ABSTRACT
English eugenics before World War I was caught in a dilemma it never succesfully resolved. Originally conceived by Francis Galton as a new science of human heredity in the 1860s, it became in the twentieth century, with its founder’s blessings, a pressure group for social, political, and economic reform. Galton’s close friend and disciple, the eminent statistician Karl Pearson, vigorously resisted the trend to convert eugenics into an activist movement. He feared that if it became embroiled in highly emotional, complex, class-oriented issues, its fragile credibility in the scientific community would be quickly undermined. The popularization of Darwinian evolution was a case in point. The later Victorians and their Edwardian offspring readily adopted simplistic derivations of biological determinism to explain a multitude of contemporary problems ranging from the persistence of poverty to the impulse for imperial expansion.
