II.

Origins of the Movement

The eugenics movement originated with the theories of heredity proposed by Francis Galton. Galton, who was a cousin of Charles Darwin, was born in the same year as the Augustinian monk from Moravia, Johann Gregor Mendel, who produced the famous study of the inheritance of biological characteristics in sweet peas that founded the science of genetics (see also Mendel’s Laws). Mendel first read a paper on his study of sweet peas before the Brünn Society for the Study of the Natural Sciences in 1865 but his work was not acknowledged until after his death, when in 1900 this paper was simultaneously rediscovered by William Bateson from England, Hugo de Vries from the Netherlands, Carl Correns from Germany, and Eric von Tschermak from Austria. Galton attempted to develop a method of analysing the effects of inherited characteristics long before Mendelian theories were made public. When developing evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin had been inspired by observing the way in which animal and plant breeders cross-fertilized different breeds to obtain various physiological characteristics. Galton posited that the human species could also be improved by selective breeding and take charge of its own evolution. He developed a new tool of statistical analysis, the correlation coefficient, to investigate human ancestry in order to demonstrate that not only physical characteristics but also talent and character, or personality, were inheritable and not the result of social conditioning. Galton argued that selective human breeding, or eugenics, could “do providentially, quickly and kindly” what nature did “blindly, slowly and ruthlessly”. If eugenics could become “a new religion” then the “general tone of domestic, social and political life would be higher”.

From the time that Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, various scientific and social philosophers cited the dictates of evolution as the route to social progress and harmony. Even before Darwin had identified natural selection as the basis of biological evolution, Herbert Spencer had used Malthusian logic (see Thomas Malthus) to identify what he believed were the basic mechanisms of progressive social evolution. His philosophy was elevated into a fashionable ideology in the last quarter of the 19th century called social Darwinism. Social Darwinists claimed that attempts to ameliorate conditions of social disadvantage had interfered in this natural self-regulation of society and had given rise to conditions that allowed artificial selection to flourish.