Francis Galton and the Science of Eugenics

Abstract

In 1877 Francis Galton (1822–1911), who had announced earlier that year the first statistical evidence of a law governing inheritance, told the committee formed to consider the future of the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s Section F that ‘usage has drawn a strong distinction between knowledge in its generality and science’. ‘The latter’ is confined, he argued, ‘to precise measurements and definite laws, which lead by such exact processes of reasoning to their results, that all minds are obliged to accept the latter as true’.¹ It was therefore only possible to be scientific about society, he believed, if one proceeded according to principles and methods recognized as belonging to the natural and mathematical sciences. This chapter will show it was as a consequence of this conviction that between 1865, when he first set out his vision of society improving itself by seizing control of the processes governing heredity, and 1903, when the Sociological Society was formed, Galton developed a social, political, and scientific programme known as ‘eugenics’. Indeed, what we will see is that it is only by resetting the account of Galton’s work against the backdrop of the late nineteenth-century debate about social science, the subject of the previous chapter, that we can truly understand the intellectual origins of eugenics and why it came to matter not just to biology but to sociology as well.