The Etymology of the Theory of Eugenics

Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage

The word eugenics was derived from a Greek root meaning good in birth or noble heredity. Darwins Origin of the Species initiated eugenics in Europe and spiked Sir Francis Galtons interest. Galton was first credited with developing the theory of eugenics in the nineteenth century although Karl Pearson assisted the theory. Galtons idea of eugenics evolved from the science of the Victorian period, and used the science of mathematics and statistics. The science of genetics and heredity were relatively new to the people of the 19th century as the science of heredity was in its infancy. Galton turned to mathematics, instead of biology, to support his theories. Much of Galtons mathematical calculations and assumptions are now proven to be wrong, but he did what he could with the knowledge of the time. The eugenics movement in Britain was post-Darwinian in conception and derived from the best science of the time. There is a variety of books written on eugenics. Some sources, mainly on the internet, dismiss eugenics as a racist attempt to control society. There are few books written objectively and with the purpose of showing both sides or eugenics such as Daniel Kevles In the Name of Eugenics. Members of the eugenics society have put out books on sciences that helped to develop eugenics, for example, Genetics and Eugenics by W.E. Castle. Governments supporting eugenics also put out books and pamphlets that explain the pros and cons of eugenics. There are various extremes on to which side the authors are on which allows a wide variety of information and views.

Francis Galton was born on February 16th 1822 and died on January 17th 1911. Sir Francis Galton actually coined the word eugenics in 1883.2 The purpose of eugenics for Galton was for the more suitable races or strains of blood to have a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.3 There were two methods of achieving this. One was positive eugenics and the other, negative eugenics. Positive eugenics was the more human friendly method but was the harder type to implement. Negative eugenics was the easier working type but infringed on human rights. In positive eugenics, the procreation of the fit and able is encouraged. This could be accomplished a variety of ways. One such way is by personal choice. A fit and able person chooses to marry and procreate with another fit and able person. Another way involves the government giving money for people of ability to produce offspring. This has already been done during times of war to increase the countrys population except that any family was encouraged, not just people of ability. Positive eugenics is much harder to do because it relies on personal choice; however, it does not infringe on a human beings rights.Negative eugenics is much easier to initiate.

The idea of negative eugenics involves the prevention of procreation by the unfit. This is also done in many ways. The unfit could be segregated from the population. By placing them in asylums or special care centres. In this method, they would not be able to reproduce due to a lack of a partner. Another technique that is used is sterilisation. The government could sterilise the people deemed to be unfit, thereby preventing them from having children. The social repercussions of negative eugenics are severe. The right to produce offspring is a very sacred right and careful consideration must be taken.The initial foundation of eugenics was that like produces like.4 This was taken from the experiments of Gregor Mendel in 1866 where he first developed Mendels Law. Mendel performed experiments on many different species of plants. He found that the offspring of the parent plants contained many of the same characteristics. One example was that of a plant with high resistance to disease. Most of the progeny of this plant would have this same resistance. Mendel then concluded that like produces like. He stated that farmers of both crops and animals could improve their crop and stock by selecting plants and animals with desired characteristics and breed them to produce hybrids with these characteristics. This was good news for farmers; they could now produce crops with higher yields and more beneficial stock. Galton could also use Mendels Law to found eugenics.Galton wanted to apply this technique to humans. He published his first eugenical ideas in Macmillan Magazine in 1865.

In this article he was inquiring into the origins of natural ability. To Galton, natural ability involved those qualifications of intellect and disposition which lead to reputation.5 To determine the origin of natural ability, he looked back two centuries at a variety of jurists, statesmen, military commanders, scientists, poets, painters, and musicians. He discovered that many of these men had blood relations to each other. This inforced the ideas of like producing like. From his analytical evidence, he determined that families of reputation had a much greater chance of producing offspring with natural ability. He stated in his book Hereditary Genius that men of genius would still have natural ability and would be able to perform well in society even if they had social disadvantages. Take Beethoven for example, his mother was very ill when she was pregnant with him and his family was poor, but he still came to be recognised. This stemmed from the Victorian middle-class view that you can do anything you want as long as you work hard enough.6 Once again European thoughts were spawning eugenics. Galton and now many others believed that natural ability was inherited.The theories of Galton and Darwin were supplemental, yet on the other hand, were topics of conflict. Francis Galton and Charles Darwin were actually cousins. Through Galtons mother they were related; they shared the same grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. Upon reading Charles Darwins Origin of the Species, Galtons interest was sparked. Galton had struggled with religion because of his Quaker heritage and the fact that his father had converted to the Anglican Church. After reading Origin of the Species, Galton complemented his cousin by saying, your book drove away the constraint of my old superstition, as if it had been a nightmare.

Most likely when he mentioned his old superstition, he probably meant religious beliefs. The old church belief that man was falling from grace, was to Galton, disproved in the book. What he derived from the book was that man was rising rapidly from a low state. What Galton hoped to achieve in eugenics was to accelerate this process. Galton had replaced his parents religious beliefs with the science of eugenics. Theories of these two men were complemented with the idea of natural selection. Eugenics could be seen as a form of artificial selection, but it is not. In nature, it is survival of the fittest, that meant the most well equipped organisms survive.8 In society, charity organisations have been set up to support the unfit. By doing this, natural selection does not occur.

With eugenics, the fit people will procreate and the unfit will not, thus allowing natural selection to occur. Darwin and Galton also opposed each other with the argument of nature vs. nurture. Galton supported the argument for nature. Nature can be defined as heredity and the way things are before environmental interaction. Some theories concerning inheritance that came about during Galtons time were Weismanns germ plasm theory, Lamarcks theory, and Darwins pangenesis. Lamarcks theory first said the effects of the environment were cumulative. Next, need determined an adaptation and use and disuse of organs determined how efficient it was. Finally, he said that all variations are inherited.9 Darwin was on the side of nurture. Nurture is what happened after birth, the adaptations that occurred. Darwin argued that it was the environment that influenced traits. Galton set out to find what really determined the attributes of a species.Galton wanted to understand how natural ability was transferred. One hypothesis that had been circulating was the theory of pangenesis.10 This was one of Darwins hypotheses. It stated that each cell of the body gives off extremely small particles called gemmules. These gemmules floated freely throughout the body and ended up collecting near the reproductive cells of the body. Thus when reproduction occurred, the gemmules would be transferred along with the traits. This hypothesis could be applicable both to plants and animals. It could also explain the processes of sexual and asexual reproduction, and the regeneration of lost limbs. Galton decided to test this hypothesis. He did this by using rabbits as his sample and using the process of blood transfusion, another field of science in which he contributed. The two breeds of rabbits he used were the silver-grey and the common lop-eared rabbit. He transfused the blood of the lop-eared rabbits to the blood of a silver-grey; he replaced nearly half of the silver-greys blood.

When he mated the silver-greys together, they did not produce mongrel rabbits, but normal silver-greys.11 He concluded that traits were not transferred by gemmules but by something else. In 1883, the year of Darwins death, a man by the name of August Weismann developed a new theory on heredity with the idea of the germ plasm. It stated that there are two groups of cells, the soma (or body) and germ cells. Germ cells are undifferentiated cells that are transformed into reproductive cells. Weismann reasoned that acquired characters in the soma would not affect the germ cells, therefore acquired characteristics could not be transferred.12 Galton was no longer interested in the biology of heredity.To prove his theories Galton decided to turn his attention concerning heredity, toward mathematics, more specifically statistics. The amalgamation of biology and statistics is called biometrics. During the mid 19th century statistics in Britain were gathered using a census, but no attempt at analysis was made. Analysing the information is exactly what Galton had planned on doing. From his background in meteorology, he used a different approach to statistics called Gaussian distribution. At the time this was known as the law of error. Carl Friedrich Gauss developed this form of statistics by the analysis of errors in measurement of true physical quantities. When Gaussian distribution is displayed on a graph, a bell curve is formed. The peak of the curve is termed the mean. The mean was the true physical quantity. Galtons interest lay in the deviations from the mean.13 Originally the distribution was used to determine right and wrong values, but Galton used it to measure variations in the population. Variations could be in height, weight, or intelligence. In 1860, Galton tried to use the law of error to estimate the number of geniuses and in his words, men of exceptional stupidity.

Galton found a method to dissect statistical data, but he had no data. First he tried to gather information on plants in 1876. He decided to use the sweet pea for a variety of reasons. First of all sweet peas had differentiating characters that he could measure, easy artificial pollination, protection from foreign pollination, and they are natural to the area of northern Europe.14 He sent an unknown number of packets to friends in various parts of Europe with instructions on what to do. They were to return the plants after they had flowered. When he received the sweet peas, he found that the weights of the daughter seeds of the plants were evenly distributed in a Gaussian fashion. Because of this, he determined that heredity could be treated mathematically using units of deviation. A unit of deviation is the distance along the horizontal axis, or baseline, of the bell curve where a vertical line would divide the area to one side of the bells centre into two equal parts. He calculated the ratios of units of deviation between the weight of daughter and parent seeds, and found that the ratios were about the same. This added to another feature from the data, that each daughter seeds weight reverted to the mean of the population. From this Galton concluded that characteristics of offspring not only came from the parents, but from the many ancestors. Galton termed the tendency of the offspring to revert toward the mean the coefficient of reversion. He had used the new science of statistics to scientifically backup eugenics.In 1884, Galton published The Record of Family Faculties in which he offered rewards of up to 500£ for extremely detailed sets of family information.15 In the same year, he established the Anthropometric Laboratory, which was used to collect data on families, so that he could use the information to confirm his mathematics. He used his newfound knowledge of plant heredity and applied it to human beings. When he received the information from the families, he began to analyse the information. He decided he would focus on the height of parents and children. He developed a new measure of the average between the parents and the children called the midparent. He used the midparent and the other results, to make a graph that he could analyse. After he had graphed the statistics, he had a series of concentric ellipses. To discover what this meant he had to use analytical geometry and laws of probability. Galton, not truly a mathematician, called on the help of an actual mathematician, J.D. Hamilton Dickson.

With the assistance of Dickson, Galton determined that the coefficient of reversion was not linked with inheritance. Galton therefore decided to rename the coefficient of reversion to the coefficient of regression and continued his search for the key to connect heredity with statistics. Galton then looked at Alphonse Bertillons system of identification of criminals.16 Bertillon too had gather data on human beings and Galton was looking to compare his results. Scientists in Bertillons field were called criminal anthropologists. Bertillon was not the only person looking at the characteristics of criminals. One other person was the Italian, Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso had found that criminals were mostly products of heredity. He found that most criminals resembled, in his opinion, savages or animals. He termed this atavism.17 Some traits he observed were primitive brains, an odd cephalic index, long arms, prehensile feet, scanty beards with a hairy body, large incisors, flattened noses, furtive eyes, and angular skulls. He also proposed that different types of criminals looked different such as thieves who had small restless eyes, thick eyebrows, crooked noses, thin beard, and a narrow receding forehead. When Galton was asked to look at pictures of criminals, he and many other scientists disagreed. Reasons for the disagreement include that descriptions of criminals eyes could not truly be measured, and that many of these characteristics were greatly overlapped in the general population. Although Galton did say fairly distinct types of criminals breeding true to their kind have become established. The main purpose of Galton studying criminal anthropology was to use his method of manipulating data to see if it worked on another sample. He discovered that when the data was plotted in the same way he had previously used, it formed the same concentric ellipses from the sets of family data. From this he found the coefficient of correlation. This measured the degree of one variable depending on another. What this meant was that one variable alone did not determine another characteristic. Not only was Galton using the science of the time to create eugenics, he was pioneering discovery into new areas of statistics.

For all his brilliance, Galton had come to a halt in developing a working theory of eugenics. His coefficient of regression stated the degree to which an offspring would regress to the previous generation. This went completely against evolution, which is not what Galton wanted. If the bell curve of the parents was the same as the bell curve of the children, then how did anything ever change in civilisation. Each generation would have the same number of variations as the last one so no evolution would occur. With all his analysis of heredity, Galton could only conclude, that with eugenics very little could be changed. Eugenics had to develop at the same rate of the science. Luckily for Galton, Karl Pearson came to the aid of eugenics. Karl Pearson was a much more established mathematician than Galton was. Pearson focused on the eugenic point of regression. Galtons law of ancestral heredity stated that each generation would regress to the mean of the ancestral population. Pearson said that the regression depended on the immediate ancestors, in other words, the parents. If this is true, then eugenics could truly work in the way they wanted it to. Eugenics could point evolution in the direction it wanted to. Pearson did have some mathematical backing with his new theory. He supported his theory with detailed statistical analysis. He also reworked Galtons theory so it predicted a population would breed for the desired characteristic. He presented to Galton, his paper on the revision of his theory in 1898.18 Pearson continued to work on Galtons theories and rework them. Eugenics now had an actual scientific background made with the new scientific field known as biometrics.

Eugenics had Darwinian origins and evolved with the science of the time. Darwins Origin of the Species was the starting point for Galton. Galton was influenced by the theories of Darwin and this fired the science of eugenics. The theories of both Galton and Darwin were complementary. One of these theories is natural selection, which states that the most fit live to procreate thereby ensuring enhanced selection. Darwin also hypothesised on how traits were transferred and he called it pangenesis. Gregor Mendel put forth another theory that showed the inheritance of traits. Eugenics was evolving with new areas of science. One new area of science called biometrics was created to deal with eugenics. The use of Gaussian distribution and the bell curve was essential to analysing the collected data. The discovery of the coefficient of reversion was another example of using the best science of the time. Galton did prove that intelligence was inherited even if in a crude fashion. He developed new scientific methods of looking at statistics. Eugenics has many failings though. First Galton and others believed nature to have complete dominance over nurture. They also believed that certain characteristics were controlled by one hereditary factor only. Now we know that such factors are controlled by more than one characteristic. The scientists of the 19th century did not know what we know now. The aims of the scientists were in the right place but their science and methods were just too crude to truly work.