 20s, he's basically, like, having a great

time. Mostly drunk, mostly shooting things. Correct. Always. Okay. Together. Yeah. And by the time he's 30, he just that thing that I think all of us do when we're 30, which is like, what am I doing in my life? Okay. And he's got this cousin who went on a trip around the world.

David Livingston has just discovered Naken Gami. Okay. So he's like, Southwest Africa. I'm going to go to Southwest Africa and I'm going to be an explorer. And that is like in cahoots with the Royal Geographical Society. Yeah, and his expedition there was so successful because he's so good at making maps of that area. And of course we know that the British Empire runs on maps. We love a map.

And because his maps were so accurate, this wins him the gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society. And when he's in South Africa, Galton meets a beautiful woman. And normally that story ends in a fairly conventional way. But not this one. Does he need to study her or something? Yeah. Yeah. And you will be my queen muse project.

Yeah, no, he describes her as having a beautiful outline, which is a weird chat outline. Wait, he's met her where now again? South Africa. This is South Africa. Oh, she's got an interesting outline. And he's going to get her measurements. She's from the indigenous Koi Koi people? Yeah, we don't know her name.

All that we know about her is that she was married to an interpreter, a Nama interpreter, who had learned Damra, which is the language that was useful in that area. And he was working for Reverend Hugo Hahn, who had his missionary out in Barman. Okay. I'm throwing lots of detail in there because we have so little about her. And what he's about to do is dehumanizing.

Of course. There's like no two ways about it. I mean, he measures her with a sextant as if she's, I mean, it's a navigational aid. Okay, so he's just like how much, how many hectares are you or something? Well. Yeah, this is the big eyes. But I mean, this is the beginning of like phrenology and other like measuring things as well? So he's well embedded.

There was a little bit of phrenology in those years in the 20s as well where everyone measures his head and tells him how clever he is. Okay. So actually to us, we say Francis Galton goes to Southwest Africa and encounters. He counters an indigenous woman, and his first instinct is that he wants to measure her. And that sounds really weird to us. But for the time period... I mean, he's not measuring any Victorian women, right?

Not yet. Oh, okay. We'll get to that. Oh, interesting, okay. So the fact that he sees someone of this shape and size, she probably had a condition which is, oh, I'm going to learn how to pronounce this, diatopoegia, which is when people have a big butt.

Okay. This is like the whole Sir Mixelot approach to, You know, Victorian society. So he's really interested, and he's probably also heard of a woman called Sarah Bartman, Sarkie Bartman, who was derogatively called the Hot and Top Venus. She lived a little bit before he was born. And she'd been in Britain and France, and she'd been a sort of somewhat celebrity. Yeah, she'd been exhibited.

Exactly, almost as a wonder, as cruel as that was. I mean, as a freak. Yeah. Is the other, is the sad thing of that. So when he sees this woman, this reaction actually makes perfect sense, because the way in which people looked at non-white people in the day is we're going to measure them, we need to understand how they work, which is exactly what happened.

He says in his quote, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms. Oh, yeah, I mean, he's a gentleman about it. Because he doesn't talk to her. He's not been introduced. So he's like, how do I measure her from a distance without, yeah, and he basically triangulates her. Wow.

Yeah. It's an illustration for us as to how he sees non-white people. And I think the really sad thing about Galton in Africa is when Charles Darwin went around the world, he had a sympathetic eye towards non-white people. He was still pretty racist in how he thought about them. But unfortunately, for Galton, travel did not broaden the mind. No.

He gets to Southwest Africa, and his negative ideas about black people in particular have become really entrenched. He's already great. He's already had a woman donating on him his entire life, who's his older. So I think he's just sort of like, great, I'm the center of the universe. And so I will measure it. And as well as winning his medal from the Royal Geographical Society,

he also... I bet he walked up to her with his medal all shined. He also gets a book deal, of course. Oh, good. And he writes a book. And actually, it's a travel book. It's called The Art of Travel. It's a guide on how to travel.

Bring a protractor. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, minimum. You're going to see lots of people you want to measure. I mean, he literally says that, Desiree. It's published in 1855. It's advice for travelers. And he says,

you should possess at least a moderate fortune and have scientific taste and knowledge. What else does these say people should bring? Practical sorts of things. You need to be able to work in the landscape. So pen knives, fishing equipment, stationary. Cutlery, blankets, and iron. So it's important.

Made by the Galton family. There we go. Yeah. So yeah, regardless of, you know, how much out in the wilderness you are, you've got to keep that safari suit nice and pressed. And in point of fact, actually, so you know in your head if you say African Explore,

And ironically, an image pops into your head of a white man in the safaris suit. It's him. He's the one. It's because of this book. I mean, he also talks about you, crack an egg into your shoe to avoid blisters. I mean, not a terrible idea, but he's giving advice, but the advice is for a certain gentleman class.

Sure, of course, because they're the only ones we're going to be able to afford to. I mean, but realistically, who else is getting on a boat to go that far? Yeah, exactly, yeah. He also includes a rather strange cure for drowning. Do you want to guess what he recommends? Don't go waiting out into the weeds, not paying attention. It's not paying attention like a dumb child.

No. If someone has gone into the water and it looks like they've drowned, what is the Francis Gulton approved method for bringing them around? I don't know. Don't fight and just float to the top. I mean, it's not... Hit him with your big gold medal. It's not far off.

I mean, because this is before CPR. No, he goes with... Cuddle them. Cuddle them between two large men. I mean, they're passed out, get a free grope before they wake up. Yeah, yeah, two large men, give them a cuddle, put heated stones on their feet, and then tickle their nostrils with snuff

and put a feather down their throat. I mean, okay. Well, that'll get the water out. I think, like, the point is warmth, but yeah, the cuddling is a bonus. Yeah, I mean, it's not stupid. In my head, I do imagine him trying various scientific techniques on various drowned men until eventually he comes to one.

And I was just like, oh, get all that water out of their mouth, and now stick a feather in it. Yeah. It's classic golden. So there we go. So he's published his travel guide. He gets back from Africa. He's measured African women,

and now he needs to marry a British woman, as his custom. and he finds one, and she's called Louisa? Mm-hmm, that's right, Louisa Butler. And quite the well-win romance. So without wanting to sound like Craig David, he met her in January. Nice.

Proposed in April, and they were married in August. Okay. So, yeah, no hanging about. No. Do you think he'd already pre-measured her and figured out that she was... Well, he is very... I mean, she's the daughter of one of the ex-headmasters of Harrow. So, like, her pedigree does...

count for a lot. Okay, so he's measured the family tree and gone approved? Yeah, I think she was a, she was a good option. I mean, but we've also got like letters back and forth between the family saying we think the great, we think the African explorer is smitten. Yeah. Yes. So Louisa Jane Butler, his wife, when he writes his memoir Desiree, how many times is Louisa mentioned in his entire memoir? I mean, the way you've set that up, like zero to one times. It's two times. Okay. Oh, wow. I double my expectations. She's in the index twice, which is brutal. How does he refer to her those two times?

It's four pages worth of pedigree. So it's four pages worth of all of the eminent men who are her ancestors. Oh, wow. Okay, but like it was all about pedigree and none about like, oh, she's got great birthing hips and all of these other things. No, he would, I don't think that that would be appropriate.

That's okay, fine. And she's a supportive wife as well. Like she's interested in his work, she's happy to support him and the things that he's doing. So he's probably under some kind of, apprehension that she's cool with this. Okay, but also it's kind of like what else would she expect except for me to say

how great she is because of her lineage. Right, like that's the best compliment you could give. And they never have kids. They never have kids. And lots of people have speculated. There's a sort of litany of reasons given. Yeah. Especially since he's super into like, oh. Yeah.

You'd think he'd be like, let me have 10 of my own specimen. Right, yeah. You'd think eugenicists would be like, we need more of me. Yes, exactly. Other way, right? Unless there's some reason they couldn't. Yeah, very much the other way. We don't. So again, we don't know.

The theories range from he had some kind of venereal disease to they did not know what to do because they were a Victorian couple. Seems unlikely. Yeah, seriously. But, yeah, this is, we don't know whether this is deliberate. Carl Pearson, who's one of his colleagues later, has this weird theory that Golton himself was concerned

with what he would be passing on in terms of mental illness, possibly. Oh, really? So, yeah, we don't know whether this is deliberate child-freeness or whether this is a personal tragedy that's happening between these two people. And it's the nature of history that we're never going to know. Sure. So instead of filling the house with kids, which may have been a choice or not a choice, we don't know,

he instead fills it with science experiments. This is the era of Galton as the tinkerer, as the measurer. You know, I think we can think of him as a sort of classic Victorian gentleman scientist, beavering away in his laboratory. Yeah, absolutely. He didn't fill the house with children. At one point, he did fill it with rabbits. I mean, which is like a nice little metaphor.

Extend the metaphor how you will. That was all to do with, he had read something that Darwin had written, and this is one of the very few times that Charles Darwin has comprehensively proved wrong, is through scientific experiments that Galton did. Darwin suggested that maybe the mechanism of inheritance comes in the blood, and so that's why all the rabbits was multiple blood transfusions over multiple generations of rabbits had no effect whatsoever. So Galton can publish and say, Charles Darwin was wrong about this one.

Yeah, sure. My cousin's an idiot. And I finally proved it. He would have definitely used that word. We'd want to find a better one. But he does found, having been, you know, he's a member of the Royal Geographic Society, having had the kind of lunar society as a sort of family background,

he found his own science club. He did. Well, actually, he's not to do with the X club. Oh, is he not? No, he's kind of on the fringes of. He's too much a gentleman scientist to be in the X club. Yeah, so the X club was a group of scientists. And they were like,

the thing a scientist should be is not a gentleman. than scientist. So this is like the fight club of scientists. This is, yeah, that's a movie I would watch for sure. And with chess as well. I don't know why, but I feel like that would work. So X club is in the letter X. The letter X.

The X is in like X-Marsk spot. Yeah. And what their principle was, was that scientists should be a proper profession. So they're the X-Men? Again with the mutants. Okay. So what they want to do is they want to professionalize science. They don't want science to be simply the purview of, like, wealthy, rich men.

So it shouldn't be dabbily poshment. They want to democratize it a bit more and regulate it, which is kind of antithetical to everything Francis Galton is. No, he was really into that. Oh, he was. But that's because I think he's so firmly held his belief in the class system and the fact that it would hold. Got it.

He's like, as long as it's just us, then let's do more of us doing this. Because the only people going to university at that time is from Richmond. Because he believes the best will rise to the top anyway, because he's a eugenicist. He is, exactly. Okay. So he has various interests. We'll get to some of the more sort of famous ones. The sort of smaller, cuter ones,

he works out the perfect algorithm for slicing cake. Is it that one that I keep seeing on Instagram? Yeah, that's exactly that one. Did he make that? Yeah. Oh, that's annoying. Now I'll never cut it like that. Because he's worried about the cake.

Yeah, exactly. Eugenic slicer. Okay. No, but like, seriously, like, you know, you can separate the scientist from the science in this one. I love that you study math at Cambridge just to figure out how to perfectly cut cake. Well, it's because he's stingy as well.

It's like it'll go off. The way that you do it, it's going to go off. He's worried it's going to go stale. Well, there's a lot of people eating polite slices. And it's like, it's cake. Just put it in your god. Not in my house. I eat all the cake.

Yeah. People are like, oh, it's so rich. Shut up. He also comes up also with the perfect cup of tea. Because, of course, he is a Brit. He's an Englishman. He must have the perfect cup of tea. Well, for his traveling, right?

Of course. So this is still, always keep the empire in view. The reason why you need to know how to make the perfect cup of tea is you might find yourself anywhere in the world where they don't understand these things. And you'll have to be teaching. it to them by example. So what is it steep for three minutes and then just a splash of milk?

I don't know the exact formula. It's like T equals something of the other. T equals Mc squared. I think we should think of him. I mean, you've made this point actually, and maybe I'm stealing your point. We should think of him primarily as a statistician. 100%. Okay, so he trains as a doctor, he moves some maths, but really his calling his stats.

Yeah, and these are his significant, meaningful, and like, they outlast him. They're still there to this day. The things that he comes up with in terms of stats are devices, they are mechanisms for understanding, and statistics still use them today. So correlation and regression to the mean, those are both him. Through these experiments, he understands how traits are starting to get passed from parents to children, but also understanding that,

so regression to the mean, and this is the best I will be able to do for you, is the fact that over the course of generations, traits tend back toward the middle. So it's not that, so too tall parents, are probably going to have kids that are taller than the average, but they're not going to have kids that are taller than themselves. Sure. That's how we keep coming back to the mean.

We keep coming back to the average. So we kind of keep going back and then we'll pass the average and then it starts going back again. So it just... Statistically, Galton understood how difficult eugenics would be. Right. So he's like, we probably should breed better people, but it's really tough to do

because over the generations we keep going back. Oh, see. But we have all these guns back in my place and so let's just get rid of the... Right. So he's primarily a statistician. His motto is whenever you can, count. So, you know, he just, he likes to measure stuff.

That's his primary instinct, is count it. But when he wasn't measuring, he was inventing. We've already heard about his sort of cake slicing. But he invents some marvelously Victorian sort of ludicrous inventions. My favorite would be the spectacles to read newspapers underwater that we all need. He was just trying to get patents into that. I mean, talk us to the Rointabager if you can. Or maybe you can't, I don't know.

No, I mean, but this is, again, one of these annoying things, and this was what happened when I was doing the job of taking care of his stuff, was that you really start to see the person, you start to have a sympathy for them. So, yeah, spectacles that you can read underwater, apparently he kept forgetting he was underwater, so he kept nearly drowning. Because you know, when you're reading,

you're really into reading a thing. This is why he had to come up with the whole drowning procedure. And he also, and, okay, the joke writes itself here, which is that he invented the dog whistle. Nice. I mean, amazing. That's so on the nose.

It's too perfect. I mean, was he doing experimentation with dogs and that's how he figured her? No, so the fact that it is the dog whistle is an accident. He was actually doing experience with humans

in as much as he was trying to be able to measure people range of hearing. He then comes up with a whistle that's such a high pitch that only animals can hear. So he tested out in London Zoo. I've seen that. The lions were annoyed. Oh,

Oh, yeah, tooth sweets, same thing. So other animals here with the dog whistle. Right, okay. Okay. So he invents the dog whistle, and now racists use the dog whistle too. That's great. We need to get to the gloves, because we promise you gloves. Yes, exactly.

So let's get to the golden gloves. What do you think he needed them for? I'm guessing to turn the pages on his underwater newspaper, to be honest, because they're going to start sticking together. No, I'm afraid. I'm going to label them either gorgeousness gauntlets or maybe misogyny mittens. Oh, so he could do experiments on women and... He is...

He's... He's... He's going out measuring the statistical hotness of women around the UK in terms of their distribution in different cities. Wait, he's trying to figure out

where the hottest women are in the UK. He's literally trying to figure out... But I mean temperature hot, not like... No, no, no. He's literally... So he's like the early Mark Zuckerberg. He literally is. That's the next joke in my script.

He is literally Zuckerberging his way around the UK going, who's the hottest, where's the hottest city? Can't see how this would go wrong. Can you talk us through it, Zabadra? Like, what... And how do the gloves work? Because you had to care for the gloves in the collection.

I did, and it is a thrill to be able to have to describe these physical objects to you in a sound-based medium. Well, we're visualised now. We are true, yes. But we don't have the gloves, sorry. If you imagine a pair of gloves, if you imagine me wearing a pair, right-hand glove, nothing doing, don't worry about it. Completely normal glove.

Don't worry about the right-hand glove. Everything fine. Left-hand glove has been modified. It's got a felt pocket. Right. across the four fingers and out of the thumb is the sharp end of a pin

so into the felt pocket what you can do is you can put a piece of paper now I am Indian so I can count to 20 on one hand ah because what we do is we count through the segments yeah yeah thank you this is our gift to you

we've given other things too how do you reckon Golton was counting with a pinprick I don't know just how many times a woman would scream every time he would touch them inappropriately with a pin. Okay. Thankfully, the pin never went near the women. Okay. What he would do was he would stand on street corners

in various metropolitan centres around the UK. What a sentence. Stand on street corners measuring women in. With his hands in his pockets. So this is a covert counting device. Oh, this is gross. Because he's like... So he's stabbing himself to count? He's stabbing himself.

Not himself. That's why you've got the felt pocket. The felt pocket stops him stabbing himself. He's stabbing the piece of paper. And it's a scale of one to three. The scale is attractive at one and repellent of the other indifferent in the middle. Oh, wow.

But so basically he's trying to see how much of a half chub he gets as women walk by. And he's like, hot, not, kind of okay. Six out of ten, whatever the hell kind of. Brown bag, yeah, beer goggles, three points, six points. Oh, I like them boobies. Oh, my, wow. So he's standing on street corners around the cities of the UK. Creeply staring at women, but this is fine.

Yeah, he's in his 60s at this point, just a painting. And he's what? He's building a beauty map of Britain. This is what he called it. His beauty map of Britain. and it is important for his eugenic program. Because what he did was something that probably we might want to think about doing now, which is that he didn't discount women on the basis of their attractiveness.

He thought the more attractive they are, the better incubators they are. He correlates attractiveness and athleticism with intelligence, jock and geek, right? Okay. So nowadays, I feel like we kind of do the opposite. How does he control for the, like, okay, so. But that's an ancient Greek idea. It's so funny you should ask that. So he says, because he's the only one measuring, he is the control.

So he said that the least attractive city was Aberdeen. I'm so sorry, Aberdeen. He said that the hottest city was. Probably Birmingham right next to him when he was used to. London. Really? He said London. Okay, fine.

I didn't want to, you know, bias toward one. Yeah, yeah. I guess it has the most people from the most different places. Like it would be a different... Yeah, I guess people move to the capital weather. Yeah, maybe. there's something there. There's a lot of, yeah. Which is just his horrible class, like snobbery and all those things showing through. Before we get to eugenics proper, I mean, we've done some, we've done a little

bit of eugenics, haven't we? But before we get to like proper, like what he means by it, there are other very sort of important contributions that Francis Gulton made to science. What sciences do you think they might be, Desiree? Well, I don't know how much he did with his medicine, but I assume that he's a social scientist, statistician, so that's where all of his contributions are going to go. I mean, that's not a bad guess. I mean, I think the ones we'd shout out, I think, would be meteorology. He's a weatherman. Okay.

Statistic you mentioned already. Because of stats. And then I think the one that's really crucial would be psychology. He's the first person to develop a questionnaire, which is a fundamental tool in psychology. And he was looking at it to look at people's temperament or that character. And so he's describing them there as mild, docile, fretful, violent and masterful. Oh my God. So every time we take one of those stupid quizlets on a meta thing,

it's because of him. It's because of him. Myers-Briggs. The people who came up with the Myers-Briggs test were eugenic. That's what they were trying to, they were trying to categorize people because they were like, this is how we need to think about how to organize society.

And it's like, and only two of you should mate. Yeah. Okay. This then has an influence on Alfred Beene, who's the guy that comes up with IQ, which is like the looking at child development and intelligence. And I think we also have to shout out the phrase that I think many of us will use

in our life. I've certainly used it as a parent, nature versus nurture. This is a gullonian notion. It is absolutely. It's the subtitle to his 1874 book, English men of science, their nature and nurture. And this is the first time a questionnaire is used in a psychological study. It's not a very sophisticated questionnaire. It's got questions like, what do you think makes you so clever? So, I'm paraphrasing, but nothing else. So it's, yeah, and he comes down very firmly on the nature side. Of course he does. He's eugenicist. I mean, yeah, okay. I mean, just very quickly, meteorology,

would you mind just talking us through? Like, as a weatherman, what does he contribute? So the thing that he's known for is that he coins the term anticyclone, which is the best I can tell you is the opposite of a cyclone. It's to do with weather patterns, pressures. It's just a bunch of people in the sea protesting cyclones. This is it. We're down with cyclones.

It goes the other way and air pressure, et cetera. But that gives you stable, fair weather, right? So that's what you want. You want nice, stable, sort of sunny days. Nothing but smooth sailing for all of those ships for the... I was going to say, is he the one that gives me that lovely sleepy time shipping report. Yeah, in that vein. But the other thing, the major thing, is the weather map.

So he's one of the early people, his first person to publish a weather map in a British newspaper. I think we need to get on to his proper eugenicist thinking. There's a huge response to his cousin's famous book of 1859, his cousin being Charles Darwin. Do you know what the book's called? The origin of species? Yeah, on the origin of species. There's probably a longer subtitle. By means of natural selection.

There you go. That's why, yeah. And so Charles Darwin sort of puts. into the world this sort of extraordinary groundbreaking, brilliant, brilliant book that still to this day is still, you know, one of the foundational texts of modern biology. But how does Galton take to it? Oh, he loves it. Okay. He thinks it's the best thing anyone ever wrote. Did you guys see what my cousin doing? I know. Cousin Charlie. Well, God will start using this voice now. But to his cousin's genius idea,

he has his own genius idea. So Darwin, especially in the first bit of origin, talks about animal domestication. And by the end of origin, what Darwin has demonstrated is that all human life on Earth has a common ancestor. What Darwin was trying to do was to say, hey, we're all connected. Maybe we shouldn't be enslaving people.

Whereas what Galton sees in Darwin's work is humans are animals like any other. And as such, we should breed them better. And this is the tragic thing, is he wasn't the only one. So I think a lot of people know the expression survival of the fittest, which was coined by the economist Herbert Spencer

in reaction to what Darwin was talking about. The things you can read that sentence two ways. The way Darwin meant it was those who are the best fit for the environment in which they live. Whereas, what, Spencer, and then Galton and then these other social Darwinists go is actually just who is fittest altogether.

And we get to say who that is. Yes, and the word eugenics, it's a phrase that's invented by Galton. It's a term that's invented by him based on ancient Greek. Yes, so he coins the term eugenics. and he uses it to mean so the eugenis part of it exists before him

and that means well born or well and best u is good in Greek and genus means stock or people or ethnicity or race yeah yeah every book that you'll read about eugenics will say he's coined the term to mean well born we need to remember the icks

yeah okay the fact that there's icks at the end another word he was considering was it's either viticulture or viriculture I forget which one you could grow people like you grow crops like you have viriculture like agriculture. The fact that he puts the icks on the end, he wants to make it a science. He doesn't, it's not, this isn't down to like taste. This isn't down to who may, I don't know, have the biggest yacht. But if he started the X club, he's going to have to like continue to fuel

it with different sciences that people can go into. This is it. So how do we use scientific data in order to be able to determine who are the people who should be allowed to have children? We should also mention the international exhibition of 1884 where Galton sets up a lab, when people of the members of the public come along and pay to be measured by his sort of various apparatus he builds what are they measuring what are people paying to be measured there so they're paying three pence of time okay and they're getting their pedigree recorded and they're also having physical measures guys you're gonna have to get on board yeah like the way what's sorry pedigree meaning like do they just report who their who their daddy is yeah okay

yeah it's like and here's your daddy yeah question here's your daddy yeah question and then they get all of their measurements done and then they figure out that they're Pisces and that they like certain things. You know what I mean? Because it's still just like, tell me more about who I am. Pretty much, pretty much.

But also science because accurate physical measurements of all parts of the body and then also things like the power of their breath or the power of their punch. He kept complaining that people kept breaking the punching machine

because at the International Health of Elbex. Of course they're going to do that. Well, they were drunk as well. So they've gone to the fair and they're drinking and now they're going to do science too. And also, if you're in front of your wife or your girlfriend, you want to head it hard, right? You want to show off. I mean, also, you pay three P, get your money's worth on this punch.

You're mad about a lot of things. This is Victoria. So he's measuring people sort of the span of their arms. He's measuring height and weight. He's measuring pull and squeeze strength, reaction time. It's sort of, in many ways this is science we do still now, right? In terms of longevity studies, in terms of athleticism studies, this stuff is sort of adjacent to what is now contemporary science,

but it's just done through a lens of eugenics. The methods are exactly the same. Right. Yeah. I mean, does he go like, here, you should breed with this person now when they're done? We haven't got enough data to be able to... This is the thing, scientist, you've got to have enough. Yeah.

This is the data gathering stage. But he got them to pay so that he could gather their data, which is a little bit. We give all this data away too, so we can't blame the Victorians. He famously looked for the biological certainty of what he called the criminal face. So he looked for a statistic... He kind of took photographs and looked for statistical average. And why was it on the pantone scale? Yeah.

I mean, yeah. The famous family guy meme, you know. But like he looked for the kind of average criminal face. Yeah, this is composite photography where you take lantern slides of people's portraits and you pile them up on top of each other and out of that emerges the average face. So that movie Minority Report? Yeah. There we go.

There we go. And the huge contribution he makes to criminology. Not just to Tom Cruise's career. Not just Tom Cruise's career. But the huge contribution Galton makes it would be in fingerprinting. Does he invent it or does he say? steal the invention because there's some controversy here. There is some controversy. He is the person,

this is uncontroversial, he is the person to demonstrate statistically the uniqueness of fingerprints to individuals. So by looking at a lot of data, he comes up with the number one in 64 billion, which is not straightforward nowadays, and fingerprinting is definitely an art, not necessarily a science. Oh, really? Oh, really? Ooh. But yeah.

Did they find a duplicate somewhere? No, it's more a question of how you read them from crime scenes. So it's not like crime scenes, like the criminal will just conveniently leave you a perfect set the fingerprints. You've got to be able to read them. Interpreting it. And the empire comes in here too because he didn't steal from anyone but he was building on research that came out of India. He also gets

credit for the work of two Indian police officers Hame Chandrabos and Azizal Hauck who were part of the Bengal police and they're the ones who do the legwork for what becomes the Edward Henry, who is the name of the head of police system for fingerprint analysis, which is what still exists today. It's like all the fancy computers

use the same method to categorize. So by 1894 fingerprints are first used in trials and in The British police adopt them as their sort of new way of catching criminals, and that's Galton again. So a huge legacy. We need to talk about just briefly, should we understand him as a data gatherer

and then other people put in place policies, or should we understand him as an advocate for eugenics in actual policy governments? I'm going to plump for the latter, because I have here a long list of his publications, and all the time that he's publishing in scientific journals, he's giving papers at the Royal Society, he's also writing articles in McMillan's magazine,

in Fort Nilely Review. So this was very much a Brian Cox level of public understanding of science, making sure that his ideas were out there for people to get. Sure. Just, you know, as the BBC, Professor Brian Cox,

not eugenicist, a brilliant scientist, are much beloved. But I mean, he's in terms of, like, he is a scientist, but he's also his own hype man really well. He understands that. Yeah, he understands that

this is going to be like a national project. He's going to have, like, hearts and minds. You've got to get the people involved. So he's doing public engagement. Yeah, public engagement of science. Okay. And he found the laboratory in 1907 which is called the...

I mean, it's at University College London. It is. And it's called the National Eugenics. It was originally founded in 1904. My colleagues at UCL have done a lot of work into the intricacies of this, but the long and the short of it is, is that by 1907,

there is at UCL the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics. So it's a laboratory, so they're gathering data. So again, more pedigree stuff, more biometric stuff. And also, yeah, it's also then, after Galton dies and leaves money to the university for the chair, of eugenics, it's being taught as well.

So you can go back to the UCL calendars and the syllabus and see that eugenics is being taught in the biology department for a good 40, 50 years. That's how eugenics becomes the kind of dominant way of understanding the world through the sort of early 20th century, which then leads to Hitler. Yeah. I mean...

Via the U.S. Yeah, I was going to say, which leads to America in the Hitler, which is amazing when you finally is like, oh, I learn from the best. How we've ever posed ourselves as a moral authority on anything. Like, were there, I mean, it's just interested to be like, oh, is this the point at which we started putting, like, babies' footprints on a, like, birth certificate or something? Do you know what I mean?

All of these things that we record about people automatically. Yeah. Only came in after Galton was like, hey, you need this information on people if you want to surveil them for the rest of their natural lives. Yeah, he worked with a doctor called Frederick Muhammad, who is actually a descendant of Sheikh Dean Muhammad. Oh, really? Of this parish. Oh, we did an episode about him, but that's... So they worked together.

to develop this thing called the life history album, which was supposed to be sent out to every citizen. And like you record, it's like a baby book, but really detailed them for the rest of your life. So all of that information gets, yeah, compiled. And actually nowadays, you know, there's all the data charts of like how the baby grows and here's the percentile and here's the average and here's the thing.

Oh, if they're in the right or wrong percentile is all based on that kind of measurement. It is, although we don't do right and wrong anymore. Yes, but I mean, okay. I don't know, I haven't had a kid since ever. But you know what I mean? I'm like, there's always these, weird books where we were like, oh, my baby isn't long enough.

Yeah, exactly. It's so weird because I'm like, they were born and they were this length. I don't care. Yeah. They were born. They have all of the fingers, great. But it is true. Like, doctors will always say, yeah, your daughter is tracking above the natural average.

And you're like, yeah, is that good? I always keep hearing where it's like, oh, my baby's too round. I'm like, well, I'm sure they'll stretch out eventually. Yeah. Or they're not talking yet. Or, you know, or they haven't, they didn't walk early. Yeah. Like, all of these things.

I mean, we should say, we should, we should end his life. We shouldn't kill him. Let's get to the end of his life. In 1909, Francis Galton is knighted for his contribution to science, race science. But a lot of the science that's still with us now post-Eugenics. However you want to make that distinction. Yeah, you know. But he was poorly his whole life.

This is a man who has many medical conditions, who has his own mental health crises over and over. He died in 1911. He was 88, actually. It's a good age. Yeah, I was going to say he lived quite a long time for somebody who was weekly and kept trying to drown himself on accidents so many times. Absolutely. It's amazing what you can do when you have lots of family money.

Where you just rise to the top of the water and pop it up and keep going. As you said, he left 45,000 pounds to the UCL National Laboratory for Eugenicist Science. Is it? Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics. Thank you. Yeah. Which of course... Stop just branding them, but yeah. It's a lot of money.

He left an awful lot of money. Yeah. His project. In today's money, because I figured you might ask this, probably in the region of three and a after four million pounds. I was saying, it's usually about 10, you sort of 10 ratios. A small endowment. Just a little, it's also the residue of his wealth.

So after his endowments bequested to people in his life, all of the rest of the money, the ironmongering, slave banking money goes to this. That didn't go into everyone else's estates. I mean, is Louisa finally like, great, took him long enough, rolling in it. I was going to say she pre-deceased him by a little long. Oh, sad face. Sad face. And he didn't have any kids.

So I guess the money went to his pet project. Yeah. Racism. Eugenics was his baby. Right. The nuance window. On that note, time now for the nuance window. This is the part of the show where Deserate and I silently measure the studio for two minutes.

Data is important. While Sabadra takes centre stage to tell us something we need to know about Sir Francis Galton. My stopwatch is ready. One second. I'll get it out. Take it away, Sabadra. When I was curator of the Goulton collection, I had a recurring nightmare. On a normal day working behind the scenes in a storeroom, a glass lantern slide, a photograph of Francis Goulton slips from my hand and smashes to pieces on the cold tiled floor.

This was by no means an irrational concern. It is a well-known fact that the people most likely to damage museum objects are the people who work in museums. And Goulton is already fragmented anyway. When I say that Francis Goulton is the most important scientist most people have never heard of, it speaks to my experience as a history buff who never. learned about him in history class. But of course many people have heard of him, depending on who you ask. Weather forecasters, crime scientists, sociologists, psychology graduates, geneticists, and statisticians all recognize the name of the man who made foundational contributions to their disciplines. Even if you're not a scientist, he often features in trivia and fun facts. He's on

QI all the time. But the Goulton most people have heard of is in pieces. When eugenics was discredited after the Second World War and continues to be disproved through a advances in genetics. His reputation was severely compromised, and it seems as though he disappeared into the footnotes. In this way, the wider absence of Galton's story is a story in itself. It's a story about the things we find easy to talk about, and the things we don't. With his ideas about eugenics, Galton rebranded race science for the 20th century. Eugenics made race into a broad church, expanding notions about racial fitness to include disability, class, gender and sexuality, and also body size. People don't mind.

marginalize themselves. And whether we know it or not, this discredited science still has the power to shape how we talk about and how we see each other. To be critical of eugenics then isn't to be anti-science or the pursuit of knowledge as a whole. It just reminds us how the pursuit of an objective truth actually objectified people. The way Galton and his fellow eugenicist viewed the world, the ways in which they chose who to value in society, leaves a lot of people out. When we write Galton back in, when we put him back together again, we give ourselves the key to finding the other people we lost on his account. Amazing, thank you so much.

Yeah. And very punctual too. Thank you. Extraordinarily save time this out. When you were talking about all that, I was like, I'm surprised he didn't invent the BMI as well. Close. He had pretty close.

Yeah, I was going to say somebody must have used that to do. I mean, did he, like, was he just sort of like chuffed his chips about his own work? or did he start to see things happening go like, oh, wait a second, not exactly that. Or was he just like keep using it? This is all great. Yeah. So the smoking gun on this one is he gave an interview to a journalist from a Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle, and the journalist was asking and saying, you know,

we've been hearing about the persecution of Jewish people in Russia. What do you feel about this? And his reply is, do brace yourself, his reply is, you should be grateful that those weaker elements of your society are being weeded out for you. Jesus Christ. Oh, wow. Okay. He's like, because otherwise, I'd have to take the whole arsenal of my family's guns and kill them myself

so that we weren't continue to bring them. So he was fully, I mean, but what did he continue? Sorry, we need to go on. But was he sort of like, oh, but we need a slave class? Because, I mean, how else would he have money to fund his work if there hadn't been an underclass for, you know what I mean? Sure. I mean, the slave trade had been abolished by this point. But in the 1930s in theory, you know.

Yeah. It's still going. It's still happening, but it's abolished legal. Like he didn't, you know, did he think that, oh, but we're always going to need these people underneath us. They should just stay underneath us. Not only do we need them, it's like this is what they're best fit to do biologically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like, so we can't kill them all.

So he is more interested in how do we pick the good ones so that we can make sure that we, the British Isles, have good population control, right? So it's like, we can't control, everywhere else. We can just import the bad ones. Well, so another, he wrote a letter to the Times once called Africa for the Chinese. He's like, the thing about Africa is that it's full of all of these amazing. natural resources. But it's also full of, and I'm quoting him, African people who are lazy and don't make the most of it.

Except for they're doing everything for us. Except, yeah, this team of 30 who carried me through my two-year expedition. As I drown in a river again. Oh, one more time. But the thing about the Chinese is that not only of the industrious, but they're good at having children. Bring the Chinese into Africa, problem solved.

Okay. So, yeah, he had plans. All right. And he influenced a lot of Teddy Roosevelt. Yeah, I was going to say, because that story of him being like a weakling who was super into science and the outdoor sounds pretty familiar.

I mean, it's extraordinary life, it's an important scientific legacy. It is now discredited science. It is. But it's still in everything. But it's still everywhere you look. We're still using questionnaires and personality tests at the very least.

So what do you know now? We could talk about this man for a long long time because he's so significant. But we have to move on. It's time now. So what do you know now? This is our quick-fire quiz for our comedian Desiree. Okay, here we go.

Question one. Which family member played an important role in Francis's early education? Oh, his older sister Adele with hunchback. That's right. Question two. What self-experimentation did Galton perform on himself during his years as a medical student? Hold on. Think alphabetical.

Oh, oh, because he did, he stopped at C with the ABC on the drugs. He did. He wanted to see, and the C just made him puke out all of his fluids. He did. Pook and poo. That's right. There we go. Question three. What happened in 1844 to allow Galton to devote himself to science? A bunch of money.

Bunch of money. His inheritance. His father died. And he goes to Sudan in Syria. That's it. There we go. Question four. How did Galton attain the body measurements of a koi-koy woman he met in South Africa?

Well, he looked at her from afar and used trigonometry to figure out her measurements without coming up to her. It's so gross. The sextant and maths. Question five. Who was Galton's most famous cousin? Oh, Charles Darwin. More famous cousin, I suppose I should have said, but most famous is probably actually fine.

Yeah, very good. Question six, how many times did Gulton's wife, Louisa, appear in the index of his memoir? Just the two times, but over the course of four long pages of her daddies. Darling, I measured you twice. What more do you want? Question seven.

I measured up close. Question seven, can you name one non-problematic scientific discipline where Gulton made important discoveries? I mean, I guess the weather map is not problematic. I was going to say. I was going to say. The other ones seem like they are about to be problematic in two seconds. I feel like meteorology is non-problematic, but yeah.

Question eight, Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883. But what does it mean in ancient Greek? I mean, good race, good stock. Good genes. Yeah, I'd say good genes, good breeding, very good. Question nine, for what purpose did Galton design his counting gloves? This is so, I mean, it just points out how gross Mark Zuckerberg is already. But he wanted to figure out who was hot or not.

That's right. Just to figure out the hottest ladies they were in. London, clearly. And for a bonus point, who were the unfortunately least hot ladies? I mean, the fishwomen of Aberdeen. I mean, obviously they were just women who were married to fishermen, but in my head, they all have fish heads, and that's why it's okay. Okay, and this for a perfect 11 out of 10, to which institution did Galton leave 45,000

pounds in his will? Eight gazillion pounds were left to UCL for his National Eugenics Laboratory. Very, very good. Like, did they sandblast his name off of it, or is it still? Pretty late. Like obviously, or did they take off the eugenics first? And now it's the Galton lab for questionnaires. It's like you have second sight.

The eugenics disappeared in the 50s. Galton's still sticking around. It's still sticking. And it's just the Galton Lab for stuff and things. Yeah. Cool. Desiree, a perfect 11 out of 10. Never in doubt.

Fantastic. Thank you about most. You know, fantastic episode. It's been problematic history as it is. Listener, if after today's episode, you want another totally banana's boffin biography, with Deseray, in fact. check out our episode on Pythagoras.

He was an absolute lunatic. Oh my God. Delicious lunatic. Amazing, fascinating. One loves a cult leader, right? For more 19th century eugenics and surprisingly funny, we've done an episode on the Kellogg Brothers, which is really good fun, and we did one on Victorian bodybuilding. Again, surprisingly funny, but again, surprisingly eugenicist.

If you've enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds to hear the show 28 days earlier than anywhere else. And if you're outside the UK, you can listen at BBC.com. or wherever you get your podcasts. But I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we had the sensational Sabadra Das. Thank you, Sabadra. Thank you so much for let me share this story.

Thank you for doing it so eloquently and sensitively and also letting us do jokes. Because, you know, we do have to do the jokes. But he's a dickhead. And in Comedy Corner, we had, you're dead to me superstar, Desiree Birch. Thank you, Desiree. What a joy to learn about this racist.

And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we measure the vital statistics of another forgotten historical figure. But for now, I'm off to go and stop my six-year-old from learning the Iliad because no good will come of it. No, no. Bye!

Hello, I'm David Badeal. And from Radio 4 and the History Podcast, I'm hosting 60 Years of Hurt, a series about football and Englishness, in which we try and define what Englishness actually is via the roller coaster history of the England men's football team. It includes contributions from various English gentlemen and women, Stephen Fry, David Seaman, England sports psychologist Pippa Grange and many others. England may or may not

win the World Cup in 2026, but maybe you'll find out why it means so much to us as a country that they might do. Listen to 60 years of hurt on BBC Sounds.