Galton’s 1904 paper in Nature

Nature [28 September] posted an editorial apologizing for publishing Galton’s 1904 speech on Eugenics as part of “material that contributed to bias, exclusion and discrimination in research and society”. Apology that I do not find particularly pertinent from an historical viewpoint, given the massive time, academic, and societal distances we stand from this “paper”, which sounds more than a pamphlet than a scientific paper, by current standards. Reading these 1904 Nature articles show no more connection with a modern scientific journal than considering Isaac Newton’s alchemy notes in the early proceedings of the Royal Society.

“The aim of eugenics is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens; that done, to leave them to work out their common civilization in their own way.” F. Galton

Galton’s speech was published in extenso by the American Journal of Sociology, along with discussions from participants of the Sociological Society meeting. This set of discussions is rather illuminating as the views of the 1904 audience are quite heterogeneous, from complete adherence to a eugenic “golden’ future (see the zealous interventions of K. Pearson or B. Shaw] to misgivings about the ability to define the supposed ranking of members of society by worth or intelligence (H.G. Wells), to rejection that moral traits are genetically inherited (Mercier), to protests against the negation of individual freedom induced by a eugenic state (B. Kidd) and to common sense remarks that improvements in living conditions of the working classes were the key factor in improving society. But, overall, there was no disagreement therein on the very notion of races and on the supposed superiority of the Victorian civilization (with an almost complete exclusion of women from the picture), reflecting on the prejudices of the era and it is quite unlikely that this 1904 paper of Galton had any impact on these prejudices.