Science

On apologising for the historical sins of science

Galton is remembered most for eugenics, the study of human inheritance with the aim of improving the human species through selective breeding

Sir Francis Galton: the Victorian scientist proposed a system of selective breeding of Britons in order to improve the human stock of the nation. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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William Reville
Thu Nov 3 2022 - 05:00

The science journal Nature has published an editorial on How Nature Contributed to Science’s Discriminatory Legacy, detailing a number of “sins” perpetrated by the journal over the years and in particular apologising for publishing the work of Francis Galton (1822-1911), the founder of eugenics.

Galton established a laboratory that bore his name at University College London (UCL) and left a bequest to UCL to fund the first professorial chair of eugenics. In 2020 UCL renamed two lecture theatres and a building that honoured Francis Galton and Karl Pearson – Pearson was the first professor of eugenics at UCL.

Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), was a Victorian polymath who made significant contributions in several areas, eg meteorology (made the first serious attempt to chart weather over large areas), statistics (devised the correlation calculus) and forensics (devised a method of classifying fingerprints). But Galton is remembered most for his studies of human inheritance of physical and mental attributes with the aim of improving the human species through selective breeding – eugenics. He was the first to study twins to assess the influence of environment on development.

Eugenics spread to most European countries and also to the United States, Canada and Australia. Eugenic measures were introduced in some countries encouraging people to reproduce who were deemed particularly fit. But negative measures were also introduced, preventing marriage and even forcing sterilisation on people deemed unfit for procreation, such as people with mental/physical disabilities, low IQs, criminals and “deviants”.

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The Nazis enthusiastically supported eugenics and developed, with the assistance of German medical scientists, the pseudoscience of “racial hygiene”. Starting with 400,000 forced sterilisations and more than 250,000 euthanasia deaths, the Nazis went on to murder millions of “racial enemies” in the Holocaust concentration camps.

Although ending in appalling tragedy, eugenics was very popular for a long time and, despite having some prominent critics, was firmly in the mainstream. It was enthusiastically supported by people on the left and the right, including leading scientists, politicians, famous writers and intellectuals, eg Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Alexander Graham Bell, John Maynard Keynes, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Julian Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Linus Pauling, Francis Crick, Jacques Cousteau, Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes and many more.

Eugenics was always entirely unacceptable morally because it offends so deeply against human dignity. But it was also scientifically flawed. Galton and many other eugenicists were racists, but at that time many scientists believed that humans were divided into races, some distinctly genetically inferior to others.

We now know that genetic differences between races are very small. For example, the genetic differences between Africans and non-Africans are smaller than the differences between Africans themselves. The eugenicists were also wrong in thinking you could successfully breed humans to select for moral characteristics like courage, honesty etc.

It is easy now to condemn eugenics as a moral abyss, knowing the awful consequences in the 20th century. But this judgment is incomplete, ignoring the widespread popularity of eugenics for so long and how easily people accepted the implication that eugenics forced so many innocent people to make huge involuntary sacrifices. How sure can any of us be that had we lived at the time we wouldn’t have supported eugenics?

By all means condemn Galton for his moral blindness. But Galton’s eugenics ideas would never have flourished if they hadn’t fallen on such fertile public ground. If it is right to strip his name now from lecture theatres and laboratories should we not also ban the books of George Bernard Shaw, for example, who enthusiastically supported eugenics? And where should we stop in such a moral crusade?

Would it not be better to simply replace Galton’s name plaque on a building with a new plaque, briefly explaining eugenics and deploring Galton’s great mistake but also giving a nod to his positive achievements?

Apologising for the past is becoming popular and Nature is only one of several prominent science journals that have recently apologised for past discriminatory errors. Granted, Galton well deserves strong public censure, but I generally have an uneasy feeling about such apologies.

Go back a generation or two and most people held opinions that were offensive by today’s standards. All that we can realistically hope for is progress, and we are progressing. Almost nobody today agrees with Galton’s eugenical ideas.

William Reville is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC

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