After Darwin

Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius provided a rationale for the highly stratified British society. Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin’s, began his studies of heredity amongst upper class English families in 1864. After studying families renowned in fields such as law and music, his findings led him to believe that qualities such as intellect, and artistic temperament are biologically inherited. Galton’s work of 1869 also suggested that legislation which provided for the poor and disabled actually hurt society by supporting those who were obviously unfit.

In 1883, Galton coined the term eugenics in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. He proposed that the human condition could be improved through “judicious matings... to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.”

Galton had been influenced by the musings of Herbert Spencer, an English sociologist who published essays positing that human nature and the existing social order had arisen by a natural process. He was an opponent of social welfare policies since such support of the poor and mentally ill simply allowed them to propagate, a situation which would ultimately harm British society. It was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the term “survival of the fittest.”

1869: Francis Galton releases his work Hereditary Genius