Nazi eugenics were Nazi Germany's racially-based social policies that placed the improvement of the Aryan race through eugenics at the center of their concerns. Those humans were targeted that they identified as "life unworthy of life" (German: Lebensunwertes Leben), including but not limited to the criminal, degenerate, dissident, feeble-minded, homosexual, idle, insane and the weak, for elimination from the chain of heredity. More than 400,000 people were sterilized against their will, while 70,000 were killed under Action T4, a "euthanasia" program.^[1][2]

Origins in the wider European/U.S. eugenics movement[link]

Wir stehen nicht allein: "We do not stand alone". Nazi propaganda poster from 1936, supporting Nazi Germany's 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (their compulsory sterilization law). The couple is in front of a map of Germany, surrounded by the flags of nations, including the United States, which had enacted (to the left) or were considering (bottom and to the right) similar legislation.

After the eugenics movement was well established in the United States, it was spread to Germany. California eugenicists began producing literature promoting eugenics and sterilization and sending it overseas to German scientists and medical professionals.^[3] By 1933, California had subjected more people to forceful sterilization than all other U.S. states combined. The forced sterilization program engineered by the Nazis was partly inspired by California's.^[4]

The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs, including the one that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.^[3][5]

Upon returning from Germany in 1934, where more than 5,000 people per month were being forcibly sterilized, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe bragged to a colleague:

"You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought . . . I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."^[6]

Eugenics researcher Harry H. Laughlin often bragged that his Model Eugenic Sterilization laws had been implemented in the 1933 Nuremberg racial hygiene laws.^[7] In 1936, Laughlin was invited to an award ceremony at Heidelberg University in Germany (scheduled on the anniversary of Hitler's 1934 purge of Jews from the Heidelberg faculty), to receive an honorary doctorate for his work on the "science of racial cleansing". Due to financial limitations, Laughlin was unable to attend the ceremony and had to pick it up from the Rockefeller Institute. Afterwards, he proudly shared the award with his colleagues, remarking that he felt that it symbolized the "common understanding of German and American scientists of the nature of eugenics."^[8]

Hitler's views on eugenics[link]

Adolf Hitler read racial hygiene tracts during his imprisonment in Landsberg Prison.^[9] He thought that Germany could only become strong again if the state applied to German society the principles of racial hygiene and eugenics.

Hitler believed the nation had become weak, corrupted by the infusion of degenerate elements into its bloodstream.^[10] These had to be removed quickly. He also believed that the strong and the racially pure had to be encouraged to have more children, and the weak and the racially impure had to be neutralized by one means or another.

The racialism and idea of competition, termed social Darwinism in 1944, were discussed by European scientists and also in the Vienna press during the 1920s. Where Hitler picked up the ideas is uncertain. The theory of evolution had been generally accepted in Germany at the time but this sort of extremism was rare.^[11] In 1876, Ernst Haeckel had discussed the selective infanticide policy of the Greek city of ancient Sparta.^[12]

In his Second Book, which was unpublished during the Nazi era, Hitler praised Sparta, adding that he considered Sparta to be the first "Völkisch State". He endorsed what he perceived to be an early eugenics treatment of deformed children:

Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.^[13][14]

Nazi eugenics program[link]

Propaganda for Nazi Germany's T-4 Euthanasia Program: "This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community 60,000 Reichsmark during his lifetime. Fellow German, that is your money, too." from the Office of Racial Policy's Neues Volk.

In organizing their eugenics program the Nazis were inspired by the United States' programs of forced sterilization, especially on the eugenics laws that had been enacted in California.^[15]

The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, proclaimed on July 14, 1933, required physicians to register every case of hereditary illness known to them, except in women over 45 years of age.^[16] Physicians could be fined for failing to comply.

In 1934, the first year of the Law's operation, nearly 4,000 people appealed against the decisions of sterilization authorities. 3,559 of the appeals failed. By the end of the Nazi regime, over 200 Hereditary Health Courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte) were created, and under their rulings over 400,000 people were sterilized against their will.^[17]

Nazi eugenics institutions[link]

Viktor Brack, organiser of the T4 Programme

The Hadamar Clinic was a mental hospital in the German town of Hadamar, which was used by the Nazi-controlled German government as the site of Action T4. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927.

In its early years, and during the Nazi era, it was strongly associated with theories of eugenics and racial hygiene advocated by its leading theorists Fritz Lenz and Eugen Fischer, and by its director Otmar von Verschuer. Under Fischer, the sterilization of so-called Rhineland Bastards was undertaken. Grafeneck Castle was one of Nazi Germany's killing centers, and today it is a memorial place dedicated to the victims of the Action T4.

Identification[link]

The Law for Simplification of the Health System of July 1934 created Information Centers for Genetic and Racial Hygenie, as well as Health Offices. The law also described procedures for 'denunciation' and 'evaluation' of people, who were then sent to a Genetic Health Court where sterilization was decided.^[18]

Information to determine who was considered 'genetically sick' was gathered from routine information supplied by people to doctor's offices and welfare departments. Standardized questionnaires had been designed by Nazi officials with the help of Dehomag (a subsidiary of IBM in the 1930s), so that the information could be encoded easily onto Hollerith punch cards for fast sorting and counting.^[19]

In Hamburg, doctors gave information into a Central Health Passport Archive (circa 1934), under something called the 'Health-Related Total Observation of Life'. This file was to contain reports from doctors, but also courts, insurance companies, sports clubs, the Hitler Youth, the military, the labor service, colleges, etc. Any institution that gave information would get information back in return. In 1940, the Reich Interior Ministry tried to impose a Hamburg-style system on the whole Reich.^[20]

Nazi eugenics policies regarding marriage[link]

Nazi Germany had strict marriage laws in which marriage partners had to be tested for any hereditary diseases. Everyone was encouraged to carefully evaluate their prospective marriage partners eugenically during courtship. Members of the SS were cautioned to carefully interview prospective marriage partners to make sure they had no family history of hereditary disease or insanity, but to do this carefully so as not to hurt the feelings of the prospective fiance and, if it became necessary to reject her for eugenic reasons, to do it tactfully and not cause her any offense.^[21]

See also[link]

Genocide portal

Further reading[link]

Books[link]

• Aly, G. (1994). Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene. The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-4824-5
• Baer, E. et al. (2003). Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. Wayne State University Press. ISBN 0-8143-3063-0
• Baumslag, N. (2005). Murderous Medicine: Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus. Praeger Publishers. ISBN 0-275-98312-9
• Biesold, H. (1999). Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press. ISBN 1-56368-255-9
• Burleigh, M. (1991). The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-39802-9
• Burleigh, M. (1994). Death and Deliverance: 'Euthanasia' in Germany, c.1900 to 1945. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-41613-2
• Caplan, A. (1992). When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust. Totowa, New Jersey: Humana Press. ISBN 0-89603-235-3
• Ehrenreich, Eric. The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-253-34945-3
• Evans, Suzanne E., Forgotten Crimes: The Holocaust and People with Disabilities. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004. ISBN 1-56663-565-9
• Friedlander, H. (1995). The Origins of Nazi Genocide. From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-2208-6
• Gallagher, G. (1995). By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians, and the License to Kill in the Third Reich. Arlington, Virginia: Vandamere Press. ISBN 0-918339-36-7
• Glass, J. (1999). 0-8018-4824-5 Life Unworthy of Life: Racial Phobia and Mass Murder in Hitler's Germany Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-09846-0
• Kater, M. (1989). Doctors Under Hitler. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-1842-9
• Kuhl, S. (2002). The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514978-5
• Kuntz, D. (2006). Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-2916-1
• Lifton, R. (1986). THE NAZI DOCTORS: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-04905-2
• McFarland-Icke, B. (1999). Nurses in Nazi Germany: Moral Choice in History. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-00665-2
• Müller-Hill, B. (1998). Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany, 1933-1945. Plainview, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. ISBN 0-87969-531-5
• Nicosia, F. et al. (2002). Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany: Origins, Practices, Legacies. Berghahn Books. ISBN 1-57181-387-X
• Proctor, R. (2003). Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-74578-7
• Ryan, Donna F., et al. (2002). Deaf People in Hitler's Europe. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, ISBN 1-56368-132-3
• Schafft, G. (2004). From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-02930-5
• Spitz, V. (2005). Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans. Sentient Publications. ISBN 1-59181-032-9
• Weindling, P.J. (2005). Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-4039-3911-X
• Weindling, P.J. (1989). Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-42397-X

Academic articles[link]

• Bachrach, S. (2004). "In the name of public health — Nazi racial hygiene". New England Journal of Medicine, 29 July 2004; 351: 417–420.
• Biddiss M. (1997). "Disease and dictatorship: the case of Hitler's Reich" Journal of Royal Society of Medicine, 1997 Jun; 90(6): 342-6.
• Cranach, M. (2003). "The killing of psychiatric patients in Nazi Germany between 1939-1945". The Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, 2003; 40(1): 8-18; discussion 19-28.
• Lerner, B. (1995). "Medicine and the Holocaust: Learning More of the Lessons" Annals of Internal Medicine, 15 May 1995; 122: 10: 793–794.
• Martin III, Matthew D., "The Dysfunctional Progeny of Eugenics: Autonomy Gone AWOL", Cardozo Journal of International Law, Vol. 15, No. 2, Fall 2007, pp. 371–421, ISSN 1069-3181.
• O'Mathúna, D. (2006). "Human dignity in the Nazi era: implications for contemporary bioethics". BioMed Central, 2006 Mar 14;7(1):E2.
• Sofair, A. (2000). "Eugenic sterilization and a qualified Nazi analogy: the United States and Germany, 1930-1945". National Center for Biotechnology Information 2000 Feb 15; 132(4): 312-9.
• Strous, R. D. (2006). "Nazi Euthanasia of the Mentally Ill at Hadamar". American Journal of Psychiatry, January 2006; 163: 27.
• Weigmann, K. (2001). "The role of biologists in Nazi atrocities: lessons for today’s scientists". European Molecular Biology Organization, 15 October 2001; 2(10): 871–875.
• "Eugenical Sterilization in Germany" Eugenical News 1933, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; vol.18:5.

Videos[link]

• Burleigh, M. (1991). Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich. London: Domino Films.
• Michalczyk, J.J. (1997). Nazi Medicine: In The Shadow Of The Reich. New York: First-Run Features.

References[link]

External links[link]

General reference[link]

• Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments
• Life Unworthy of Life
• Medical Experiments of the Holocaust and Nazi Medicine
• Nazi Race Laws
• Race and Membership: The Eugenics Movement
• Sterilization Law in Germany
• The History Museum - Nazi Euthanasia
• Victims of the Nazi Era
• Eugenics - A Psychiatric Responsibility
• Nazi Medicine by Michael Berenbaum

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum[link]

• Bibliography
• Deadly medicine
• Euthanasia program
• Mentally and physically handicapped
• Nazi Persecution of the Disabled

v t e Nazism Organizations Nazi Party (NSDAP) Sturmabteilung (SA) Schutzstaffel (SS) Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) Hitler Youth (HJ) National Socialist League of the Reich for Physical Exercise (NSRL) League of German Girls (BDM) National Socialist Women's League (NSF) History Early timeline Adolf Hitler's rise to power Machtergreifung Re-armament Nazi Germany Night of the Long Knives Nuremberg Rally Anti-Comintern Pact Kristallnacht World War II Tripartite Pact The Holocaust Nuremberg Trials Denazification Ideology Architecture Gleichschaltung Anti-democratic thought Hitler's political views Mein Kampf National Socialist Program New Order Propaganda Religious aspects Women in the Third Reich Race Blood and soil Eugenics Greater Germanic Reich Heim ins Reich Master race Racial policy Religion Atrocities Doctors' Trial Final Solution Human experimentation Outside Germany American Nazi Party Arrow Cross (Hungary) German American Bund Greyshirts (South Africa) Hungarian National Socialist Party Nasjonal Samling (Norway) Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging (Netherlands) National Movement of Switzerland National Socialist Bloc (Sweden) National Socialist League (UK) National Socialist Movement (United States) National Socialist Workers' Party of Denmark National Unity Party (Canada) Ossewabrandwag (South Africa) Ustaša – Croatian Revolutionary Movement (Independent State of Croatia) Lists Books by or about Hitler Ideologues Leaders and officials Nazi Party members Former Nazi Party members Speeches given by Hitler SS personnel People Adolf Hitler Heinrich Himmler Joseph Goebbels Alfred Rosenberg Hermann Göring Martin Bormann Josef Mengele Rudolf Hess Reinhard Heydrich Adolf Eichmann Albert Speer Rudolf Höß Hans Frank Related topics Esoteric Nazism Far-right politics Glossary of Nazi Germany Nazi salute Neo-Nazism Stormfront Völkisch movement Category Portal

Russell L. Blaylock is a retired neurosurgeon and author. He is a former clinical assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and is currently a visiting professor in the biology department at Belhaven College.^[1] He is the author of a number of books and papers, including Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills (1994), Health and Nutrition Secrets That Can Save Your Life (2002), and Natural Strategies for Cancer Patients (2003), and writes a monthly newsletter, the Blaylock Wellness Report.

Blaylock has endorsed views inconsistent with the scientific consensus, including that food additives such as aspartame and monosodium glutamate (MSG) are excitotoxic in normal doses and that the H1N1 influenza (swine flu) vaccine carries more risk than swine flu itself.^[2][3][4]

Education and career[link]

According to his website, Blaylock completed his general surgical internship and neurosurgical residency at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, SC.^[5] He was licensed to practice Neurological Surgery in North Carolina between May 6, 1977 and December 15, 2006.^[6] Along with Ludwig G. Kempe, Blaylock published a novel transcallosal approach to excising intraventricular meningiomas of the trigone.^[7][8] He is retired as a clinical assistant professor of neurosurgery from the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and is currently a visiting professor in the biology department at Belhaven University,^[1] a Christian university in Mississippi.^[9] He is associated with the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and was on the editorial board of their journal.^{[when?] [10]}

Allegations of health dangers[link]

Blaylock has been quoted several times in media outlets regarding his position that MSG is toxic to the brain.^[11][12][13] He also states that the widely used artificial sweetener aspartame is toxic^[14][15] and may be the cause of multiple sclerosis.^[16] He has additionally cautioned against heavy use of the artificial sweetener Splenda (sucralose).^[17] These positions are not supported by scientific consensus or regulatory bodies, as extensive studies support the safety of aspartame, sucralose, and MSG.^[2][3][18]

Blaylock has also urged avoidance of the swine flu (H1N1) vaccination, which he claims is more dangerous than the infection itself. In various alternative media outlets, Blaylock has given advice on what he feels an individual should do if faced with mandatory vaccination.^[19] Current research indicates that an effective vaccine is a vital tool in protecting the public and that the new H1N1 vaccine is both safe and effective.^[4][20] Advertisements selling the 'Blaylock Wellness Report' at newsmax.com contain claims of additional health dangers, including fluoridated drinking water, fluoridated toothpaste, vaccines, dental amalgam, cholesterol drugs, pesticides, and aluminum cookware.^[21]

Views on politics[link]

Blaylock wrote that the Medical University of South Carolina (where he did his internship) was "deeply embroiled in a leftist-initiated war on Western Culture". He called the American medical system 'collectivist', and blamed this collectivism for the retirement of his friend Miguel Faria. Blaylock wrote that it was around this time that he began "exploring for the first time some of the classics of liberty", including Frédéric Bastiat's The Law, Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty, and works by Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard.^[22][23]

Media[link]

Television and radio[link]

Blaylock has appeared on the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), including on the network's The 700 Club, a talk show started by televangelist Pat Robertson.^[24][25][26] Blaylock states that he has also been a guest on over fifty syndicated radio programs.^[5]

Books[link]

• Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills Health Press, 1994. ISBN 0-929173-14-7
• Health and Nutrition Secrets That Can Save Your Life Health Press, 2002. ISBN 0-929173-42-2
• Natural Strategies for The Cancer Patient New York : Twin Streams, 2003. ISBN 0-7582-0221-0

Articles[link]

Blaylock is the author or co-author of two case reports in the Journal of Neurosurgery,^[27][28] and a 32-page report entitled Multiple Sclerosis (Pritchett & Hull, 1988).

He has written for, and been on the editorial board of the journal of the politically conservative non-profit organization Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.^[29] This journal was entitled Medical Sentinel until 2003, when it became the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPandS).^[30][31][32] He also authors The Blaylock Wellness Report for the conservative website NewsMax.^[33]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Russell Blaylock's website

This article has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality. Discussion of this nomination can be found on the talk page. (April 2012)

Sir Francis Galton
Born	(1822-02-16)16 February 1822 Birmingham, England
Died	17 January 1911(1911-01-17) (aged 88) Haslemere, Surrey, England
Residence	England
Nationality	English
Fields	Anthropology and polymathy
Institutions	Meteorological Council Royal Geographical Society
Alma mater	King's College London Cambridge University
Doctoral advisor	William Hopkins
Doctoral students	Karl Pearson
Known for	Eugenics The Galton board Regression toward the mean Standard deviation Weather map
Notable awards	Linnean Society of London's Darwin–Wallace Medal in 1908. Copley medal (1910)

Sir Francis Galton /ˈfrɑːnsɪs ˈgɔːltn̩/ FRS (16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911), cousin of Douglas Strutt Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath: anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. He was knighted in 1909.

Galton was a very bright child growing up, learning to read at the age of two and a half. A little before he was 4 years old, he had already written his first letter; learned how to do multiplication and tell time whereas an average child would do all that after the age of 7.^[1]

Galton had a prolific intellect, and produced over 340 papers and books. He also created the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean. He was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies.

He was a pioneer in eugenics, coining the term itself and the phrase "nature versus nurture". His book Hereditary Genius (1869) was the first social scientific attempt to study genius and greatness.^[2] As an investigator of the human mind, he founded psychometrics (the science of measuring mental faculties) and differential psychology and the lexical hypothesis of personality. He devised a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science. He also conducted research on the power of prayer, concluding it had none by its null effects on the longevity of those prayed for.^[3]

As the initiator of scientific meteorology, he devised the first weather map, proposed a theory of anticyclones, and was the first to establish a complete record of short-term climatic phenomena on a European scale.^[4] He also invented the Galton Whistle for testing differential hearing ability.^[5]

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Galton was born at "The Larches", a large house in the Sparkbrook area of Birmingham, England, built on the site of "Fair Hill", the former home of Joseph Priestley, which the botanist William Withering had renamed. He was Charles Darwin's half-cousin, sharing the common grandparent Erasmus Darwin. His father was Samuel Tertius Galton, son of Samuel "John" Galton. The Galtons were famous and highly successful Quaker gun-manufacturers and bankers, while the Darwins were distinguished in medicine and science.

Both families boasted Fellows of the Royal Society and members who loved to invent in their spare time. Both Erasmus Darwin and Samuel Galton were founding members of the famous Lunar Society of Birmingham, whose members included Boulton, Watt, Wedgwood, Priestley, Edgeworth, and other distinguished scientists and industrialists. Likewise, both families were known for their literary talent: Erasmus Darwin composed lengthy technical treatises in verse; Galton's aunt Mary Anne Galton wrote on aesthetics and religion, and her notable autobiography detailed the unique environment of her childhood populated by Lunar Society members.

Portrait of Galton by Octavius Oakley, 1840

Galton was by many accounts a child prodigy — he was reading by the age of 2, at age 5 he knew some Greek, Latin and long division, and by the age of six he had moved on to adult books, including Shakespeare for pleasure, and poetry, which he quoted at length (Bulmer 2003, p. 4). Later in life, Galton would propose a connection between genius and insanity based on his own experience. He stated, “Men who leave their mark on the world are very often those who, being gifted and full of nervous power, are at the same time haunted and driven by a dominant idea, and are therefore within a measurable distance of insanity”^[6]

Galton attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, but chafed at the narrow classical curriculum and left at 16.^[7] His parents pressed him to enter the medical profession, and he studied for two years at Birmingham General Hospital and King's College, London Medical School. He followed this up with mathematical studies at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, from 1840 to early 1844.^[8].

According to the records of the United Grand Lodge of England, it was in February 1844 that Galton became a freemason at the so-called Scientific lodge, held at the Red Lion Inn in Cambridge, progressing through the three masonic degrees as follows: Apprentice, 5 Feb 1844; Fellow Craft, 11 March 1844; Master Mason, 13 May 1844. A curious note in the record states: "Francis Galton Trinity College student, gained his certificate 13 March 1845".^[9] One of Galton's masonic certificates from Scientific lodge can be found among his papers at University College, London.^[10]

A severe nervous breakdown altered Galton's original intention to try for honours. He elected instead to take a "poll" (pass) B.A. degree, like his half-cousin Charles Darwin (Bulmer 2003, p. 5). (Following the Cambridge custom, he was awarded an M.A. without further study, in 1847). He then briefly resumed his medical studies. The death of his father in 1844 had left him financially independent but emotionally destitute,^[11] and he terminated his medical studies entirely, turning to foreign travel, sport and technical invention.

In his early years Galton was an enthusiastic traveller, and made a notable solo trip through Eastern Europe to Constantinople, before going up to Cambridge. In 1845 and 1846 he went to Egypt and travelled down the Nile to Khartoum in the Sudan, and from there to Beirut, Damascus and down the Jordan.

In 1850 he joined the Royal Geographical Society, and over the next two years mounted a long and difficult expedition into then little-known South West Africa (now Namibia). He wrote a successful book on his experience, "Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa". He was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's gold medal in 1853 and the Silver Medal of the French Geographical Society for his pioneering cartographic survey of the region (Bulmer 2003, p. 16). This established his reputation as a geographer and explorer. He proceeded to write the best-selling The Art of Travel, a handbook of practical advice for the Victorian on the move, which went through many editions and is still in print.

In January 1853 Galton met Louisa Jane Butler (1822–1897) at his neighbour's home and they were married on 1 August 1853. The union of 43 years proved childless.^[12][13]

Louisa Jane Butler

Middle years[link]

Galton was a polymath who made important contributions in many fields of science, including meteorology (the anti-cyclone and the first popular weather maps), statistics (regression and correlation), psychology (synaesthesia), biology (the nature and mechanism of heredity), and criminology (fingerprints). Much of this was influenced by his penchant for counting or measuring. Galton prepared the first weather map published in The Times (1 April 1875, showing the weather from the previous day, 31 March), now a standard feature in newspapers worldwide.^[14]

He became very active in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, presenting many papers on a wide variety of topics at its meetings from 1858 to 1899 (Bulmer 2010, p. 29). He was the general secretary from 1863 to 1867, president of the Geographical section in 1867 and 1872, and president of the Anthropological Section in 1877 and 1885. He was active on the council of the Royal Geographical Society for over forty years, in various committees of the Royal Society, and on the Meteorological Council.

James McKeen Cattell, a student of Wilhelm Wundt who had been reading Galton's articles, decided he wanted to study under him. He eventually built a professional relationship with Galton, measuring subjects and working together on research.^[15]

In 1888, Galton established a lab in the science galleries of the South Kensington Museum. In Galton's lab, participants could be measured in order to gain knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses. Galton also used these data for his own research. He would typically charge people a small fee for his services.^[16]

During this time, Galton wrote a controversial letter to the Times titled 'Africa for the Chinese', where he argued that the Chinese, as a race capable of high civilization and (in his opinion) only temporarily stunted by the recent failures of Chinese dynasties, should be encouraged to immigrate to Africa and displace the supposedly inferior aboriginal blacks.^[17]

Heredity, historiometry and eugenics[link]

The publication by his cousin Charles Darwin of The Origin of Species in 1859 was an event that changed Galton's life. He came to be gripped by the work, especially the first chapter on "Variation under Domestication" concerning the breeding of domestic animals.^[18]

Galton devoted much of the rest of his life to exploring variation in human populations and its implications, at which Darwin had only hinted. In doing so, he eventually established a research programme which embraced many aspects of human variation, from mental characteristics to height, from facial images to fingerprint patterns. This required inventing novel measures of traits, devising large-scale collection of data using those measures, and in the end, the discovery of new statistical techniques for describing and understanding the data.

Galton was interested at first in the question of whether human ability was hereditary, and proposed to count the number of the relatives of various degrees of eminent men. If the qualities were hereditary, he reasoned, there should be more eminent men among the relatives than among the general population. He obtained his data from various biographical sources and compared the results that he tabulated in various ways. This pioneering work was described in detail in his book^[19] in 1869. He showed, among other things, that the numbers of eminent relatives dropped off when going from the first degree to the second degree relatives, and from the second degree to the third. He took this as evidence of the inheritance of abilities. He also proposed adoption studies, including trans-racial adoption studies, to separate the effects of heredity and environment.

The method used in Hereditary Genius has been described as the first example of historiometry. To bolster these results, and to attempt to make a distinction between 'nature' and 'nurture' (he was the first to apply this phrase to the topic), he devised a questionnaire that he sent out to 190 Fellows of the Royal Society. He tabulated characteristics of their families, such as birth order and the occupation and race of their parents. He attempted to discover whether their interest in science was 'innate' or due to the encouragements of others. The studies were published as a book, English men of science: their nature and nurture, in 1874. In the end, it promoted the nature versus nurture question, though it did not settle it, and provided some fascinating data on the sociology of scientists of the time.

Galton recognized the limitations of his methods in these two works, and believed the question could be better studied by comparisons of twins. His method was to see if twins who were similar at birth diverged in dissimilar environments, and whether twins dissimilar at birth converged when reared in similar environments. He again used the method of questionnaires to gather various sorts of data, which were tabulated and described in a paper The history of twins in 1875. In so doing he anticipated the modern field of behavior genetics, which relies heavily on twin studies. He concluded that the evidence favored nature rather than nurture.

Galton invented the term eugenics in 1883 and set down many of his observations and conclusions in a book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.^[20] He believed that a scheme of 'marks' for family merit should be defined, and early marriage between families of high rank be encouraged by provision of monetary incentives. He pointed out some of the tendencies in British society, such as the late marriages of eminent people, and the paucity of their children, which he thought were dysgenic. He advocated encouraging eugenic marriages by supplying able couples with incentives to have children. On October 29, 1901, Galton chose to address eugenic issues when he delivered the second Huxley lecture at the Royal Anthropological Institute^[15]

The Eugenics Review, the journal of the Eugenics Education Society, commenced publication in 1909. Galton, the Honorary President of the society, wrote the foreword for the first volume.^[15]

Galton's study of human abilities ultimately led to the foundation of differential psychology and the formulation of the first mental tests.

Galton also devised a technique called composite photography, (produced by superimposing multiple photographic portraits of individuals representing a “natural” kind—like Jewish men, criminals, patients with tuberculosis, etc.—onto the same photographic plate, thereby yielding a blended whole, or “composite”), that he hoped could generalize the facial appearance of his subject into an “average” or “central type.”.^[21][22] See also entry Modern physiognomy under Physiognomy). He hoped his technique would aid medical diagnosis, and even criminology through the identification of typical criminal faces. However, he was forced to conclude after exhaustive experimentation that such types were not attainable in practice.

The First International Congress of Eugenics was held in July 1912. Galton died just two weeks before the day of the congress. Winston Churchill and Carls Elliot were among the attendees.^[15]

Joseph Jacobs[link]

In the 1880s while the Jewish scholar Joseph Jacobs studied anthropology and statistics with Francis Galton, he asked Galton to create a composite photograph of a Jewish type.^[23] One of Jacobs' first publications that used Galton's composite imagery was “The Jewish Type, and Galton’s Composite Photographs,” Photographic News, 29, (April 24, 1885): 268–269.

Pangenesis experiments on rabbits[link]

Galton conducted wide-ranging inquiries into heredity which led him to challenge Charles Darwin's hypothetical theory of pangenesis. Darwin had proposed as part of this hypothesis that certain particles, which he called "gemmules" moved throughout the body and were also responsible for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Galton, in consultation with Darwin, set out to see if they were transported in the blood. In a long series of experiments in 1869 to 1871, he transfused the blood between dissimilar breeds of rabbits, and examined the features of their offspring.^[24] He found no evidence of characters transmitted in the transfused blood (Bulmer 2003, pp. 116–118).

Darwin challenged the validity of Galton's experiment, giving his reasons in an article published in Nature where he wrote:

Now, in the chapter on Pangenesis in my Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication I have not said one word about the blood, or about any fluid proper to any circulating system. It is, indeed, obvious that the presence of gemmules in the blood can form no necessary part of my hypothesis; for I refer in illustration of it to the lowest animals, such as the Protozoa, which do not possess blood or any vessels; and I refer to plants in which the fluid, when present in the vessels, cannot be considered as true blood." He goes on to admit: "Nevertheless, when I first heard of Mr. Galton's experiments, I did not sufficiently reflect on the subject, and saw not the difficulty of believing in the presence of gemmules in the blood.^[25]

Galton explicitly rejected the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarckism), and was an early proponent of "hard heredity" through selection alone. He came close to rediscovering Mendel's particulate theory of inheritance, but was prevented from making the final breakthrough in this regard because of his focus on continuous, rather than discrete, traits (now known as polygenic traits). He went on to found the biometric approach to the study of heredity, distinguished by its use of statistical techniques to study continuous traits and population-scale aspects of heredity.

This approach was later taken up enthusiastically by Karl Pearson and W.F.R. Weldon; together, they founded the highly influential journal Biometrika in 1901. (R.A. Fisher would later show how the biometrical approach could be reconciled with the Mendelian approach.) The statistical techniques that Galton invented (correlation, regression—see below) and phenomena he established (regression to the mean) formed the basis of the biometric approach and are now essential tools in all the social sciences.

Innovations in statistics and psychological theory[link]

The Lexical Hypothesis[link]

Sir Francis was the first scientist to recognize what is now known as the Lexical Hypothesis.^[26] This is the idea that the most salient and socially relevant personality differences in people’s lives will eventually become encoded into language. The hypothesis further suggests that by sampling language, it is possible to derive a comprehensive taxonomy of human personality traits.

The questionnaire[link]

Galton's inquiries into the mind involved detailed recording of people's subjective accounts of whether and how their minds dealt with phenomena such as mental imagery. In order to better elicit this information, he pioneered the use of the questionnaire. In one study, he asked his fellow members of the Royal Society of London to describe mental images that they experienced. In another, he collected in-depth surveys from eminent scientists for a work examining the effects of nature and nurture on the propensity toward scientific thinking.^[27]

Crowd sourcing[link]

Galton was a keen observer. In 1906, visiting a livestock fair, he stumbled upon an intriguing contest. An ox was on display, and the villagers were invited to guess the animal's weight after it was slaughtered and dressed. Nearly 800 participated, but not one person hit the exact mark: 1,198 pounds. Galton's insight was to examine the mean of these guesses from independent people in the crowd: Astonishingly the mean of those 800 guesses was 1,197 pounds, accurate to fraction of a percent.[1]Schell, Barbara A Boyt (2007). Clinical And Professional Reasoning In Occupational Therapy. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. pp. 372. ISBN 0-7817-5914-5.  This insight presages the idea of crowd sourcing and the wisdom of the crowd.

Variance and standard deviation[link]

Core to any statistical analysis, is the concept that measurements vary: they have both a central tendency or mean, and a spread around this central value: variance. In the late 1860s, Galton conceived of a measure to quantify normal variation: the standard deviation. [2]

Experimental derivation of the normal distribution[link]

Studying variation, Galton invented the quincunx, a pachinko-like device, also known as the bean machine, as a tool for demonstrating the law of error and the normal distribution (Bulmer 2003, p. 4).

Bivariate normal distribution[link]

He also discovered the properties of the bivariate normal distribution and its relationship to regression analysis.

Correlation and Regression[link]

After examining forearm and height measurements, Galton introduced the concept of correlation in 1888 (Bulmer 2003, pp. 191–196). Correlation is the term used by Aristotle in his studies of animal classification, and later and most notably by Georges Cuvier in Histoire des progrès des sciences naturelles depuis 1789 jusqu'à ce jour (5 volumes, 1826–1836). Correlation originated in the study of correspondence as described in the study of morphology. See R.S. Russell, Form and Function. He was not the first to describe the mathematical relationship represented by the correlation coefficient, but he rediscovered this relationship and demonstrated its application in the study of heredity, anthropology, and psychology.^[27] Galton's later statistical study of the probability of extinction of surnames led to the concept of Galton–Watson stochastic processes (Bulmer 2003, pp. 182–184). This is now a core of modern statistics and regression.

Galton invented the use of the regression line (Bulmer 2003, p. 184), and was the first to describe and explain the common phenomenon of regression toward the mean, which he first observed in his experiments on the size of the seeds of successive generations of sweet peas. He is responsible for the choice of r (for reversion or regression) to represent the correlation coefficient.^[27] In the 1870s and 1880s he was a pioneer in the use of normal distribution to fit histograms of actual tabulated data.

Theories of perception[link]

Galton went beyond measurement and summary to attempt to explain the phenomena he observed. Among such developments, he proposed an early theory of ranges of sound and hearing, and collected large quantities of anthropometric data from the public through his popular and long-running Anthropometric Laboratory, which he established in 1884 where he studied over 9,000 people.^[15] It was not until 1985 that these data were analyzed in their entirety.

Fingerprints[link]

In a Royal Institution paper in 1888 and three books (Finger Prints, 1892; Decipherment of Blurred Finger Prints, 1893; and Fingerprint Directories, 1895)^[28] Galton estimated the probability of two persons having the same fingerprint and studied the heritability and racial differences in fingerprints. He wrote about the technique (inadvertently sparking a controversy between Herschel and Faulds that was to last until 1917), identifying common pattern in fingerprints and devising a classification system that survives to this day.

The method of identifying criminals by their fingerprints had been introduced in the 1860s by Sir William James Herschel in India, and their potential use in forensic work was first proposed by Dr Henry Faulds in 1880, but Galton was the first to place the study on a scientific footing, which assisted its acceptance by the courts (Bulmer 2003, p. 35). Galton pointed out that there were specific types of fingerprint patterns. He described and classified them into eight broad categories. 1: plain arch, 2: tented arch, 3: simple loop, 4: central pocket loop, 5: double loop, 6: lateral pocket loop, 7: plain whorl, and 8: accidental.^[29]

Final years[link]

In an effort to reach a wider audience, Galton worked on a novel entitled Kantsaywhere from May until December 1910. The novel described a utopia organized by a eugenic religion, designed to breed fitter and smarter humans. His unpublished notebooks show that this was an expansion of material he had been composing since at least 1901. He offered it to Methuen for publication, but they showed little enthusiasm. Galton wrote to his niece that it should be either “smothered or superseded”. His niece appears to have burnt most of the novel, offended by the love scenes, but large fragments survive.^[30]

Honours and impact[link]

Over the course of his career Galton received many major awards, including the Copley medal of the Royal Society (1910). He received in 1853 the highest award from the Royal Geographical Society, one of two gold medals awarded that year, for his explorations and map-making of southwest Africa. He was elected a member of the prestigious Athenaeum Club in 1855 and made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1860. His autobiography also lists the following:^[31]

• Silver Medal, French Geographical Society (1854)
• Gold Medal of the Royal Society (1886)
• Officier de l'Instruction Publique, France (1891)
• D.C.L. Oxford (1894)
• Sc.D. (Honorary), Cambridge (1895)
• Huxley Medal, Anthropological Institute (1901)
• Elected Hon. Fellow Trinity College, Cambridge (1902)
• Darwin Medal, Royal Society (1902)
• Linnean Society of London's Darwin–Wallace Medal (1908)

Galton was knighted in 1909. His statistical heir Karl Pearson, first holder of the Galton Chair of Eugenics at University College London (now Galton Chair of Genetics), wrote a three-volume biography of Galton, in four parts, after his death (Pearson 1914, 1924, 1930). The eminent psychometrician Lewis Terman estimated that his childhood IQ was on the order of 200, based on the fact that he consistently performed mentally at roughly twice his chronological age (Forrest 1974). (This follows the original definition of IQ as mental age divided by chronological age, rather than the modern distribution-deviate definition.)

The flowering plant genus Galtonia was named in his honour.

See also[link]

Biography portal

• A Large Attendance In The Antechamber, a play about Galton
• Darwin — Wedgwood family Darwin, Wedgwood and Galton's family tree
• Efficacy of prayer
• Eugenics in the United States
• Historiometry

Notes[link]

Further reading[link]

• Brookes, Martin (2004). Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton. Bloomsbury. 
• Bulmer, Michael (2003). Francis Galton: Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-7403-3 
• Cowan, Ruth Schwartz (1985, 1969). Sir Francis Galton and the Study of Heredity in the Nineteenth Century. Garland (1985). Originally Cowan's Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, (1969). 
• Ewen, Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen (2006; 2008) "Nordic Nightmares," pp. 257–325 in Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality, Seven Stories Press. ISBN 978-1-58322-735-0
• Forrest, D.W (1974). Francis Galton: The Life and Work of a Victorian Genius. Taplinger. ISBN 0-8008-2682-5 
• Galton, Francis (1909). Memories of My Life:. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company. http://books.google.com/?id=MvAIAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA3&dq=Samuel+%22John%22+Galton. 
• Gillham, Nicholas Wright (2001). A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514365-5
• Pearson, Karl (1914, 1924, 1930). "The life, letters and labours of Francis Galton (3 vols.)". http://galton.org 
• Daniëlle Posthuma, Eco J. C. De Geus, Wim F. C. Baaré, Hilleke E. Hulshoff Pol, René S. Kahn & Dorret I. Boomsma (2002). "The association between brain volume and intelligence is of genetic origin". Nature Neuroscience 5 (2): 83–84. DOI:10.1038/nn0202-83. PMID 11818967 
• Quinche, Nicolas, Crime, Science et Identité. Anthologie des textes fondateurs de la criminalistique européenne (1860–1930). Genève: Slatkine, 2006, 368p., passim.
• Stigler, S. M. (2010). "Darwin, Galton and the Statistical Enlightenment". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) 173 (3): 469–482. DOI:10.1111/j.1467-985X.2010.00643.x.  edit

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Francis Galton

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Francis Galton

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Galton, Sir Francis.

• Galton's Complete Works at Galton.org (including all his published books, all his published scientific papers, and popular periodical and newspaper writing, as well as other previously unpublished work and biographical material).
• Works by Francis Galton at Project Gutenberg
• The Galton Machine or Board demonstrating the normal distribution.
• Portraits of Galton from the National Portrait Gallery (United Kingdom)
• The Galton laboratory homepage^{[dead link]} (originally The Francis Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics) at University College London
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Francis Galton", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Gillham.html .
• Biography and bibliography in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
• History and Mathematics
• Human Memory — University of Amsterdam website with test based on the work of Galton
• An 8-foot-tall (2.4 m) Probability Machine (named Sir Francis Galton) comparing stock market returns to the randomness of the beans dropping through the quincunx pattern. from Index Funds Advisors IFA.com
• Catalogue of the Galton papers held at UCL Archives
• "Composite Portraits", by Francis Galton, 1878 (as published in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, volume 8).
• "Enquiries into Human Faculty and its Development", book by Francis Galton, 1883.

The following is a list of significant men and women known for being the father, mother, or considered the founders mostly in Western socities in a field, listed by category. In most non-science fields, the title of being the "father" is debatable.

Church[link]

Games[link]

Humanities[link]

Military[link]

Nations[link]

Natural and social sciences[link]

Sports[link]