ABSTRACT
Francis Galton (1822-1911) was Charles Darwin’s first cousin and a great admirer of Charles’s concept of natural selection as a major force in evolution. Galton studied humans and advocated selective breeding or nonbreeding among certain groups as a way of, respectively, hastening evolution and saving humankind from degeneracy. Galton coined the word eugenics, and its practice in human populations eventually resulted from his theories and the correlational studies of human traits by himself and Karl Pearson, among others.1 Galton failed completely to realize that valued human traits are a result of various complicated kinds of interaction between the developing human organism and its social, nutritional, educational, and other rearing circumstances. If, as Galton found, men of distinction typically came from the upper or upper-middle social classes of nineteenth century England, this condition was not only a result of the selective breeding among “higher” types of intelligent and moral people but also was due in part to the rearing circumstances into which their progeny were born. This point of view is not always appreciated even today, that is, the inevitable correlation of social class with educational, nutritional, and other advantages (or disadvantages) in producing the mature organism.
